Mary – An End to Short-Termism – 062

My dear Byron, and assembled company,

You have, as ever, turned our gathering into an intellectual sport, and though I suspect you delight in setting snares for the rest of us, I accept your challenge. The flaw you have assigned to me — short-termism — is perhaps the root from which many of the others draw their sustenance. For what is greed, if not the hunger for gain in the instant? And what is fear of the new, if not a reluctance to suffer uncertainty now for the sake of future reward?

In the spirit of Mr. Swift, I offer my own modest proposal:

Let us abolish the calendar.

By this I mean that the human measure of time — its neat divisions into days, months, and years — has rendered our perception of the future too small, too tame. We think only to the end of the week, the quarter, the term of office, because our minds have been trained to step in such short paces.

Instead, I propose we adopt a calendar whose smallest unit is the lustrum — five years — and whose primary division is the century. Children would learn their age in lustra, and plans would be spoken of in centuries as easily as we now speak of hours. No law could be written without its effects on the next three centuries being plainly described. No public work could be considered complete until it had withstood a full lustrum of testing.

Of course, this will create some initial difficulties. Birthdays will be rare, occurring only once every five years — which should please those who dread the passing of time. Politicians will need to serve terms of no fewer than two lustra, so that their works may have time to grow, or fail, in their own hands. Merchants will wail, for sales will be measured not in days but in decades. But, after the first shock, I believe the effect would be salutary.

When one thinks in centuries, one plants forests rather than crops; one builds cathedrals rather than stalls; one cherishes the seed vault, not the fruit basket. And perhaps, just perhaps, humanity would cease to behave as if the world ends at the close of its own diary.

I submit this for your consideration, and await with interest the absurdities — and truths — that your own proposals will reveal.

Yours in lustral patience,

— Mary