Tuesday 4 December 2018

Word of the Day: Time

A moment in time (Creative Commons)

Political times are different from other times. For example, thermodynamic time is irreversible: entropy (roughly: a measure of energy dispersal or disorderliness) never decreases in a 'closed' system (e.g., the universe, or a very good thermos flask). In these systems, entropy goes up and up, but never down. So thermodynamic time isn't that different from psychological time - it just keeps moving on, never stopping, never reversing. You can't turn back the universe's clock.

But political times are often different from this version of time. (Perhaps not all times, but I'm no physicist - and certainly no quantum mechanic!). Most people see time as a linear progression, or at least as an irreversible trajectory ('past, the point of no return...', with apologies to Andrew Lloyd Weber). But for others, political time goes up, down, and back round again... Or should I say political times?

In this post, I take us through three different versions of political time: linear, cyclical, and plural. The first is a bit like thermodynamic time, but the second and third are different. I think the pluralist interpretation of time is best for our diverse world.

'Political time is a line'
For many political thinkers, admittedly, time is a line. And it's irreversible. A bit like thermodynamic time. There is a 'right' and 'wrong' side of history - like a ladder rising into heaven, with anything low being 'backward' and anything high 'advanced' and 'developed'. Time is progress. Both Marxists and liberals often think this way. Their common ancestor is Hegel, for whom history was a progression of ideas ('theses') being challenged by other ones ('antitheses'), from which improved 'syntheses' were formed which drew on the advantages, while casting away the drawbacks, of both thesis and antithesis. History culminated in an Absolute Idea, superior to all other ideas thanks to its constituting the synthesis of a long dialectical process. Hegel construed this 'end of history' as Napoleonic good government. So history ended with the invasion of Jena by Napoleon's forces in 1806. But Karl Marx thought Hegel neglected the continuing economic struggles after Jena between proletarians and bourgeoisie, which would lead to the challenging of capitalism from class antitheses. This new dialectic would lead to a different end of history: communism (after taking socialism as a further stepping-stone). For political scientist Francis Fukuyama, however, Hegel was more accurate than Marx: history was the culmination not of a dialectic of material struggles (as Marx suggested) but of a dialectic of ideational clashes (as Hegel contended). The final clash was the Cold War, which ended in the replacement of communism in eastern Europe with some form of democratic capitalism. Democratic capitalism, for Fukuyama, was the 'final form of human government' - the end of history, if 'history' is taken to be the progression of ideas until they reach a utopian end-point.

But despite their disagreements, Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama concur on this: history is a progression of contradictory ideas, and the end of history will eliminate these contradictions for good in a worldly utopia - be it Napoleonic-style rule, communism, or democratic capitalism. Time is a line - or, more specifically, a ladder - rising from the dark depths of the First Man of prehistory to the Last Man of modernity. Life for the First Man is 'nasty, brutish and short' (in Hobbes's words), but life for the Last Man is prosperous, free, and long. Time is a line - and it's pointed towards the sky.

'Political time is a loop'
But for many political scientists, political time doesn't go up and up. It goes down and comes back round again. Time is cyclical, not linear. For James Madison, the American republic was less of an 'end of history' than a modest return to the republican virtues of antiquity. For Donald Trump, the ideal America is to be sought some time in the past, which we must rise back up to meet, in order to 'make America great again'. For sociologist Saskia Sassen, we must return to the 'logic of inclusion' under the Keynesian forms of democratic capitalism practised between 1945 and 1978, rejecting the 'logic of exclusion' and 'expulsion' which has dominated since then. Geographer David Harvey similarly scorns the 'neoliberal' phase of capitalism. So we might need to seek out alternatives in the past, from the movements of indigenous people in Ecuador (and their ecological 'buen vivir' thinking) to the social democracy of the post-war era. Finally, for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortéz, the immediate post-war phase of regulated capitalism was better than the twenty-first century's phase of deregulated capitalism. For all these thinkers, Marx and Hegel are wrong to think that political time doesn't 'reverse'. Because time is not a line. It's a loop. Make {{insert a given period in the past two centuries}} great again!

'Political times have many shapes'
Both the linear and cyclical interpretations of time are, in my judgment, misled. Political time, of course, is itself a construct of our imaginations - but this is not my grounds for criticism. Religion, nation, and human rights are all constructs of our imagination - but that doesn't mean we should reject religion, nation, and human rights! Political time, similarly, is a construct we can use to look at how our political theories view historical change through time. Most political projects have some moralised version of time - as a line, as a loop, or as some other shape (a zig-zag, perhaps?). I do not propose we reject the notion of political times. But I do propose that we reject the singular notion of one political time. Because there are, I think, many political times. 

This doesn't just mean that different people have different opinions on whether things are getting 'better' or 'worse' (see the debate between the optimistic psychologist Steven Pinker and pessimistic intellectual John Gray for more details). I mean that different elements of society - from violence and poverty to life-expectancy and political systems - each have distinct political times. While violence between humans seems to have decreased as a proportion of the total population (as Steven Pinker has meticulously demonstrated), violence against nature has increased exponentially during the 'Anthropocene' (see novelist Amitav Ghosh, journalist Naomi Klein, or theorists Bonneuil and Fressoz for more details). Absolute poverty has decreased, but relative poverty and inequality have increased. We live in a 'high risk, high opportunity' society (as sociologist Anthony Giddens contends). Some things seem to progress towards a brave new world, while others go back to the 'good' or 'bad' old worlds. Some political times seem to be travelling on a trajectory towards a Hegelian Utopia - the political time of life expectancy, for instance, propped up by stabler political and economic systems. But the political times of democracy, socialism, and alternative ideologies are looping, rising, falling, and zig-zagging in myriad ways. There are many political times, depending on your vantage point.

This is not to say that political time is unimportant. It can help us to imagine where we've come from, and where we might be going. But political time is plural. There is no one 'political time', both due to different views and due to different trajectories seen in different aspects in the world today. There are many times, and they have many shapes. The upshot? Politics is many-sided, so we should adapt to each problem in a different way, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all model to humanity's disparate issues. Political times have many shapes - so should our political choices.

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