Time has always been a means of dividing one’s own life into the hours of everyday life, the days of work, the months, years, death. In the age of climate change and the looming climate catastrophe, time becomes a means of measuring the whole species – how far back does humanity go compared to the age of the earth, how long will it last in the face of possible mass extinction?
From a more private category, even if it has been the subject of social struggles like the length of working hours, time is transformed into a political category that goes beyond the periods of reflection and legislature of the present and of democracy: what does it mean that man is a ushered in a new earth epoch, the Anthropocene? What does it mean that the earth has existed without humans for many billions of years and will exist without humans for many billions of years? What are the consequences for the present?
With their names they mark the politicization of the time
The activists of the “Last Generation” already have this eschatological dimension in their name, they make clear the politicization and also instrumentalization of the time – and from the possible annihilation of humanity they draw the conclusion to act radically here and now. Their protests are time protests in the present because they interrupt everyday life, which for many people consists of getting from A to B by car as quickly as possible.
Other currents of thought such as “long-termism” draw the conclusion from the dangers of the near future that they think far beyond the present and calculate the maximum benefit for the survival of the species quite unemotionally – “as strange as it sounds”, writes the favorite philosopher of long-term thinkers William MacAskill, “We are the Ancients. We live at the beginning of history, in the most distant past”.
99.5
percent of its time is what the human species has, according to the favorite philosopher of long-term thinkers William MacAskillstill ahead.
For a distant future, do what you can today
His calculation: Even if 90 percent of humanity were to die out and the species survived as long as all mammals in the history of the earth, one million years, our species still has 99.5 percent of its time ahead of it. His consistency is cold and calculating: We must do the best we can today in order to bring about the best over over over the day after tomorrow. Utilitarianism in the face of climate change and artificial intelligence, for MacAskill a far greater threat to humanity than global warming.
MacAskills Book “What We Owe The Future” was met with controversy last year – it has a lot to do with the tech milieu and thinking of Silicon Valley and the idea that human lives can best be saved by engineers.
Early history is supposed to provide answers about the future
A radical look ahead – where other books are looking for exactly the other direction and are looking for answers for the present in the early history of mankind or the formation of the world. They are looking for answers for the present in the early history of mankind
This is roughly the approach Helen Gordon in “Notes from Deep Time”, her fascinating journey into the deep past and thus the possible future of the earth. In view of the geological time, the layers of rock, sediment, time, other perspectives on our options for action today open up, almost meditatively – an anarchic thinking, time anarchism, which also characterizes the book “Beginnings” by David Graeber and David Wengrow, the past year caused a sensation.
For Graeber and Wengrow, it is the archeology of our earliest civilizations that shows how misguided we are about the deep past of the species – and on which misconceptions our political present is built. Here, too, time becomes a political issue, far beyond today’s political debates.
As different as they are, these books have one thing in common: in a basic sense, they work like a brain massage and awaken dormant synapses; in concrete terms, they shake up a lethargic present and change the view of political practice.
To home page
