Cathedral-thinking in an Age of Distraction
Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona. Photo by Ken Cheung on Unsplash.
Our minds are trained by our commerce and our politics to view the world in short increments of time. Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and Jimmy Johns have set new standards for speed in their delivery of what we want, when we want it. We expect that what we order from Amazon Prime will arrive within days, if not within hours, and that we can binge watch the latest series immediately. We expect to know straight away the latest thoughts of our closest friends and distant acquaintances. While such speedy service is undoubtedly beneficial, it tricks us into thinking that all of our problems can be solved with such immediacy. This is, of course, not the case when we are seeking new solutions to historic and deeply entrenched systemic social challenges. These are urgent challenges, but we must temper our urgency with a recognition that true change goes hand in hand with deep patience.
At Capita, we are working against the grain of immediate gratification that we’ve become conditioned to expect. Stewart Brand has called this distinctively contemporary phenomenon our “pathologically short attention span.” We choose to take a long-view of the problems facing our youngest children and we believe that the most immediate solution to a problem is not necessarily the best solution, particularly if our goal is the flourishing of persons and communities, not just the eradication of problems. We think that our long-term vision fosters responsibility for the flourishing of both today’s children and their children’s grandchildren. Our collaborative publication with KnowledgeWorks of Foundations for Flourishing Futures: A Look Ahead for Young Children and Families adopted a ten-year frame and has become a charter for our work.
“Short-term thinking distracts us from the more important tasks of establishing strong foundations for our children’s and grandchildren’s futures by patient investment, the development of new knowledge, institution building, and the long work of culture change.”
In a remarkable speech last year to the European Parliament, the climate activist Greta Thunberg urged parliamentarians to adopt “cathedral-thinking” to tackle climate change. The great European cathedrals to which she was referring weren’t built in even a few years, but over centuries. Many of the construction workers who built them never saw the finished building. In the Middle Ages, Notre-Dame de Paris took almost 200 years to build and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is still not finished some 138 years after construction began. Such deliberate construction is necessary to build something sturdy, strong, and beautiful that will last well-beyond the lifetimes of today’s children. Such deliberate and slow building is a necessary act of stewardship of our future.
Too often philanthropy and non-profit organizations set out in well-meaning ways to solve social problems without adopting cathedral-thinking. We falsely believe that the problem right before us- a problem hundreds of years in the making- can be solved within a few years: some grants invested here, a few reports, or an innovative, new program there. And, we want to see immediate results. Such thinking distracts us from the more important tasks of establishing strong foundations for our children’s and grandchildren’s futures by patient investment, the development of new knowledge, institution building, and the long work of culture change.
This work is the work of being a “good ancestor.” Let’s not just think about the work we are doing now and the immediate gratification we receive from work well done, but what we are building that we will never see.