More’s Law
INTRODUCTION
Narrator: Bearded, a little disheveled, a man who wants to save the world. His messianic fervour makes him eminently believable though prone to bouts of paranoia.
Time. It’s the pulsing envelope in which we all live, the rhythm section of our days. In a world of unbridled evolution, its beat is fast and getting faster. I was once a junkie to this pace. Always running. A myopic goldfish gobbling at instant gratification.
But that was before. Before the light broke through.
Now it is my task to open the eyes of the people. To help them understand the Faustian pact that we all must make with this demon time. I beg you to come, join me.
The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
(Hamlet Act I Sc V)
PART 1 – INVENTING TIME
1) What is happening? ‘More’ is happening
What is happening to our time? The simple answer is ‘more’ is happening.
We fill each day of our lives to the brim with the many necessities of life. We have more consumables to consume, more relationships to relate, more information to assimilate, more of just about everything – except time.
2) Our insatiable appetite for more
Our impulse for ‘more’ is not a new phenomenon. It’s a primal motivation, a little like storing acorns for the winter. The more we have, the greater our chances of survival. This is what French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard is saying when he draws the longest of bows:
The human race is already in the grip of the necessity of having to evacuate the solar system in 4.5 billion years.
(Jean Francois Lyotard – The Inhuman (1988))
We are all driven by our desire to continue. There is no limit to our need for more. This is our fundamental dilemma. We are condemned to death at birth – yet our appetite for more is boundless. In an attempt to solve this conundrum we have sought to tame time – to fit ever more in less time.
3) The dawn of time
In the beginning, when we were nude and naïve, time seemed irrelevant. God saw to our every need and we could afford to lie back and work on our suntan. But even in Eden there was no such thing as a free lunch. We were told we must “go forth and multiply” – or quite simply “more please”.
Now to have more requires that there can also be less. Under this theory of relativity, time becomes a pre-condition for achieving more, for without it there can be no less. It was perhaps for this reason that prior to making us, God had created the first clock when he set in motion the cycle of day and night.
The imposingly named Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan first noted the existence of circadian rhythms in 1729. He placed heliotrope plants in constant darkness and observed that they continued to open and shut their fronds in accordance with the cycles of day and night that continued in the world without them. Since then, research has demonstrated the presence of circadian rhythms in almost every living thing from fruit-flies to ourselves.
Chronobiologists believe that these biological clocks synchronise the living world – offering each creature the best opportunity to utilize its survival talents. It has even been suggested as a reason as to why the current bout of global warming threatens the eco-system. The habits of plants, frogs, birds and insects as informed by their circadian clocks are out of sync with the conditions for their preferred lifestyles.
From the outset then we have been programmed to manage our time in the quest for more.
4) Evolution rewards speed
Circadian rhythms emerged out of a process of cause and effect. The sun rises and we open our petals to its rays.
The rules that govern such innate behaviour are embedded in our genetic code. They have been written over many generations. With each generation, mutation in our genes leads to a reprogramming of how we might respond to events. This is the mechanism through which biological evolution unfolds.
Charles Darwin sought to capture this dynamic in his theory of natural selection. He suggested that species that are most likely to flourish are those that effectively adapt their environment. Conversely, those that drag their evolutionary feet are at risk of being consumed. Under natural selection, evolution is about more, more of the species or its next of kin. Notably, it implies that evolution rewards speed.
5) Accelerating cause and effect
Whatever the merits of Darwin’s theory, evolution has given rise to acceleration in the cycle of cause and effect.
So whereas life that emerged as single cells some 3.5 billion years ago relied solely on genetic mutation, those species that proliferated through the Cambrian explosion some 3 billion years later did so with eyes, legs, arms, or the trilobite equivalent. They were capable of interacting in their environment with an immediacy that genetic mutation could never deliver.
Life was no longer bound to the pace of genetic evolution. Consider, for example, reflexes. Actions without thought. These binary responses empower a creature to respond to an event in milliseconds.
Similarly, the evolution of the brain and the emergence of understanding offered a more flexible, more efficient means of managing challenges. Creatures could begin to anticipate and to influence outcomes.
This is how evolution has compressed the cycle of cause and effect and in so doing fostered our love of speed.
6) One Great Leap
It then remained for our ancestors to make the Great Leap Forward. We discovered how to abstract cause and effect.
We learned how to generalize our experiences and pass this knowledge onto our clan. Our improving communication skills gave us the ability to understand things well beyond our own experience and enabled knowledge to be shared at an accelerating rate. We became storytellers – the Homo Narrans.
Over many generations our biology adapted to support the increasing demands for memory and for imagination. We were able to conceive the past and the future in a fashion so very far removed from our peers on the evolutionary tree that it became difficult to see the family resemblance.
The poet WH Auden understood this distinction:
Sessile, unseeing
The Plant is wholly content
With the Adjacent
Mobilised, sighted
The beast can tell Here from There
And Now from Not-yet
Talkative, anxious
Man can picture the Absent
And non-existent
(WH Auden “Progress?” in ‘Thank You Fog – Last Poems’ (1974))
7) Discovering time
So it was that a primal urge for more delivered us into awareness. In the process we had conceived the purest abstraction of cause and effect, the before and after. We called it time.
Time was the apple into which we bit. For without knowledge of time, we would be oblivious to this mad scramble for more. But with awareness of its meter, we were empowered to become ever more efficient, to squeeze ever more into our time.
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children’s circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books.
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What’s never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have the cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
(Dylan Thomas “Was there a time”)
In the words of the 16th century German mystic Meister Eckhardt: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us”.
END PART 1
Subscription Options:
