Now
June 28 2021
Would you go forward or back?
Into the future
to see what's become of you?
To exult in the wonders
of advanced civilization,
sure that by then
we won't have done ourselves in,
left the place
uninhabitable?
Or into the past,
as if you will be the one person
to change history,
even though all of your life, up until now
all you've felt
is powerless?
And could you really have done Hitler in?
Pushed the pregnant mother
in front of a car,
or in cold blood
plunged a knife
into the baby's heart?
Or perhaps bet on the races
buy stock,
never embark
on that first fateful date?
Of course, time travel is impossible.
Even though we do it all the time,
replaying the past
again and again,
or planning, fretting, imagining we can
take fate into our hands
and be masters of our own small lives.
The past,
as if there aren't multiple versions
depending on whom you ask.
And the future
as if it's already there,
singular
and predetermined
and better for sure.
The time machine
in all our heads
inexorably set to now,
the perpetually unscrolling present
where I'm contented to stay.
In Act 2 of this week's repeat episode of This American Life, the producers asked random people if they want to travel through time, and if so, to when? Their quest was inspired by the unexpected result of a poll that asked respondents to name a future technology they would like to have. 9% of 1001 subjects -- without prompting or any list of choices – spontaneously chose time travel.
Which surprised me as well. I think I would have chosen the power of flight. Not teleportation, but actual flight. Sounds like less fraught and more fun!
I think the common presumption is that the future will be better. Improved technology, more wisdom, problems solved, better lives, human flourishing. But I more often think that now may be the high point of civilization, and that I was extremely lucky to be born in the middle of the 20th century. (Not to mention healthy, and to a middle class family, and in a first world country; which seems to me to have won the lottery of the accident of birth from the get-go.) Not so sure I'd like to be a young person today. Perhaps we have come to the self-destructive tipping point of hubris and reckless power and flawed human nature inevitably reached by all civilizations. Why presume progress is inexorable and the natural order of things?
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