In the arc of time as we know and define it, the presence of man is almost too brief to be noticed; and the presence of ‘civilization’ is even more brief.TIME is the one common element in the lives of each of us; it is the sea we all must swim in. TIME is the universal carrier of choices, the mass transit for decisions. Our notions of time, whether we are aware of them consciously or not, shape who we are. What ever we do, we do in the NOW, yet what we do here reverberates into the FUTURE. Time is inextricably entangled with the entire concept of sustainability and all precepts of morality. When did you last consciously think about TIME, not time as an appointment, due date, or a milestone anniversary, but TIME as an idea? Have you ever considered the notion of Time as something to guide and shape your actions? What was your longest view into Time? Could you imagine your own mortality or perhaps your own immortality? Can you truly imagine tomorrow? Next week? Next year? Can you imagine thinking about Time from the viewpoint of being not just one individual or a member of a family but as an entity that is a member of an entire species? And part of a larger integrated web of existence?
Each of us has a time lens or even a set of time lenses through which we look at the world. Yet most of us rarely examine our fundamental ideas of time; these ideas fly under our ordinary radar and remain folded firmly into our unconscious. Becoming aware of the lenses we use and how they shape our vision of the world is a crucial component in how life unfolds for us as individuals, as part of a family, as citizens of a nation, or as members of a species. As we look at ourselves in each of those contexts, we are aware, if only vaguely, that we look at ‘existence’ through a different lens for each ‘location.’ In short, our view of the world, our place in it, and what we do in it is profoundly shaped by our sense of time, at any point in time.
Our sense of time is an essential factor in the building and unfolding of understanding. Time is both a connector and a separator; it can join us with the flow of events or keep us apart from them. Our notion and beliefs about time influence our apperception of life. Apperception is one of those meaty significant words not common in our current lexicon. According to Webster’s it means “to interpret (new ideas, impressions, etc.) by the help of past experience.” Apperception is kin to the word perceive, which means “to grasp mentally; take note of; recognize; observe; to become aware of through sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell.” In other words, apperception emerges from perception, the information given to us by our senses as filtered by our brains. You can have perception without apperception, but not the other way around. You could also argue that perception is more of an immediate activity, something that happens in ‘real time’ while apperception is something that unfolds in a larger, more inclusive time scale; it involves a constellation of time that embraces not only the present, but the past and future as well.
So what is TIME? There are lots of ‘answers’ and opinions on this. Some view time as an inherent quality of reality; while some see time as an artificial, human construct. Others view it as a shared common experience, a kind of mental sensation. Then there are those who hold that time as being much like a physicist’s notion of energy: a something that is both a particle and a wave; first one and then the other; it’s here and it isn’t. Time is all of these. Time changes form and varies in its effects depending on how you look at it. There is no one ‘correct’ answer – though I suspect there are some folks who dabble in theoretical physics and mathematics who will dispute this. In my experience, it seems that as you become more or aware or sensitive to how you view time, or how you see things as a part of the ‘flow’ of time, when you become a conscious and deliberate observer, what time is changes for you, and you change because your view of the world is changed. It’s a complicated and convoluted affair, but the view you hold of time affects how you deal with your relationships and your interactions with the tangible world all around you; it influences virtually of your decisions and behaviors. The trick – or whatever you want to call it – is to be aware of your position. For most of us, most of the time, our notions of time are profoundly unconscious.
Which Now do you Prefer?In fact, for most of us, our base time frame of reference is what Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, has called the ‘Short Now’…. that immediate moment in which the grain and flow of our culture is happening at breakneck speed instantaneously. We all become nailed to the immediacy of what’s happening, but if we focus solely on the immediate and the current, we are stuck in our own singularity, our own individuality. This view catches us up in the rush, the exhilaration of the Short Now. And from that perspective TIME and ENERGY are blurred, and their differences are ignored; we begin to view them in similar ways. As a result we treat both time and energy with reckless abandon; we spend them with astonishing profligacy. We seem to assume that time, like oil and gas, will never really run out, and we behave accordingly. We are all immediacy and gratification; we are all perception and no apperception.
ZOO…OOO….OOM RIGHT NOW THIS INSTANT
‘24/7’ --- it’s everywhere, over and over and all the time, the sizzle and snap of right now and ASAP. 24/7 is always, always roaring at the back of ours necks in a tsunami of things-to-be-done STAT. When you find yourself hemmed in by a stacked-up line at the check-out, how do you feel? Do tentacles of roiling cart rage begin to reach out toward that person just in front of you? Is there a little inner nag urging you to move just a little faster ….and on the outside, you find your foot is tapping, your knee is bouncing, or your hands are fluttering and just then your cell phone warbles its penetrating mating call. And you grab it and talk, and talk and talk. And speed is ubiquitous and incessant. A majority of people seem to idolize this speediness, junkies addicted to fast this, fast that, fast everything. Certainly computers feed our addictions and make them more acute and even harder to shake.
All around us the culture is egging us on to greater and greater velocity as though there is some cosmic deadline looming. For example, a recent TV commercial for a cable company is a masterful paean to the mania for fastness. The ad shows an urban couple whose guests have just departed from a party and left them to deal with all of the clutter and the dirty dishes. They are both obviously tired and just want to get their apartment tided up. In a spasm of frustration the woman says, ‘why don’t we just ‘crack open your computer and take out some of the speed’. Frantically they dump some shiny, mercury like substance out of the computer, ingest it, and in a flash they are flying through the clean up in a breathless, manic burst of activity. Apart from its questionable suggestions and the larger implications of their behavior, it is tiring just to watch them. And then of course, there is the ultimate ironic and iconic USofA fast ‘sport’: NASCAR. This is an ‘event’ during which thousands of people sit and watch cars speed around in a circle for hours.
Whether we like it or not, we carry around assumptions and expectations about the need for speed in virtually everything we do, from communications, to travel, to eating, to relationships, to entertainment, to sex, to pleasure and to pain. We constantly try to do more and more in less and less time. For many, if not most, people this is seems entirely OK. Perhaps a majority of people, in our culture at least, even think this is normal; they believe humans are just plain hard-wired for speed and that going fast may be our default setting. But if it is, we are paying a high price for it.
Not only has our physical health suffered … you just have to look at all our bloated waistlines … our mental health has probably taken an even bigger hit. Today the average American gets 90 minutes less sleep than a century ago, ‘stress’ is at near pandemic levels, and our drug use at every economic level and in every age group and even ethnic group has skyrocketed. Other parts of the world are showing their own signs of speed disease. In Latin American and Spanish countries the traditional siesta has gone the way of the dodo. And in Japan, speed and work-aholicism has led to the coining of a new word: karoshi. It means death from overwork. Here we have another label or labels, most of which feed our drug habits: we call this constellation of symptoms hypertension and premature heart failure. It costs us billions of dollars every year and tens of thousands of shortened lives.
How did we get to this point?For almost all of civilization’s brief ten millennia, people have lived in ‘natural time”; folks did things when it felt right and made sense. In most cultures, the sun’s rising and setting made a handy yardstick for noting the passage of time in the short term, as did the phases of the moon, in a somewhat longer term. Along the way, some clever, if crude, devices were introduced to help out in the daily measuring. Hourglasses and ‘water clocks’ were used to ‘time’ events or to set limits on the duration of things, but these devices didn’t tell the hour of the day. Sundials as devices for noting the passage of time have been around since ancient Egyptian times; they were a common feature of medieval life, but there was no real standardization of ‘hours’ or ‘minutes’. You could say that these devices treated time more as waves or rhythms than as particles
Christian monks were the first people in Western culture to quantify and measure time as particles, or in small increments. As a result of their quantifying, specific ‘time’ became associated with specific activities. And these particles of time began to have a value assigned to them. Clock time took over during the 13th century when the first mechanical clocks appeared in the monasteries. Initially, these were huge, unwieldy contraptions using large wooden cogs and gears. Even though these monstrous instruments weren’t particularly accurate, they were widely used in towns all over Europe for centuries. Spring-powered clocks were invented at the beginning of the 16th century. With this new technology clocks could be made small enough for portability and were reasonably accurate. The first truly precise clock, a pendulum-regulated device that had an error of less than a minute a day, was made in 1656, by a Dutch scientist, Christiaan Huygens. This set a standard that is good enough even for most of today’s timepieces.
It was the Industrial Revolution, however, that that propelled the Western world into an obsession with time and schedules. It was during this period that Time began to be equated with Money. This notion insinuated itself into every aspect of life in our culture. In 1876, the first wind-up clocks hit the shelves as consumer items. Next, in what seemed like no time at all, factories began installing punch clocks. And, bing, in practically the second it takes to say his name, Frederick Taylor, the time and motion maven, armed with a slide rule and a stopwatch, showed up at the Bethlehem Steel Works in Pennsylvania. Taylor figured out how to measure the time required, to the fraction of a second, for every single task at the steel plant. He then proceeded to rearrange the whole process for maximum efficiency. “Scientific Management”, he stated, was the goal. “In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the System must be first”. It is Taylor we have to thank for bringing severe order to our lives. Bye, bye to natural time. From then on our natural time was stolen or at least bartered for, usually in an uneven exchange. Speed had arrived and it hasn’t stopped; in fact, it’s gotten speedier. ONLY recently has there been a conscious, concerted and growing response to the frantic, frenetic jittery juggernaut of speed: the SLOW movement.
Putting on the BrakesSLOW is an international movement that has unfurled the yellow caution flag about the pace of everything in our lives. SLOW is not merely an action but a working and deliberate concept. SLOW is a time lens that asks and encourages us to deliberately slow down and smell the roses. SLOW helps us to enter into an enhanced apperception.
As a word/concept, SLOW has multiple personalities, or shades of meaning. Its ‘values’ or colors vary depending on its context, its usage, and the intention of the person using it. It can be pejorative or it can be complimentary. SLOW can suggest ponderous, wasteful dithering; or SLOW can imply thoughtful consideration, as opposed to impulsive reaction. In the context of a phrase like ‘slow-roasting’, slow takes on a positive patina, stirring images of warmth and careful attention. When extended into the area of design, slow is most often associated with things that are hand-made and suggests something constructed carefully and lovingly crafted.
The Long Slow Now In the political and practical context, SLOW is more than just a stubborn, resistive, Luddite,reaction to the relentless pushiness of fast; SLOW is a corrective response. In our daily lives and culture, the most common victims of speediness are pleasure, satisfaction and participation in communal activities, such as family dinners or just hanging out. SLOW is a genuine antidote to fast. SLOW enables assimilation, appreciation and apperception. Perhaps more than anything else, SLOW is about finding a balance or, to use a phrase from music, SLOW seeks tempo giusto …. the right or best pace.
As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella Slowness, “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” Of course some things are supposed to happen quickly, instantaneously even. Some things can be rushed, in fact some activities need to be fast to be effective or to work at all. BUT, some things should never be rushed. Sometimes speed works; sometimes it doesn’t; and sometimes, as the saying goes, “speed kills”! And even if it doesn’t kill us, speed often blinds us. SLOW, on the other hand, opens us up to the Long Now.
WHAT is the Long Now?
S. Johnson: “The future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification.” As we are reminded by Stewart Brand: “Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovations and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.”
This is not a plea for slowness in everything, but, let’s face it, there is a time and a pace for everything. Speed does not allow for deliberative contemplation and regenerative revision. SLOW does. Speed does not allow for seasoned crafts-manship. SLOW does. Many people are convinced that SLOW will damage the current economy, that it is incompatible with the way we need to do things for our economy to prosper. That is a very debatable proposition. If absolutely everything is measured in terms of its monetary value, perhaps that might be true, but only perhaps. Slow is not adverse to capitalism; far from it, though it does not endorse the more egregious effects of excessive materialism that we have seen experienced. Most of what the SLOW philosophy espouses – spending more time in the company of family and friends, for example, or walking, doesn’t ‘cost’ anything. Ironically this is why snarky capitalists often oppose its ideas. Such things don’t require the exchange of money; they require the exchange of different capital, one we all have in equal amounts: time. SLOW delivers the things that really make us happy: good health, a thriving environment, strong communities and relationships, and freedom from perpetual hurry.
Give SLOW a chanceBeginning to inject SLOW into your life doesn’t mean dropping out or being less involved. On the contrary, SLOW is a path to renewal. As Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food notes, “Our praise of rest is not intended for the lazy or for sleepyheads, for the weary or neurotic. They simply would not appreciate it. Instead we are aiming at those who wish to listen to the rhythm of their own lives, and possibly adjust it.” SLOW is a way to add gusto, piquancy and genuine value to your life.
SLOW enables us to broaden our view of time, which in turn broadens our view of the entire spectrum of life…. in the SLOW life we see more colors and we see them more vividly; we taste more fully; we listen more openly; we have an expanded vision of what was, is and could/can be. SLOW brings an appreciation of how to balance the present, the past and the future; it lifts us out of the frantic rut of immediacy and ushers into the presence of the Long Now.
Ways of looking at Time and ResponsibilityPhysicist Freeman Dyson believes that each of us have an inherent sense of six different scales of time, from hours and years, to millennia and eons. Each of the scales has its own distinct psychological allegiances, whether it is to the self, the nation or the species. Moreover, each of these times sense stirs up its own, often conflicting, demands on our thoughts and behaviors. The short now gets most of our attention.
Looking at things from an operational level rather than individual internal struggles, Stewart Brand proposes six gradations of pace with corresponding sizes of time chunks that influence how we act in the world. [see chart] Moreover, he believes that a robust and adaptable civilization incorporates activities that move from fastest to slowest, and consequently from innovation to stability, from fashion and style at the fast end of the scale through infrastructure at the medium pace to Nature at the slowest pace.
Friction between the Short Now demands of commerce and ‘the economy’ and the needs of Long Now survivability sets off conflicts in this flow of activities. You can see it in the on-going struggle between business and government. For example, one of the things we seem to have forgotten is that infrastructure, essential as it is, cannot be justified in strictly commercial of capitalist economic terms. This fundamental maintenance activity of civilization must be taken on by governments and be supported by the culture. Moreover, education is intellectual infrastructure and so is science. And, as An Inconvenient Truth has jolted us into awareness, we have just begun to truly engage the still Longer Now of nature. Continuity, sustainability and perpetual renewal go hand in hand, unfolding over time. These are the fruits of investing in the Long Now.
Changing to the view of the Long Now has real benefits. As Brian Eno reminds us, “Civilizations with Long Nows look after things better.” Among the Long Now options you can choose is the 200-year Now suggested by Sociologist Elsie Boulding, or the 10,000-year Now, essentially the time size of all we recognize as human civilization, espoused by Stewart Brand. Either view leads toward a living future.
Some see Time as our adversary, while others see time as our friend. Optimist or pessimist, it makes no difference. Time has no moral or political position.
So what the F does all this mean? If anything? Well our notions of time and how they affect us personally and as a species are absolutely relevant and critical to the on-going unfolding debate about global climate change. Unless we are willing and able to start viewing time through the lens of species, we will lose the game, if we haven’t already. Time is carrying on without us. Time doesn’t need us or heed us.
It's time to kill off "Mother Nature"Let’s look at an image we commonly use, an image we love to trot out and deify. It’s an image wrapped in layers of time, like an old fish wrapped in newspapers: Mother Earth. Charming, isn’t it? Familiar? Cozy? Comforting – sort of? We like to think of ourselves the children of Mother Earth, but there is a twisted and deeply conflicted notion of time involved in this concept. On the one hand there is Mother Earth -- a nourishing, protective figure, though she’s carrying a few years on her she’s also fat with the wisdom accrued over millennia. Mostly she takes care of us and though she occasionally needs our help, she abides, endures and embraces us for the most part despite our atrocious behavior. Most of the time, ME is fulsome and bountiful, bursting with warmth and affection. It’s an iconic appealing image conjuring up a flood of joyful, happy feelings that have a Technicolor Hollywood musical aura about them. Certainly it’s one we’ve come to love after all, it’s bound up with our orchestral-accompanied vision of Mother. It’s time to fess up; let’s face it, we’re more in love with the image than we are with the reality. For a great many of us children of Mother Earth, our relationship with Mom is, well, not that familial; it’s estranged and strained. In fact, it’s become more abusive than loving. Our daily, in-the-present, real time relationship with this particular Mom is more like an on-going soap opera. We continue act with capricious, willful abandon and through it all we mostly assume and expect MOM, this long-suffering icon, to just suck it up and keep on taking care of us. She isn’t going to do that. It’s time to put the framed photo of Mom on the mantle right next to the one of Uncle Sam; they can inspire and remind us from there, but they certainly aren’t going to save us. And part of our confusion with this image is bound up with our notions of time, e.g., Mom will endure forever, that are associated with it and the behaviors these notions inspire and endorse.
Why are we so fixated on the image/notion of Mother Earth or Mother Nature? In reality, there is no adequate or appropriate anthropomorphic image of the earth or of time. Any such an image is dangerous; it misleads and simplifies and muddies our thinking, while inspiring false hopes.
Maybe we should change our perspective. Let’s exercise some apperception here as well as perception; let’s explore some other options. For instance, as James Lovelock has suggested, maybe the entire Planet earth is a sentient being. I kind of wish he hadn’t used the word Gaia since it imparts some vaguely feminine character to the notion. I would prefer to think of the earth as sort of gender neutral or a meta-gender, uni-sexual being. And if the Earth is this sort of uber-being, it is probably beginning to consider us humans as little more than a really irritating infestation that has gotten out of control. I suspect it has some pretty unpleasant ways of dealing with us.
Of course if you are more comfortable with a benign and anthropomorphic image maybe you should consider thinking of the earth as a vulnerable entity that requires our attention. Try looking at the earth as the child. Or, if that’s too familial for you, try taking a more technical view; look at the earth as though it is an extraordinarily valuable and unique estate, a spectacular house and garden, and you’re one of the caretakers. And like most of us, you’ve been falling down on the job for a few decades. Whether parent or trustee, each of these roles require that we look at our responsibilities and that we look at time differently.
Choose an image; choose a role: Be a parent or a trustee or a louse. Depending on my frame of mind, I can imagine myself as all three.
