Thinking about thinking; Cathedral Thinking Covid19 & Climate

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I'm sure we all have during the lockdown. Never in the field of daily life was so much extra time on everyone's hands. As busy as we are, there are fewer pointless meetings, irrelevant emails and no commute with which to contend: silver linings and all that.

Since lockdown began, I've become a bit of a podcast and LinkedIn addict. I've hosted a podcast, been interviewed online and interviewed online, scribbled a few articles, attended more zoom meetings and virtual hangouts than I ever imagined. I've played lots of board games with my wife, become one son's history teacher and my other's PE buddy. I've also done lots of thinking about how we think.

Part of my motivation is that my pre-teen sons are growing up (10 and 8), and I wanted to understand how their brains will develop during adolescence. I've just read a fascinating book called Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, by Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. It's both terrific and terrifying; adolescence is challenging, and we adults are just bystanders of a neurological roller coaster. Oh good, I can't wait. I also do a section of my 'introduction to marketing' course on the irrational biases to which we are all subject. We are primates with a conflicting maelstrom of reflexes, instincts, biases, prejudices and beliefs. Almost everything we know is already wrong, or shortly will be. As a fan of The Oatmeal, one of my favourites is this brilliant cartoon on how we react to information that challenges our preconceptions. In summary, not well. Not well at all.

One thing we humans are particularly terrible at is long-term thinking. Seriously farsighted thinking is what some refer to as Cathedral Thinking. Cathedrals - the soaring vaulted naves, mighty flying buttresses, awe-inspiring towers and hushed cloisters. These are buildings that those who laid the foundations would probably never see to completion. In my home city of Lincoln (UK not USA), there is Lincoln Cathedral and also a leather-bound Book of Oaks. In this book are kept the records of oaks planted decades ago that will reach maturity and be ready to replace timber trusses and beams in the medieval roof space in years to come.

On so many levels this literal cathedral thinking sits beautifully with 19th-century French theologian Hyacinthe Loyson's; "These trees which he plants, and under whose shade he shall never sit, he loves them for themselves, and for the sake of his children and his children’s children, who are to sit beneath the shadow of their spreading boughs." This is often misattributed, abbreviated or misquoted rather well as; "Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit."

So, cathedral thinking is the ability to think beyond one's own "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" life and to the many lives of others who will follow.

It has been telling how the world has responded with such pace and rigour to the immediate danger of Covid19. Coronavirus threatens our loved ones and us today, so governments have acted radically and with impunity. We have collectively supported their actions, mostly. This response and reaction are even more impressive when you consider the endless international hang-wringing and prevarication or so much public apathy when addressing the more massive crisis of irreversible climate change.

Maybe what is more telling is the lack of international cooperation or a global consensus on how to respond to the current pandemic. Nations are dealing with the virus unilaterally and in significantly different ways, with varying degrees of success. While the scientific and medical community has acted collaboratively across our planet, our political leadership has fallen short. There has never been a better example of lions commanded by donkeys; the exceptional talent and sacrifice of our leonine medical professionals around the world and the asinine global political leadership that has failed them.

So now to cathedral thinking of a much larger scale. Nearly three hundred thousand people have already tragically died from Covid19. Hundreds of thousands more will probably die - from the virus directly, from related illnesses, from untreated health problems caused by not seeking care and finally from the extraordinary economic fallout. But the current death toll is as a fraction, however brutal and tragic, of that which will be caused by climate change. I say this not to diminish the ongoing pain and real tragedy in any way but to listen and learn 2020's vital lesson. Let's avoid something worse than this current hell happening.

Over the next 50 years, up to three billion people could live in regions that are just too hot for humans to exist if the planet continues to warm at current levels. Three thousand million. Over one hundred and fifty million people live one metre or less above sea level, within the range predicted (75 and 200cms) for sea level rises in the next 80 years. Add to that deforestation, top-soil loss, exhausted aquifers, polluted and exploited oceans, and we simply run out of food to feed eight billion mouths.

We must think far beyond ourselves and our own few scores of years. We must think about our children and our children's children as well as those descendants of others we do not know.

Cathedral thinking today is not about buildings, however achingly beautiful and majestic. Today it is to put in place the environmental, social and economic systems that serve our planet's many species for the millennia and generations to come. As the lockdown eases, we must cathedral-think and act in this centuries-long way rather than just deliver a short-term economic recovery that sacrifices future generations to far greater crises. Or there will be no trees left to sit beneath, nor people to do the sitting.