Context In An Age Of No Context

Lastly, as Michael Moore points out, corporations such as Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical, and Disney have for the last two decades been buying what’s called Dead Peasants Insurance. What’s that? That’s you and me friend, and more specifically, the life insurance policies taken out on low and mid-level employees where the corporation is the beneficiary. Yeah, we’re worth more to them dead than alive. That's a Bush-ism. So, what is the underlying theme here? What do these apparently distinct examples of public betrayal have in common? The thread here is time. Each of the above is an example of discounting the future, our future, to meet the increasing and seemingly endless gratifications of a decreasing minority. The cost is stress: ecological, psychological, and physical. We work harder for less, yet are entrained to fantasy images of future success and affluence and Freedom 55. Maybe the bigger question is how do we understand and act within a world defined by the speed in which we consume and deplete resources - and each other? How are we to re-conceptualize our cultural values in view of the complexities of globalization, be they social, economic, or ecological? Within our accelerated lifestyles, past and future appear as a perceptual ‘present’ informed by a radical self-interest at the expense of an awareness of the reality and needs of the other. It is as if we live in the context of no context. What we have lost, as John Ralston Saul argues, is our ‘inherent memory’ - and with it, a genuine sense of meaning, morality, and justice. He writes: … increasingly the creative forces of Western democracies are obsessed by the malfunctioning of time. By speed, yes, the speed of change. But also by the problems of memory, the tidal wave of shapeless fragments, the information which drowns us rather than informing Saul's lament is echoed and given shape by Johanne Gelinas, Canada's Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, when she writes that the, … environmental impacts and the financial and social burdens of environmental degradation and unsustainable development are such that Canadians can no longer afford the luxury of indecision and inaction. By continuing to allow these costs to grow, the federal government is failing to address the most fundamental principle of sustainable development: ensuring that future generations have the resources to meet their needs...The challenges we face are multiplying far faster than the solutions we are adopting. In this light, a temporal understanding of events may be conducive to the re-emergence of our ‘inherent memory.’ A sense of time and timing – of continuity through time - is the natural grounding of the moral and pragmatic imagination and sense of place. From here we may begin to see the outlines of an expanded cultural schemata recognizing and integrating the interdependencies of the social, ecological, and political fabric, as tattered as it is. Coupled with an understanding of the timing and rhythm of the natural world, we may further discern an alternative model of society based not so much on the linear extremes of political economy - and perpetual crises management, as on the nonlinear and emergent properties of nature. The increasing tempo by which we live in modern society is corrosive to such an understanding. Indeed, be it through the four year attention span of most politicians, the expectations of the quarterly shareholder report, the inherent narcissism of instant gratification, or the cold reality of living one pay cheque from poverty, the time horizons for meaningful decision making have been radically downsized – and with it, a vital sense of continuity and context defining us as human, and humane. Consequently, any sense of meaning (and democracy for that matter) is reduced to choosing one brand name over another - as if there is literally no tomorrow. In a very real sense, the citizen, in the eyes of power, is reduced to and - replaced by, the consumer, a commodity – a Roman mob to be entertained and fed. Where time itself is a commodity (time is money) speed becomes an important factor in the definition of self-worth and social progress. Excessive emphasis on this value is not only destructive in an ecological sense, as we increasingly consume the biological capital of the planet, but in an individual and social sense as well. Increased stress related claims by employees, for example, are increasing the disability claims paid by their employers. The ultimate cost may even be our own memories, the actual sense of who we are. Recent memory research reveals that exposure to high levels of stress, for as little as two weeks, can lead to permanent damage of the hippocampus - and with it, lasting memory impairment. In short, modern society is a place without time. Here, change is measured by maximization at whatever cost, of consumption over conservation – and with it, any time to introspect, to see, and to act upon the connections between the social and ecological debris accumulating around us and the lives we are expected to live: like the embarrassing spectacle of modern politics, out of site, out of mind – and therefore control. How ironic that our collective obsession with the ‘end of time’ at the turn of the millennium only masks the reality of personally ‘having no time’ – a cliché for success. British social theorist Barbara Adam coined the phrase ‘timescapes of modernity’ in reference to a conceptual framework allowing for a temporal understanding of events. It is a tool to comprehend the magnitude of consequences put into play by decisions (often short term) made both in the past and present. Be it radiation contamination of land and water (now in Canada), the depletion of the ozone layer, or any other number of events whose temporal aspect extends beyond our collective attention span, the purpose of a timescape is to make visible and immediate what would otherwise remain an abstraction. The ozone layer, which may not recover to early 1980 levels until 2050, exemplifies a process of delayed consequences that, despite prompt response through the Montreal Protocol, has evolved into a complexity beyond human control. Chemical and pharmaceutical contamination of food and water systems presents another case in the delayed consequences of actions taken both in the past and present. Persistent organic pollutants (the so-called endocrine disruptors), for instance, may have the ability to affect the regulation of hormones in the human body. Other time-delayed contamination is evident in the rise of antibiotic resistance and the unregulated use of antibiotics in the North American food industry. So how does a timescape approach to these events contribute to an expanded awareness – and ideally, to the act of meaningful decision making? We may not gain so much in factual information as we do in creating a perceptual framework in which the relationship between facts and between causes and effects are clarified. A temporal context allows for a perspective larger than us – and, to see a range of possibilities beyond what passes for government and democratic participation in the present. To clearly see those possibilities requires that any temporal narrative be located within a yet larger context - the natural world. Timing and rhythm are fundamental and pervasive processes in both culture and nature, including the human body. One way in which the infinitely intricate orchestration of nature’s time may be understood, in relation to culture, is through the science of non-equilibrium dynamics, or complexity. Complexity basically describes how systems, biological and otherwise, qualitatively change over time. The primary themes of this narrative include the interrelations between simple and complex processes, similarity across scale, and emergent self-organization. Recent theories of the biological clock suggests that the emergence of time keeping processes, including circadian rhythms, are themselves emergent of metabolic coupling between individual cells. This comprises a fundamental and intrinsic subsystem within each of the various levels of biological organization, including human communities. Emergent properties have been recognized in the disciplines of geophysics, chemistry, neurology, cognition, ecology, theology, and yes, business management. Although no one theory of emergence has been accepted, what is common to each is that a network gives rise to new and unexpected properties. Such properties can be found in such disparate dynamic systems as the human neural network, the regional power grid, and the way in which infectious diseases spread and adapt. Ecological designers have recently employed a similar approach, like Sim Van der Ryn, who argues that the nature of complex systems gives us a ‘sobering perspective from which to view our own managerial crisis of complexity.’ The temporal narrative as portrayed by the language of science is also a portrayal of the language of the imagination. Many of the world’s great scientists, including Einstein, believed that the events of the natural world could be known because they reflected events in the structure and function of the human mind. Indeed, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued that evolution and human learning are different aspects of essentially the same creative process. What he called ‘the pattern that connects’ is a developmental process inherent both in the domain of the physical world and what he called ‘mind.’ Thus the story of temporality as told by science is complemented and completed by an account that includes the way in which individuals and cultures creatively change and adapt in the face of social and ecological extremes. The recent drought on the southern mainland of BC for example, saw Vancouver residents enthusiastically responding to water restrictions, and of course the destructive southern BC fires last summer brought out a collective sense of caring and well-being not otherwise seen. From this perspective, we may begin to see the intimate relation between a sense of mortality and morality - or what the theologian and naturalist Thomas Berry calls a ‘functional cosmology,’ an ecological-cultural coding ‘available as a foundation for the total range of human activities.’ To paraphrase Thomas Beckett in Waiting for Godot, we are between a death and a difficult rebirth. That is, we live in an “in-between” time, where the old cultural narratives (myths) are no longer adequate or available (and even lethal) as a foundation for meaningful decision-making and action. In the meantime a new cultural narrative has yet to collectively emerge, at least at the political level. This coincides however with a waning faith in our civil institutions in the last three decades and in the politicians who have mismanaged and degraded them. The rise of the so-called anti-globalization movement is only the most recent expression of this sentiment, the most visible example of an expanded sense of social and ecological justice. Alethia in ancient Greece meant the ‘right time.’ That time is clearly at hand.