Time

Generational Ways of Thinking

Agency and limits both are strongly supported by traditions of generational knowledge transfer, rooted in specific place. Equilibrial investment and draw from local resources over generations grounds a community in time and place, giving joy in the present and assurance of the future.

Invest in the millenium. 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.

— Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

So far, we have discussed how affectionate relationship unlocks pathways for agency and limits to emerge in balance toward resilient home places. Now, we will explore how this equilibrium is matured across generations as we build local community memory—traditions of knowledge transfer edified by our relationship to that which came before us, and which comes after. Without these traditions, our rootlessness leads our children to increasingly fragile dependence.

A culture can be understood as an accumulation of its people’s various traditions—of language, land stewardship, cooking, gathering, and many other practices. Stewart Brand’s conception of pace layering below describes society’s nested, polycentric orientation to time, with slow-changing natural systems and their resulting cultures at the core. Here, we can see that affection for our place not only grounds our relationship to each other and limits, but also to time.

Pace Layering Visualized

As our cultural center moves away from the slowness of natural systems, we are no longer in conversation with the past or our place. Accelerated by the virality of internet phenomena, the present comes to pass quickly, leaving us with shortened memory spans and without cultural footholds. Instead of a song to sing to our children, our story is now a firehose of information, growing in quantity but losing its meaning. This unmoored culture, in pursuit of universal understanding, destabilizes our sense of belonging, continuity and therefore truth itself.

We have had in only about two centuries a steady and ever-quickening sequence of industrial revolutions in manufacturing, transportation, war, agriculture, education, entertainment, homemaking and family life, health care, and so-called communities. All of these changes have depended upon industrial technologies, processes, and products. […] But what technology can replace personal privacy or the coherence of a family or a community? What technology can undo the collateral damages of an inhuman rate of technological change?

— Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection

How do we escape the unpleasant trend-chasing of pop culture without fetishizing a conception of the past sourced from a place-agnostic internet or hoping for a future that is enduring only in its failure to arrive? How can we ground ourselves appropriately in time? Only through our home places.

Historically, long-standing connections between people and their places have rooted their traditions and their collective memory in a slow-paced ecological rhythm, but this was not necessarily out of some prescient wisdom. Before the technological capability to regularly consume resources from anywhere on earth, communities necessarily had to more fully provide for themselves within the context of their local environment.

While our consumption is no longer technically restrained to our places in the same way, local affection and relationship to a specific place is still the best way to orient ourselves in time. Without this anchor, we lose our ability to perceive ecological limits and build stable identities to carry us forward over the coming generations. Resilience is no longer something we inherit from our places, but something we must choose by binding ourselves to them.

The Amish are far less captive to the future than the rest of us, and that is because their lives are so complexly serviceable to their land and their neighbors in the present. And so they are providing for the future as fully and effectively as humans possibly can.

— Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush

Because of the sanctity of our home places, we cannot see the future as some infinite piggy bank from which to draw. Solving problems by assuming resources will be readily supplied by outside communities at some unspecified point in the future is not innovation or progress but laziness and greed— a “movement from old damage to new destruction,” as Berry puts it.

As a people we have escaped to the West from the East, from the country to the city, from the city to the suburbs, from the suburbs back to the country or back to the city. And because we have never known well enough, or worked well enough, where we were, this has almost always been a movement from old damage to new destruction, and always with the aim of 'a better future for our children'.

— Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush

Generational thinking avoids the kind of overuse and excess that sacrifices the future for the present, but this does not mean we should sacrifice our present time or place for the future either—as some utilitarians and effective altruists may suggest. Instead, we can sustain our communities joyfully both through the present day and coming generations by leaning on place-based traditions as a foundation for agency, trust, and humility.

Instead of unsustainable growth by the accrual of existential debt, progress should be defined by a community’s capacity to maintain the kind of equilibrium that allows it to ‘rest upon the earth’. This locally emanating stability conveys more agency to adapt to a changing world than dependence on broad and abstract organizational structures.

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” Margaret said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.”

— E. M. Forster, Howards End

Healthy natural systems cycle flows of energy in ways that sustain the community of organisms within—matching inputs and outputs with no waste. We see this in forests, coral reefs, and even our soils. As natural systems mature, these cyclic patterns spread their available energy over broader time horizons. This temporal polycentricity builds an ecology that is not a ‘movement’ but a self-sustaining system with stabilized consumption and production, whose prospects of health in the future are deeply in relationship with today’s habits.

The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

In contrast with the natural world—sustained by flows of energy in relationship over diverse temporal and spatial horizons—large institutions impose a short-sighted, one-way demand of legibility on both local ecologies and cultural traditions. This attempt to replace the hardness of natural systems with a bureaucratic wisdom anesthetizes communities that have adapted to their specific place. Acknowledging natural ecologies and cultural tradition as foundational to and in relationship with potential institutions of governance is necessary for the long term health of a place.

Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.

— Stewart Brand, Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

This conflict between quickening forces of change and the stability of culture rooted in place is seen in the world of Mexican distilling traditions. Ostensibly created to protect traditional production, the institutionally regulated Mezcal denomination of origin (D.O.) ironically excludes the spirits most representative of traditional local processes.

Agave distillates (including mezcal) have historically been produced by families in small batches for their village and personal network. Small mezcaleros typically do not have the money, legal literacy, or social capital to have their work certified as ‘official’ mezcal by federal institutions, especially when each of their small batches must be approved individually.

Instead, the mezcals that have the easiest time being certified are those who’s industrialized processes and scale of production make them more legible to institutional standards. Much has been said of the gentrification of mezcal by foreign markets, but a shift away from traditional processes is caused as much by institutional demands on economic (and physical) forms than natural demands of the market.

Mezcal distillation in San Agustin Amatengo vs placeless industrial distillation

Despite instiutional intervention, we are capable of learning about the traditions we are in relationship with and supporting them. In fact, this is regularly true in the world of ‘uncertified’ agave spirits, where individual mezcaleros and communities are elevated over brand names, and customers are encouraged to visit producing communities themselves. In this case and many others, systems that elude or ignore institutional oversight may be doing so for very good reasons.

A traditional mezcal has a social function in its community of origin, and as is such, a substantial part of its production is consumed in said community or region.

There exists a complex and highly varying biodiversity (that includes agaves, trees, microorganisms, bacteria, insects, bats, etc.) that has been preserved, recreated and modified by the mezcal producing populations.

— Cornelio Pérez, 14 Criteria for Traditional Mezcal

Nick Szabo has defined an institution as simply “a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors.” Governance, families, and even language are institutions that, aided with broadly defined ’technologies’ like legal frameworks and voting protocols, can scale and perpetuate these traditions to allow us to better coordinate our home places.

These modes of organizing society are not just abstract universal systems; they are in deep relationship with the physical and cultural landscapes they inhabit. At the same time—and while acknowledging our current overdependence on centralized institutions and technologies—not every process needs to be recreated at the local level in order to begin to impart greater agency to communities. While common language among a community is important, for example, there is no objective measure of what kind of scale is ideal.

Some communities in southwestern China maintain a common language only local to their village, with neighboring communities having trouble understanding each other. Many of these languages have formed in direct relation to the steep valleys these communities have inhabited for centuries, with directional prefixes representative of valley geography (up-river and down-river instead of north/south). For them, this level of scale is appropriate and the level of linguistic/ecological intimacy is worth preserving.

In contrast, the nearly global scale of the English language creates advantages for global business but also may not be able to retain local memory as well as a smaller language. While there are indeed benefits to remaining illegible to broader regulatory structures, a language for every village is probably not the sweet spot for the coordination of resilient physical communities at this point in humanity's development.

A photo I took in one such valley-bound village in Sichuan in 2013. The camera shutter was giving me issues, rending half of the image illegible, an apt representation of this place.

Instead of having to choose between isolated local traditions or monolithic unilaterally coordinated institutions, we can employ technological architectures and tools that respect and support local sovereignty, but network local places into coherent regional and national polycentric relationship.

So how can we determine which tools are productive in moving toward such a sustainable, long-thinking society? There is nothing inherently wrong with organizational structures that span geographies, especially when they serve as scaffolding for relationships between local places—but when local traditions are themselves shaped in service of these structures, we put the cart before the horse. What is the use of relating at scale if the tools for coordinating these complex relationships require reduced local fidelity? If national policy goals or technologies gain control over local social traditions, the system breaks down.

Organizational flows of influence, then, should be in the direction of Gandhi's oceanic circles, moving outward as a ripple emanating from small communities. In this architecture, natural ecologies inform local social traditions of care, which inform local formal methods for organization, which in turn inform broader formal conventions of relationship.

Though today our technologies mostly erode our individual and community sovereignty, tools for coordination surely have a place in any healthy society. Chapter 5 and 6 of this series will dig further into emerging technological pathways for the pursuit of endogenous sovereignty—including collaborative tools for ‘community computing’ like blockchains and other peer-to-peer protocols.

If used appropriately, tools for community computing can impart both social flexibility and local sensitivity to support us in building healthy, long-thinking communities with more robust generational memory than we are capable of with our current institutional and technological dependencies.

Civilizations with long nows look after things better.

— Brian Eno

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Art by Alex White