The Creative Coast’s blogspot is Savannah’s sounding board for local thinkers, innovators, wanderers and wonderers. Guest bloggers share their thoughts, opinions and creative noodling from all over the map. This week’s blog is from Tom Kohler, executive director of Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy, and one of Savannah’s unsung heroes. Tom’s ideas always make one pause and ponder the possibilities. Take the time to read Tom’s interesting proposition….
Over the past several years I have been giving The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand to my young friends who are graduating from high school and college.
Brand has been a writer and publisher for the past 50 years. Artists, intellectuals, commune dwellers, hippies, druggies, academics, entrepreneurs and geeks all mixed intellectual spit in his Whole Earth Catalogue from 1968 to 1974. Brand and his Whole Earth Catalogue won the National Book Award in 1972. Not bad for a project birthed at a Grateful Dead concert!
Fred Turner tells the story of Stewart’s role in the “rise of digital utopianism” in his book, From Counterculture to Cyberspace (University of Chicago Press). Bottom line, Stewart Brand is a cool, heavy guy.
These days, Brand and a gang of his long tooth Internet buddies are building a clock, the Clock of the Long Now. Jeff Bebos, founder of Amazon, has donated $42 million for the project.
Their notion is simple. We need to be reminded and provoked into thinking long term. The speed and immediacy of the web has warped our sense of time. And this is dangerous to the well being of our communities and our culture. The Clock of the Long Now is a warning from those who built the web.
Chapter 7 is my favorite. “In civilizations with long now’s you feel a very strong but flexible structure… built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.” Here is the “order of civilization” – - the fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity. I have listed the layers with short explanations – hoping to attract you to read the entire six page chapter.
- Fashion
The job of fashion and art is to be froth and quick. From this variety comes driving energy for commerce. - Commerce
If commerce is completely unfettered and unsupported by governance and culture, it easily becomes crime. One of the stresses of our time is the way commerce is being accelerated by global markets and digital and network revolutions. - Infrastructure
The payback period for such things as transportation and communication systems is too long for standard investment, so you get government guaranteed instruments such as bonds. Education is intellectual infrastructure, so is science. High yield with delayed payback. Ignore and raise long term risk. - Governance
The rise of democracy around the world and the rise of the social sector within democracies are at play. One example is the rise of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the U.S. and Britain. People decided it was OK to change tenants but not buildings. Even New York City, the most demolition-driven metropolis in America, began to preserve its downtown. The pace of commercial change had to be slowed to honor culture. - Culture
Culture is where the long now operates. Culture is slower than political and economic history, it moves at the pace of language and religion. In Asia you see it when you travel into remote villages and see change that is century paced. - Nature
Its vast power continues to surprise us. When we disturb nature at its own scale – as with our “extinction engine” and greenhouse gases of recent times, we risk triggering apocalyptical forces.
The total effect of the pace layers is that they provide corrective, stabilizing negative feedback throughout the entire system. It is in the apparent contradictions of pace that civilization finds its surest health.
Think about these ideas in relation to a couple of recent events in Savannah – the loss of 200 year old oak trees on Bonaventure Road and the proposed harbor deepening. Commerce and nature interplay. We count on governance to mediate.
The 1733 Project is simple. Let’s try and have 1,733 people who live in Savannah/Chatham County read chapter 7, “The Order of Civilization”. Let’s see if thinking about the long now might sharpen and stabilize our way of going forward.
Email me at tomkohler@bellsouth.net and I will send you the chapter by PDF, or find it on the web. You know how.
Tom