When the language we speak makes us a little… short-sighted

Remember when, in primary school, we had to study large pages of verbs?

No one could imagine that the harmless future tense can, in some way, undermine our future (and that of our planet).

Does future tense lead to not caring about the future?

“Present-tensed” languages, such as German or Finnish, indicate future actions and situations using the present tense.

Sentences like "I'm going to the grocery store tomorrow morning" become something like "I go to the grocery store tomorrow morning".

While it may seem counterintuitive, these futureless languages foster future-oriented behavior.

Their speakers tend to save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, are less likely to become obese and more likely to use condoms.

The macroeconomic differences are significant: within OECD, countries that speak a “present-tensed” language save 5% more of their GDP each year than countries that speak a “future-tensed” language (i.e. with a future tense). 

Furthermore, according to some research, climate change laws are stricter in countries “with no future”. 

Moreover: 

- the personal inclination to contribute to environmental protection is 20% lower among speakers of “future-tensed” languages compared to speakers of “present-tensed” languages
- the willingness to pay higher taxes to fund environmental policies is 24% lower among speakers of "future-tensed" languages

One explanation for all of this is that when the future is expressed in the same way as the present, it seems closer – and the potential dangers to finances, health and environment also seem closer.

When we use the future tense, however, we place a distance between the present and what will or could happen.

This distance could move the possible consequences of our behavior away and make them less worrying.

The difficult balance of our intertemporal choices

It is not easy to get people to accept present sacrifices for future benefits.

This applies to environmental policies, which today impose constraints so as not to threaten the future of our ecosystem; but also for our personal economic decisions and health habits, which sometimes force us to give up something today to reduce future risks that seem distant - until these risks suddenly happen, jeopardizing our life.

There is an extensive literature on how humans calculate their "discount rate" in assessing the relationship between a present action and its consequences, and on how often future benefits are discounted relative to immediate ones. 

Behavioral economics experts, for example, are aware of how widespread the "present bias" is, driving many people to prefer immediate utilities rather than greater future opportunities. 

An instant reward would activate the brain areas involved in the processing of emotions and gratifications much more than a future one (it is no coincidence that the bias would not occur when the decision concerns others - therefore personal emotions and gratifications do not come into play).

Many of you will be familiar with the 1970s Marshmallow Experiment on delayed gratification: a group of children were given the choice between an immediate reward (a marshmallow, a cookie, a pretzel…) or waiting 15 minutes to double the reward. 

Children with greater self-control, those capable of waiting, would have recorded higher scores in the future university entrance exams, a lower body mass index, greater self-esteem, improved frustration tolerance, greater adaptation to stress.

The language we speak is not a neutral tool

In general, the language we speak profoundly influences the way we experience and interpret the world.

In other words: languages are not a simple vehicle of independent and self-contained meanings.

Their vocabularies and grammars reflect values, sensitivities, a peculiar historical and cultural heritage that influence the communities of people who speak them.

It is the Weltanschauung so dear to linguists like Benjamin Whorf: that is, the vision of the world that languages can reproduce and transmit, deeply affecting social structures.

There seems to be a correlation, for example, between gender language and women's participation in the labor market; or between the economic structure of a society and linguistic structures such as tenses, grammatical gender and courtesy formulas.  

As often happens in social facts, this correlation seems bidirectional: language influences culture, but also the opposite.

The presence or absence of certain lexical and grammatical forms would affect a society's culture; the latter, in turn, would inspire linguistic structures that reflect their beliefs and values.

The influence of language on color perception

An example of how language also influences the perception of physical reality (in addition to the psychological, social and cultural one) is given by the way of defining colors. 

Physically, colors are a continuum that varies according to the wavelength of light; culturally, that continuum is broken down into discrete categories through language.

Dani, a language spoken in New Guinea, has only two basic terms for distinguishing colors: mili (for cold colors) and mola (for warm colors).

On the one hand, Dani speakers can distinguish between different color tones (such as red, yellow and orange); on the other hand, they distinguish better between color tones that have different names (for example, blue and red).

The same goes for number perception (Chinese kids learn to count earlier because their numbers are more consistent and regular) or spatial orientation (the spatial deictics of some Australian languages explicitly refer to the cardinal points, improving the orientation ability of their speakers).

As linguists and anthropologists well know, there are countless examples of how the vocabulary and grammar of a language influence the speakers’ attention, perception and memory.

Feeling a Sword of Damocles above our heads could be helpful

Coming back to environmental policies, I don't think we could erase the future tense from our languages.

However, we can make our dangerous future seem less distant, showing with vivid images and concrete data what we face if we do not immediately adopt responsible behavior - not only as individuals, but as a society.

An example is the Doomsday Clock which has been talked about a lot recently. 

The Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947 by the researchers of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” of the University of Chicago.

Since then the clock has metaphorically measured the distance that separates us from a global apocalypse generated by humankind itself through its technologies.

The apocalypse coincides with midnight.

In the collective imagination, the Doomsday Clock is often associated with the possibility of a nuclear conflict, but humankind is also creating other pitfalls for itself, such as global warming.

A few weeks ago the magazine's experts reduced the distance that separates us from the end of the world from 100 to 90 seconds.

So, the Doomsday Clock tries to convey, through a tangible and familiar metaphor, the potentially devastating scope of uncertain and complex events, in order to make them feel more looming and shake our consciences.

Hopefully.