Living the 200-Year Present: An Interview with S.E.W. Smith

S. E. W. (Stuart) Smith, author of “Restore the Timeline,” talks about moving beyond the feeling that history is happening to us. His conversation with FJ senior editor Martin Kelley explores a Quaker understanding of change: the future is shaped by the choices made in the present, and hope becomes meaningful when it leads to action.

Beginning with the popular idea of “the worst timeline,” Stuart reframes time as a field of responsibility rather than fate. He connects the butterfly effect to everyday moral agency, introduces Elise Boulding’s idea of the 200-year present, and reflects on Thomas Kelly’s “eternal now.” Together, Martin and Stuart consider how Quaker history—its courage, contradictions, and unfinished work—can help people act faithfully amid today’s complex challenges.

Bio

S.E.W. Smith is a longtime member of Grass Valley (Calif.) Meeting and is a lifelong theater artist, writer, and educator, who is in his third year as a doctoral scholar with the University of Birmingham’s Quaker Studies program.

Transcript

Martin Kelley: [00:00] Hi, I’m Martin Kelly and this is a Quaker Talk podcast interview. I’m here with S.E.W. Smith. S.E.W., welcome! You can use Stuart, it’s fine. Great, well we’ll call you Stuart. Stuart Smith. Stuart is the author of an article in the October issue called “Restore the Timeline.” And boy, sometimes we really wish we could be restoring this timeline. How did we get here? This wasn’t the future that they promised us, right? All sorts of trends were going to be happening. You know, you read the political blogs 20 years ago—it’s not like that now. So, Stuart, yes—how do we restore the timeline? How did we get to this timeline in general?

Stuart Smith: [00:42] Well, that’s the article. I laughed because it’s such a meme right now of someone saying, “Restore the timeline! We live on the worst timeline.” And I even wrote that and said that, and I caught myself in saying, “Wait a minute, that’s implying somebody else is in charge of the timeline and not us, right? That there’s some great hand of fate that’s changing things.” And that’s not the way it is at all, especially not in Quaker society. We’re really a group built to live in a state of constant transformation—that we’re looking at a heaven that is made on earth. It’s not a millennialist group in the technical sense, right? It’s not that we’re just biding time for some better world out there; we’re supposed to do it right here.

[01:23] So I took a step back and had this moment of realizing, “Oh wait, timelines are a big thing, we know about it all the time.” And I went back to the great short story by Ray Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder, which is where the butterfly effect gets its name. Because this guy steps… he goes back in time, he wants to shoot a dinosaur. Spoiler alert: he succeeds, but everything works out except he steps on a butterfly on his way back to his time machine. And he says, “Ah, it couldn’t possibly be a big deal.” And of course, he gets back to his own time and everything is drastically changed. And that’s where the butterfly effect gets its name.

[01:59] I went through, you know, there’s tons and tons and tons of the what-ifs out there. And oh yeah, the other truism I’m sure you’ve seen also is the one where we say, “Hey, in time travel we always say, ‘Hey, the smallest thing can change your life in the future.'” But we forget that we’re time traveling now, and what we’re doing now…

Martin Kelley: [02:14] Yeah, yeah, we are creating the future now.

Stuart Smith: [02:15] Right! So that’s where the article came from originally, and it ends up with some soapbox standing of saying we can get up there and actually make changes if we take that responsibility seriously. And not in a ponderous way, but really a liberating way: that we can imagine ourselves to be time travelers, we can imagine ourselves to be from a different world—that world of the future that can be better. We can imagine we were traveling back from a better future: What would it look like? What would we do to make sure we brought that future around, right? That’s where it comes from.

Martin Kelley: [02:50] Yeah, whenever one sort of suspects that we’re agents in our own future—which I know sometimes, you know, Friends have this weight of Quaker history on us, and you know, “Oh, is this how we should be a right Quaker?” without realizing like, we are the Quakers who the future needs, you know? And we are the ones doing this and needing to be doing this and figuring out what needs to be happening in this time and space that we have found ourselves in.

Stuart Smith: [03:13] Yeah, there’s a… I think there’s kind of like a temporal analogy to how we feel about meeting for worship in the occasion of business, where we say, “You know what, there’s 50 people in this meeting, but there’s seven of us here at the business meeting. Guess who gets to make the decisions? The people who were here.” It’s not just a spiteful, “Well, we were here so we got to do it.” It’s that we have to make the best decision we can because that’s who’s here. We can’t know anything beyond this room right now. We can only know what we know as a corporate body right now. And I think if we apply that to time, we do better. 375 years’ worth of Quaker history—that’s true, but they’re not here now. We are. And so if we live that same way in terms of time that we do in physical proximity, I think we do better.

Martin Kelley: [04:05] One of the interesting things that I saw in this is your description of the 200-year present from Elise Boulding. Can you share with people who haven’t read the article yet what that 200-year present is? Because I find it fascinating.

Stuart Smith: [04:16] Well, she’s a great… at least Boulding is fascinating. There’s two Quaker conceptions of time that I look at all the time right now, especially in my professional educational work as a Quaker studies scholar working with Pink Dandelion and other folks at the University of Birmingham on my doctoral work in Quaker studies. There’s a sense of this very fundamentally different sense of time, and one is Boulding’s notion of the 200-year present.

[04:38] She says you can see the world as the now and going backwards in memory to the oldest person around. My eldest… last man standing in my father’s generation is my 95-year-old uncle. It doesn’t take much work at all to get 100 years in the past. He can tell me everything about his parents, my grandparents, who were born well over 100 years ago. That’s instantaneously back to 100 years—no Social Security, no television or rockets or any of those things. But also no hot showers, no refrigerators. I mean, it doesn’t take long to go 100 years. That’s just kind of the mundane stuff, but also no atomic bomb, no Vietnam… you know, there’s a number of things, right?

[05:25] But then we also go forward in Elise Boulding’s idea another hundred years to someone who’s going to be alive 100 years from our present. You know, my kids are all 21st-century children; they’re all born in the 21st century. And God willing… may they live well into the 22nd century through this whole century. What will that be like in 2126, right? I can imagine… it never works out exactly how you imagine, but at least you have to plan for it.

[05:53] You know the great work, the book The World Without Us? It’s a great book about what would be left if we were all twinkled away tomorrow. Well, within a couple hundred years, nothing! All humanity left… nuclear waste and plastic, that’d be it. Everything else is fine, will take care of it, right? So you can kind of imagine, and with that 200-year gap between choices, all of a sudden we can do all kinds of imagining at that point. I like that 200-year moment of hers.

[06:26] She founded the first peace and conflict studies program in the United States at Dartmouth years ago. She came to the United States as a refugee from fascism, as so many people did in the middle of the 20th century, and she knew how much could change how quickly. Seeing this new conception of time allows people the space to conceive of big changes if you start now, right? The compounded interest of hope.

[06:57] With that same notion, she sets up something I think is, for me, really good because you’ve heard probably the Indigenous teaching of the Seven Generations, right? Seven Generations sounds very similar.

Martin Kelley: [07:08] Yeah, well…

Stuart Smith: [07:09] What’s… I’m always kind of listening for trying to avoid cultural appropriation. So for me, reaching to a Quaker’s idea of time helps me a little bit. Seven Generations spans that 200-year present, but it goes in both directions, which the Seven Generations teaching doesn’t always—it really goes forward, but it doesn’t also reach back. I think you don’t have to scratch very deeply into American history to find people who… unless you’ve read Beloved or other works like that where you say, there are lots of people in this country who would not like to go very far back in time in the United States, right? Because the present’s much better than the past for lots of folks. Reaching forward and backwards simultaneously—that’s a 200-year present, and that really helps us make, I think, more informed choices about what we’re doing.

Martin Kelley: [07:52] Yeah, and it also helps us think about how the small things we’re doing now might grow and build. Not to just be in despair because “how can we change anything, everything seems to be so settled in place?” But like, no—if you’re thinking about a 20, 50, 100-year plan, everything can kind of change, and you can be planting the seeds (to use a favorite modern Quaker metaphor) to affect change, even if it’s not going to be obvious right now. We can have that faith and that vision to be doing that.

Stuart Smith: [08:22] The other conception is from another Quaker, but just a little bit before her: Thomas Kelly, the Quaker mystic. He talks about the “eternal now.” He says time spreads itself out like a ribbon, reaching back from the now into the past and forward from the now into the future. He says on this ribbon of time we live anxiously, surveying the ribbon of the past to learn how to manage our future. He says, “But time is no judge of eternity. It’s the Eternal who is the judge and tester of time.”

[09:01] When you start thinking at time versus eternity, it’s the eternal now—and I think he means it as God, I think that phrase “eternal now” is one of the words he uses for God. Living in the eternal now, he says, that’s the moment when you get into a meeting for worship and you really settle in. He says the presence steals upon us all unexpected, and not the product of agonized effort—which we’ve all felt in meeting—serenity. Now, he says that’s the eternal now. So that eternal now stretches out, and you get the chance to breathe: 100 years in the past, 100 years in the future, and you can start thinking about what really is eternal, and not just what’s present.

Martin Kelley: [09:42] My introduction to the issue, I wrote a little bit about a time where I was reading John Woolman, I think it was, and just sort of quietly contemplating. I had this moment where I felt a little jealous because John Woolman—for those who don’t know, 18th-century Quaker who advocated very strongly against slavery and helped turn Quakers’ attitude towards slavery to be against it—it seemed like the issues he was facing were so obvious and so morally right, not like the complicated issues we have now.

[10:13] I sort of indulged myself for a few moments thinking that, and I was like: “No, no, no, no.” I mean, the major powers that be in his yearly meeting at the time were slaveholders! There were questions about the American Revolution about to come, what’s the real role of Britain and the US, democracy, slave products… our whole economic system was built on this. He had it just as tough as any of us. To realize that we’re all plopped at some point in a timeline that is complicated, that is messy, and that we just need to be faithful to that throughline that goes through time so that we can know what to do and how to act and how to make sure that next hundred years is better than it might be.

Stuart Smith: [11:00] Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. I’m the first Quaker in my family in a while, about 100 years, but there was a whole line of Quakers up until the mid-to-late 1800s, stretching back into the early 1700s. There were definitely slaveholders among them.

[11:19] My family was part of this whole group that moved out of North Carolina into Indiana because it was not only legal to enslave persons, it was illegal to emancipate them in North Carolina at the time. So they had to connive this elaborate system—I haven’t got the full records yet, I think it’s out there in Earlham’s archives—where a whole bunch of families, including one of mine, left North Carolina, sold all their assets, took their enslaved workers with them across the line to free territory in Indiana, bought new land, handed them a batch of it, and said, “Go be free quick before anyone finds out.”

[12:06] The amount of planning… and you had to think generationally, because it was ruinous for that family’s generation, right? Because you’re giving up this vast percentage of your wealth if you’re counting humans as wealth. But of course, it was the right thing to do! Of course it’s the right thing to do. And the idea that you’re doing it 60 years ahead of the Civil War… for us now looking back at it, we go, “Man, I’m glad they did that.” But at the time, to make this ruinous economic choice—foolish by anyone’s standards—rough, really rough.

Martin Kelley: [12:42] I’d like to ask you what your favorite “what if” is. Do you have a favorite story or time that you want to look at?

Stuart Smith: [12:49] I think I name-dropped it in the article. It’s For Want of a Nail, and it’s the nerdiest “what if” ever. It is hundreds and hundreds of pages of academic imagination—none of it’s real, but it’s played so close to the vest. It’s what happened when we lost the American Revolution.

[13:12] It gets dark. I mean, the rebels are hanged, and a bunch of people escape to what’s going to become Mexico and they form the United States of Mexico, and Britain has the Confederation of North America. He just writes footnotes to books that don’t exist! None of it exists, except that as a good scholar, he just runs it for hundreds of pages. The level of devotion to the counterfactual is so inspiring, right? The more academic work I do, the more I laugh at how detailed he gets: he creates tables, election results, he just fabricates it all.

[13:50] It does show you how you can start at a small event and have a butterfly effect play out. Like I said, we do it retrospectively all the time, but if we do it prospectively forwards, we can start really thinking about it.

[14:08] The next article, if someone wants to pick up on this, would be to think about Solarpunk. Because Solarpunk is this whole genre of science fiction writing saying, “Hey, what if we figure it out? What if we don’t blow ourselves up, what’s the world going to look like then?” Some of those stories are near future, some of them are distant future like Star Trek. Tying those little chains together from now to that distant future—that’s wonderful.

Martin Kelley: [14:37] That’s great! Yeah, I’ll tell you, if I ever write a story that’ll have 100 readers or something, one that’s fascinated me is when George Fox visited Quakers in Barbados. If you remember the story, George Fox has this whole liberating message about human growth and following Christ. He goes to Barbados, he’s there with in-laws who are all slaveholders, he’s also not feeling well, he’s sick, and he kind of dodges as best he can the slavery question. He says, “It’s not great, you should free them, but I’m not going to insist.”

[15:09] It’s kind of a shameful moment that set in motion a whole lot of bad stuff in early Quaker history, and a lot of early Quakers were slaveholders. So I’ve always wondered: What if he had just said, “No, slavery is not right”? You know, he would have gotten kicked out of the house where he was staying, obviously. But also, the Barbados government would have come in and jailed all the Quakers, his in-laws would all be penniless, the English government would probably have shut down Quakers back in England because the King was getting money from all these sugar-producing plantations. Quakerism would have been stuck in its tracks. What would have happened then?

[15:53] There would have still been an interest in this. I’ve always thought about this interesting church in London a generation or two later that was sort of Moravian, sort of Methodist, that had all these wild people there. I’ve always wondered: What if someone like John Woolman never came to the US—there was never a colony over here—he was a Yorkshire tailor there, and what if he got involved in this church and they had all started a new radical movement? So that’s my “what if.” You know, 10 other people will want to read it and it’s not going to be a bestseller, but I’ve always wondered that: What if at a moment where a Quaker had a really important choice to make, instead of trying to hedge and play both sides, he had just been bold and said, “No, slavery is wrong”—anticipating the Quaker position 100 years later, but in a way that probably would have gotten the whole thing shut down and we’d be another footnote in history?

Stuart Smith: [16:50] That’s exactly what I was thinking of—a footnote. Because there are these coalescings of ideas, right? Sometimes it just takes a certain weight. But the connection that I look at is these links in the chain.

[17:13] For me, luckily all the new attention’s gone to Benjamin Lay, right? Where Benjamin Lay comes in and comes from a place of distance already as an outsider, and he has such moral authority that he’s working ahead. Well, who are young attenders in meeting at the time? John Woolman’s a young attender in meeting at the time! So the right person taps you on the shoulder at the right time.

[17:38] I think anybody who… when you go into meeting and you meet elders—I know for me, going into a meeting and meeting elders who were conscientious objectors in World War II, their simple existence helps you realize the what-ifs. I grew up with parents who were kids in the Depression and kids in World War II, and I said, “Man, our whole neighborhood is half Japanese American. How can you deal with that?” And they said, “Well, you weren’t there. You don’t know how afraid we were.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but you know what, I have all these guys in meeting who were also afraid and didn’t make the same choice.”

[18:24] So you can see the what-ifs in these few people who make exceptional choices. I think that’s something that we’ve kind of always been—we’ve put ourselves in front of the wheels, and we’ve been those people for 375 years. Sometimes it has these hiccups and strange what-ifs like George Fox’s moment in Barbados, but ultimately at some point in almost every generation, somebody comes in and says, “Hey, I got a crazy idea: What if we’re just nice to people and treat them right?” And then we have to go on for a while until enough of those people tap somebody else on the shoulder, who taps somebody else on the shoulder, and gathers enough people together to make that possible.

[19:00] So the what-ifs are all around us all the time. You know, our meeting’s first queer marriage was in the 1980s. Somebody has to step forward, and that “what if” is brought into a sacred space like a Quaker meeting, and that’s when things start to happen.

Martin Kelley: [19:21] How do we get to this point? If we’re talking about restoring the timeline, what is restoration, and how do we start that work with one another? If we’re being tapped—maybe even the Holy Spirit’s tapping us saying “this is wrong,” or maybe it’s other Quakers, or maybe we have shoulders we need to be tapping?

Stuart Smith: [19:44] I think that’s it. We have to get into that process of discernment all the time and think about it. I use the words “restore the timeline,” and I realize, of course, restoration in England meant bringing the king back, which is not something we want to do these days, right? But whether you say restore, rejuvenate, revitalize, re-something, right? What is it that can be rebuilt, reinvented? Find the right place to start, and it can be small, because we’re just planting seeds, like you say.

[20:13] Get into that process of discernment, and get in the habit of speaking the truth plainly and clearly and regularly. I think that will get us on the right foot. We don’t know who hears us, we don’t know who gets our messages, we never know how it’s going to be received. But if we don’t give them, no one will hear it.

Martin Kelley: [20:38] Yeah, and especially now on the internet, we put out things and we put out the magazine. It used to be Friends Journal magazine just went out to the 10,000 people who got the actual print magazine. Now it goes out to more like 100,000 people on the internet who just find us randomly. We may not ever have any correspondence with many of them, we don’t know what they’ve read, but it’s out there. We are putting things out there, and we don’t know how it’s going to be received and how it might change a person or a town or a world eventually.

[21:08] Well, thank you Stuart for sharing this here with us in the video, and then of course also the article itself all about restoring the timeline. It’s in the October 2026 issue of Friends Journal, and you can leave comments there and leave comments on this video. Thank you so much.

Stuart Smith: [21:21] Well, thank you for the chance. I really appreciate the chance to talk about it. I’m glad people have been reading it, and if they have interest, send notes out through us. Friends Journal receives all those notes. I can get reached out there as well, so I’m happy to talk to folks about it. It’s a wonderful thing, and I’m so glad people got to have that article out there. Thanks so much!

Martin Kelley: [21:40] It’s a pleasure. I hope we see some more from you soon. Thanks, Stuart! Bye-bye.