As a new year approaches it is natural to think of years past and years ahead. But on any given day when asked to look forward or back, a year's span would come most naturally to mind.
Mentally, we have evolved to measure "long term" time in years.
One might challenge this notion and say for the sake of argument that the calendar year is a cultural artifact, that we have been trained by society to parse time in annual installments.
I would feel embarrassed for anyone so ignorant of human cultural development. The annual cycle has been obvious since the earliest hominids started recognizing the cycle of seasons. We don't require calendars for us to know a year has passed. The Earth tells us this with irrefutable clarity.
The cultures of the first agricultural societies expanded their vigilant watch of the seasons' progress by charting the skies. It was useful to know when to plant crops in expectation of spring, and this knowledge was fundamental to holding power. Culture has expanded upon, not imposed, the year as the basic unit of long term time.
Our biological clock is tied to the circadian rhythm of earth's rotation. That is as clear as night and day, so to speak. Time beyond the moment, time that stretches years into the distant future, or reaches back into the distant past, is not so clear. Counting the years ahead or behind, we walk into a mental mist.
When rulers and conquerors sought divination of how their exploits would fare, oracles were at a psychological advantage in knowing what the powerful wanted to hear. I doubt the oracles would have considered answering such a vague and tricky question as, what is the empire going to be like in ten years? "Absolutely great, dear emperor, but please pay me now."
Traditionally, ten years was about the outside reach of foresight. But businesses don't have ten year plans anymore, and five years could be a perilous overreach. Too many unpredictable events arise too fast for a five year plan to supply much more than a statement of ambition. Almost all grand business headquarters, like skyscrapers and Googleplexes, have to be built within five years, lest the company be stuck in hard times with an unfinished edifice.
When the Millennium turned over, there were few who seriously shouted, Happy New Millennium, or even Happy New Century. A century is still a hundred years and a millennium a thousand, five and fifty generations in duration, respectively. Both are much too long to encompass any planning horizon. Human minds are trapped in the now and envision even next year with great difficulty.
The designer of the 10,000 year clock wrote that our concept of time is so limited that we must even segment our own personal existence into episodes to make sense of development and aging, and that we are truly many different successional selves throughout the course of our lives, not just one self living out an allotted span.
To speculate with any probity what humanity will do about climate change, we must consider humanity's limited perspective on time. We are mentally ill equipped for the challenge. A scope of awareness measured in years isn't going to do the job.
We have to start thinking in terms of decades and centuries and millennia. We have to transcend with our imaginations the limitations of our counting in years.
Perhaps with the recently approved international climate agreement, we have embarked upon a cultural shift in the way we regard time, so that the prospects for every child born are considered over the whole span of that person's lifetime. We have put ourselves on a proactive clock. We have given ourselves goals that transcend generations, declaring that we must measure up to those goals through the actions of our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.
Perhaps the tick tock of the human mind has now become the pacekeeper of a long journey forward.
