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TIME AND THE SHAPE OF HISTORY

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................viPreface............................................................ixStarting Points....................................................xii1. History in Time.................................................1Chapterlink 1-2: Shaping History - Time Travel.....................192. Deep Continuities...............................................26Chapterlink 2-3: Shaping History - Time Cycles.....................493. Micro-change....................................................57Chapterlink 3-4: Shaping History - Time Lines......................804. Radical Discontinuity...........................................89Chapterlink 4-5: Shaping History - Time Ends.......................1135. Mutable Modernity...............................................122Chapterlink 5-6: Shaping History - Time Names......................1506. Variable Stages.................................................158Chapterlink 6-7: Shaping History - Time Pieces.....................1857. Multiple Dimensions.............................................194Chapterlink 7-8: Shaping History - Time Power......................2248. History Past and Future.........................................233Coda: Time Frames and History......................................249Notes..............................................................253Further Reading....................................................290Index..............................................................297

Chapter One

To situate history in the long term entails having a view upon time. Its dynamic force provides the unfolding framework within which things both continue from the past and also change. Time's three perspectival states of past, present, and potential future remain fixed in their successive sequencing. Yet the eras to which they apply are always being updated. As that happens, more history is generated daily for humans to consider.

This consistent temporal flux means too that interpretations are perennially liable to adaptation in the light of altered circumstances. The here-and-now, poised at the fulcrum of retrospection and anticipation, changes all the time, whilst always remaining Now. 'And do not call it fixity,/Where past and future are gathered', as T.S. Eliot, the twentieth century's most famed poet of temporality advised in his elegiac Four Quartets. The immense power of the present, however intensely felt - 'quick now, here, now, always' - does not erase the mental awareness of 'before' and 'after': 'Only through time time is conquered.'

So history's complex unfolding has to be understood within an even more complex temporal process that ceaselessly welds duration and change, persistence and flux. Pervading this universe, it is known as cosmic time. And it has - uniquely - the capacity for auto-renewal, as each present moment both lives and dies simultaneously.

Assumptions about the shape of the past are therefore linked with assumptions about time as the framework power. One striking visual representation of this is seen, for example, in the Aztec calendrical map of the Five World Regions (see illustration 1). It was devised in fifteenth-century Mexico to provide a summary of cosmic history. The designs at the four cardinal points, N, S, E and W, indicate four past eras (N is located on the left, E at the top). Each time zone is protected by two tutelary gods standing by an emblematic tree, topped with a great perching bird. At the centre is the fifth era, which represents the present. Here dwells the celestial fire-god, sustained at the heart of all that has gone before. So a complex and dynamic past is rendered as also orderly and explicable, leading from then to now, via the patterned dots that mark the days.

Of course, not all communities by any means visualise history within such a structured plan. Nonetheless, the challenge to find some way of understanding time, and the past in relation to time, is one that confronts all who live within unfolding temporality. So there has emerged a global case history of approaches and problems, which are ripe for re-examination.

History and Defining Time

In the first place, it is right to consider whether it is possible for humans stuck in the here-and-now to investigate something as vast and strange as cosmic time. The Scottish philosopher and famed sceptic David Hume once warned sharply that it is hard to range mentally beyond our immediate sense-data: 'Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves.' How, then, can any one generation of humans, limited in time and place, make any valid comment about times past and long ago?

However, Hume's prohibition is not as limiting as it might at first seem. As creatures of the universe, we are ourselves temporal as well as spatial beings. Time is therefore not a purely external phenomenon that is completely 'beyond' us.

Humans have access to the workings of temporality in many ways. Time not only surrounds us, as something that can be studied, measured and debated, but it also inheres within us, in the form of our subconscious body clocks, our genetic timetabling and our capacity to live in time. Accordingly, we recognise temporality de facto, even without having an agreed explanation or full definition. Even young children can be taught to 'tell' the time, without any special lessons in science, philosophy or the study of history being undertaken either by the learners or the teachers.

Such a state of familiar-unfamiliarity was noted long ago, in one of the most celebrated comments ever made on this subject. The fourth-century Christian theologian St Augustine asked himself rhetorically: 'What then is time?' And he answered with a paradox: 'Provided that no one asks me, I know. [But] if I want to explain it to an enquirer, I do not know.'

For most ordinary purposes, an Augustinian intuitive response is quite sufficient. In fact, it is notable that people very rarely express anxiety about 'what is time?' (as opposed to the more common 'where are things going?') even though it might be thought worrying not to know about the essential medium in which we live. But it is so basic that it readily appears as a 'given'. Nonetheless, that has not stopped people from also cogitating about the subject. And there are plentiful external clues, as well as our internal time signals. For example, the light of the stars sends visual messages about their own past via long trajectories of sparkling luminosity. While we see these in the present, we can calculate their earlier history. So our own sense-data, plus the effort of thought, can move us mentally beyond our own eras. Within planet earth's immediate vicinity, meanwhile, the sun is another marker of longevity. It is calculated to be approximately halfway through its life cycle, with sufficient power to last for at least another five billion years before it evolves into a red dwarf. By careful study and calculation of such stellar evidence, astronomers can apply a range of data to the complex task of telling the age of the universe.

Another signal of its long history comes, uncannily, from the residual electro-magnetic 'noise' or...