The past is another country, according to LP Hartley’s opening line of The Go-Between. Nowadays, we may say the same of the present, as the pace of technological and demographic change quickens.
As for the future, what confidence and certainties can we have for our children and grandchildren?
Countries might not exist in any recognisable form as a new world order is cemented. But it is not only borders that are being undrawn. When Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ on the fall of communism, perhaps he was inadvertently priming for the globalists’ most dramatic impact on humanity: the erasure of time. As warned by David Fleming, whose philosophy of continuism offers a unifying rationale for preserving humanity against the technocratic onslaught, ‘chronocide’ is a strategy.
As social animals, human beings create society. Over generations, each community establishes and maintains its customs, beliefs, roles and relationships. While ideologically progressive humanists emphasise that we have more in common than our differences in race, religion or region, a person from one culture cannot simply move to a place of different culture and expect life to go on as normal.
The crucial component of society is time, measured in lifetimes of immersion. Indeed, human beings + time = culture. In this equation, important factors may be understood as nature or nurture in the human-temporal complex, such as terrain, resources, climate, commerce, conflict and technology. Each society writes and curates its history.
In the classic dystopian novels of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the past was deleted by design. Winston’s job is to revise records of events to comply with the current narrative, as it evolves. In Aldous Huxley’s futurism, babies are born by machine, and the idea of a woman giving birth is disturbing.
As the Marxists of the Frankfurt School realised in the 1920s, and as every management consultant knows, nothing really changes unless the culture changes. Social bonds and traditions are bulwarks against radical plans imposed from above. Piecemeal, incremental policies are prone to regression to norms, but major restructuring or other shocks to the system break social connections and shatter stability. The more dramatic and sudden the change, the more readily resistance is overcome.
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