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JON CARROLL
- Jon Carroll
Friday, March 4, 2005
It is midnight and I am staring out the window at my back garden. It is midnight and I am thinking about time. I am thinking about how we think about time. It's an important issue.
I am not talking about time in the Stephen Hawking sense. I am not talking about 11 dimensions and string theory and the black hole where time runs backward. I do not understand any of those things, and I have heard real astrophysicists say that they don't understand them either. I gather it's sort of a placeholder theory until further investigations are complete.
It is raining, but the house to my left has a bright all-night security light, so I can see the red tulips standing up boldly. These are new tulips; they might last five years, longer if we take care of them, but experience shows that we probably won't. Five years can seem like a long time: Five years ago, Bill Clinton was president. On the other hand: I have had this job for 23 years. Five years is a drop in the bucket. Five years is, on the other hand, a thousand columns.
I am thinking about human time, the time span that adults can reasonably keep in their heads. I'm putting it at about 125 years -- 100 years in the past, 25 years in the future. We still have links to the year 1905; we know many people who knew people who lived full lives in 1905; we can imagine it, even though it is very different from the world we live in.
And probably we can envision the year 2030. Experience suggests that it will look and smell pretty much the same; the same political issues will be debated; the same music will be played. Experience, though, has limited predictive capabilities; someone living in Hiroshima in 1930 would have been very wrong about what 1955 would look like.
The United States is 228 years old, theoretically, although it has existed in its current form only since 1959, when Hawaii entered the union. We can't really imagine the America of 1776, although we know that both the cities and the people smelled really bad. (One thing has always amazed me: Most of the people who wrote the Constitution did so with really severe toothaches. Let us spend a moment thanking modern dentistry.)
Still, we think of ourselves as a mature country. We think of ourselves as a stable country. Revolution and environmental disasters are for other countries, countries that don't have their acts together the way we do. We see no real need to plan for a future longer than 25 years out because it is unknowable and these things have a way of working themselves out. As indeed they do, until they don't.
"Collapse" by Jared Diamond is a book that has stayed with me. Its ideas are with me now, as the rain makes small rivers in our garden path and carries the soil under the back deck and into the yard downstream. Soil erosion is one thing it is hard for us to hold in our heads. Deforestation is hard to comprehend. However rapidly it happens, it seems like a slow process. It seems like a localized phenomenon -- this one hillside loses its trees, so what? We've got lots of hillsides.
On Easter Island, someone cut down the last tree. The last tree. He probably was thinking of something else at the time -- getting warm or getting fed or getting laid. The more stressed we are, the more our time scale compresses.
The Anasazi capital at Chaco Canyon lasted 600 years; in other words, longer than the time between Columbus discovering the Dominican Republic and now. The classic Maya culture lasted 700 years. In both cases, the cities were largest just before the end. We think of "decline and fall" as an apt description for historical change, but the records show that "collapse" is a better word.
People act in their own self-interest, but the time span of self-interest is limited. No one in Tikal or Copan wanted to bring about mass starvation, but they did. In one sense, they knew what they were doing; how the world works is not a secret. When crop yields go down, when drought years pile up, when warfare consumes resources, bad stuff happens. The Mayans were not dumb.
Did the mining companies in Montana want to poison the groundwater? They did not. But they were willing to accept the poisoning as a byproduct of something they wanted more, because the poisoning wasn't their problem, not in the sense that keeping their companies solvent was their problem.
Archaeologists stretch their sense of time by projecting it
further into the past. They discover patterns. The patterns suggest
that certain policies might be useful. See the topsoil disappear from
my garden. See.
The Mayans really had their act together. They measured time, developed a written language, ate a lot of chocolate. But they paid attention to the wrong portents. It's a human thing.
In the year 2525, who the hell knows? Not jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
