Is "cathedral thinking" still feasible?
The recent fire at Notre-Dame de Paris recalled to mind a concept I’ve thought a lot about over recent years: cathedral thinking.
The basic concept, articulated in a nice talk by Rick Antonson, is that in the Middle Ages, architects and builders would commence work on a cathedral such as Notre-Dame fully aware that they would not live to see the project’s completion. Notre-Dame took at least 150 years to effectively complete (which is quick compared to some other medieval cathedrals), and there were numerous additions and expansions during the following centuries. Antonson seeks to highlight and celebrate this form of long-term thinking—the kind that pursues a legacy project that will take decades or even centuries to accomplish, and that will outlive its creators.
I fully agree with his sentiments about the power and worth of cathedral thinking, but I’ve been wondering lately how feasible it really is in the 21st century. Have the changes in modern society so shrunk our field of vision that we simply can’t pursue these kinds of ambitious, multi-generational projects anymore?
* * * *
Here’s an important point: in the Middle Ages, there was little if any sense of “progress.” Technological innovations were few and far between. Meaningful political change was almost unheard of. People looked to the past for guidance and clung tightly to tradition. Medieval folk pursued the same sorts of occupations and lived in the same sorts of societies for centuries. An adult had no reason to believe that their children, or grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren would live a life substantially different from theirs. The world seemed largely unchanging.
Also, the perception of time was radically different back then. There were no clocks to relentlessly drive people, keeping them tightly on schedule. Instead, people lived by the natural rhythms of the day and of the seasons. While our modern society has become increasingly enslaved to the relentless ticking of time—we measure it not just in hours but in minutes and even seconds—such measurement was absent from the Middle Ages. People instead acknowledged time in broader strokes: the changing of the seasons, the cycle of births and deaths, the transitioning from one monarch to the next. As such, their horizon stretched far further into the future.
Finally, there was the religious motivation. Medieval Christians knew life to be harsh and unforgiving, but they held out hope for an afterlife, and this desire to reach paradise motivated them to glorify God and build works to honor him while they were alive. Religion, despite the doctrinal conflict it also incited, was an inspirational idea and a unifying factor that brought people together in the service of something greater than themselves. It encouraged people to live not just for the present, but for the eternal future, and so again the time horizon was expanded.
These conditions greatly facilitated cathedral thinking. Because people did not expect the future to be radically different, because they were more used to thinking about time cyclically instead of linearly, and because they were inspired to celebrate and pursue causes far greater than themselves, they were eminently capable of building cathedrals that could take much more than a century to complete.
* * * *
Life in the 21st century is vastly different, in many ways even the polar opposite. Whereas medieval folk looked to the past, we look to the future, which we hope will be better but know will be radically different. The rate of technological change has intensified such that each decade seems light years beyond the previous one. Whereas the difference between the years 1100 and 1200 was negligible, the difference between 1900 and 2000 was enormous, and even the difference between 2000 and today is almost as substantial. We live in the era of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.” There is no more sense of permanence; instead, people change jobs, relationships, residences, and ideas with increasing frequency, making adaptation a tough task. We have an anxiety-inducing uncertainty of what the future holds; we only know that change will come quickly and that it will be disruptive, and this inability to comfortably predict the future—even ten years out—makes it risky to undertake long-term projects. The increasing inundation of change that we now face greatly shrinks our time horizon and keeps us hyper-focused only on the immediate future.
Furthermore, we moderns perceive time very differently than the ancients did. We function according to artificial timepieces that regiment our day down to the minute. We no longer live according to the rising and setting of the sun or the changing of the seasons; thanks to artificial light and the communication revolution, we can be “productive” at any time or place. We are determined to get things done as quickly as possible so that we can rush on to our next project. Evidence of this change is revealed in the declaration of French president Emmanuel Macron, who insisted that Notre-Dame would be rebuilt and repaired within a mere five years. What took over a century to build with patience and loving craftsmanship must now be hurriedly reassembled with no room for delay!
And of course, there is the decline of religion in modern society, which is not usually something I bemoan but which in this instance does have repercussions. While the advance of science and reason has certainly put religion on its heels, I would also argue that the growing cult of individuality in the West has dealt it another egregious blow. Even those people who have not essentially abandoned religion nonetheless now seek “spirituality” instead, doing so as individuals who attend churches (if they attend one at all) as free agents who can come and go based on their personal feelings. Loyalty to a greater cause or established tradition is replaced by a quest for personal fulfillment. Religion in the West is no longer a massive, unifying force that can channel the efforts of thousands of people toward a common cause, prompting them to give their treasure and talent to a project (cathedral or otherwise) that will persist through the ages. And there is little else that can match religion’s power; political parties and secular ideology can sometimes unify people, but they lack the transcendent power of religion.
* * * *
So, is cathedral thinking merely wishful thinking? What can we do as a society to once again stretch our time horizon so that we give greater weight to the future, including a future beyond our own lives? This is a particularly concerning problem given that many of the challenges looming before us—climate change, AI creation, energy and water crises—will require thoughtful decisions that will address not just immediate challenges but also generational effects. We’ll need that cathedral thinking if we want to survive.
