For these reasons changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective. Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if they’re living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.

When confronted with the empirical and evaluative complexity that faces us, it can be easy to feel clueless, as if there’s nothing at all we can do. But that would be too pessimistic. Even if we’re walking backwards into the future—and even if the terrain we’re walking on is unexplored, it’s dark and foggy, and we have few clues to guide us—nonetheless, some plans are smarter than others. We can employ three rules of thumb.

I am reminded of what Einstein said on the death of his friend: He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

Most of what will be important in the future is outside our knowledge; it exists only in the future. The direct approach demands a capacity for prediction that we can never possess.

But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow.