Studying up on paleontology, the vast span of geological time I once thought intimidating doesn't seem so vast anymore. One hundred seventy million years of dinosaurs goes by fast.
Continents move at a quick pace for something as large as a continent. We can now measure contemporary velocities with GPS technology at centimeters per year, a stampede of mountaintops and shorelines.
Continents moving as fast as fingernails grow seem to me in fairly rapid motion.
The major psychological shift I'm experiencing is that the human life span now feels impossibly brief. Deep time can be plumbed, but the breadth of existence from birth to death is a measure too thin to be useful.
And what a slight proportion of our time is spent transferring knowledge from generation to generation! Perhaps once there was a thing worthy of being called a culture, but nowadays, as we approach the attention span of Drosophila, what mechanism is there for collective learning that transcends the momentary sensation?
Yes, some will claim that the longest lived cultural institutions are the Abrahamic religions, which together span about three thousand years. And I answer that no religion has demonstrated itself to be a learning institution. Religions are stasis institutions, insisting on adherence to abstract timelessness and placeless ideals. They have no clocks and they do not value this world. They have sponsored scholars and universities, but their belief systems do not function as living, collective memories ingesting and processing human experience, constantly revising their conclusions.
For that, one would have to turn to science. Science might seem the only hope for a cultural repository of cumulative investigation, except that science as practiced has become diversified beyond comprehension, an institution of cubbyholes, where specialized experts don't understand each other's work.
And yet, science provides the only wide scope on reality we have beyond immediate sensation. The climate changes we have wrought might remain mostly under the radar of human awareness, save for sensationalist headlines written about scientist's findings. When things happen too slowly for us to notice, we think no change is taking place. The gradient of change is below the threshold of perception. When things happen fast, they usually happen in fits and starts, the jagged chart line of change providing ample excuse for denial.
A cultural learning process would have heuristics substituting for statistical analysis, ways of recognizing shifting envelopes of variability, an instinct for knowing that things are not as they were.
An individual can grasp time before and after one's existence, but a society cannot. Our clocks tick too fast and out of sync. We have no means for gathering and evaluating knowledge that transcends generations, save for a rare "longitudinal" study, and even then, the results are regarded by a public with severe short term memory issues as the curiosity of the moment, quickly forgotten.
It occurs to me that human affairs should be run by scientists, and only scientists, and that democracy is absurd because it always tries to undo itself with ceaseless battles for dominance swaying between extremes, that make of our collective mind a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Taken together, we are a truly psychotic species.
But a world run by technocrats would be just as bad, solving problems through genetic engineering and extermination.
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, has funded a ten thousand year clock. What we need is a society of ten thousand year clock keepers, people who invisibly nudge the course of human affairs toward wisdom.
This needn't be a secret society, as no one would take seriously an organization whose vision looked forward farther than recorded history can look back.
This society would need the endurance of religion and the awareness of science. It would have to pass its mission on through generations even as it adapted to changing circumstances. It would be able to infiltrate every center of power without revealing its methods for guiding human affairs.
Rather sounds like Asimov's Second Foundation, except that mentalism isn't an option.
I would not be disturbed to learn that there is a smart, benign hand guiding an otherwise stupid, self destructive species. Not the hand of a god who thinks nothing of destroying the planet it created, as a broken plaything is to a child, but rather, the hands of the smartest, most humane and empathetic people human genes can produce.
A society of Nelson Mandela types, looking ten thousand millenia hence. As far fetched as that sounds, it is about the only hope we have for lasting as long as the dinosaurs did.
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