Last week, the football team I support played against our local rivals. I followed the game on a live-text website using my mobile phone, checking on the score every few minutes for the first hour or so, until the result became foregone, which is the next best thing to watching the game live on television. One of the great joys of sport is experiencing the changing fortunes of your team, or the individual for whom you are cheering, in ‘real time’: this is true for the ten seconds of the Olympic 100m final, the hour and a half of a Premiership game in North London, the five days of an Ashes Test match, or the three weeks of the Tour de France. There is, no doubt, some pleasure to be taken from a long period of sporting success for a team or an individual, but this is not quite the same as the thrill of the live game or race, and as anyone who has played sport seriously knows, you are only as good as your most recent result. It’s the short term – the present moment – that matters most.
In this respect, sport is quite dissimilar from the rest of our lives. Most of the time, it’s the long term that counts and our pleasures, benefits, and advantages are accumulated slowly and steadily; likewise, pains, costs, and disadvantages pile up incrementally, often unnoticed, until the task of dealing with them becomes overwhelming. Compounding is not just one of the wonders of the world, it is also one of its fundamental operating principles. For which reason, if we want to know what is going on around us, to understand the deep causes that determine the way the world works, rather than look at day-to-day fluctuations and momentary variations, we need to study the forces at work over the long run; we need to attend to la longue durée. I would rather watch a race between hares, but to comprehend the world we need to keep track of the tortoises.
Continue reading “La longue durée”