TIME AND TIME AGAIN
Time has no intrinsic substance; no force, per se, that can be substantively manipulated. Time is merely a conceptual tool for measuring the rate of movement and the measurement of decay from the point of view of a select moment in time.
The past, as we use it, is a compilation of recollections of a nonexistent present. The present is nothing more than a series of elusive moments that quickly become conceptualized as the past. The future is a compilation of anticipatory moments conceptualized as not yet realized. In terms of linear time, the future decays to the present and the present decays to the past with the past being the place of no-time, eventually becoming the point where time runs out, the point of singularity.
It is important to keep these definitions in mind, because we tend to imbue time with a force it does not possess. The fact is we humans are obsessed with measurements. We can't help it. It's what we do. After all, we're the differentiators, the namers of things, the measure-ers of them, the ultimate discriminating animals who identify same and different, and we struggle mightily with all of that. To that end, we have come to identify time as a measurement and differentiate it into past, present, and future, moment by moment.
Time is one of humanity's greatest conceptual achievements that almost all humans accept as a real entity in our lives. What we consider the force of time is in actuality movement. We're always moving. We're always active even if we sit still; we're still moving and wearing out. We see this in everything around us and we feel it in ourselves. At the same time, we experience movement as heading towards something, which we call the future. While we wear away, we anticipate that more shall come after us.
This differentiation of time into its various categories of past, present, future, seconds, minutes, hours, days weeks, years, eras, seasons, etc. has given it a hold on our perceptions and cognitive capabilities. Time captivates the human imagination as a reality we cannot escape until, perhaps, we're dead. Even then, the living mark the graves and memorialize the deceased by measuring the span of deceased's life as a moment in time and celebrate events of a loved one's life as if they're still subject to time.
PUDDLING THE PAST
Our relationship to time is largely bipolar. When thinking of time, we largely think of the past and the future. The present almost always gets us to think about where we've been and where we're headed. Our minds rarely stay put in the present.
Of the two poles, the past appears the easiest to comprehend. We may not adequately know where we're at in historical terms or where we're headed, but we think we know where we've been. The polarity of time, however, is merely conceptual. Past and future are not strict polar opposites. They are interrelated concepts, with the past casting a long shadow into the future.
The further back one looks at time, the more one tends to puddle events by confining them with generalized or specific dates and giving them distinct names like the Axial Period, the Dark Ages, Medieval Times, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. History is our attempt to domesticate time by categorizing the random and unpredictable feelings that we associate with time as illustrated in Dickens' opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... ." Time is also domesticated by identifying events as recurrent seasons, as illustrated in Ecclesiastes 3:1, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."
History does not preserve the past but rather it is an attempt to keep the collective memory of what has passed current. There is no way to accurately replicate the past, no way to accurately capture what people at the time felt or thought about the events swirling around them as they occurred. We can only speculate and reference them imaginatively through our own present-day thoughts and experiences.
In fact, people who lived through a recent event; experienced it first-hand and can remember it as if it just happened cannot replicate it exactly because all the elements of the time in which it occurred no longer exist as they have moved on and memory becomes imbued with meaning very quickly which creates a curved lens through which recall occurs. One's recall may be categorically accurate, but it can never replicate the exact experience because certain elements of that experience pass with the moment in which it occurred, which is a long way to say that memory can never produce an exact replication because time is not something that can be replicated and the human mind takes the million, if not billions, of pieces of information and stores them categorically.
Pragmatically speaking, time can only be recalled as the measurement of an event - "It started at this time and ended at this time" or "It took about so long." In other words, we puddle the event in the context of time passed. Memory is largely about meanings, and time, in recall, contributes to one's sense of meaning as a defining element. Every historian knows this.
THE CURSE OF HISTORY AND THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
There is a saying attributed to different people that goes something like "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." A historian, whose name I unfortunately cannot recall, made an intuitive adjustment to this statement by saying history repeats but not in like. This cautionary insight helps avoid the tendency to concretize the meanings of history as a binding cause and effect relationships, "If this happens then this must occur." This type of thinking leads us to ignore the ever-elusive present. When events occur there are perhaps millions, if not billions, of factors that affect it, that give it its particular flavor.
The past, however, has a tremendous influence on how we interpret the present and how we forecast the future. We distill lessons from the puddles of the past that give definition to the events and situations of today and what we are looking for in the near future. What is problematic in using the past to interpret the present and in forecasting the future is imprecision. What comes to mind is the "butterfly effect," the possibility, if not the probability, that some isolated, unnoticed occurrence or series of occurrences creating a wave of causation that has a direct impact on current events. In retrospect, some of these butterfly moments can be discovered in a generalized way, but most cannot.
My cautionary approach to historical application is that humans are subject to engaging in self-fulfilled prophecies. History is very important in understanding where we've come from, but it is not prophetic. It cannot tell us with any precision where we're headed. Why we feel it does is because we can reference current events as being like past events. The problem is that current events are not past events. They may recall a certain flavor, but they're not concocted the same way.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV
This verse from the Hebrew Scriptures has likely shaped much of the West's thinking about the historical relationship between past and future. The fact is there have been a number of new things under the sun since that was written: industrialization, locomotion, air travel, space travel, telecommunication, the internet, advances in medicine to mention a few. What the "Teacher" was getting at and which is relevant to this discussion is that humans haven't changed much since that time. In fact, Ecclesiastes is a good read regarding the relativity of time in conjunction with the finitude of existence and the apparent immutability of human behavior.
But are we perpetually stuck with engaging in recurrent behaviors?
Does the concept of time, particularly the past, confine us to behavioral patterns that we are destined to repeat?
The Teacher in Ecclesiastes seems to be saying yes. For all practical purposes, this appears evident. Human history appears nothing more than an exhibition of repetitious behaviors within the context of variable circumstances. Our ability to scientifically examine the past, however, says maybe not; that repetition is merely a cog-like action in an expansive evolutionary system; that while we seem to behaviorally spinning our collective wheels, human behavior, in all probability, is slowly evolving.
What prevents us from seeing this, I believe, is our attraction, if not our addiction, to the past. As individuals we have difficulty in letting go of our personal pasts, especially that which has wounded us in some way; the things done and left undone to us and the things we have done and left undone to others. One of the Hebrew psalmists captured this sense of being wounded in Psalm 51:3, "For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me." The psalmist is not talking about the sin that will be committed but rather the sin that has been committed and about the person who cannot find a way around it.
I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks believed that the past is always in front of us; that the future comes from behind and sneaks up on us. The psalmist reflects this sense of the future; that in looking ahead we look through the lens of the past and that it is our past behaviors that are projected ahead of us as we speculate the future, and for many, if not most, it paints a grim picture.
Future-Fear, as I am using it in these posts, is connected to a fear of repeating the past or the past repeating itself. Such fears are based on our knowledge of the past; that from this knowledge we know what we are capable of doing. Unfortunately, what sticks most in our collective memories is not the good we have demonstrated a capacity for but rather the bad which has placed us on more than one occasion near the brink of universal devastation. One has only to read, listen to, or watch the news feeds to understand the validity of that statement; especially, as they relate to the recent past. As a whole, we are instinctually prone to be wary of predation and it is that which prompts us to probe the past for predicates of the future.
The past also possesses an allure to go back to the way things once were; particularly if one finds the present uncomfortable or encounters changes that have or appear to have little reference to the past. I will explore this time-related phenomenon in future posts, but the allure of past is similar to the fear of repeating the past. Both the allure and the fear of the past are illusionary. Nothing from the past can be replicated. The allure of the past is nothing more than a Siren's call that leads to stagnation and distortion of the present. Fearing what has occurred in the past as becoming a recurrent reality in the near future likewise serves to distort the lessons of the past; rendering them useless in understanding their application to the present.
Being from South Dakota, what comes to mind is weather forecasting as an example for the imprecision of using the past in predicting the future. From the past experiences and the study of them, we are given models, contexts in which weather patterns develop and can, with some precision, define today's weather conditions, but as is often the case, these patterns do not hold true when it comes predicting the weather precisely over time, let's say a week's time. That a storm is gathering in the previous week does not mean a storm will occur sometime this week, even though the historical pattern would indicate it happening. This does not mean we don't pay attention to what the forecast is saying. To ignore a forecast is like ignoring the patterns of history and risk being caught in a situation that could have been avoided, but it also means that we keep an eye on the present and understand that what was forecast a week ago is not set in concrete that conditions change - that a butterfly, somewhere, can change the course of the Jet Stream and change the course of history.
There will be more about the past as we look to present and then to future.
Until next time, stay faithful.
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