Time and Tide

In Beowulf’s Old English:

se geweald hafað
sæla ond mæla; þæt is soð Metod.

In Chaucer’s Middle English:

For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde,
Ay fleeth the tyme, it nyl no man abyde.

And in Edmund Spenser’s modern English:

For, all that from her springs, and is ybredde,
How-euer fayre it flourish for a time,
Yet see we soone decay; and, being dead
To turne again vnto their earthly slime:

Time waits for no man, nor does it wait for ideas.But time is more kind to some ideas than to others, just as some men show the ruin of their youth earlier than others, while some gently age and look distinguished rather than decayed.

There is no more obviously outdated idea than failed futurisms of the past, and I have written about this on several occasions, since it is so easy to dismiss all attempts at futurism when we consider how wrong twentieth century predictions of the future were. I’m going to write on this again soon, but today I want to make a distinction between the kind of futurist ideas that seem painfully dated and the kind of ideas that age more gracefully.

Ideas of the future that remain unrealized are those that show their ruin early. Once the moment for a particular future passes, it passes irretrievably into the past and carries with it the stamp of the era whose vision it is. Such ideas become dated, and they are dated because they were never widely adopted and are therefore identified with the time in which they experienced their brief efflorescence.

As time passes, an idea that was never realized or widely adopted becomes less and less likely to be acted upon, and in terms of ideas of future human society that means that a failed futurist idea becomes more closely associated with the past than with the present. No one wants to show how dated and out of fashion they are by investing their hopes in the future that is already passé in the present.

Distinguished ideas that age gracefully are those that are enthusiastically adopted and undergo rapid development as a result of competition in the marketplace of ideas; these ideas become commonplace in our lives even while they continuously evolve. As a result, these ideas do not seem dated. Familiar ideas age and evolve incrementally before our eyes, so we usually don’t notice it.

Think of someone who decorates their home in a particular style that is clearly identifiable with a particular stage in the development of popular culture. They live in the home every day and don’t notice their decor becoming more faded and dated year in and year out. When they pass away and the house is sold or inherited, it feels like a time warp to walk inside because the decor is so clearly identifiable with a particular period of history.

This isn’t really the best example, however, since interior decoration doesn’t change in the way that ideas adopted by popular culture evolve, but it does illustrate the role of familiarity in the perception of datedness.

But there is an additional wrinkle – a wrinkle in time. In popular culture there is often a failure to distinguish between trivial ideas that briefly become fashionable, are talked about by everyone, and then disappear, and ideas that really do explain some feature of the world, but not on the time scale of popular culture, so when such ideas become briefly popular and then seem to fail to explain short term events, they are drop out of popular usage, but the phenomenon they explain continues to work away in the background, even if unnoticed.

This has been the case most recently with globalization, and before that with secularization and with several other futurist ideas. Talking heads now routinely mock the idea of globalization, even as global trade flows increase and global institutions are progressively more integrated. Similarly, the rise if Islamic militancy was regarded as definitive proof of the failure of secularization theories, but recently a few scholars have been returning to secularization and reassessing the theory in light of evidence that clearly points to the growth of secularism in wealthy, industrialized countries.

I previously addressed these considerations in Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History, in which I discussed the changing currents of history is assessing whether Marxism has been validated or refuted by history. A perennial idea is never refuted, but returns time and time again; each time it seems to be discredited beyond the possibility of future resurrection, it appears again – perhaps with a different name and in a different formulation, but the same idea nevertheless.

The idea that time waits for no man is a commentary upon the transitory nature of all things of this world – sic gloria transit mundi. However, we could just as well invoke this idea to explain the eternal recurrence of perennial ideas.

Grand Strategy Annex

Time and Tide