How unique?
We all like to think that we are living in unique times. Something novel that keeps popping up with the narrative of constant progress that history so often promises and the linear narrative that it usually implies. All the new and shiny advancements- Semiconductors, mRNA vaccines, Quantum computers, self-driving cars, and apps that serve your groceries within ten minutes- seem to have so much promise in the future. At the same time, there is also the rise of Populism, the increasing wealth & values gap, increasing debt, global pandemic, military aggression, and refugee crises. Indeed, we are occupying unique spaces in unprecedented times, right? Let’s explore that last sentence, one related to time and the other related to spaces.
Unprecedented times?
When I am writing this, taking the topic of debt, the creation of debt and money has been happening in amounts greater than at any time since World War II. The creation of a lot of debt and printing money was also done in response to the 1929–32 debt crisis in the US when interest rates were similarly driven to 0 percent. Spanish flu took place in 1918, and pandemics have taken place cyclically. Both debt cycles and pandemics occur with certain repeatability in patterns.
When credit cycles reach their limit, it is the logical and classic response for central governments and their central banks to create a lot of debt and print money spent on goods, services, and investment assets to keep the economy moving. That was done during the 2008 debt crisis when Central Banks could no longer lower interest rates because they had already hit 0 percent as the banks did in 1933.
Throughout history, rulers have run up debts that won’t come due until long after their reigns are over, leaving it to their successors to pay the bill. So, there is a cyclical nature to history that is implicit in the ‘debt cycle’ terminology, but we always seem to be caught off guard because we feel we are in a privileged position outside the scope of history.
Now take Populism next. It is a political and social phenomenon that appeals to ordinary people who feel that the elites are not addressing their concerns. It typically develops when there are wealth and opportunity gaps, perceived cultural threats from those with different values inside and outside the country, and “establishment elites” in positions of power who are not working effectively for most people. Populists come into power when these conditions create anger among ordinary people who want those with political power to be fighters for them. Populists can be of the right or the left, are much more extreme than moderates, and tend to appeal to the emotions of ordinary people. They are typically confrontational rather than collaborative and exclusive rather than inclusive. This leads to fighting between populists of the left and populists of the right over irreconcilable differences. The extremity of the revolution that occurs under them varies. For example, in the 1930s globally, Populism of the left took the form of communism, and that of the right took the form of fascism while nonviolent revolutionary changes took place in the US and the UK. More recently, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a move to the Populism of the right while the popularity of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflects the popularity of Populism of the left. There are increased political movements toward Populism in many countries.
One of the defining qualities of our era(us vs. them, i.e., haves vs. have-nots, left vs. right) is that of separation. Our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world. Charles Eisenstein argues that the impoverishment we feel, cut off from community and from nature, is an impoverishment of our souls. Contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not separate beings having relationships. To a great extent, we are relationship. What happens when we sever those relationships, or it is severed from us? Take the extreme example with Solitary confinement, where there is a scholarly consensus that solitary confinement is seriously harmful, which has led to a growing movement to abolish it. In November 2014. the United Nations Committee Against Torture stated that complete isolation for 22–23 hours a day in super-maximum security prisons is unacceptable. The United Nations have also banned the use of solitary confinement for longer than 15 days and has deemed it to be a form of torture. Humans don’t just like to be social; we need to be.
Individuated spaces
Some argue that technology is causing this separation. The limitations of the hunter-gatherer life had kept man in check for three million years and had allowed for strong social bonds of the tribe(less than 150 in number) to flourish. With agriculture, those limitations vanished. The settlement gave rise to the division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the increase in technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole thing was underway at last, and the rest, as they say, is history. The community of life on this planet has worked well for three billion years — it has worked beautifully. And now we draw back in horror from this community, thinking it to be a place of lawless chaos and savage, relentless competition, where every creature goes in terror of its life. We separate ourselves from nature and go on weekend trips out to nature.
In cities, with people glued to their phones, Sherry Turkle wrote a book on the effects of technology on our relationships. She suggested that, far from bringing us together in a global village, technology increases alienation and pushes people apart as we move from deep relationships to shallow ones. It is not only technology that is the sole cause for our separation.
We enforce the separation between us and nature when we think of property.
We buy and sell property, things that we own, things that we perceive as belonging to us. Technology has constantly widened that domain, making things available for ownership that was never attainable or even conceivable before: minerals deep within the earth, bandwidth on the electromagnetic spectrum, sequences of genes. Contemporaneous with the technological extension of our reach was the progression of the mentality of property, as things like land, water rights, music, and stories entered the realm of the owned. The lack of a limit of money implies that the realm of the owned can grow indefinitely, and therefore that the destiny of humanity is to conquer the universe, to bring everything into the human domain, to make the whole world ours. After all, we experience money (and property) as an extension of ourselves; hence the possessive pronoun “mine” to describe it, the same pronoun we use to identify our arms and heads: my money, my car, my hand, my liver. Consider the sense of violation we feel when we are robbed or “ripped off,” as if part of our very selves had been taken.
Stepping outside of the social realm and moving to a biological one, we often think of the purpose of the human immune system as a way to distinguish the human us vs. the other microbes. This implies us vs. them narrative is playing out at the microscopic level. But the latest estimates suggest that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial ones — a roughly even split. Knowing what we know, how would we even define an individual? If you define an individual anatomically as the owner of a particular body, you must acknowledge that microbes share the same space. You could try for a developmental definition, in which an individual is everything that grows from a single fertilized egg. But that doesn’t work either because several animals, from squids to mice to zebrafish, build their bodies using instructions encoded by their genes and microbes. In a sterile bubble, they wouldn’t grow up normally. You could moot a physiological definition, in which the individual is composed of parts — tissues and organs — that cooperate for the good of the whole. Sure, but what about insects in which bacterial and host enzymes work together to manufacture essential nutrients? Those microbes are absolutely part of the whole and an indispensable part of that.
The easiest way to check if an animal needs microbes to develop properly is to deprive it. Some die: the dengue-carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti makes it to larva-hood but fails to progress. Others tolerate sterility better. The bobtail squid merely loses its luminescence; that might not matter in the lab, but it would make the uncamouflaged animal an easy target in the wild. If zebrafish or mice grow in the absence of bacteria, their guts don’t develop fully, their pillars are shorter, their walls leakier, their blood vessels look more like sparse country lanes than a dense urban grid, and their cycle of regeneration pedals in a lower gear.
Having addressed our separation of various aspects in space(From nature, other people, or the microbes) or time (debt cycles, recurring pandemics, Populism in politics, war), let us look at the time itself. Can we apply a similar lens when looking at the very nature of time?
Time
Time itself is a non-trivial aspect to consider here, especially as we humans are bound to see the world in terms of cause and effect, implying a linear temporal worldview, further compounded by the Judeo Christian view on a linear time. Both Judaism and Christianity refer to the eventual coming of the messiah, an “end of days” of sorts, a goal to which believers should work. A circular conception of time is incompatible with an “end of days” since circles have no end. Physics does not describe how things evolve ‘in time’ but how things evolve in their own times, and how ‘times’ evolve relative to each other. To dive deeper into the same, check out this excellent book, The order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.
Fundamental physics doesn’t distinguish past, present, and future. Not Newton’s laws governing the mechanics of the world; not the equations for electricity and magnetism formulated by Maxwell. Not Einstein’s on relativistic gravity, nor those of quantum mechanics devised by Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac. Not those for elementary particles formulated by twentieth-century physicists. Not one of these equations distinguishes the past from the future.
In the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. Therefore, the link between time and heat is fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd if projected backward, something is heating up.
Only when there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. When a ball falls down it can bounce back up, but if heat is transferred between a hot and cold object, it cannot be transferred back. It can only move in one direction. Thoughts unfold from past to future, because thinking produces heat. Traces of the past exist, and no traces of the future, only because entropy was low in the past. The increase of entropy in each individual process is what makes the whole thing work. Life is this network of processes for increasing entropy — processes that act as catalysts to each other. The universe's entire history consists of this halting and leaping cosmic growth of entropy. It is neither rapid nor uniform because things remain trapped in basins of low entropy (a pile of wood that is not yet met a spark or fire, the cloud of hydrogen till it collapses to form a star) until something opens a door on to a process that finally allows entropy to increase(spark of fire, gravity causing the gas to clump together to make fusion possible).
The presence of abundant traces of the past produces the familiar sensation that the past is determined. The absence of any analogous traces of the future produces the sensation that the future is open. The existence of traces makes it possible for our brain to create extensive maps of past events. There is nothing analogous to this for future ones. This fact is at the origin of our sensation of being able to act freely in the world: choosing between different futures, even though we cannot act upon the past.
It is the memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made. In this sense, we exist in time. For this reason, I am the same person today as I was yesterday. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time, we need to reflect on ourselves. The brain interacts with the passage of time and establishes bridges between the past, present, and future. To a large extent, the brain is a mechanism for collecting memories of the past to use them continually to predict the future. This happens across a wide spectrum of time scales, from the very short to the very long. If someone throws something at us to catch, our hand moves skilfully to where the object will be in a few instants: the brain, using past impressions, has very rapidly calculated the future position of the object that is flying towards us.
In summary, space is shaped by our external sense, that is to say, by our way of ordering things that we see in the world outside of us, but that difference between us and them is very blurry(from microbes to our relationship with nature), time is shaped by our internal sense, that is to say, by our way of ordering internal states within ourselves. When time itself is not this smoothly flowing entity separate from us, it has markers from the past(stories, books) with lessons for avoiding making the same mistakes that we did in the past. I do hope that humanity makes new mistakes and learns from them, rather than drowns in mistakes that we could have learned from the past(Fascism, fiscal irresponsibility). The possibility of predicting something in the future improves our chances of survival, and, consequently, evolution has selected the neural structures that allow it. But to understand our relation to time (and the cycles in which things reoccur) and space (between people socially, other living organisms), we need to reflect on ourselves. I am reminded of the quote by philosopher Blaise Pascal “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
