- Not as harmless as it seems?
In September, barely a month after the new government assumed office, a casual acquaintance mentioned how it had “completely” failed – free falling rupee, inflation, security challenges and a host of other reasons that I struggle to recall.
Mind you, the person in question was well versed in political and financial affairs, demonstrating acute insight into matters of governance and policy, but nevertheless poorly oriented towards time.
I wonder if the attitude demonstrated by the individual had more to do with our social mores and cultural outlook than with a disposition uniquely his own.
So let this exercise be a humble attempt at hypothesising.
Certain features of popular culture, our social structure (and norms), rapid political and technological changes, and our all too human nature, I suspect, have gelled together to form an attitude of indifference and disregard for time – past and future.
Mindless consumerism exploits the instinct for immediate gratification, excessive individualism breeds self-importance and popular culture reacts by exhibiting a casual disinterest in long-term affairs.
Under such conditions, we find ourselves in an environment where the future is defined with regards to the individual, the past shrouded in mist – purana zamana; a complete and utter disregard for the scale of time – in a geologic, historicor pre-historical sense.
One does not necessarily has to subscribe to Luddite philosophy to argue that once flanked by electronic devices and a multitude of applications clamouring for our focus, our attention itself has been commodified. An information-dense network focused on immediacy so to speak.
Such temporal apathy is not as harmless as it seems.
The Japanese term Kokoro, meaning heart-mind, avoids this distinction between the intellect and one’s emotional self, thereby simultaneously expressing the idea and the feeling of temporality
Policy assessments are limited to five-year terms (if not less) and long-term effects of social changes are rarely evaluated. Funding for research and development is designed for quick returns on investments rather than clearly delineated long-term goals.
But what kind of consequences such an attitude yields? Well, one is that this approach has and is causing anthropogenic climate change that threatens civilization as we know it. And yet, warnings by experts are ignored for their suggestions threaten immediate profits, short-term objectives and inconvenience leaders whose only tools are shrewd focus on individual interest and parochial political expediency.
Geologists often note that if the time span of Earth is represented on a 24-hour scale, the entirety of human history can be captured in a part of the last second – 11:59:59 pm. It is at once wonderful and sobering to think that human activity within that fraction of a fraction of a second has created a new geologic time-scale now being termed the “Anthropocene”.
Meanwhile, archeologists and paleoanthropologists detail in-depth the breathtaking saga of the human species – from controlled use of fire and stone tools to sedentary lifestyle and then the invention of writing. Note that “history” is generally thought to begin with the invention of written language – more than 5,000 years ago.
Historians, similarly, deeply study historical events and processes that carry valuable lessons, explaining how relatively minor and negligible events repeatedly caused outstanding changes, cutting across geography and time.
The aforementioned perspectives, steeped in a sense of time, confront the excessive individualism and self-importance that is a malady in the zeitgeist we find ourselves in.
The consequences of temporal apathy are not limited to social or political affairs but have a significant impact on an individual as well.
Consider, for example, why the Existentialist movement, broadly seen, emerged where it did and when.
Will it be too much of a stretch to argue that a uniquely western experience with capitalism (commodification of the individual), coupled with the decline of religion (Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859), rapid technological change (industrialisation) and social collapse (world wars) played a critical role in the movement?
Are not the ideas espoused by the movement excessively focused on the individual (personal meaning) and therefore embody immediacy?
No object, idea and event can be divorced from time. Language, identity, social structure, political policy or economic affairs are all deeply connected with time – past and future. As is the origin and evolution of sexism, racism, fascism, nationalism, discrimination and every conceivable idea or behavior one can point at. This is occasionally mentioned as a ‘matter of fact’, and yet the values we embody and the behaviours we showcase rarely exhibit this.
Common sense, some say, is not so common after all.
From such a temporal perspective, the individual at once feels humbled and empowered.
Is there no beauty and grandeur in this view of one’s existence? To find oneself in and be a moment within a bare moment; a transient character in a never ending story, unquestionably bound to a sprawling web of objects and meaning. Perhaps it’s an exercise in futility to attempt to elucidate such a perspective, for the heart rebels if its perceptions are chained by language while the intellect obsessively hammers everything into place.
The Japanese term Kokoro, meaning heart-mind, avoids this distinction between the intellect and one’s emotional self, thereby simultaneously expressing the idea and the feeling of temporality. A phrase widely used in Japanese literature – Mono No Aware (Transcience of things) highlights the personal knowledge and deep feelings of the sublime with regards to passing time that every object or event evokes within us.
Such an attitude of temporal perceptionhas value in the way we view official policies, social changes, our collective future and, indeed, ourselves.
