Now is Not the Time

This stimulating book argues that ‘human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasise the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective – what the author calls presentism and tempocentrism, an attitude of superiority attributed to the present because we live in it ourselves without the advantage of hindsight. He also discusses the speeding up of our lives, and, at the other end of the scale, deep time. Our era can be seen in the cycles of civilisation, and there is a hubris in calling a geological era after ourselves – the Anthropocene. Besides, in current circumstances, the future looms as dystopia, hardly the culmination of progress, and our descendants may look back on us as pretty misguided. The author quotes Arthur Lovejoy’s observation that even if we have ‘more empirical information at our disposal, we have no different or better minds.’ And it is precisely a higher form of thinking and a deeper order of feeling that is required.