Imbuing Futures and Time with Agency and Urgency: Reframing Concepts for a Planetary Emergency

Introduction

The relationship between concepts of time and concepts of futures has been in an ever-changing and dynamic evolution for thousands of years. Yet, time has been relatively underexplored in the futures studies literature until recently. Furthermore, the transdisciplinary fields of “time studies” and “futures studies” have operated in relative isolation within the siloism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century academia. In my recent book, which undertook a Very Short Introduction (VSI) to futures studies by way of an Oxford VSI to the Future (sic), I explored this dynamic duo in some detail (Gidley 2017). ¹

In this article, I draw from some of that work, but would encourage readers to also read the full text of the book, which places this brief article into the larger historical context of what we humans have done in the past with these deeply interwoven concepts, how we relate to them today, and what is emerging regarding new concepts of futures and time in our current era.

By understanding how humans in the past have storied and framed both time and the future, we can gain a deeper appreciation of the significance of time consciousness on futures thinking. If we explore “the past of the future” and its links with “present-day futures,” we will be better prepared to design and create wiser futures for tomorrow.

Measuring Time to Help Control the Future

As part of our quest to understand and tame our world, humans set out thousands of years ago to measure and control time, in the hope of controlling our future. We achieved this on a macro scale through calendars and astrolabes that measured the passing of the sun, phases of the moon, and the patterns of the stars and planets. On a micro scale, we achieved it through clocks.

Calendars demonstrate how humans tried to understand and, up to a point, to predict the patterns of the macro-time cycles of the sun, moon, and stars to get a grasp on the future. Most of the historical calendars we know about today (Persian Archaemenid, Chinese, Mayan, Roman, and Julian) were invented 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. This was the same era when Greek philosophers were reframing time from its cyclical to its linear shape and developing abstract thinking.

Clocks, however, were used to measure time on a more micro scale, to assist with the ordering of day-to-day activities. Before the invention of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century, humans devised numerous ingenious ways and means to measure the passing of time. For thousands of years, before we developed the technology to invent the pendulums, springs, and gears required for mechanical clocks and watches, we measured time with sundials and stone circles, water clocks, candle clocks, and hourglasses.

These two types of time machines—calendars and clocks—were not always as separate as they are today. In the border zone between calendars and clocks are astrological clocks and astrolabes. The early clocks included astronomical/astrological features, indicating our concepts of time were still connected with cosmic cycles. A beautiful example is the 600-year-old astrological clock in Prague town square.

Contrast this with the digital smartwatch, otherwise called a wearable computer. In spite of being able to record our voices, run mobile apps, perform basic tasks, calculations, and translations, the digital smartwatch at best gives its wearer a type of virtual connectedness. Requiring recharging every two days, it is locked into short-termism and will either fail, or be superseded by a “smarter” watch, within two years of its launch. Both the astronomical clock and the smartwatch “tell the time.” But what time are we talking about? And what do they tell us about the future of times yet to become?

When “the Future” First Began

Our evolving views about the future, and their connection with time, are intimately interwoven with the evolution of human consciousness. Many people wrongly assume when thinking about the future that humans have always had a three-part idea of time—consisting of past, present, and future. This is not how humans have always viewed time and is not how all cultures view time today. This linear view of time emerged about 2,500 years ago, in parallel with the origins of Western philosophy in ancient Greece. Prior to this period, we humans lived in a more embedded, cyclical sense of time governed at the cosmic scale by the large astronomical cycles, and at the everyday scale by the rhythms of the seasons and the solar and lunar cycles.

The cultural evolution literature tells us that, from the time of Plato, humans were expanding their views of the world as represented in myths, stories, epic poems, and pictographs, to more abstract, thought-out conceptions of the world. Evolution of consciousness researchers explain that the newfound ability to form abstract mental concepts enabled the Greek philosophers and mathematicians to lay the foundations for the kind of logical thought that we aspire to today (Gidley 2007; Tarnas 1991; Wilber 2000). The striving of philosophers such as Parmenides and Heraclitus to understand the nature of existence led to the formation of a variety of schools of philosophical thought with respect to time. The key ideas were that time is eternal, permanent, and unchanging, versus the notion that time is the measurement of change. The latter concept led to the idea that existence can be divided into linear blocks of time: past, present, and future in contrast with the old cyclical view of time as flow (Gebser [1949] 1985). Along with the linear concept of time came philosophy and mathematics. Pictograms were replaced with alphabets, and written history was born, meaning that the past was becoming more fixed, and the future was becoming conceptually distinct, and an object of interest in its own right (Gidley 2016). This linear view of time continued to dominate in the West until the turn of the twentieth century.

Evolution of Time Consciousness

The 2,500-year-old concept of linear time has undergone evolutionary change since Ancient Greece. What began as the more formal measurement of already recognized cosmological and natural cycles became gradually stripped of its natural and cosmological dimension.

Cultural historians and consciousness researchers have provided ample evidence that Charles Darwin’s biological theories are not the entire story of evolution. Theories about the evolution of culture and consciousness were already circulating in the late eighteenth century between German idealist and romantic philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (Gidley 2007; László 2007; Loye 2004). The idea that human consciousness has evolved over great time periods is central to the work of twentieth-century thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, Jürgen Habermas, and Ken Wilber, to name a few (Gebser [1970] 2005; Habermas 1979; Steiner [1926] 1966; Teilhard de Chardin [1959] 2002). Evolution of consciousness has influenced how we have historically viewed time and the future.

Cultural historian Gebser distilled twenty years of research across thousands of years of human consciousness (Gebser [1949] 1985). He theorized that five structures of consciousness developed throughout human history, calling them archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral (emerging). Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber also claimed that time consciousness changed with the evolving consciousness of humans throughout history (Gebser [1949] 1985; Steiner [1926] 1966; Wilber [1981] 1996). British sociologist Barbara Adam, who writes extensively on social time and the future, draws on Gebser’s detailed history of culture (Adam 2004). Sociologist of futures studies Eleonora Masini undertook an analysis of time and the future in sociological, historical, and anthropological terms (Masini 1996). Here is a brief description of Gebser’s structures including the type of time consciousness that he and others associate with it.

Archaic consciousness was experienced by the earliest of humans well before recorded history, and little can be known about it. Gebser’s view is that the earliest of humans lived in a kind of pretemporal experience that he called the “ever-present origin” or “eternal now.” Feminist futurist Ivana Milojevic refers to this earliest phase as the Dreamtime, which she also calls the eternal now (Milojevic 2002).

Early hunter-gatherers, nomadic peoples, and cave dwellers, who lived very close to nature, up to and including the Ice Age, experienced what Gebser called magic consciousness. He called their temporal consciousness “timelessness” and also claimed we can have a taste of it as modern humans when we listen to music, or have other blissful experiences. Barbara Adam uses the phrase “a time before temporality” to refer to this ancient time when humans lived in a kind of embedded unity with the whole, as in magic consciousness.

The shift from magic to mythical consciousness paralleled the shift from nomadic life to settled agricultural villages at the end of the Ice Age, laying foundations for the emergence of the world’s first cities. Mythical consciousness is associated with the development of language systems that enable complex mythology and pictographic writing, astronomy, and more complex social groupings. Gebser calls the time consciousness of this mythical period “rhythmic/cyclical.” Masini refers similarly to a cyclical time perspective found in the mythological narratives of Buddhist and Hindu cultures (Masini 1996).

Gebser and others place the origins of mental-rational consciousness in the ancient Greek period of the great philosophers. It led to intellectual and cultural leaps through alphabetic writing, philosophy, mathematics, elite formal education, and formal legal systems. Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber all refer to the beginnings of the concept of linear time in this period, and by association, the beginnings of the default idea of the future that we have today. Masini’s linear time concept also originated in the Graeco-Roman era and is symbolized by an arrow (Masini 1996). It later came to represent progress in the modern period of scientific and technological development. She also points to the erosion of the idea that linear time is always associated with progress, in the wake of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report in the 1970s.

Gebser called the fifth type of consciousness integral, beginning with the Renaissance and gradually strengthening in individuals and culture through advances in sciences, philosophy, and human rights. Integral consciousness parallels the development of higher reasoning, identified by developmental psychologists as postformal reasoning (Commons and Ross 2008; Gidley 2010; Kohlberg 1990; Sinnott 1998). Gebser’s integral consciousness, being the most highly evolved, is associated with the most highly evolved time consciousness. Gebser calls this “time freedom” or “concretion of time” in which we are capable of experiencing all the different cultural time senses, rather than being restricted to only one. Masini’s most evolved time consciousness is symbolized by the spiral, which is an integration of the circle and the arrow, and draws on the work of systems scientist and consciousness researcher Ervin László (László 2006).

These evolving temporalities have changed our future perceptions over thousands of years. The emerging time sense associated with integral consciousness will shape our futures consciousness tomorrow.

How Time Consciousness Interacts with Futures Consciousness

From the 1960s, Bertrand de Jouvenel created some new philosophical concepts as he developed his “art of conjecture” (de Jouvenel [1964] 1967). Many of de Jouvenel’s concepts show the complex, and paradoxical relationship between futures and time. De Jouvenel’s “transferred presents” are made up of all those structural certainties that are “structural features of the present, which our thought automatically carries forward into the future”: for example, the sun will come up tomorrow, winter will be followed by spring, and the stars and planets will continue to appear to us as if they are circling the earth. By contrast, his notion of “foreknown futures” is made up of those matters of daily life that we feel subjectively certain about. These are what de Jouvenel calls the subjective certainties. Obviously, these are less certain than the structural certainties. De Jouvenel points out that there may be conflict between the transferred presents and the foreknown futures. Here is his most paradoxical claim:

If the future is predetermined, then we can know it in advance. But if we can know it in advance, we can change it, so it’s not predetermined.

Along with philosophers and sociologists, futurists have made important contributions to advancing our ideas about the complex relationship between time and futures. Elise Boulding developed the concept of a “200-year present” (Boulding 1990). This concept involves thinking about the time span of the present as beginning 100 years ago, so that people born then would be 100 years old today. At the other end of Boulding’s 200-year present is 100 years from now, when babies being born today will be 100 years old. In this view, we stand in the middle of a 200-year present with our grandparents stretched behind us, and our grandchildren stretched ahead of us. This perspective tends to link us more strongly with the long-term consequences of our actions today. And as Boulding reminds us, “This present is a continuously moving moment, always reaching out 100 years in either direction from the day we are in.”

A much more extended time frame is the concept of the “long now” that has been embedded in an organization called the Long Now Foundation, cofounded by Stewart Brand. ² The aim is to offer an institutional counterpoint to short-termism, to encourage long-term thinking, and to cultivate thinking and responsibility about a long-term framework of 10,000 years. Of course, from the perspective of evolution of life on earth, or even human life, 10,000 is a short time frame. To fulfill this ambitious project, the Long Now Foundation is in the process of building a 10,000-year clock. The prototype held in the London Museum has been ticking since December 31, 1999. “The six dials represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky.”

Johan Galtung developed the idea of macrohistory with Sohail Inayatullah, in relation to futures studies, as a way of focusing on big patterns of change over long historical time periods to assist with understanding the present and possible futures (Galtung and Inayatullah 1998). The idea of big history, ³ pioneered by historian David Christian in 1989, is a neighbor to macrohistory. Christian was inspired by the Annales School of French historians who sought to write a histoire totale that avoided the siloism of separating economic, political, social, and other forms of history. Big history contextualizes human life and culture within the cosmological time scales, from the big bang to the present. Australian futurist Joseph Voros is building conceptual bridges between big history and futures studies.

Gebser’s concept of “concretion of time” characterizes how time is experienced by the emerging integral consciousness of the present era. Integral consciousness, as understood by Gebser, does not place mythical/cyclical and modern linear time constructions in opposition to each other, as both modern and traditional approaches do. Instead, Gebser’s concretion of time involves an intensification of consciousness that enables us to reintegrate all of the structures of consciousness—including their different ways of experiencing time—in the same fully conscious moment. Gebser pointed to Picasso’s facial portraits as evolved attempts to show this visually, in that Picasso painted the same face at different moments in the one portrait.

Gebser helps us to understand concretion of time using two additional related terms. “Latency”—meaning what is concealed—is for Gebser the “demonstrable presence of the future.” It includes everything that is not yet manifest. Gebser’s concept of “presentiation” integrates the presence of the past as well as the future (Gebser [1949] 1985). Gebser claims that capacity to experience the latency of the future leads to time freedom, or being “freed from time and thus free for the spiritual.” Needless to say, these philosophical concepts, related to new concepts and relationships between time and futures, deserve the attention of another book.

A Multiplicity of Times and Futures

From the outset of the Industrial Revolution, linear time further contracted into factory time. As time became entrapped in the industrial machine, humans came under the spell of mechanical notions of time.

However, this predictable, mechanical, conception of time began to unravel with the elaboration of Einstein’s theory of special relativity and the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early 1900s. Time was no longer an object, upon which the movement or change of things can be measured in discrete, identical fragments. The new scientific discoveries had huge philosophical implications, gradually displacing fixed concepts of linear time with radically new concepts.

German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl developed the idea of “subjective time”—the time of the soul—in contrast with external or objective time (Husserl [1905] 1964). Following Husserl’s phenomenological explorations of time, Martin Heidegger spoke of the notion of “existential time” (Heidegger [1927] 1962). British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead applied his process view of thinking to time, and Bergson described the paradoxical notion of time as durée (the conscious flow of life; Whitehead [1929] 1985). Bergson’s views of time as having a radical multiplicity sit well with the notion of multiple futures (Bergson [1922] 1965). Husserl, with his concept of subjective time, was the first to take into account the personal, or psychological, aspect of time. Even within futures studies, this psychological aspect is underdeveloped and needs to be further researched. Like quantum mechanics and chaos theory, these new concepts will take time to trickle into mainstream thinking.

Other societal developments have contributed to our changing sense of time throughout the last century. Accelerating technology has extended the old divisions of seconds, minutes, and hours into nanoseconds at one extreme and radioactive half-life at the other. Industrial-era time is dominated by politics and economics, and these metaphors dominate everyday conversations, with such phrases as “time is money,” or “buying time.” The speed addiction of the present age can be seen in fast-foods outlets, instant communications, and the culture of overconsumption. The speeding up of time means that the future now rushes toward us in a hurry!

While time was tied to the industrial-era world view dominated by linear time, Newtonian physics, and scientific positivism, we were also locked into the concept of the one and only predictable future of a machine universe. While some of us may feel locked into some of the worrying future predictions and trends that we hear about in the media, learning about different ways to think about these concepts can empower us to recognize our human agency, to reclaim our times, and to design and create alternative futures.

Time-Urgency for Human Futures Agency

Life today is not simple and one-dimensional. In contrast with the accelerating anxiety and time panic of the twentieth century, countertrends are emerging, such as the slow-food movement, the retro-travel movement, and the urban-gardening movement. The old concept of cyclical time is being reclaimed from both non-Western and feminist perspectives. These emerging issues require us to reexamine our relationship with time and rediscover time’s multifaceted relationship with nature, cosmos, and humanity.

My personal passion for this topic is how to reframe our concepts of futures and time to avert planetary collapse. My position is that we need to imbue our futures thinking with human agency and our concepts of time with urgency, because we are living in a planetary emergency. ⁴