What happens when you gather thinkers in thrall to scientism, and ask them to list the most important books for civilization? A compendium that includes books on robot sex and immortality, but nothing on plumbing, or farming, or the God recognized by a third of the world’s population. As you might imagine, I take issue with that, as you can see in my most recent Good Letters essay. Here’s an excerpt:
I learned about The Long Now Foundation via Brain Pickings, a website that describes itself as a “cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest.” Aptly, this captures both the breadth of Brain Pickings offerings, and the constriction of its worldview. Both evidence a breathlessness over science and man which is captured by lopping off the disquieting portions in the opening to A Tale of Two Cities: we live in the best of times, an age of wisdom, a season of light…
The Long Now Foundation was established by futurists “to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common.” One of the Foundation’s mitigations is the Manual for Civilization, envisioned as a 3000-volume collection spanning four categories: “cultural canon” (note the careful ellipsis of article), “mechanics of civilization,” “rigorous science fiction,” and “long-term thinking, futurism, and relevant history.” This last is defined as “Books on how to think about the future that may include surveys of the past.”
The past may be useful in service to the future, in other words, but what we need is not a remembrance of the past so much as a continual march into the coming centuries, our superior sensibilities as metal-halide lanterns piercing the darkness. A gimlet eye might perceive here the very shortened attention span its creators despise. Can anyone possess enduring wisdom who is besotted with his own age?
You can read the rest here.