For background on how and why these gleanings are here, see the first in this three-post series (here).
As for this third post, it consists mostly of leftovers — gleanings that I didn’t fit into one batch or another in the preceding posts. It was tempting to just discard these leftovers. But each strikes me as interesting — not only for their own content, but also because they help show that analyzing time perspectives involves more than Zimbardo & Boyd’s kind of typologizing. Besides, I did discard a leftover from last year’s gleanings about space, and then months later I had a need for it and couldn’t find it. So now I’ve resolved to err on the side of inclusion.
Again, I’ve assembled these gleanings into quasi-thematic batches. In order of appearance, and with minimal discussion and a semblance of order, the quotes in this third post are from: William Wishard, Jose Ramos, Mark Taylor, Gary Becker, Greg Gutfeld, and David Foster.
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Two gleanings focused on concerns about the effects of globalization on people’s sense of time’s past and future.
William V. Wishard on ”engage globalization without losing our traditions”: In a New York Times letter to the editor, Wishard worried that American-style globalization means that many people around the world will be “losing our traditions … our links with the past”.
“While we Americans believe that what works for America will work for all nations, we sometimes forget that cultural differences represent profound psychological differences. The critical question for all nations is, “How can we engage globalization without losing our traditions?” For traditions are our links with the past. How do our traditions become integrated into some new worldview?” (source)
Jose Ramos on globalization vs. “the possibility of many futures”: Ramos, a researcher with the Australia Foresight Institute, worries that neo-liberal globalization acts like a “cultural bomb” that makes people “see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement”. He sides with attempting to “articulate the possibility of many futures”.
“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement. …
“In this vein, Sardar writes that the ‘future has been colonised’, the image of the future as corporate globalisation and neo-liberalism has become so pervasive that, throughout the world, no other future is possible (Sardar, 1999b, p. 9). In challenging a monolithic development vision, he argues we must reject the teleological projections of Western development, and proponents and pioneers of development alternatives must articulate the possibility of many futures, and many experiments with development.” (source)
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For me, the time orientations of economists tend to be too ordinary or uninteresting. But I ran across two quotes about economics that I liked — the first one perhaps because it is not by an economist.
Mark Taylor on “two economies … at two different speeds”: Religion professor Taylor disparages what “the cult of speed” is doing to our economy and society. He observes, as have others, that there are now two economies functioning at different speeds — and his analysis is about space as well as time.
“In the past 50 years, two economies that operate at two different speeds have emerged. In one, wealth is created by selling labor or stuff; in the other, by trading signs that are signs of other signs. The virtual assets scale at a speed much greater than the real assets. …
“There are only three ways markets can expand to keep the economy growing: spatially — build new factories and open new stores in new places; differentially — create an endless variety of new products for consumers to buy; and temporally — accelerate the product cycle. When spatial expansion and differential production reach their limits, the most efficient and effective strategy for promoting growth is to increase the speed of product churn. …
“The obsession with speed now borders on the absurd.” (source)
Gary Becker on “the most fundamental constraint” making “Utopia impossible”: Thanks to a post by Brayden King at the orgtheory.net blog, I learned about Becker’s Nobel speech and, according to Brayden, its “insight about the impossibility of Utopian dreams” and “how precious and valuable our time is”. Here's Becker:
“Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time. Economic and medical progress have greatly increased length of life, but not the physical flow of time itself, which always restricts everyone to twenty-four hours per day. So while goods and services have expended enormously in rich countries, the total time available to consume has not. Thus, wants remain unsatisfied in rich countries as well as in poor ones. For while the growing abundance of goods may reduce the value of additional goods, time becomes more valuable as goods become more abundant. Utility maximization is of no relevance in a Utopia where everyone’s needs are fully satisfied, but the constant flow of time makes such a Utopia impossible.” (source)
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There’s no end to tribalized conservatives debating if not demonizing the time orientations of liberals / progressives — and surely vice-versa as well, but I only browsed across the former in this period. Usually the debate clusters around broad questions like the one KT McFarland posed at a conservative gathering to discuss James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: “How many of you think that America's best days are behind us?” But less grand, more curious, yet equally rhetorical temporal perspectives arise as well, as in the two quotes below.
Greg Gutfeld on when “the temporary … is always permanent: In his role on Fox News Network’s show The Five, Gutfeld maintained that preferential policies favored by liberals (as I spun momentarily past, I assumed he meant affirmative-action and entitlement policies) never come to an end — they may seem temporary at first, but end up becoming permanent.
“But will there ever be a time where these policies of preference are no longer necessary? The hard-core proponents say no, which to me is a corrupt argument because it means the solution is not ever going to solve the problem. And that's the issue I have with the left is that the temporary, whether it's a program or anything, is always permanent.” (source: The Five, 04/22/14 — my transcription, which differs a bit from the transcript posted online)A valid point, in some respects. But isn’t he being tribal about it? Many policies favored by Republicans, notably on behalf of business, have a similar temporal design.
David Foster on “temporal bigotry”: Chicago Boyz blogger Foster caught my eye with his novel notion of “temporal bigotry” — and his association of it with “progressives” who “put down previous generations” and neglect “what we can learn from their experiences.”
“Today’s “progressives,” particularly those in the educational field, seem to have a deep desire to put down previous generations, and to assume we have nothing to learn from them. It’s a form of temporal bigotry. Indeed, Thanksgiving is a good time to resist temporal bigotry by reflecting on the contributions of earlier generations and on what we can learn from their experiences.” (source)However, the implication that only progressives engage in temporal bigotry was belied by the right-wing hyperbole I saw in reaction to President Obama’s address to the National Prayer Breakfast meeting on February 5, when he brought up the Crusades amid his points about ISIS. I spotted a lot of conservatives roundly — to my knowledge, inaccurately — chastising him for doing so, on grounds that the Crusades happened centuries ago and thus had no relevance to discussing ISIS. Yet, when it suits them, conservatives have condemned Islamic terrorism many times for being too medieval, too out of the Middle Ages.
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And that finishes off the gleanings I collected about time orientations in this period.
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