The Big Here
and Long Now
by
Brian Eno
It
was 1978. I was new to New York. A rich acquaintance had invited
me to a housewarming party, and, as my cabdriver wound his
way down increasingly potholed and dingy streets, I began
wondering whether he�d got the address right. Finally he stopped
at the doorway of a gloomy, unwelcoming industrial building.
Two winos were crumpled on the steps, oblivious. There was
no other sign of life in the whole street.
"I
think you may have made a mistake", I ventured.
But
he hadn�t. My friend�s voice called "Top Floor!" when I rang
the bell, and I thought � knowing her sense of humour � "Oh
� this is going to be some kind of joke!" I was all ready
to laugh. The elevator creaked and clanked slowly upwards,
and I stepped out - into a multi-million dollar palace. The
contrast with the rest of the building and the street outside
couldn�t have been starker.
I
just didn�t understand. Why would anyone spend so much money
building a place like that in a neighbourhood like this? Later
I got into conversation with the hostess. "Do you like it
here?" I asked. "It�s the best place I�ve ever lived", she
replied. "But I mean, you know, is it an interesting neighbourhood?"
"Oh � the neighbourhood? Well�that�s outside!" she laughed.
The
incident stuck in my mind. How could you live so blind to
your surroundings? How could you not think of �where I live�
as including at least some of the space outside your four
walls, some of the bits you couldn�t lock up behind you? I
felt this was something particular to New York: I called it
"The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I
was used to living in a bigger Here.
I
noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York
paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything
was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings
came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely
got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years
ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be �passing
through�. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that
it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I
came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested
the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".
�Now�
is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that
the precise moment you�re in grows out of the past and is
a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more
past and future it includes. It�s ironic that, at a time when
humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create
huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most
of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short
nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom
line and the next shareholders� meeting. Politicians feel
forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The
media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated
reactions to �human interest� stories while overlooking longer-term
issues � the real human interest.
Meanwhile,
we struggle to negotiate our way through an atmosphere of
Utopian promises and dystopian threats, a minefield studded
with pots of treasure. We face a future where almost anything
could happen. Will we be crippled by global warming, weapons
proliferation and species depletion, or liberated by space
travel, world government and molecule-sized computers? We
don�t even want to start thinking about it. This is our peculiar
form of selfishness, a studied disregard of the future. Our
astonishing success as a technical civilisation has led us
to complacency � to expect that things will probably just
keep getting better.
But
there is no reason to believe this. We might be living in
the last gilded bubble of a great civilisation about to collapse
into a new Dark Age, which, given our hugely amplified and
widespread destructive powers, could be very dark indeed.
If
we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have
to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable
- gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants.
Such changes of social outlook are quite possible � it wasn�t
so long ago, for example, that we accepted slavery, an idea
which most of us now find repellent. We felt no compulsion
to regard slaves as fellow-humans and thus placed them outside
the circle of our empathy. This changed as we began to realise
� perhaps it was partly the glory of their music � that they
were real people, and that it was no longer acceptable that
we should cripple their lives just so that ours could be freer.
It just stopped feeling right.
The
same type of change happened when we stopped employing kids
to work in mines, or when we began to accept that women had
voices too. Today we view as fellow-humans many whom our grandparents
may have regarded as savages, and even feel some compulsion
to share their difficulties - aid donations by individuals
to others they will never meet continue to increase. These
extensions of our understanding of who qualifies for our empathy,
indicate that culturally, economically and emotionally we
live in an increasingly Big Here � unable to lock a door behind
us and pretend the rest of the world is just �outside�.
We
don�t yet, however, live in The Long Now. Our empathy doesn�t
extend far forward in time. We need now to start thinking
of our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren,
as other fellow-humans who are going to live in a real world
which we are incessantly, though only semi-consciously, building.
But can we accept that our actions and decisions have distant
consequences, and yet still dare do anything? It was an act
of complete faith to believe, in the days of slavery, that
a way of life which had been materially very successful could
be abandoned and replaced by another, as yet unimagined, but
somehow it happened. We need to make a similar act of imagination
now.
Since
this act of imagination concerns our relationship to time,
a Millennium is a good moment to articulate it. Can we grasp
this sense of ourselves as existing in time, part of the beautiful
continuum of life? Can we become inspired by the prospect
of contributing to the future? Can we shame ourselves into
thinking that we really do owe those who follow us some sort
of consideration � just as the people of the nineteenth century
shamed themselves out of slavery? Can we extend our empathy
to the lives beyond ours?
I
think we can. Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating
realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in
their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream�"
, he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream
becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured
against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense
the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving
differently � as though that world is starting to come into
existence, as though, in our minds at least, we�re already
there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us
forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of
imagining something makes it real.
This
imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists
and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th
century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art
as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging
towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes
� things that exist and change in time, things that are never
finished. Sometimes this is quite explicit - as in Walter
de Maria�s �Lightning Field� � a huge grid of metal poles
designed to attract lightning. Many musical compositions don�t
have one form, but change unrepeatingly over time � many of
my own pieces and Jem Finer�s Artangel installation "LongPlayer"
are like this. Artworks in general are increasingly regarded
as seeds � seeds for processes that need a viewer�s (or a
whole culture�s) active mind in which to develop. Increasingly
working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people
who start things, not finish them.
And
what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. We become
our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion
and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. Through
them we sense what it would be like to be another kind of
person with other kinds of values. We rehearse new feelings
and sensitivities. We imagine other ways of thinking about
our world and its future.
Danny
Hillis�s Clock of the Long Now is a project designed to achieve
such a result. It is, on the face of it, far-fetched to think
that one could make a clock which will survive and work for
the next 10,000 years. But the act of even trying is valuable:
it puts time and the future on the agenda and encourages thinking
about them. As Stewart Brand, a colleague in The Long Now
Foundation, says:
Such
a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would
embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit,
interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic
in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking
about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done
for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the
way people think.
The
20th Century yielded its share of icons, icons like Muhammad
Ali and Madonna that inspired our attempts at self-actualisation
and self- reinvention. It produced icons to our careless and
misdirected power � the mushroom cloud, Auschwitz � and to our
capacity for compassion � Live Aid, the Red Cross.
In
this, the 21st century, we may need icons more
than ever before. Our conversation about time and the future
must necessarily be global, so it needs to be inspired and
consolidated by images that can transcend language and geography.
As artists and culture-makers begin making time, change and
continuity their subject-matter, they will legitimise and
make emotionally attractive a new and important conversation.
This essay was
originally published by
The
Long Now Foundation
http://www.longnow.org/
Brian Eno's installation
"New Urban Spaces Series No. 4" opened March 3, 2001 at San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition
"010101: Art in Techological Times."
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