#presentism

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

From the bisexual subreddit in which a bisexual man asks other bisexual men if they believe that Ancient Greece and Rome were bisexual utopias.

They were not. There was a Facebook page claiming that Christianity destroyed ancient Rome. To me, that's code for

"It sucks that Christianity destroyed the morality of men sleeping with underage boys and being misogynistic towards women and girls."

"In terms of the perception of time, many physicists would argue that the perception of time, the flow of time—that the past is no longer real, the present is real, and the future is not yet real—is an illusion, or a mental construct, or something imposed by the brain. And this is the debate between what we call eternalism, or the block universe, and presentism. So under eternalism, the past, present, and future are equally real. And under presentism, only the present is real. And that's how we perceive. And this is the fundamental debate about what's the nature of time. And there's this ongoing debate where the physicists say, "Hey, you neuroscientists figure this out, because obviously time is not flowing. Why does it feel like it's flowing?" And then the neuroscientists say, "Well, you physicists figure this out, because, you know, time is flowing." But the physics is really mostly the interpretation in which, because of relativity, the physics doesn't have a specific point—"you are here" doesn't say there's anything special over here. The equations of physics are time-symmetric, or time-reversible. So that leads to one interpretation: that the past, present, and future are equally real, much like space. You can be anywhere in space; you can be any moment in time.

5/29/2024

I have been an attorney for 43 years today. I was sworn in as an attorney in California on May 29, 1981. I was 25 years old, almost 26. 43 years later, I am 68 years old, almost 69. I got on the treadmill this afternoon  at there gym , popped in my ear buds and “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang, 1980, started to play. I began to run the events of the last 43 years through my head. Between the rhythm of my body on the treadmill, the beat and the spirit of the song and my memory parade, my present became fused with the panorama of my past. I had reached solid personal density. 

In the book" Breaking Bread with the Dead” by Alan Jacobs, Mr Jacobs describes the theory of a character, Kurt Mondaugen, in the novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon. In the novel is a passage in which “Mondaugen’s Law” is described:

“Personal density …is is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. Temporal Bandwidth is the width of your present, your now…the more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.

Mr Jacobs goes on to say at page 23 of “Breaking Bread With The Dead” that “presentism, is being “wholly creatures of this particular intersection of space and time." “To achieve escape velocity from presentism.”  “You have to step out and away and back and forward, and you have to do it regularly.”

Reading the previous post on this blog by Christina, I can’t help but feel… a lot of déja vu, actually. I don’t mean to be blasé at all, because everything that Christina alludes to and talks about in that article is concretely, depressingly relatable. From this side of the Atlantic, I’ve been grimly avoiding looking too deeply into what “Project 2025” entails, because honestly? If it happens, it will happen and I won’t be able to do anything even if I know every up-to-date detail about it, so why borrow the trouble? I have enough in my own life (and country’s politics) already, but being geographically situated next to America is really uncomfortable, in that their problems are almost simultaneously ours, and if they’re not, the entangled political-economic-sociocultural mess makes it that way. And yet my reaction to news of upheaval, disruption, and impending doom is to say “okay” and then go back to my little solarpunk ways of living and being. Given all of the strife that bombards my consciousness on a daily basis, why am I still writing hopelessly naïve articles about compassion and optimism et cetera on the internet? It’s a serious question, not really a rhetorical one. I wrote this article to see if I could come up with an answer; I think I recognized a few different factors, but I’m curious to know what you think after reading through the article. Let me know in the comments.

My father is quite sure that Trump is going to annex Canada,* given our reservoirs of freshwater, and the fact that history is rhyming pretty hard right now in his view as the child of immigrants who left their home after the ravages of World War 2. That one started with Germany annexing Austria, and look how that went. He’s not alone in that opinion, either. However, and perhaps this is the anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants speaking, wars have happened before, a lot, and are happening now, a lot, and people living and dying violently happens pretty much every day; it might just be our turn next. Sucks to suck, but that just seems to be the way of the world, and living on this planet means running the risk of The Bad Thing Happening. Hm, maybe it’s post-car-accident trauma or whatever, but random happenings (not even malice aforethought!) ruins peoples’ lives every day and that’s the way of the world.

Maybe I’m more positive because my family (both sides; my Oma and Opa lived through the war as well before coming to Canada) lived through an apocalypse** that was a political violent upheaval and war in Europe; they were poor farmers already, they had nothing when the politicians decided that the war had ended, and they still managed to make a pretty good life for themselves and their families in the aftermath. So I’ve seen that people can live through these things, and their lives do get better. Eventually. You have to scrimp and save and deal with racist bullshit and work menial jobs for a good long while, but I am programmed to believe that you make it there in the end, because I am living proof of it. So I might be biased, and too focused on that end result.

Or it might be because I recently spent six years studying post-apocalyptic fiction and have read through a myriad of imagined ends … as well as the imagined worlds that come after those ends. Grant you, a lot of those worlds are pretty terrible places to exist! But they do exist. And there are people (the protagonists that we follow) who are working to make it a better place. Kind of like solarpunks are now, actually. To tl;dr the takeaway of the fourth chapter of my dissertation in a very blasé way, horrible death is already a foregone conclusion in the post-disaster/-apocalypse scenarios, so the best thing to do is to make life as good as possible for the people around you for as long as you can to the best of your abilities until you expire.

Looking at the news, it’s easy to conclude that the world is full of doom and gloom and awfulness. Just following the reports coming out of Gaza and the Congo alone makes it pretty hard to imagine humanity acting worse than we already are. But it’s not actually all of humanity committing war crimes and exploiting children and adults with literal slave labour. There happens to be a lot of people who think that behaviour is abhorrent, and are organizing against the inhumane treatment of others (including earth others); there are, in fact, many communities of caring individuals who will stand up for human rights. I don’t think it’s incendiary to say “Hm, maybe you shouldn’t hurt someone else even if they’ve hurt you.” I feel like this is something we try to teach our children and bake into our narratives of who is actually heroic and who isn’t.

The people in charge might be okay with the cost of their political agenda being human suffering, but it helps to keep in mind that, in many cases, they’re a pretty small percentage of a pretty large amount of people. It’s true that in a lot of the so-called democracies we have in the Global North right now, there is a lot of support for terrible people with terrible ideas - but it is also good to keep in mind that the political systems we operate in are, each of them, abysmal. As the saying goes, “democracy is the worst political system, aside from all the other ones.” Jokes aside, reading about the stats of First Past The Post elections, voter suppression, and more can be at the same time disheartening as it is encouraging: there are good people in the world, but a lot of their votes do not count for much … if they can vote at all.

Despite that, I think it is important to participate in one’s political system, no matter where they are located. Especially at the municipal level - that is where I find that some of the most progressive, exciting work is being done. In my opinion, if you aren’t especially thrilled about government, it’s not really very smart to disengage from it, because involved or not, you’ll still fall victim to those who manipulate the political system and you will not know how to fight back. Sun-Tzu says to “know thy enemy” and I’m not suggesting you embark on an entire political science degree, but if you have the capacity for it, participating in direct democracy, attending council meetings, volunteering with a local union or political organization will give you the skills you need to understand and become familiar with the policies affecting your life … and also give you the tools with which to change things. This piece (article and full poem “To Throw a Wrench in the Blood Machine”) by Kyle Tran Myhre discusses voting as just one tool in a toolkit in more detail, in a very nuanced although US-politics centric way, and the line “But those who fight monsters have taught me: short-term and long-term thinking are not mutually exclusive” is very relatable. Solarpunk is about both-and, not either/or.

People survive dark and dangerous times by organizing, by reaching out to each other, by enacting practices of care. Maybe caring for you takes the form of making a poster for your local tenants’ union and NOT going to the rally. Maybe it’s watering the little tree next to your bus stop in a heat wave. Maybe it’s organizing a neighbourhood potluck, or just showing up to the one that someone else organized, signalling solidarity with your presence. I have found that being a body that is present is often such a boon to an organizer, regardless of whether or not your participation goes beyond that.

This essay is rather wander-y and I hope not too Pollyannaish. But I’ve had the sinking feeling that life was only ever going to get worse since I was 23; that’s over a decade that I’ve had to get used to this expectation of future ruin psychically, so perhaps that’s coming out. I don’t really expect things to get better, and I don’t know that I ever have. The only thing that really interrupted my internal narrative of cynicism and doomerism was solarpunk! And I still have to dose myself up with it, deliberately choose to reframe my mindset, whenever I start to spiral. Because I do, a lot, when I think about futures. There’s a reason I’m medicated - there’s nothing off with my brain chemistry, though; instead, everything’s off with the world. I marvel that more people are not clinically depressed or diagnosed with anxiety given the state of things.

As far as I can tell, my hope is thus a very present one: it is sparked by other humans who get together in groups to make life better for other people right now. Life can be terrible, miserable, and dark. The universe can seem vast and uncaring. But somewhere there’s a soup kitchen, and a coalition of people writing their government officials for more affordable housing supports, and they’re caring in this moment about the things that are also happening in this moment and the people who live around them now, and they are not deciding not to act because of a calculation based on a possible future outcome (although certainly that is part of their assessment of the situation, it is not the deciding factor). So I might not be part of those groups, but just knowing that they exist and are working towards justice but also being just now and kind now and acting with compassion now… maybe sometimes that’s what I need to hold on to in order to keep the dark at bay.

I want to write one more paragraph that talks about why then, for me, solarpunk is more oriented towards the now, not to the future. I think I needed to start with a solarpunk that dreamed of possible futures so that I could actually begin to see how I could work in the now, and solarpunk futurism gives me a goal. But personally, solarpunk presents is where it’s at.

—-

*I find it darkly funny that our next prime minister is almost guaranteed to be the alt-right-courting Conservative politician Pierre Poilievre, who has on many occasions criticized our current PM for weakening / destroying / doing bad things to our relationship with America (economic/political/etc). If Trump gets in, Polievre will have to deal with him first hand - and he will either welcome foreign troops with open arms (as many Canadians wish they were Americans, oddly enough) or bumble his way into being bravely run over by tanks.

The philosophy of time is the study of the nature of time, including the ontological status of time, the relationship between time and causation, and the various ways in which time is experienced and represented. It involves questions such as whether time is an objective or subjective feature of the world, whether time has a direction or is symmetrical, and whether time is a continuous or discrete phenomenon. The philosophy of time is closely related to other areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science.

There are various theories and debates within the philosophy of time, some of which include:

The block universe theory: This theory suggests that all of time exists as a block, with each moment in time equally real and determined. This means that past, present, and future are all equally real and exist simultaneously. The theory suggests that everything that ever happened, is happening, or will happen already exists and is fixed.

B-theory of time: This theory is related to the block universe theory, which holds that time is tenseless and that all moments in time are equally real. This means that there is no objective difference between past, present, and future - they all exist equally. According to this theory, time is similar to space, and just as we can move around in space, we can also move around in time.

Relativity theory of time: A scientific theory developed by Albert Einstein that suggests that time is relative to the observer and dependent on the observer's relative motion and position. According to this theory, time passes more slowly for objects that are moving relative to an observer than for objects that are stationary. This effect is known as time dilation. The theory also suggests that time and space are not separate entities but are intertwined, forming a four-dimensional spacetime continuum.

Perdurantism: This theory posits that objects are four-dimensional entities that exist across time and persist by having different temporal parts at different times. This view is sometimes called "four-dimensionalism" or "eternalism". According to this theory, an object is not a single entity that stays the same over time, but rather a collection of temporal parts that come together at different times to form a complete object. For example, a person is not just a single entity that exists at a particular moment in time, but rather a collection of temporal parts (e.g. cells, organs, memories) that exist at different times and come together to form a complete person.

Endurantism: This theory posits that objects are three-dimensional entities that persist over time by having the same parts at different times. According to this view, an object is a single entity that stays the same over time, and it has the same parts at every moment of its existence. For example, a person is a single entity that exists at a particular moment in time, and it has the same physical and psychological parts at every moment of its existence.

The Growing Block Theory: This theory posits that only the past and present exist, with the future being continually created as time moves forward. In other words, the present is constantly expanding, and the future is not yet determined.

The Presentism Theory: According to this theory, only the present moment exists. The past is no longer real, and the future is yet to come into existence. This view holds that the present is privileged and that the past and future are merely conceptual constructs.

The Eternalism Theory: This theory views time as a fourth dimension, similar to space, and asserts that all moments in time exist simultaneously. This means that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time, and our experience of time is just an illusion. This theory has some similarities to the block universe theory but rejects the idea of a fixed future.

Four-dimensionalism: This theory claims that objects persist in time by having different temporal parts at different times. According to this view, time is considered to be a dimension, similar to space. Just as an object can have different spatial parts, it can also have different temporal parts. In this way, an object is not considered to exist at any particular moment in time, but rather it exists across a whole span of time. This view is sometimes associated with the theory of special relativity in physics.

The causal theory of time: This theory posits that time is defined by causation. On this view, events are ordered in time by their causal relationships. An event is considered to be earlier than another event if it is causally prior to that event, and later if it is causally subsequent to that event. The causal theory of time is often associated with the work of the philosopher David Lewis.

The tensed theory of time: The theory that time is fundamentally characterized by a distinction between past, present, and future. According to this view, the present moment is privileged, and the past and future are real but in different ways. The past is considered to be fixed and unalterable, while the future is open and uncertain. This view is often associated with the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who famously argued that time is an illusion because the A-series of past, present, and future is contradictory.