Evolution of the Conceptions of Time Across History
Discussion
Michel Bauwens:
"In order to understand the visions and insights of the macrohistorians, it might be of interest to have in mind a certain evolution/development of the conceptions of time and the temporal order.
It would seem that First Peoples who live in tribal, i.e. kin-ship based arrangements, have a cyclical view of time, an expression of the organization of life in close connection to the rhythms of nature, in which things are born, grow, mature, grow old and die, but also the cycles of day and night, the seasons, and the observable movements of the star. But whereas First Peoples are geared towards the re-enactment and preservation of the culture of the ancestors, the organized religions that emerged with the class-based civilizations of the Axial Age, while keeping a cyclical vision of the evolution of their societies, do introduce novelty in their conceptions.
Most well-known perhaps is the Hindu cycle, which sees four very long cycles following each other, each new cycle more decadent and imperfect than the preceding ones, and ending in the period of the Kali Yuga, the age of decline and collapse, which is the prelude for an entirely new cycle, that may well last for all eternity.
According to Alexander Bard, in a three-volume treatment of how civilizations are impacted by technology, it is Zoroaster who is the first to introduce a future-oriented arrow of time, in which the ‘son’ can indeed improve upon the ‘father’.
But this attention to creativity, which could be linked to the need for creativity that emerges in power-based civilizations that are in armed confrontation with others, nevertheless stays within an ‘entropic’ civilizational cycle.
It would seem however, that the ‘higher religions’* which insist on a transcendent reality, and a path of salvation or enlightenment, share a stronger insistence on the arrow of time. The Hebrew religion, and the christian religion as expressed by St. Augustine shared a vision that there is a beginning and creation of the universe, but that this universe goes towards a apocalyptic endpoint, which opens up the way to transcendence, and eventually, the creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth. With this spiritual innovation, human history has a direction, even though it is not seen as an improvement of the temporal world, but rather as an evolution to an end moment of salvation.
A franciscan monk, Joachim de Fiore, is often credited with the creation of a linear secular time, which would eventually lead to the modern notion of progress. His innovation is to see salvation, not in purely transcendent and spiritual terms, but in earthly time. He distinguishes an ‘Age of the Father’, the world of the Old Testament with an authoritarian God establishing the rules of obedience; an age of the Son, the age of love embodied by the christian Church after the advent of Christ, and a final age of the Spirit, in which brotherly (and sisterly) love spreads throughout society, without the need for religious institutions. This is important because for the first time, salvation is posited, not in a transcendent realm, but in the future of the earth and human society itself. This idea is born during the time of the re-emergence of cities with their actively entrepreneurial burghers, who are naturally sympathetic to a world of perpetual innovation and betterment. According to Eric Voegelin, this represents a ‘immanentization of the eschaton’, and will lead to the emergence of what he calls ‘political gnosticism’, i.e. first religious (the Reformation), then political movements, all geared towards the overcoming of earthly evil on the planet itself, and the creation of a future Utopian Age, always described in three ages, and requiring a overturning of the social order to achieve the age of perfection.
Once western civilization sets in, with its focus on technological improvement and the invention of new energy sources and practices like scientific inquiry, the dominant concept of time becomes the notion of progress, i.e. a concept of history that is based on a succession of ages, in which each subsequent age is an improvement of the former. This is of course an inversion of the previous views of the negative cycle of history. Once the dominant western model enters in crisis itself, and the awareness of ecological overshoot enters societal awareness, the concept of progress becomes very problematic. It makes place for the relativistic notions originating from postmodern thought, which deny progress, or it is replaced by much more negative conceptions of the evolution of time and human society, which moves towards collapse and decline.
We can posit a broad relationship between the conceptions of time and societal evolution, and the evolution of technology.
In times of no or very low progression, in which civilizations come and go but the majority of the agricultural producers do not substantially evolve their lifestyles (only the minority urban elites do), cyclical visions dominate. But once a sustained form of technological progress can be witnessed, visions of Progress start to dominate, while in times of crisis, politically gnostic movements proning earthly liberation emerge as strong social forms. Alternatively, when postmodernity, reflecting the thermodynamic crisis of the current political-economic forms, challenges the very idea of progress, negative time conceptions of ‘collapse’ and ‘deep adaptation’ come to the fore, predicting the end of the golden age of technological progress. It could be said that times of progress stimulate visions of an eternally sustained positive evolution (the extropian, neguentropic vision), whereas in times of decline, visions of inevitable entropic decline of the human race and its natural environment may come to dominate public perception.
There is however an alternative, represented by the spiral conception of human and natural evolution.
This conception, which emerges with the ‘integral tradition of thought’ that is very much linked to macro-historical conceptions, notes a dual reality:
On the one hand, human history seems cyclical: human societies come and go, grow dynamically then decline On the other hand, after 400 years of technological and scientific progress, it seems untenable to hold that there is no accumulation of knowledge or complexity in human affairs.
The double reality can be squared with the spiral conception of time. In such a conception, societies and civilizations alternate between cycles of ‘progress’ and ‘decline’, but a residue of growth persists over time (and can be demonstrated). Therefore, it could be posited, and observed, that not only does a central civilization persist over many millennia (David Wilkinson), but that as regional civilizations decline and collapse, the decline never goes lower than the low point of a previous cycle.
In this vision, relatively stable complex adaptive systems (CAS), are regularly shaken by chaotic transitions, which give way to a new form, another relatively stable CAS, which may in fact solve some of the issues that plagued earlier systems, thereby preserving a more optimistic vision for the future of human societies.
What is at stake in these visions is also the proper place and task of humanity. If the world is seen as fundamentally ‘entropic’, in a meaningless materialist universe, destined to universal disorder, then a nihilistic and hopeless future may be the best to hope for; if however, the universe is seen as a struggle between entropy on the one hand, and ‘neguentropy’ or ‘extropy’ on the other, then humanity may be seen as an agent of order. After all, temporally, as science tells us, first came the geosphere, ‘dead and unconscious matter’; then came the biosphere, with its autopoetic agents that can move; and finally out of life emerged conscious beings with culture and civilization, humanity. Humanity’s current technosphere may actually be harmful to the biosphere, i.e. it functions as a immature technosphere, but if we can transition to a mature technosphere that can live in long-term harmony with the biosphere, then humanity could be an active agent to bring more life and consciousness in the universe.