The Temporal Sublime

Life viewed through the convergence of timelines, and a new perception of context.

The ICE raids, the melting ice caps, and the last days of the ice-cream van are all connected.

The fetishisation of territory, resurgent racism, the disregard for human rights, the depletion of civic decorum and democratic norms, the forsaking of ecological sanity, and the weakening of social capital, all arise together. Though I am keen to move beyond diagnosis, these are all interacting parts of the same metacrisis.¹

You might think I’m joking about Mr Whippy, but I see the ice-cream van as totemic of a fading world of anologue excitement and civic dignity, where shared realities become arenas of mutal recognition and care. In my only slightly confected elegiac feelings for the ice-cream van, I see a connection to Robert Putnam noticed in his classic Bowling Alone (2000), and what Sarah Stein Lubrano calls social atrophy. When social bonds weaken, our capacity to forge them weakens too, and many other things we value get weaker as a result, including, for instance, concern for objective truth, meaning and wellbeing, and even the rule of law. We need shared worlds, places to congregate with relative strangers and not talk about politics, ideally with some kind of ritualistic pulse. If that place can’t be church, we can at least connect over a place or a view while we wait, and heartily disagree about really important things like when to eat the flake, whether to have blue and red sauce, who wants sprinkles etc. The world moves on of course, but we’ll miss Mr Whippy when he’s gone.²

More generally I am moved to say something about time. We are living through the culmination of converging historical processes in which our cosmological and geological context is becoming more salient, while our modern story of progress is unravelling. What we are experiencing, I believe, is less about the hollowing out of liberalism over decades and more about the mental structure of consciousness entering its deficient mode over centuries. Yet it’s all happening at the same time. ³

So much, so familiar. But recently, I have been feeling something new, something more specifically about time, and how it is layered upon itself.

**

Our future is not what it used to be. It never was, of course. As the poet Ayisha Siddiqa says, wonderfully:

The future frolicks about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Yet today’s futures lurk, hide, and play in the present in unprecedented ways, so we are well advised to think about our the future as part of our relationship with time. The changes in expectation we are expericing together are not merely historical but epochal, planetary and ontological. I have written about this before in Five Flavours of Betweeness, but I have a newfound sense of awe at the convergence of temporalities that shape our experience of the world today.

In the hum below the surface of current events is the culmination of several timescales that are now interacting with each other with potentially explosive effects, ranging from earth-system dynamics to meaning systems to political–economic regimes to neurocognitive conditions to existential orientation and spiritual temporality; considering them together helps explain why the present feels simultaneously ancient, accelerated, haunted, precious, unstable, and morally urgent.

I started this post planning to write about politics in the here and now, but it first feels necessary to zoom right out, to start by expanding the frame of reference with the widely-quoted refrain of Alasdair MacIntyre:

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

This statement is an important touchstone for anyone asking “What can I do?” or “What should I do?”. The ‘stories’ dimension can be articulated in a range of ways, but for now I want to focus on the temporal context and setting for stories, which are also interdependent plot lines and characters of sorts. I notice them showing up in the present, and I believe, if we take time to notice, we can all find ourselves to have some kind of tacit relationship to them. If we allow ourselves to feel our way into it, and seek T.S. Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’, the reality of these converging timescales in our lives can feel sublime.⁴

Planetary Time: Earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and yet it sometimes feels as if we don’t realise we are living on a planet, in a solar system, in outer space, that predates us, that situates us, and should humble us. In his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal famously said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” and that’s long before we knew the half of it. Many feel an intellectual shift away from ‘globalisation’ to planetisation. So the next time someone tells you to get things in perspective, you could say: “I am living on a planet. How much more perspective do you want?”

Postglacial Time: At the level of Earth-systems and evolutionary time, the wider organism we are all part of, early hominins arose 6–7 million years ago, and Homo sapiens have been around since c300,000 BCE. Some believe people alive today are nonetheless feeling, at the level of species memory, the shift from the tens of thousands of years of relative Holocene stability since c9700 BCE to the volatility of the Anthropocene today, which has not been officially confirmed by geologists and goes by other names with other meanings, not least the Capitalocene (Moore) Novocene (Lovelock) and Chthulucene (Haraway). But one of the implications of geological awareness is that we are experiencing what might be considered Postglacial Time, described by Ian Christie in a personal communication as follows:

Postglacial conditions generated a variety of human predicaments that generate patterns of behaviour we can see repeated across recorded history, and which are well described in game theory and in social psychology of in/out groups, scapegoating, psychopathy and sociopathy. Zero-sum resource contests elicit violence and breakdowns of cooperation as well as promoting some actors to collaborate and innovate. Such zero-sum contests arise typically in conditions of ecological disruption (famine, plague, extreme weather, climatic shifts). To put it crudely, you don’t get the rise of Trump in positive-sum conditions, and you don’t get the triggering of violent rejection of Others unless a critical mass of people think they are in a zero-sum contest or threatened by one. To put it another way: prehistoric dispositions and pathologies of zero-sum behaviour are only lightly overlaid by post-neolithic social innovations for cooperation and learning.

Cosmological Time: As discussed recently in Are we a Cow Standing on One Leg?, according to Vedic cosmology, Kali Yuga began in 3102 BCE, the fourth and worst of the Yuga cycles, marked by a breakdown in cosmic dharma. It is said to last for (just) another 426,875 years (!). This should not be taken literally, as the yugas describe divine time as much as human time, but it speaks to being ‘up against it’. Towards the end of Kali Yuga, it is said that even the concept of truthfulness will become foreign, and that is certainly how it is starting to feel today, though it may be truer(!) to say that we live in a world where the perceived need to signal tribal belonging overrides respect for evidence.

Noetic Time: The Axial Age, spanning roughly 800–200 BCE, remains the closest reference point we have for a truly profound, global shift in human consciousness, one that was co-extensive with major historical change. We may now be in the midst of a new axial age, implying a change in metaphysical orientation and an ontological shift in our relationship with the world through a new experience of time, causality and meaning; often described as a transformation of consciousness. Whether our theorist of choice is Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Raimon Panikkar, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ken Wilber, Owen Barfield, or Jean Gebser, there is a strong case both that we need a new kind of mind, and that it appears to be arising (would it be rude to ask it to hurry up?). The challenge, highlighted by Sam Mickey in his wonderfully titled Co-existentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency(2016) is that while the last Axial age converged around the arising of montheism and individuated consciousness, there is no such fulcrum today; we appear to be in a new axial age, but without any obvious axes on which to turn.

Colonial Time: Many are reckoning with unresolved debts of injustice arising from the colonising enclosures that have a contested history and arguably go further back, but can be traced to at least England around 1500 AD and went global, including slavery, imperialism, coercion, extraction, and the enduring privileges, structures, assumptions and expectations they produced. Colonial time endures through institutions, economies, and inherited inequalities. I had a chance to ask Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein about their work in this sphere, and in particular the work that ‘colonialism’ does that ‘capitalism’ does not. (Both colonial time and fossil time (next) co-arise with ‘modernity’, and the major tensions they create are part of the sense of culmination that leads some to believe modernity is dying).

Fossil Time: Humanity’s only viable habitat - Earth - is paying the price for the rapid growth of industrial civilisation enabled by coal, oil, and gas since around 1750, as fossil energy translated civilisational expansion directly into Earth-system disruption and later to the breach of planetary boundaries. We are in a time of deep dependence on fossil fuels alongside a deep need to become less dependent on them (in my first climate report back in 2013, I called this ‘stealth denial’). Almost anyone living a normal Western lifestyle is to some extent complicit in this contradiction, and we live amidst the shared sense of disavowal and dissonance.

Ideological Time: Neoliberal ideology (“the state-led remaking of society on the model of the market” - Will Davies) since around 1980 appears increasingly exhausted. More broadly, liberalism’s difficulty in narrating its own limits or transforming itself has led to increasingly desperate attempts at self-maintenance, contributing to resurgent populism, nationalism, tribalism, and authoritarianism.

Dopamine Time: The widespread adoption of social media since about 2003 and the internet-enabled smartphone becoming popular around 2010 has rapidly fragmented attention and destabilised the infosphere, while destroying the epistemic commons. The root cause of this is arguably neurochemical and addiction-forming technology.

Geocybernetic Time: There is, purportedly, a race between the USA and China to develop artificial general intelligence or otherwise to dominate artificial intelligence, and that race compresses decision cycles and raises the stakes of speed, prediction, and surveillance. We are told the race is on, and it really matters who wins, while not really understanding the stakes or what it means for us.

Astrological Time: (*I have been reading Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas and learning to see astrology archetypically.) Within astrological frameworks, Neptune (associated with dreams, dissolution, and the oceanic) moves into Aries (initiation, will, assertion) on February 20th, 2026. This transition last occurred 165 years ago and will shape the next 13 years, offering a symbolic lens on shifts in collective mood and archetypal emphasis. Some will consider this irrelevant misinformation, for others it is a really big deal.

Chiastic Time: In the work of mystic Cynthia Bourgeault, this refers to a crossed, non-linear temporality in which time is patterned with meaning, and future fulfilment reaches back to transform the past, with awakening in the present at the point of intersection, rather than at history’s end. This kind of time is also there in spirit in the poet Rilke’s beautiful sentiment in his letters to a young Poet (1929):

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Now Time: In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Jetztzeit names not merely lived or experienced time, but time seized.

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

This ‘Now Time’ is the present thick with history, an interval in which action interrupts the illusion of neutral continuity. Time is neither simply given nor wholly made; it is taken up, grasped at a moment of intensity, and shaped through decisive intervention. Benjamin’s emphasis falls on historical rupture not individual volition, and this idea can be considered alongside his famous image of the angel of history:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Cheery stuff.

I could add to the list, but already the culimination of timelines is a lot to take in. It’s really a lot. I share this perspective to help disabuse ourselves of the idea that things might “settle down” or that the world is “a little bit crazy at the moment.” No. It’s altogether more endemic, alive and generative than that.

Our sense of culmination and collapse manifests in today’s politics being exhausted by yesterday’s economics and tomorrow’s technology; and that sense of incipient despair we often feel is, I think, a recognition that the forms of hegemonic power currently shaping the world will try to outsmart its cosmological setting, to ignore its geological condition, to outrun its imperial shadow, and further despoil its ecological inheritance. And yet, just when we most need to contend and respond from this place of expansive recoking, our epistemic commons – a fancy way to say our shared knowledge of the world and knowledge of a shared world - has been hijacked by profit-seeking algorithms, which makes it hard to speak truth to power, or mobilise for the greater good.

The perennial questions of who we are, why we are here, and what we should do are still with us, but as creatures vulnerable to habit and convenience, we are as likely to look for answers on our phones, as in the rivers or the stars. This is still a viable, liveable, wonderful planet, and life is a great blessing. Yet all our challenges are compounded by the way technology is reducing our capacity for attention and increasingly shaping our patterns of attachment. Our perception of the present is no longer merely informed by the deep and recent past but increasingly reconstituted by data affordances, through a predictive process that we carelessly call artificial intelligence.

Yet real intelligence, intelligence worth its salt and star dust, should be present to reality as it discloses itself moment by magical moment, and be ready to act with discernment. That intelligence says we should not despair. That intelligence says we are not wrong to love our home and seek to restore ecological sanity, not wrong to imagine that peace may be possible, not wrong to think our lives amount to more than an accident curated by an algorithm. That intelligence is available to us, and it is up to us to find it, create it, share it, and use it. Aligning ourselves with that deeper intelligence is alone what allows to become and remain what Ursula K Le Guin beautifully calls realists of a larger reality.

1. If you prefer video: Living in the Metacrisis. I am also reminded that my first major piece of public policy research was about social capital, and social networks in particular. See Connected Communities (RSA, 2010).

2. I know you must be wondering, so, yes, there is evidence for the decline of the ice-cream van. The British ice cream van has declined over recent decades due to falling operator numbers, rising costs, tighter regulation, supermarket competition, and changing consumer habits, shrinking it from a widespread everyday presence to a more seasonal and nostalgic fixture. There is local authority licensing data for a start, but The Ice Cream Alliance (no really) estimate that in the UK, in the 1970s and 80s, estimates often put the number of vans at 15,000–20,000, while recent industry estimates suggest numbers closer to 3,000–5,000 operating vans in the UK. Not quite the Northern White Rhino, but definitely on the way out.

3. On Monday, the combination of a good swim, a good conversation, and a good lunch led me to change my afternoon plans to make a few remarks about UK politics. I found myself getting pulled into a much bigger reflection on what a post-conventional politics might look like, which got me thinking about metamodernism again, and then I remembered that I decided, five years ago now, that the point of an episteme like metamodernism is that it helps with “the perception of context”. So I asked myself if I really understood my context, and it spiralled from there. The original essay became unwieldy, and I realised it had to be more than one post. So I am going to start, not with Zack Polanski and the fortunes of the Green Party of England and Wales, nor with the idea of political culture, metapolitical thinking or para-political practice. Instead, I start with a reflection on the times we are living in that takes time seriously. I plan to pick up from there in the next post.

4. I am grateful to Perspectiva Trustee and advisor Ian Christie for a personal communication about converging timescales that initially informed this post. As I developed the idea, I began to notice this connection to the sublime, which stems from thinkers like Burke and Kant and speaks to a sense of awe at the vastness of things, often with a tinge of fear, but still some sense of inspiration. The Temporal Sublime is not a new idea (unfortunately!) and has been mentioned in aesthetic theory, in literary criticism, in historiography. For instance, it’s mentioned in a book called The Historical Sublime, by Dan Edelstein (2022) and is a subset of that.