Publishers are wary of short books, as I’ve discovered when trying to pitch them. Apparently they feel insubstantial and subconsciously poor value for money to prospective buyers. But sometimes a short book is exactly what a topic needs, and this extended essay on tempocentrism is a good example. I don’t need 400 pages on it. I need to hear the word for the first time, get a handful of thoughts on the idea and I’ll work the rest out for myself as I reflect on it.
Tempocentrism is the tendency to over-value the present moment. It’s a tendency that is very common, says Bowden, a professor of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at Western Sydney University. “The present is all-too-often afforded undue significance, privileged over both the past and the future, seemingly for no better reason than we happen to live in it.”
There are reasons why we might slip into this. Enlightenment ideas of progress suggest time as an arrow, with humanity improving along the way. This leads us to infer that we are always at the peak of human achievement, both in technology and in morality. We come by our superiority to the future in different ways, often worrying that we are on the cusp of collapse or decline – again making our present moment the pinnacle.
In practice, we see this sort of thing in popular culture dystopias, or talk of living through unique and unprecedented days. There’s something flattering about this – “we all want to believe that we live in the most exciting and consequential of times.”
How much does it matter? Bowden argues that tempocentrism leads us astray in the same way that anthropocentrism or eurocentrism does. It limits our view of reality. Everything is judged from the viewpoint of the present, “a perspective that is loaded with bias and prejudice.”
This is a challenging idea to environmentalism, which frequently deploys arguments based on tipping points, deadlines, and the threat of looming disaster. We’re always the last generation that can make a difference. Of course, that may well be true – there are such things as critical turning points. Bowden just suggests that you can only ever tell a turning point after the event. The Anthropocene, for example, is something that really ought to be called by scientists in a few thousand years, when we can see how profound the human impact on the planet actually is.
This might sound like a recipe for complacency, though that isn’t what I took from Now is Not the Time. What I took from the book was more of a call to humility, to keep the bigger picture in mind, and to be a little less quick to declare the present – and therefore ourselves – to be cosmically important and consequential.
- Now is Not the Time is available from Earthbound Books.
The Earthbound Report 