Is the past in front or behind?

Zoltán Balázs makes an intriguing point at the Telos blog in 1968: The Birth of Secular Eternity 01/28/08. I have the impression that the political tilt of that blog is pretty much neoconservative. But Balázs deals with a theme that fascinates me, the perception of time.

The ancient Greeks had a similar view of the past and present as Balázs describes here:

One of the most idiosyncratic features of human communities is the way they think of time, even though there has been little reflection on that in political theory. To mention just one example that indicates how different the collective experience of time may be, I allude to the South American Aymara people, who associate the past with the spatial front, and the future with the spatial back. That is, past is ahead of us, and future is behind us. In this framework progress in time makes perhaps less sense, since the very concept of progress is, at its root, advance in space, and we can hardly move back to the past. (In science fiction, time travel to the past is a problem just because we presuppose that in the past we would be as free to act as we are in the present, and shall be in the future—that is, we take our present back with us to the past!)

In terms of methaphors of position, there is a definite physical, spatial logic to this. We can see what is in front of us, and we can see the past. We can't see the future, and we can't see what is physically behind us.

Balázs observes, "The dominant Western vision of time is, obviously, the opposite. We look forward and constantly move to the future, whereas the past becomes more and more distant."

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his betst-known work, La rebellión de las masas [Revolt of the Masses] (1929-30), also discussed changes in the European perception of time. People of ancient Europe saw their own time as a progressive diminution in the quality of society from an earlier Golden Age. He quotes Horace's Odes describing successive generations becoming progressively more depraved. in the 19th century, Europeans developed a strong view of the times progressively improving. This optimistic future-oriented viewpoint was shattered by the Great War of 1914-18.

Ortega described the postwar attitude as one in which Europeans no longer expect infinite progress. Instead, a more complex and pessimistic attitude prevails, which also provides a sense of liberation from previous certainties. Europeans feel, he wrote, as though they "had escaped, and are going forth anew beneath the stars of the authentic world, a deep, terrible, unpredictable and inexhaustible world where everything, everything is possible: the best and the worst." The feeling of the new era was like the joy and excitement "of kids who have escaped from school".

He identified this feeling as a dissociation from the past, a perspective "that the dead didn't die in a joke, but rather completely; that they can't support us". And therefore we must rely on present resources as never before in solving the problems of the time. And yet pride in their own power sometimes alternates with insecurity about the destiny. Postwar Europeans, he argued, felt the present to be "more than other times and inferior to itself". (Philosophers write that way.)

But Ortega also believed a strong orientation toward the future is necessary. To live is to act, and to thereby orient oneself toward the future. He even believed that the essence of national patriotism was such a future orientation. "When we defend the nation we are defending our tomorrow, not our yesterday."

Balázs argues that the view of progress that became part of the Western view of seeing the future as in front of us was shared widely in political theory. Liberals and conservatives accepted it, and the Communist offshoot of democratic theory as embodied in the Soviet Union accepted it.

He then makes this suggestion:

This is, I think, what the 1968 revolutionaries failed to see at first. Contrary to their presuppositions, the forces of the past did not exist any more. Contrary to their perceptions, the present was not pregnant any more. Hence, and this is my thesis, put inevitably in rough terms, 1968, at least in Europe, essentially changed the conception of time and introduced the present as the ultimate category of political thinking. However, this is not a present related to the past or to the future, that is, a present favored against past or future, yet still understood in their terms. This is an eternal present, characterized by a consciousness cleansed from any reference either to the past or to the future. (my emphasis)

Although 1968 is viewed as a highly eventful year in the US, in Europe it is probably seen as a more decisive period. The May-June uprising in Paris and the "Prague Summer" in Czechoslovakia were the two most outstanding political events there.

Balázs then proceeds to make an argument which I don't understand that somehow the proposed new Constitution for the European Union failed because EU leaders failed to relate it sufficiently to the new, prevailing sense of time:

But politics is made within time, it presupposes time, being a joint business of past, present, and future. In the eternal present, however, time is unreal, and there is no room for politics, for collective action. European governments look more and more like ghosts on the stage of world politics, and whereas they have agreed upon a constitution that proclaims its independence from past and future, they simply lacked the political power to tie it up with the present.

He also makes a point that I think is important, "We, the heirs of 1968, are fully accustomed to the comforts of modern life, and rarely think we enjoy them."

That latter point is one that Herbert Marcuse - an Hegelian philosopher that was published and commented upon in the Telos journal - also stressed. In An Essay on Liberation (1969), he wrote:

This same trend of production and consumption, which makes for the affluence and attraction of advanced capitalism, makes for the perpetuation of the struggle for existence, for the increasing necessity to produce and consume the non-necessary: the growth of the so-called "discretionary income" in the United States indicates the extent to which income earned is spent on other than "basic needs." Former luxuries become basic needs, a normal development which, under corporate capitalism, extends the competitive business of living to newly created needs and satisfactions. The fantastic output of all sorts of things and services defies the imagination, while restricting and distorting it in the commodity form, through which capitalist production enlarges its hold over human existence. And yet, precisely through the spread of this commodity form, the repressive social morality which sustains the system is being weakened. The obvious contradiction between the liberating possibilities of the technological transformation of the world, the light and free life on the one hand and the intensification of the struggle for existence on the other, generates among the underlying population that diffused aggressiveness which, unless steered to hate and fight the alleged national enemy, hits upon any suitable target: white or black, native or foreigner, Jew or Christian, rich or poor. This is the aggressiveness of those with the mutilated experience, with the false consciousness and the false needs, the victims of repression who, for their living, depend on the repressive society and repress the alternative. Their violence is that of the Establishment and takes as targets figures which, rightly or wrongly, seem to be different, and to represent an alternative.

Balázs also points out that the notion of the present as eternity also reinforces the strong European support for the social state, which is far stronger and more effective in Europe than in the US:

... in eternity there cannot be suffering. The dominant, that is, essentially 1968-type of liberalism tends to think that cruelty and coercion are the greatest vices for they cause suffering which is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable. The main purpose of society is to minimize or avoid suffering. The classical liberal maxim, the harm principle, which permits everything for everybody provided that no harm to others is caused, is now generally thought to be inefficient. The political community has a primary duty to alleviate or terminate suffering, without regard to its causes and circumstances, and without regard to the scope and depth of intervention. The ground for it is that suffering and pain dehumanizes and thus makes us unfit for eternity. They are not simply bad, they are outrageous. The right for euthanasia is most firmly grounded in the emotions the sight of suffering elicits in us. (my emphasis)

In a vaguer point, Balázs says that the European sense of the present-as-eternity is also connected to "the idea that human rights, and especially human dignity, overrides any other moral and political value".

And he writes:

... we tend to favor the present in everyday practices, too. Again, this is not a hedonistic and individualistic feeling of carpe diem. This is a collective, rather than an individual, obsession with time, or with being up-to-date. Unlike Faust, we do not want to stop time because our goals have been achieved. We are already lords of time, hence we must make it pass. Our communication means, mobile phones, Internet access, reality shows, news channels, digital and web cameras, our passion for watching sporting events, especially those where new records can be expected, serve this collective purpose: to make time pass together, and prove to be masters of time.

And, as philosophers are inclined to do, he raises a question about the implications of this view:

This is why anguish and sadness fills the earthly eternal present, lurking behind the joy of the saved. The inhabitants of the earthly eternal present are nowhere. They are not anxious and agitated by fear. Rather, they are sad and anguished by their powerlessness. For those living in the eternal present lack the basic human political, i.e., community-creating, capacities, recorded by Hannah Arendt: the power to forgive and the power to make promises. By forgiving, we have power over the past. By promises, we have power over the future. But in order to forgive, we need the past; and to make promises, we need the future. Without them, we lose our power. And since we have no past, we cannot remember, we cannot enliven it, we cannot forgive - we cannot act. Since we have no future, we cannot make plans and anticipations, we cannot justify our actions, we cannot make promises - again, we cannot act. Only God, who alone is Lord of Eternity, knows where the way back to time lies. (my emphasis)

Tags: ortega, ortega y gasset, time, zoltán balázs