INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
What will remain in 100 years& time of the city or town where you were born: which landmarks or buildings? What about in 500 years? The
controversial author Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers a counter-intuitive rule-of-thumb for answering questions like this
If you want to know how long something non-perishable will endure & that is, something not subject to the limits of a natural lifespan &
then the first question you should ask is how long it has already existed
The older it is, the more likely it is to go on surviving.
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Take my home town, London
If I want to bet on which of its buildings will still be standing a few centuries from now, Taleb rule of thumb suggests I should start with
At 941 years, the keep at the heart of the Tower of London is a good choice, closely followed by Merton Priory in south London, which has
London oldest place of worship, the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield, has also proved pretty tough: parts of it date back
896 years.
The logic of Taleb argument is simple
Because the only judge that matters when it comes to the future is time, our only genuinely reliable technique for looking ahead is to ask
what has already proved enduring: what has shown fitness and resilience in the face of time itself, surviving its shocks and assaults across
decades, centuries or millennia
The Tower of London may seem modest in comparison to the Shard skyscraper & which sits across the Thames at 11 times the height & but it has
also proved its staying power across 94 times as many years
The Shard may be iconic and imposing, but its place in history is far from assured
When it comes to time, the older building looms larger.
The Tower of London and Shard (Credit: Getty Images)The Tower of London in the
foreground is dwarfed by the Shard skyscraper (Credit: Getty Images)Taleb preferred name for this line of reasoning is the Lindy Effect, for
impeccably eccentric historical reasons
In June 1964, the American author Albert Goldman published an article titled &Lindy Law& in The New Republic magazine in which he presented
the &cautionary fable& of showbiz conversations in Lindy delicatessen in New York
It was here that in-the-know comedians gathered to discuss the likely staying power of their peers
If someone over-exposed themselves by using up their material in a short burst of activity, the reasoning went, their career would soon be
But if they played the long game, making fewer but higher-impact appearances, this conservation of resources might see them endure for
decades in the industry.
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The perils of short-termismHow to build to last 10,000 yearsTechnology in deep time: How it
evolves alongside usTaleb has extended this anecdotal insight considerably
&Things that have been around for a long time are not ‘aging& like persons, but ‘aging& in reverse,& he writes in his 2012 book
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
&Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.&
A book that has been in print for half a century, he
argues, can expect to be in print for half a century more
Once it has lasted another 10 years, however, its prospective lifespan increases by that much again
Every additional year tells us something that prognostication cannot
Thanks to an inscrutable variety of intermeshed causes, this volume has continued to find an audience & and its capacity to keep on doing so
deserves more respect than the hundreds of thousands of copies of that brand new book sold last year.
Consider London buildings once again
They are subject to the same forces of wear and tear as everything else on Earth: they may be tough, but they cannot remain in good
condition without human support
And it for precisely this reason that the Lindy effect is so useful when it comes to understanding them
The longer something has endured, the more significance and symbolic meaning it has accrued & and the more tests of function and fashion it
The modern city of London, like most cities with hundreds of years of history, bends and weaves itself around its monuments
Over the centuries, fortune and favour have fixed them into the city identity
Within days of the fire at the 800-year-old cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris earlier this year, the watching world had pledged over a
billion Euros to fund its reconstruction
It unlikely the Shard would have commanded quite the same response.
The force of the Lindy effect & and the relationship between
architecture and culture & can also be seen in the efforts of those who wish to eliminate something old
In the name of efficiency and anti-idolatry, Saudi Arabia has over the last few decades destroyed vast amounts of its ancient heritage,
aiming to accommodate both the immense number of pilgrims who visit the holy city of Mecca and the ultraconservative Wahhabi ideology of its
Much of the country culture and heritage are treated as a threat to this ideology, perhaps because those things that have lasted for
centuries may engender more complex and enduring loyalties than absolute rulers are comfortable with.
Plenty of terrible practices have a
terrible vigour to them, for reasons rooted in the darkest parts of human nature
It a situation paralleled by modern China razing and
sanitising of its cities in the name of modernity and ideological purity & a strategy that, in recent years, has been turned with
devastating fervour against Muslim citizens
The Lindy effect marks a deep threat and affront to those who wish to sweep away the complexities and intransigence of our relationship with
And it suggests the importance of deploying as your wrecking tool something else at least as ancient and atavistic.
At this point, fitness
in the evolutionary sense & that which has proved its worth and adaptability by surviving & may seem to be in conflict with one of the basic
principles of reasoned argument
If you cannot give good reasons for something, it is not reasonable to believe it: and saying &things have been like this for a long time&
it is surely not a good reason to keep on doing something
Yet this is only a problem if we confuse &good& reasons in the sense of strong reasons with &good& reasons in the sense of praiseworthy or
Plenty of terrible practices have a terrible vigour to them, for reasons rooted in the darkest parts of human nature: slavery, murder, rape,
The darkest human crimes are also the most anciently attested & and it for this very reason that any efforts to mitigate and move beyond
them need to be similarly rooted in a close reading of history.Lindy is one half of Taleb toolkit for thinking about the future
The other half is equally important: fragility
Something is fragile when, rather than adapting and surviving, it shatters into pieces at its first major shock
In the evolutionary scheme of things, individual creatures are horribly fragile & but this fragility serves the greater robustness of their
The varied and competing existences of perishable individuals ensure adaptation and renewal from generation to generation, much as the
immense variety of life as a whole on this planet has ensured some survivors of even the most cataclysmic events.
When it comes to human
creations & buildings, artefacts, ideas & there a similar adaptive superfluity in play
Even the hardiest buildings are fragile in the grander scheme of things
But the emotions and ideas that lead us to admire, maintain and emulate a handful of them are robust
(Read more: How to build something that lasts 10,000 years.)
Similarly, while individual artefacts may be fragile, their lineage is likely
to continue if they serve and extend deeply-rooted needs
Hence the innovator twin adages: &what significant problem does it solve?& and &how does it make life easier?& If you can&t answer either of
these questions about something new & if you can&t in some way connect the temporary to the timeless & it probably makes sense to wait
rather than betting the farm.
The future is those pieces of the past that have evolved and endured, minus those parts of the present most
likely to crack and crumbleIf you want to think about the future in terms of fragility and robustness, you can sketch a kind of equation
The future is those pieces of the past that have evolved and endured, minus those parts of the present most likely to crack and crumble
And this is where we should look if we&re hoping to make predictions that matter: at time twin extremities of adaptivity and inadequacy
As the author Ursula Le Guin once put it, if you wish to understand that which is enduring, you&re better off exploring the capaciousness of
myths than fine-tuning present lines of reasoning
&True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and
The real mystery is not destroyed by reason
The fake one is.&
The hot new trend, the next big thing? No matter how big it gets, it almost certainly won&t last
Yet some phenomena exhibit an extraordinary resilience
And the ancient battleground these have staked out within us and our cultures & between need and desire, love and hate, freedom and
servitude & is where the real action will always lie.
When you look across the present moment, almost everything you see is noise
In the long view, it amounts only to distraction
To bastardise a famous quote by the author William Gibson: the future is already here, but the most importantparts of it happened a long
