In the words of the great philosophical work The Sandlot, "We've been going about this all wrong. I blame myself." We talk together a lot about wisdom, seeing things correctly, and the future. But I have noticed myself falling prey lately to one of the most basic traps that I know of in this area: the pitfall of short-term thinking.
We've discussed my growing insistence on a sense of holy optimism when looking to the future, and explained the theological and natural grounding I have for this belief. But short-term thinking has the potential to bring all my best intentions to nothing. I could quickly slip right back into a pessimistic fog if I allow my misplaced expectations for the speed of the fruit's growth to frustrate me and succumb to my impatience. So let me try to convince you that your thoughts, also, might be far too focused on too brief a moment. Let's widen our view.
I'm beginning to suspect that attempts by any generation to grasp the meaning of their times or the narrative of the world around them are largely futile. This is a concept I learned from my time studying history, where we were taught that works written less than a decade or two from the circumstances the author is examining are not considered historical works at all, and instead categorized as journalism. This isn't meant as a barb against the craft of journalism (patience, possibly another time) but simply a humble acceptance on the historian's part that they are unable to clearly see events close to their own moment. By being so close to the subject their analytical eyes cannot focus and they would find themselves overemphasizing unimportant matters while entirely missing vital concepts. And worse still, they would quite possibly realize none of their mistakes until much later. The past is, as many have observed, an undiscovered country for us. In a sense the door to that country only begins to open for those who have not lived through the events that they set out to understand. If this is the case, then humility would be the proper response for each successive generation as they look back to the events of their parents' lives. Not yet truly able to grasp the complexities of their times, we should refrain from claiming to understand their decisions or generalizing about their impact. This will be a study for our children perhaps, clear-eyed then as the shreds of mist pass from their grandparents' epoch.
And if we cannot claim to truly understand the immediate past, when all the facts are carefully arrayed already and yet we are foiled by our lack of perspective, how can we suppose to have solved our present? We float around our whole lives with a shred or two of evidence, this favorite fact and that datum, like a chip of bark in an unfathomed sea. We are unable in our own times to fully understand our town, our family. And yet we fill petabytes with our takes and think-pieces on issues where we have demonstrably less knowledge even still. (Physician, heal thyself. I can hear you saying it. However I still have the floor, being that this is my essay. Get your own). Our confidence seems to be unmerited. Here again, humility would be a better response, increasing as we venture further away from our sphere of direct experience. While we can of course reason well about things outside our experience (if we have good prior assumptions and a correct philosophical and metaphysical grounding for our reasoning), but even our logical analysis must beware of the sin of pride.
So if we cannot reliably grasp our immediate past, and must be cautious when we generalize in the present, how will we fare when we look to the future? This is of course the area where we at the highest risk of making mistakes. At least with our past and present we have some data, however scant. But peering into the future we rely on trends and assumptions, extrapolating and estimating. The primary problem with future prediction is that humans have consistently demonstrated our default viewpoint to be far too short-term to be able to understand the future at all. Our assumptions about the present begin slightly skewed, like a rocket fired towards to moon canted half a degree from true, becoming increasingly distant from the mark the further we progress in time. We are impatient and transient beings. We don't recognize the seeds of the future from where they lie now, asleep in the dirt. We look to the weeds exploding skyward and assume they were endure forever, when their days are already numbered. Generation after generation we confidently assert our vision of the next decade, let alone century, only to have reality again prove our myopia.
Since these are our handicaps as we attempt to understand the times we have inherited, inhabit and can look forward to, we need to humbly accept them. The reality of our limits should change the way we live. When we invest hoping for returns in the future, we ought not spend our time scanning daily charts for the progress of our net worth. When we build or serve others, we should avoid obsessing over obvious signs of progress. We still have much to learn if we are betting on our own ability to recognize a good investment of capital or time in the present moment. We don't know what our actual legacy will be yet, because we aren't wise enough to recognize our best work or most significant impact. That's why our lives should be filled with all kinds of different efforts and activities, hedges against future uncertainty. Diversifications of our legacy. The short-term view will cause us to repeatedly miss out on the most powerful forces in the universe, rumbling on frequencies so low that they cannot be perceived in daily experience. Once you accept that you cannot guarantee your own success in the short term, you become much more hopeful in the power of patience and consistency. Once you stop frantically planting and prematurely excavating a tiny patch of investment carrots, you can sow a forest for your great-grandchildren and then take a quiet walk among the trees of your ancestors.
Any individual generation can neither fully grasp the bits of wisdom we retrieve from the debris of lost civilizations nor see those who will discover our gestated understandings hidden away in the sand. Each of us exists alone in history, learning and writing and hoping that others will discover our importance. We have to let go of our demand for visible results and accept that our best efforts are unknown to us. We spend our best days working and praying that others will one day discover the fully grown fruits of our labor, and rest in their shade. Perhaps we are about the right things, but measuring them on the wrong scale. Try a lifetime. Notice that the lives we envy are those who have spent fifty or seventy years pursuing a single way. We can't rush the process, but we also don't have to wait another moment to get started.
WGMI 😎
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. ~ Wendell Berry, the Mad Farmer Liberation Front
But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. ~ 2 Peter 3:8