Long-term ecological time is sacrificed by short-term time

Defining exactly what time is remains a difficult thing in spite of the effort made in the field of science and of instruments of observation and measurement. Each of us would give the answer of the philosopher Saint AUGUSTIN concerning its meaning: “if they don’t ask me, I think I know, but if they ask me, I don’t know”. Contemporary intellectuals define it as an abstract datum, for others it is a kind of mental space where events take place.

Saint AUGUSTINE admits the creation of the world with an origin of time and the delegation to man, by his creator, of a freedom, which allows, on the one hand, sin, and, on the other hand, merit. Even if current physics admits the beginning of time with the “Big Bang”, deterministic physicists do not like time to have a beginning, perhaps not to speak of divine intervention, and not to contradict NEWTON who imagined a nature like a large clock which rotates under the action of the gravitational force in a continuous movement without beginning or end.

For the philosopher René GUENON, what is really measured is never a duration but the space traversed during this duration in certain movements of which we know the law. This law is presented as a relation between space and time, whereas mental phenomena have no spatial character, but on the other hand also take place in time.

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Social or lived time is made up of a set of representations whose elements synthesize social consciousness. The particularity of social time is that it is not perceived in the same way in modern societies as in traditional ones.

In the “Natural Contract” Michel SERRES, defines modern social time as short-term time, ie calculable time and traditional social time as long-term time. He specifies on this subject that politics, the media and science are representations belonging to the short term and that their mission consists in masking the traditional time acting in the long term. Indeed the politician carries out projects according to the upcoming elections, the media man is preoccupied with the week, even the day and the scientist sees his articles hardly exceeding ten years within the framework of the perpetual changes of paradigms. . If long-term time saves the memory and genes of older generations, short-term time seems to affect them.

The Koran evokes a divine time without commonality with the numbered terrestrial time. Thus it reveals the limit of a too one-sided conception of time. Terrestrial time is in relation with bodily existence, as soon as it is made to disappear, we are in an “extra corporeal” extension.

The time of revealed religions is considered as a function, on the one hand, of the fall of ADAM. Time in relation to the Koran, while being vectorial and irreversible, has not been freed from the cyclical conception, given the return of religious holidays and times of prayer. In the life of monotheistic cultures, there was a certain continuity between the past and the future; the present was experienced as an opportunity to purify oneself and correct the past in order to avoid punishment in the world beyond.

Formerly, social time was confused with religious time. With modernity and the development of cities, we have gone from religious time to the time of traders; thus, time has taken on a material value “over time”. The really busy time today is when you earn money for yourself or for others.

– MODERN TIME DEVORATOR WILL FINALLY DEVORATE ITSELF HIMSELF.

Today, more than ever, we have the impression that modern times are also “deregulated”. This time unfolds at an ever increasing speed according to the different manifestations, to such an extent that we begin to project ourselves permanently towards an elsewhere that we believe is better, by refusing to take the present as a source of meaning. So we no longer live, but we hope to live, but in the end we risk never reaching the state of happiness we were aiming for, because as J.ATTALI says “To advance or to retreat are empty concepts of meaning. It is another geometry of history that must be prepared ”. And intellectual certainties do not last long, certain technological applications resulting from modern times are consumed in a time much less than the time it takes to reduce their polluting effects upstream and downstream. René GUENON said on this subject that “the most visible character of the modern era is the incessant agitation, of continual change, of ever increasing speed like that with which the events themselves unfold; it is the dispersion in multiplicity and in a multiplicity which is no longer unified by the consciousness of any higher principle “. The rapid development of knowledge does not mean that there is something abnormal in the very nature of this knowledge.

If in the past, the activities of humanity seemed to aim to fight against the ephemeral and to leave traces that give meaning to their passage, today everything has become ephemeral and fleeting. Yet we always try to find a meaning in this collective organization of the destruction of time. Today we are experiencing total disorientation, caused by the fact that we want to synchronize with the technological rhythm. Even in the field of management one feels a great helplessness; of large companies change their strategy frequently at the risk of disappearing forever. In the United States, managers must always be able to seek to go beyond the current paradigms. And when a paradigm changes, everything comes back to zero and the successes of the past do not guarantee anything.

How we can solve the problems that arise in our humanity starting from the reasonings belonging to the short term, because for Michel SERRES the pollution affecting today the ecology comes from modern time that is to say from the knowledge belonging to the course term. He specifies that the salutary future is more linked to the long term, experienced by those who, from local gestures, induce large cultures.

By Ahmed Khaouja