Contemplating the Long Now
In The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand provides a diagram of the pace of change within the layers of civilization. The top layer, “Fashion,” changes rapidly. “Commerce,” the next layer down, changes a little less quickly. “Infrastructure” and “Goverance” are slower yet. “Culture” is conservative and tends to change slowly. “Nature” is the slowest.
According to Brand, “The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.” (Stewart Brand – “Cities And Time”, April 11th, 02005 by Simone Davalos.) When the pace of change accelerates and Infrastructure and Goverance cannot absorb enough shock, you can expect a backlash from Culture. When Commerce and Goverance run roughshod over Nature, Nature will eventually have the last word.
The thinkers and organizations who have dedicated themselves to the Long Now are not trying to dam the rush of accelerated change, but to provide flood plains and bayous where that change can be absorbed and transformed.
You would think that Pagans, who usually practice an Earth-based spirituality, would be among the husbands and midwives of this 10,000 year project. Paganism, however, is still a relatively new movement with an increasingly younger membership. When Gerald Gardner founded Wicca about 60 years ago, he was about 40 years old and claimed that he had been initiated into an ancient religion by an old woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck, who was a hereditary witch. For the next generation, Pagan traditions were passed from teacher to student with several stages of initiation. And while there are still Pagan traditions and lineages, most Pagans these days are “self-initiated” and get their training from books and the Internet. So the majority of us are among the “fast folk.”
And a great many of us are recovering Christians or Jews–or were raised with no religion at all. Many of us have rebelled against strictures and abuses of institutions and dogma. Still critiquing the culture of our parents, we are willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid forming Pagan hierarchies and institutions. And while we might live in cities, we long for the countryside where we can “worship in nature.”
Brand says:
Cities are humanity’s longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it’s much faster.
Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.”
So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is
exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe.
The Clock of the Long Now will be built in a high mountain top in eastern Nevada, about a day’s walk from anywhere, amid 1000 year old pines, but the Long Now Foundation understands that organizations will have to created to maintain it for 10,000 years. The Christian monasteries preserved West Culture during the Dark Ages. Inspired by the Clock of the Long Now, Neal Stephenson wrote the new science fiction bestseller, Anathem, about a monastery devoted to the contemplation of mathematics and the long now.
Many Pagans will tell you that Paganism is an ecstatic religious experience resulting in direct contact with the Divine–no intermediate clergy is required; no sacred texts are required. The notion of monastic life would give most Pagans the willies. The notion of any kind of structure or institution or approved canon of culture would give most Pagans the willies. We tend to live very much in the Right Here! Right Now! As much as we profess to be stewards of Gaia, I am not sure if we are ready to contemplate the Long Now.