THEORY OF THE END - Part 16: The Subjugation of Time

The sixteenth part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.

“Money's flesh.

Money is flesh in your hand.”

-Swans, from “Money is Flesh”

We currently live in an age of pessimism. The future, in the eyes of many, holds untold horrors of steel and smoke, snarling and foaming at the mouth and waiting to be unleashed upon a soft and unprepared populace. What once held so much hope several decades ago has in recent history descended into visions of bloody dystopia. “The future is over,” writes Franco Berardi. “It is not a new idea, as you know: born with punk, the 1970s and ’80s witnessed the beginning of the slow cancellation of the future. Now those bizarre predictions have become true.”

Francis Fukuyama, in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” paraphrased Alexandre Kojeve, stating that “after the rise of the Shogun Hideyoshi in the fifteenth century, Japan experienced a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years which very much resembled Hegel's postulated end of history.”

To Fukuyama and Kojeve, such a time of peace, characterized in the historical record by the many artistic achievements of the age, was a preview of a golden age to come. What Fukuyama fails to mention, however, is that many in the Edo era saw it as an age of decline and, much like we often do now here in the West, frequently looked to the past for answers. One man’s “end of history,” it seems, is often another man’s decadence.

The Zen Master Suzuki Shosan was one of these individuals. His book of sayings records a conversation he had with one of his disciples, who had claimed that the era’s monks had “no interest in The Way.” Shosan replied: “Quite apart from that, not one of them actually leaves the world at all. That's why if you threw them out of their temples right now they'd all be helpless.” In his eyes, the Buddhist clergy had been drained of all vitality and contented themselves with “skinning the dead” to get by, i.e. merely conducting funerary services in exchange for money. “Still less does anyone work up the grit to sink his teeth into things like a man-eating dog,” he continued. “It's too bad, it really is.”

The most significant instance of this, however, were the Kokugaku scholars, who generally saw the remote past of Japan as the peak of societal harmony. An example from the prominent scholar Motoori Norinaga can be found in his treatise on ancient poetry entitled “Ashiwake Obune”:

Simply because these people lived in the ancient past does not mean that they were all honest, and there were no people who were deceitful to some extent. Even among the ancient people there were many who were full of wickedness, lies, and deception. Even in the present we find that there are some people who are quite sincere and simple, so one cannot make blanket statements about people. However, if you compare the overall characteristics of the ancient past with the present, anyone will notice the change.

Norinaga’s contemporary, Kamo no Mabuchi, had even stronger thoughts on the matter, believing that the ancient Japanese developed no writing system because it was not needed. People were honest and communicated clearly, and what they communicated, they remembered. To appreciate only the eras after Chinese writing was put to use and dismissing the eras before as childish and naïve was, to him, like “wishing to scoop up water at the muddied end of the river, hating the upper stream where the water is clear.” He writes in his treatise “Goiko”:

As I have said early on, the original hearts of the Japanese were sincere, so there were few tasks and few words; there was no confusion in speech, and people did not forget what they had once heard. If there was no confusion in communication, and nothing was forgotten in that era, then the ancients should have transmitted their traditions for a long time. Since the hearts of the people were straightforward, there were few edicts from the emperor. And when the court gave an imperial edict, it spread throughout the land like the wind, penetrating the hearts of the people like water.

Since this was the case, heaven caused the population to increase, and there were no mistakes in the orally transmitted traditions. The pure people protected the traditions for many generations, nothing varying. What need did the ancient Japanese have for characters?

But he did not extend this belief to the Japanese alone. In his work entitled “Kokuiko,” he says that “when one reads the words of Laozi, you realize that the hearts of the Chinese originally were sincere. They were sincere like the poetry of the ancient Japanese…” However, later developments would render China an “evil-hearted country,” with their “deep and profound teachings” appearing outwardly reasonable, but working to throw the country “into confusion.”

Mabuchi’s words evoke an image of the past that was “pure” and uncorrupted by the complications of words and philosophies. In the eyes of the Kokugaku scholars, the lives of those in the remote past was characterized by a simple sincerity which required few words to express itself. Humans of later eras, on the other hand, became increasingly enamored with words and pretentious doctrine, and thus required more complexity, regulation, and long-winded philosophy. “False wisdom,” in the belief of men like Mabuchi, had captured men’s hearts and "polluted" their minds.

Whether or not we take this as true is irrelevant for my purposes at the moment. The important point is that it illustrates a view of the past that was seen as very naive and foolish for much of modern history, especially in the Western world, but is now seeing a resurgence as technological advances paint for us a future that looks increasingly less human.

A disdain for the Edo period was also shown by the Nichirenist thinkers of the early 20th century, although for a different reason. Despite being a largely Buddhist movement, they saw the Meiji revolution (which had devastated the Buddhist establishment through a wave of widespread iconoclasm) as an extremely positive development, as it shattered the utterly stagnant religious environment of the Edo era and freed Buddhist thought from its secularized and bureaucratized confines. Kishio Satomi writes in his book “Discovery of Japanese Idealism”:

After the death of Nichiren, spiritual Japan had to pass through a lifeless period of monotony and stagnancy for about six hundred years. At the close of this period, the darkness was suddenly pierced by the appearance of the most prominent idealist, the late Emperor Meiji the Great.

In Satomi’s eyes, and those of his father, Chigaku Tanaka, the Meiji era was a step towards realizing Nichiren’s vision of worldwide proliferation of Lotus Sutra Buddhism; the catalyst to an eventual end to the “Latter Age” and period of decrease wherein man experiences the three calamities of war, famine, and pestilence. Satomi explains the Nichirenist interpretation of Nichiren’s writings in his book “Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and Realization” as follows:

According to Nichiren, in the degenerate days of the Latter Law, there is no Buddhist commandment outside of our vow for the reconstruction of the country and the realization of the Heavenly Paradise in the world. Even the so-called virtuous sage, if he does not embrace this great and strong vow, in other words only enjoys virtue individually, such a sage is pretty useless.

To fully comprehend the Buddhist concepts of the Latter Age and period of decrease, however, we must return to the oldest model of time, namely the “cyclical.”

Time, in the eyes of ancient man, was characterized by repetition; day and night, the changing of the seasons, birth and death. Thus the “cycle” was the most natural model of cosmic time. The Aztecs saw their world as being subject to “sun cycles” wherein the sun itself would fall and need to be reborn, while the Hindus saw the cosmos through the lens of a “yuga cycle” consisting of four periods: the Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga. Buddhists as well saw time as a holographic expanse of various cycles of degradation and restoration, but we will discuss that more in a later chapter.

According to the Marxist thinker Guy Debord, however, the dominance of cyclical time began to slip with the popularization of writing and the creation of historical chronicles. In his view, this nascent “linear” model of time was determined by the masters of the respective societies, thus “history's” direction was a product of whoever was in charge of the recordings; the “owners” of time. Debord writes:

The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of power. It also serves to inspire the continued progression of that time by recording the past out of which it has developed, since this orientation of time tends to collapse with the fall of each particular power and would otherwise sink back into the indifferent oblivion of cyclical time (the only time known to the peasant masses who, during the rise and fall of all the empires and their chronologies, never change).

However, Debord states that it was not until the “monotheistic” religions rose to prominence that linear time was ushered in as a defining fixture of the human experience by establishing a sort of compromise “between the cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples.” These faiths are at least in part defined by an orientation towards a singular future event, which Debord summarizes as “the Kingdom of God is coming” (I want to note here that linear-time is not exclusive to the monotheists, but we will cover that in due time).

The eventual recession of religious thought and rise of industry marked the true solidification of continuous linear time in the form of what Debord calls “the irreversible time of production.” He writes that “the victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom.”

History was, in effect, established “as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path.” Yet there is a caveat: most of society, although instilled with an understanding of linear historical time, is “prevented… from using it. ‘Once there was history, but not any more.’”

The last sentence in the quotation above calls to mind Francis Fukuyama’s claims about “the end of history” having been reached with corporatized Liberal Democracy, and there may be something to that. However, what I think is far more characteristic of modern man being limited in his utilization of “linear time” is his manner of work. The average worker in America sees his time split into work days, weeks, quarters, years, and pay periods, all with different transactional implications; e.g. “annual bonuses,” “vacation time,” “quarterly performance reports,” etc. The economy as a whole too works in business cycles, boom and bust cycles, annual cycles, and so on.

This deranged iteration of cyclical existence feeds into what blogger Paul Skallas calls “the consistency space,” the tendency to strive towards keeping things frozen as they are for as long as possible, stuck in the same “work cycle” indefinitely. He writes in a blog post entitled “The 4-Hour Life”:

… your real job is to be consistent at work. To be reliable. You’re in a domain called the Consistency Space. A domain where messing up could cost you your nice life. It’s not about scoring goals as much as not letting goals into the net. This simple idea influences your life, and the lives of others. It is the single most influential idea around you…

Mondays feel like Mondays, Fridays feel like Fridays, nothing you can do will change that. The structure will dictate how we feel, in a way that grey clouds make us feel slightly more low energy than a sunny day.

When we also take into account the fact that various technical fields can have very different ways of viewing time, for instance accounting and politics (election cycles, tax periods, etc.), then what we have overall is a system in which every individual has their own miniature conception of time, often completely separate from those who do not work in the same field or for the same company. Like everything else, time has become atomized and individuated; a “self-time,” if you will, turning one’s view away from the world at large and further inward until he finds it difficult to even communicate with others. How can you relate to someone who resides in a completely different world?

The unifying feature between all of these various “self-times,” of course, is the clock; mechanized time. Man is obsessed with time; constantly running late for this and that and peering towards that infernal machine hanging on his office wall. He is, after all, paid for his time, or rather he sacrifices his time, and thus his life, to make a living; his time is money, and “money is flesh.” There are also entire industries built around wasting people’s time, like advertising. If a man will not willingly trade his attention (i.e. his processing power, “cyber-time”), there are techniques for ripping it away through other means.

Countless individuals, countless information streams, all pour into man at any given time, fighting for a bloody pound of his very finite “cyber-time,” and the pressure strains his entire being. Here we see what can be called “commodified time.”

Like this, time has not only been shattered, but utterly subjugated. Time is differentiated for each person because that is the optimal model of time for technological neoliberal society, feeding into what Jacques Ellul called “the plasticity of the social milieu.” Atomization, more than anything else “conferred on society the greatest possible plasticity — a decisive condition for technique.” The “self-time” I have described is thus a “technicization” of time, broken into countless modular pieces for the benefit of technical furtherance.

With all of this in mind, is it any wonder that the future has become so overwhelmingly bleak? How could it be any other way?

Upon examining the array of frameworks developed for the understanding of time, the early 20th century French philosopher Rene Guenon (who was, as you will find, quite different from Marxists like Debord) saw “cyclic time” as the most accurate by far, writing in his 1945 book “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times”:

… time is not something that unrolls itself uniformly, so that the practice of representing it geometrically by a straight line, usual among modern mathematicians, conveys an idea of time that is wholly falsified by over-simplification… The correct representation of time is to be found in the traditional conception of cycles, and this conception obviously involves a ‘qualified’ time.

To understand what exactly is meant by the peculiar passage above, we will need to explore the profound and perhaps somewhat disturbing notion that Guenon introduces (or rather re-introduces, if we are to accept that the cyclical view of time is in fact the oldest) in his aforementioned book of time having a “quality” on top of having a “quantity.”

Until next time, Thank you all very much for reading.

To be continued…