Time and the Shape of History - Hardcover

Corfield, Penelope J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030011558X ISBN 13: 9780300115581

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

This ambitious book explores the relationship between time and history and shows how an appreciation of long-term time helps to make sense of the past. The book is devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of the way different societies have conceived and interpreted time, and it develops a theory of the threefold roles of continuity, gradual change, and revolution which together form a "braided" history. Linking the interpretative chapters are intriguing brief expositions on time travel, time cycles, time lines, and time pieces, showing the different ways in which human history has been located in time.
In its global approach the book is part of the new shift toward “big history,” in which traditional period divisions are challenged in favor of looking at the entire past of the world from start to end. The approach is thematic. The result is a view of world history in which outcomes are shown to be explicable, once they happen, but not necessarily predictable before they do. This book will inform the work of historians of all periods and at all levels, and contributes to the current reconsideration of traditional period divisions (such as Modernity and Postmodernity), which the author finds outmoded.

About this title

About the Author

Penelope J. Corfield is professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Among her books are Language, History & Class and Power & the Professions in Britain, 1700-1850.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TIME AND THE SHAPE OF HISTORY

By PENELOPE J. CORFIELD

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Penelope J. Corfield
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-11558-1

Contents

List of Illustrations..............................................viPreface............................................................ixStarting Points....................................................xii1. History in Time.................................................1Chapterlink 1-2: Shaping History - Time Travel.....................192. Deep Continuities...............................................26Chapterlink 2-3: Shaping History - Time Cycles.....................493. Micro-change....................................................57Chapterlink 3-4: Shaping History - Time Lines......................804. Radical Discontinuity...........................................89Chapterlink 4-5: Shaping History - Time Ends.......................1135. Mutable Modernity...............................................122Chapterlink 5-6: Shaping History - Time Names......................1506. Variable Stages.................................................158Chapterlink 6-7: Shaping History - Time Pieces.....................1857. Multiple Dimensions.............................................194Chapterlink 7-8: Shaping History - Time Power......................2248. History Past and Future.........................................233Coda: Time Frames and History......................................249Notes..............................................................253Further Reading....................................................290Index..............................................................297

Chapter One

History in Time

To situate history in the long term entails having a view upon time. Its dynamic force provides the unfolding framework within which things both continue from the past and also change. Time's three perspectival states of past, present, and potential future remain fixed in their successive sequencing. Yet the eras to which they apply are always being updated. As that happens, more history is generated daily for humans to consider.

This consistent temporal flux means too that interpretations are perennially liable to adaptation in the light of altered circumstances. The here-and-now, poised at the fulcrum of retrospection and anticipation, changes all the time, whilst always remaining Now. 'And do not call it fixity,/Where past and future are gathered', as T.S. Eliot, the twentieth century's most famed poet of temporality advised in his elegiac Four Quartets. The immense power of the present, however intensely felt - 'quick now, here, now, always' - does not erase the mental awareness of 'before' and 'after': 'Only through time time is conquered.'

So history's complex unfolding has to be understood within an even more complex temporal process that ceaselessly welds duration and change, persistence and flux. Pervading this universe, it is known as cosmic time. And it has - uniquely - the capacity for auto-renewal, as each present moment both lives and dies simultaneously.

Assumptions about the shape of the past are therefore linked with assumptions about time as the framework power. One striking visual representation of this is seen, for example, in the Aztec calendrical map of the Five World Regions (see illustration 1). It was devised in fifteenth-century Mexico to provide a summary of cosmic history. The designs at the four cardinal points, N, S, E and W, indicate four past eras (N is located on the left, E at the top). Each time zone is protected by two tutelary gods standing by an emblematic tree, topped with a great perching bird. At the centre is the fifth era, which represents the present. Here dwells the celestial fire-god, sustained at the heart of all that has gone before. So a complex and dynamic past is rendered as also orderly and explicable, leading from then to now, via the patterned dots that mark the days.

Of course, not all communities by any means visualise history within such a structured plan. Nonetheless, the challenge to find some way of understanding time, and the past in relation to time, is one that confronts all who live within unfolding temporality. So there has emerged a global case history of approaches and problems, which are ripe for re-examination.

History and Defining Time

In the first place, it is right to consider whether it is possible for humans stuck in the here-and-now to investigate something as vast and strange as cosmic time. The Scottish philosopher and famed sceptic David Hume once warned sharply that it is hard to range mentally beyond our immediate sense-data: 'Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves.' How, then, can any one generation of humans, limited in time and place, make any valid comment about times past and long ago?

However, Hume's prohibition is not as limiting as it might at first seem. As creatures of the universe, we are ourselves temporal as well as spatial beings. Time is therefore not a purely external phenomenon that is completely 'beyond' us.

Humans have access to the workings of temporality in many ways. Time not only surrounds us, as something that can be studied, measured and debated, but it also inheres within us, in the form of our subconscious body clocks, our genetic timetabling and our capacity to live in time. Accordingly, we recognise temporality de facto, even without having an agreed explanation or full definition. Even young children can be taught to 'tell' the time, without any special lessons in science, philosophy or the study of history being undertaken either by the learners or the teachers.

Such a state of familiar-unfamiliarity was noted long ago, in one of the most celebrated comments ever made on this subject. The fourth-century Christian theologian St Augustine asked himself rhetorically: 'What then is time?' And he answered with a paradox: 'Provided that no one asks me, I know. [But] if I want to explain it to an enquirer, I do not know.'

For most ordinary purposes, an Augustinian intuitive response is quite sufficient. In fact, it is notable that people very rarely express anxiety about 'what is time?' (as opposed to the more common 'where are things going?') even though it might be thought worrying not to know about the essential medium in which we live. But it is so basic that it readily appears as a 'given'. Nonetheless, that has not stopped people from also cogitating about the subject. And there are plentiful external clues, as well as our internal time signals. For example, the light of the stars sends visual messages about their own past via long trajectories of sparkling luminosity. While we see these in the present, we can calculate their earlier history. So our own sense-data, plus the effort of thought, can move us mentally beyond our own eras. Within planet earth's immediate vicinity, meanwhile, the sun is another marker of longevity. It is calculated to be approximately halfway through its life cycle, with sufficient power to last for at least another five billion years before it evolves into a red dwarf. By careful study and calculation of such stellar evidence, astronomers can apply a range of data to the complex task of telling the age of the universe.

Another signal of its long history comes, uncannily, from the residual electro-magnetic 'noise' or reverberation, known as cosmic background radiation, which is faintly detectable in the here-and-now by sophisticated radio-scanners. This sound, scientists argue, is a 'ghostly remnant' from an original Big Bang that in all probability formed this universe some 13 to 15 billion years ago.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the restless power of temporality is also detectable through its effect upon the interacting processes of creation and decay, decay and creation, in the animate and inanimate worlds all around. Early in the twentieth century the economist Maynard Keynes, living up to his profession's reputation for ironic gloom, propounded the classic dictum that 'In the long run we are all dead'. Yet he might have added too that destruction is counterbalanced by renewal. In the long run, the dead are replaced by the living, if not always of the same species. As a result, any point on earth, viewed attentively, contains evidence of time's longitudinal dynamics, with signs of both endings and beginnings.

Given many clues, therefore, and the will to analyse them, it is possible to discuss the history of the cosmos, in terms of its origins, its age, its effects, and its future prospects.

Since all the observations and interpretations of such evidence are made by conscious humans, however, the argument is sometimes brought round once more to the sceptical position of David Hume, in this permutation to argue that the very concept of time is nothing but a human invention. Far from temporality being 'beyond' us, this viewpoint considers it to be purely 'within' our minds. Time is thus presented as a sensory illusion, although even the sternest theorists who reject the externality of time do concede that it is an extremely potent illusion that is found among all human communities. (This argument, by the way, intends to refute the 'existence' of a persistent temporality. It differs subtly therefore from (say) those Buddhist teachings which urge people to live 'as though' time is an illusion. That is a different proposition.)

Anti-persistent-time theories, that accept at best a fragmented temporality of the moment, emerge in time studies as classic heresies, propounded by a minority of physicists and philosophers. The recurrence of such sceptical viewpoints demonstrates the difficulty of finding a definition and explanation with which all agree. Nonetheless, the continuing 'illusion' of a connected temporality, if no more, indicates the converse difficulty of abolishing the concept.

Were there no persistent duration, then there would be no past that had happened and that could be recollected in the present. Instead there would be only a happenstance of sundered instants. Thus, leading the case for a theory of fragmented time, Julian Barbour argues that each nanosecond (a billionth of a second) or even each atto-second (an infinitesimal billionth of a billionth of a second) frames its own separate universe, each one being the outcome of a different quantum probability. With such a splintering, humans would have no possibility of a through-time identity. They would scarcely have time to draw breath, let alone to ponder their thoughts and feelings about the process. It would mean, speculates Barbour, that 'All the instants we have experienced are other worlds, for they are not the one we are in now.'

Yet this remarkable formulation has quietly smuggled some through-time phenomena back into the picture. If 'we' are able to experience many worlds, some before others, then some durable beings must have persisted across the notionally divided micro-moments to have such different experiences. By contrast, any atemporal beings, who truly live instant by instant, would know only their own instant, which would appear timeless. They would not be able to experience many separate worlds because, if they could leap across from one quantum-world to another, the micro-moments would no longer be entirely separate.

Moreover, any atemporal beings that do manage to live exclusively within a single atto-second would have to signal any instant reactions to their condition instantaneously, because they would be debarred from any through-time modes of communication, such as speech. But, in fact, sequential sounds are regularly joined together by many living species to convey comprehensible messages that unfold as they are conveyed. In addition, humans have also invented communication via written words that are read in a specified order and via moving pictures that have to be viewed in specific sequence. These through-time messages would make no sense if the successive moments are entirely fragmented and dissociated. Thus Barbour is obliged to use consecutive language to present his case against consecutive time. Moreover, he fills his preface with autobiographical information about his own intellectual history and his text with details from past scientific debates, presenting these antecedents not as occurring in separate para-worlds but within this one.

Indeed, it might be speculated, in reverse-Barbour, that only in a time-bound cosmos is it possible to argue about the nature and meaning of time. By contrast, within the endless present of an atemporal and unattached attosecond, there would be nothing to suggest even the remotest possibility of something as strange as alternative temporal states, whether anything as remote as a past or as subversive as a potentially different future.

Be that as it may, the fragmentary-time arguments, while repeatedly stimulating good scientific and philosophical debates, tend not to attract majority support. There is no generally agreed formula for temporality in the guise of T =. Nonetheless, that it has some characteristic persistence is generally accepted, or simply taken for granted, as befits something that is familiar as well as strange. Some binding agency, whether it be viewed as a divine or cosmic power or both, therefore links the micro-moments together. The process survives, even if human understanding of that process is only imperfect. In traditional Islamic thought, then, it is the unifying force of divine providence that compassionately holds the cosmos together, while enabling individuals to participate in the immediate moment: 'now' thus intersects with eternity.

Among physicists, there are analytical tensions between those who favour insights from quantum physics, which stress the jagged and restless toing and froing of subatomic particles at micro-level, and those like Roger Penrose, who stress countervailingly the cohesive power of the forces of gravity at macro-level. These scientific debates are currently subjects of much research and argument. To a historian, however, it appears plausible to accept that some high-level balance between steady persistence and rapid turnover is consistently in operation, in order to sustain something as remarkable as long duration and, within long duration, continuously unfolding change. In other words, there is a prevalent meshing between the quantum micro-cosmos and the gravitational macro-cosmos.

Certainly, it is within this ordered time frame, that is both coherent and dynamic, that through-time humans have and sustain valid through-time knowledge. The present links to the past, rather than opposes or excludes it, just as the past blends into the present, rather than halts before it. On those grounds, humans generate interpretations of the shape of history that stretch through time. With no impermeable barriers between past and present, furthermore, our verdicts or statements about things long gone may be as potentially true - or as untrue - as are verdicts or statements about the current moment. Thus we operate routinely within a time-infused cosmos. And temporality forms a prime subject for our study, not because we have invented it, but because it is simultaneously all-important and completely beyond our control.

History and Time's Arrow

Not only do we live in time, but we can strive to identify time's particular characteristics. Throughout the long temporal progression, the regularity of the process is apparent from the fact that humans are able to measure it systematically. Conversely, were there a fragmentary-time of purely sundered micro-moments, there would be no way of quantifying duration. Being able to measure time means too that we can date historical events and processes by situating them within specified calendars. However, a human capacity for temporal awareness historically preceded the development of formal measurements. As a result, our awareness of past and present does not depend upon absolute precision in such matters. It is highly characteristic, indeed, to combine a sense of 'before' and 'after', 'then' and 'now', with considerable haziness about precise dates.

Crucial to the entire process of time measurement, and the consequent framework for history, is the special characteristic of time in that it is unidirectional. Moments run onwards and never go into reverse. A favoured metaphor, often used to describe this feature of temporal progression, is time's arrow. It points poetically to momentum in one single direction. So there is a coherent process that links the past to the present and that heralds the potential future, on the strength of what has gone before. This was noted long ago by St Augustine. 'But no time is wholly present,' he wrote, '... all past time is driven backwards by the future, and all future time is the consequent of the past.'

Another term for this unidirectionality is temporal asymmetry. Again physicists are uncertain as to why time has this property. Logically, some argue that a case could be made for temporal momentum to run either onwards or in reverse. On the other hand, other scientists are currently investigating the singularities in the cosmos and its physical contours - singularities that inhibit time from either splitting into multiple directions or from backtracking. And those constraints must pertain universally, commencing with temporal origins and persisting thereafter - or, if temporality has no specific origin, then simply persisting.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from TIME AND THE SHAPE OF HISTORYby PENELOPE J. CORFIELD Copyright © 2007 by Penelope J. Corfield. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030011558X
• ISBN 13: 9780300115581
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 309