Disinterested in the Future?

Geology has way of bringing perspective. In a few hundred million years it is likely that the continents will fuse together, going back to a time a few hundred million years ago, when a similar situation prevailed. Obviously none of us or our foreseeable descendants will be alive to see that, but the truth is that no one will ever get to experience the change. Nobody will ever notice the biggest changes that the earth will see. Geological time moves so slowly that it in a sense it does not exist. The world comes into being as a fully realized fact of life without ever quite showing any signs of becoming one.

Reading the magnificent Indica by Pranay Lal, where the author brings alive the ‘deep natural history’ of the sub-continent, one gets confronted with the scale of reality that we inhabit and of our own insignificance in it. We are surrounded by time in a manner that we cannot comprehend. The earth that we walk on, the rocks that we pass by, the hills that we climb, the ocean waves that lap at our feet, these are all creations of millions of years. Heat, pressure, time, the earth straining against itself, large land masses drifting, asteroids smashing into the planet, the dance of tectonics – these are what have helped create the planet as we know it. And all it would take is a geological shrug of a shoulder for it to change beyond recognition.

In an age that obsesses about change, and cannot stop congratulating itself on the advancements that it has made, it is sobering to locate oneself in vastness of the reality that has produced us. All prevailing certitudes seem laughable, for the very basis of the reality we consider inviolable appears meaningless. All the conversation about the future, all the hope and anticipation that we invest in it, feels a little absurd given that to the human mind a century seems like an impossibly long time.

It is understandably difficult for us to understand time in its geological avatar, but it seems that our interest in any scale of time that exceeds our own lives has been diminishing. The cathedrals of old, for instance took lifetimes to build. The Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to build, the Milan cathedral took 577. In Cologne it took 70 years before the first choir could sing there. The Taj Mahal was built in the lightning quick time of 17 years. In so many of these cases, the original conceivers of the project could not possibly have been alive to see the fruits of their imagination. What drove them to create such wonderful structures beyond themselves?

Our sense of who we are comes from an ability to get located in history. We stroll through our own past thanks to the efforts of previous generations that have built monuments that have outlived themselves. We are overwhelmed by the cultural inheritance that we have received and yet have created virtually none of our own. We build things to tear them down. Very few structures that we have built will survive long enough to become documents of our times.

The mental model of the current generation is that we exist as individuals with limited liability for future generations. This clearly wasn’t the case earlier nor is it case in certain parts of the world even today. Living life in the lap of continuous time, as links in an unbroken chain gave humanity a perspective that valued life in a profound way. In Meghalaya, for instance, we can find bridges that are living trees- these root bridges take decades to grow but can often grow up to 100 feet tall and take the weight of up to 50 people at a time. The act of going such bridges is an acknowledgement of a collective need over a vast period of time. One makes it not for oneself but for future generations.  

Our relationship with tradition is indicative of our larger relationship with time. Tradition is implicitly synonymous with ‘dated ideas that need to be changed’. We think of tradition as being inexorably located in the past and show little awareness of the fact that with every passing moment it is we who are creating, altering and adding to tradition. The only way that we will be remembered is as ancients who had quaint customs and archaic ways. We chase modernity but can only make tradition.

Our relationship with the environment points to our troubled relationship with time. The intellectual argument about humanity’s impact on the environment comes up against an absence of an emotional connect with the future. We think of the future through the lens of advancement rather than connection and continuity. Showing a concern for the future is seen to be a sign of nobility rather than an essential feature of humanity.

As a generation, we are feasting on time in both directions. The intense involvement with our own selves and the present makes us impervious to the past and indeed to the future. Business thinks in terms of quarters or if in a really expansive mood, condescends to draw up 5 year plans. Human beings are fascinated with the future but cannot comprehend any time frame larger a century or two. In reality, we are creating virtually nothing for the future; what we develop today will become useful for future generations, no doubt, but whether in science or in art, our concern with the future is low. We are focusing efforts on our own selves rather than on the world that we live in.

Geology is humbling for we can see how insignificant and contingent our place is in space and time. Our planet may not get demolished to make way for an inter-galactic bypass, as Douglas Adams perhaps wistfully imagined, but it is a fragile organism, that will almost certainly perish or transform beyond recognition in the fullness of time, a phrase that begins to mean much more in geology. An awareness of time in its vastness and of our truly tiny place in it might make us more respectful of the world we have been given to live in.

(This is a modified version of a piece that has appeared previously in the Times of India)