Another day, another day Deadline: To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, greenhouse gas emissions must peak “by 2025 at the latest,” according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. report. This is how we live now—not in the last days of the Bible, but in a permanent “time ends,” in the words of the 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders. Between the possibility of nuclear war and the course of climate change, for at least 70 years, an apparently secular apocalypse always seemed to be on the horizon. Time itself is one of the victims.
Just look around: The massive droughts, wildfires, and devastating hurricanes we see today are the result of past emissions — a haunting weirdness of the carbon cycle. Acute stress of the Covid-19 pandemic time slows down for some people, while for others acceleration—Natural responses, psychologists say, to the immense stress of lip-locking. News of the war in Ukraine, which may have appeared in the morning paper or the nightly program, is streamed through our screens 24/7. And TikTok trends move at the speed of a micro video, dragging fast fashion and even fast furniture with it. Everywhere, the past, present and future seem to be collapsing into each other.
Speed has been the name of the game since the Industrial Revolution, according to German political scientist Hartmut Rosa, author of Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. For centuries, Westerners have believed the story that “we can overcome material scarcity through economic growth, time scarcity through faster technologies, and a freer life.” , for the better through changes in science and politics,” he said in 2015. People are driven to pack in more labor, to consume more, more things. However, the more we cram, the less those experiences register in our minds and memories, leading to a profound sense of alienation.
Now, time isn’t just speeding up; For many, the future also feels limited. In a 2021 survey of more than 10,000 young people in 10 countries, more than a half agreed that “humanity perish” and many described feeling that they had no future. “Environmental anxiety” and “climate grief,” while real and powerful, are not the only consequences of this change of pace. It is modern liberal democracy struggling to keep its power and envision a future for all. What citizens do with their changed relationship over time is sure to have profound implications for governments around the globe.
The concept of time has changed dramatically in human history, from cyclic to linear, religious to secular. But “scientific” time, based on the traditional Newtonian conception of arrow of time moving forward at an average pace, is the clock of modern times, of capitalism, and of liberal democracy. While more recent physics studies have challenges political philosopher Elizabeth Cohen, author of The political value of time. In this context, time is not an inert substance, but the very soil from which democracy springs.
However, many rich countries are increasingly backward. Instead, people’s daily lives operate on “cyber time,” says Robert Hassan, professor of media and communication at the University of Melbourne and author of Empires of Speed. Since the 1960s, networked computing, which makes everything from social networking to Zoom calls possible, has enabled a kind of connection that spans both space and time. As a result, democratic politics seems to be consistently lagging behind the pace of commerce and culture, and people’s dual identities as citizens and consumers feel more and more at odds with each other.
The itchiness of clicking the political fast-forward could be a reason 40 percent Americans — 54 percent of Republicans surveyed and 31 percent of Democrats — say they would support a military coup in a hypothetical scenario where “there is a lot of corruption” in the goverment. Other models of governance, from illiberal democracy to fascism, can act much more decisively, which has clear appeal in our stalemate. The British astronomer “Only an enlightened forger can take the necessary measures to navigate the 21st century safely. Martin Rees wrote. Young people feel it too: One of environmental science professor Sarah Jaquette Ray’s students “emailed me to say she was heartbroken and ready to submit to a green dictator.” if they tackle climate change,” Ray wrote in American Science last year.
But making good decisions – which decent democracy is intended to make – takes time. Its a lot. Bills must be read, ideally complete, and contested. Citizens deserve time between elections to reflect on the future they want. Politicians should have enough patience as they try to deliver on their campaign promises. And history shows us that frustrated people are rarely enlightened. While authoritarian environmentalism “may excel at making policies, [it appears to] nothing better than democratic environmentalism in producing good results,” based on The Economist. In China, for example, “the Communist Party’s policy output has been very prolific,” but its actions are inconsistent with stated goals. As of 2021, the country is building coal plants in 60 new locations to avoid power shortage; if used as intended, the plants will remain operational through the 2050s.
