Hyperculture : the human cost of speed by Bertman Stephen

Author:Bertman, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technological innovations -- Social aspects -- United States, Speed -- Social aspects, United States -- Civilization -- 1970-
ISBN: 0275962059
Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Praeger
Published: 1998-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

TIME AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

The Synchronous Mind

The synchronous society looks upon time the way a diner looks at a buffet. To the diner it is irrelevant how long it took to prepare and cook the many dishes before him; what matters is how appetizing they look. Hungry, he puts on his plate whatever suits his taste. In the same way, the synchronous society acknowledges only those aspects of past belief that serve to confirm its own current attitudes. The rest is ignored. The synchronous citizen likewise lives for today. Neither past nor future are his concern.

The widening use of drugs, the burgeoning of crime, the deepening national debt, the rampant spread of sexual disease, and even the expand

ing destruction of the natural environment are all rooted in our sense of time. In seeking to gratify our desires instantly and in denying the ultimate consequences of our choices, we simultaneously reject the place of the future in our lives. At the same time, we turn our faces away from the past and the moral guidance it could provide. For the demands of the present are too insistent; its voice, too loud.

Were the separate problems of our society the result of disparate causes, we could deal with them one at a time. But cutting off the separate heads of this social Hydra will not cause the beast to die, for each of the heads will grow back anew. Though the problems of our society are by no means simple to solve, their separate causes stem from a basic attitude: the denial that we live in a temporal continuum, that our actions must be conditioned by the acknowledgment of future and past. It is from this one central principle that our major social ills radiate. Yet these ills are more threatening than the mythical Hydra, for their menace lies not within some alien monster but within ourselves, within the nature of the synchronous mind.

Unlike the totalitarian society, the synchronous democratic society is not unified by ideology. All effective totalitarian states have galvanized popular sentiment through the use of temporal imagery. The masses are called upon to join the great cause to fulfill their historic mission and spiritual destiny. To the cry of "Bonzai!," beneath the banner of the Third Reich, mouthing the sayings of Chairman Mao, the faithful have marched forth on totalitarian crusades across the ages, inspired by the image of an unfinished past and the glorious picture of a future yet to be. But these anthems are not sung by the synchronous democratic society, for it has allowed its citizenship in time to lapse, bound as it is by allegiance only to the present.

Nor is a synchronous society the same as a conformist one, in which the individual cooperatively and silently complies with an unspoken social code and thereby gains acceptance. For in the synchronous society there is no set of rules, only flux. Instead of statesmen with steadfast principles, there are candidates continually adjusting their positions to match the latest focus groups and polls.

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