Time
Some thoughts on why the left needs a better understanding of time
Yesterday I was watching a video on Norvara media with Clara Mattei, whom I hadn’t listened to before, but became enamored with while hearing her speak about her studies regarding austerity and the rise of fascism in the early 1900s. While there were many things they discussed (highly recommend watching the video), one of the brief tangents that they took was on time and the eternal present.
While I don’t think there’s a standard definition, the eternal present in capitalism is essentially the way in which neoliberalism forces us to live in a constant state that is unmored from any sense of time. Often this is sold to us as limitless potential (Byung-Chul Han), the idea that because of technological advances, and because of the insatiable need for capital to continually grow, we arrive at a place of the eternal present, one where we have (according to the technocrats) the ability to make of life whatever our desires press us towards. But when our material conditions (in the old-school Marxian sense, the conditions which shape our history) prevent us from being able to actualize this infinite possibility, we internalise the shame around it. We walk around in a world that claims everything is right there at our fingertips and yet feel both instinctually and materially that it is forever out of grasp.
So what does it mean to have no sense of time? Those on the right have an intuitive sense of this; neoliberalism divorces us from any sense of shared storytelling, and as a result, leaves us feeling angry, confused, and unmoored. The right’s answer to this is to blame the progress of time, to pine for an imagined past (which, to be clear, is nothing more than an image). They couple this with a desire to return, one which is full of either dog whistles towards all kinds of fascist programs, or one which is overt and violent (see the last decade plus).
So when I speak about what is lost with this eternal present, I want to start by obviously rejecting this notion. The past was indeed worse for a lot of us, frankly, almost all of us, though certainly worse based on one’s class, race, sexuality, gender identity, etc. So what is it we are missing?
Then of course, there are the futurists, which to my mind are a kind of inverse of the conservative form of fascism. These are those who still have the strange veneration of an imagined past, but in their case, seek technology that can propel us forward towards a reclamation of the imagined past quickly and, in their eyes, efficiently. (A side note that efficiency as a word tends to terrify me; it is the buzzword of technocrats, this, along with words like optimize and the like, deserves the same scorn we would have for other taboo words.)
So where does this leave us? I think, somewhere in the in-between. Neoliberalism has indeed robbed us of any sense of time, and those focused on the past or the future are just substituting one symbolic image for another. Where the reality lies is somewhere in the middle, which I think Buddhism has some interesting things to say about.
First, I want to differentiate between actual Buddhism (or at least, a version of it) and mindfulness. This is important because often the lay understanding of mindfulness is to “be present, to be here”. On the one hand, yes, part of meditation is a way to pull ourselves into the present moment. But, and this is important, if we simply do that (as most secular mindfulness programs attempt to), we miss a huge part of the philosophy of Buddhism, and even more problematically, we divorce the idea of the present moment from ethics, which makes it just a bourgeois hippie version of the exact listlessness that capitalism and neoliberalism create. (Be more present while you consume…)
The distinction lies mainly in the concept of dependent arising. A very simple way of thinking about this is through a table.
A table as a concept is just a name for a thing, and in this way of looking at it, we could say the table has no essence. This is because a table is made of many things: the labor to make it, the materials, the raw wood, the rain/sun that made that same wood grow, the soil…and so on. Mediation is often an attempt to realize that dialectic intuitively.
Of course, this is a super truncated version of this concept, but it helps to mark the difference between just “letting go” (an egotistical demand, one which centers no letting your ego be effected by the external world) and “letting go of distinctions or concepts” which in Buddhism is part of the way in which we let go of self centered or egotistical ideas about the world, while understanding in an almost intuitive way, that everything is connected. (Nothing about us, without us!)
If we can look at time this way, it becomes possible to contain the past, present, and future. I am not suggesting that everyone needs to become Buddhist for this to happen, just that it is one way of thinking about time that allows us to contain the past, present, and future. With this, we can begin to understand things like traditions and see how we can adapt them. Time, and the ability to feel our place within it, is important, not that we need to honor the past blindly (in fact, much of the past needs to be dismantled) but that we need a sense of it, a place within and without it, in order to have a narrative. We can even play with this time, warp and shape it, so long as we have an understanding of it. To be truly “present” would be to have an awareness of where we are, where we’ve come from, and what we need to do in order to move away from a world in which so much suffering is taking place.
