Ultimately, we believe that challenging short-termism will involve reauthoring some of the deeper narratives that animate our society, the collective beliefs that shape our direction of travel – from narratives about our place in the natural order of things to those which drive our economic paradigms. The stories we live in justify the status quo, make institutions feel inevitable, legitimise certain kinds of solutions, and make our world feel preordained. These cultural narratives are often foundational to the structures that incentivise short-termism, whether at the individual, political, corporate or financial level. For examples of this kind of narrative shift work, see recent work on poverty by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the oceans by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and The Pop Culture Collaborative, which is underpinned by the belief that “activists, artists, and philanthropists can encourage mass audiences to reckon with the past and rewrite the story of our nation’s future.”
Culture is foundational. It is the soil from which our civilisations grow. If we want to ensure that humans have a long, thriving future on this planet, then we need to work at the level of culture as well as politics, science, technology, finance and infrastructure. If we can work with art and culture to stretch our time frames so that we care about the long-term future, then hopefully as a species, we will have a future in the long term.
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Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke are the founders of the Long Time Project, which champions art and culture as a route to helping people think and act more long-term. It is a new multidisciplinary initiative involving the creative and cultural industries, the humanities, science, media and business. Twitter: @LongTimeProject
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