"Real" Time

The New York Review of Books published a mind-widening essay on time a few weeks ago, in the form of a review of Time Reborn by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin.¹ The review, by James Glieck, discusses Smolin's meditations on the difference between what we might call real time vs. ideal time. Any ideal, of course, is inherently perfect, and thus does not exist in our real world of mutability. Many people are attracted to abstract studies like mathematics and theoretical physics because such studies allow them to dwell, in their minds at least, in a perfect world. Smolin says as much of himself:

I used to believe in the central unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an

adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and

inhospitable, for a world of timeless truth.

Time, in theoretical physics, is dealt with in an ideal manner, as one of the four dimensions of our world—i.e., as an abstract concept. Yet Smolin now finds himself questioning the reality of time in the abstract, if I may put the issue in that paradoxical manner. (More on paradox later.) As Smolin puts it:

Everything we experience, every thought, impression, action, intention, is part of a moment.

The world is presented to us as a series of moments. We have no choice about this. No choice

about which moment we inhabit now. . . . In this way time is completely unlike space [which

can be subverted by electronic communications, e.g.]. This is not a small distinction; it shapes

the whole of our experience. . . . The world remains, always, a bundle of processes evolving in

time. . . . Logic and mathematics capture aspects of nature, but never the whole of nature.

There are aspects of the real universe that will never be representable in mathematics [i.e., in

ideal form]. One of them is that in the real world it is always some particular moment.

It is pretty easy to see, from Smolin's perspective, that some of our abstract ways of knowing our world, such as theoretical physics, are akin to religion. Both abstract science and religion attempt to mediate between the real messy world as we experience it in time and abstract ideals outside of the passage of time, whether those ideals are called laws of nature or God. Smolin is especially helpful on this point: “In science, experiments and their analysis are time-bound, as are all our observations of nature, yet we imagine that we uncover evidence for timeless natural laws” (emphasis added). This is not so different from a religious person who deduces a perfect creator from the intricacy of an eye, not being able to conceive that such intricacy can evolve naturally through time. Smolin argues against the assumption of abstract ideals, though, by remarking that “laws are not timeless. . . . Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.” We need only think of the changes in our understanding of the “law” of gravity from Newton's time to Einstein's.

The problem with this juggling act of balancing real time and ideal time is “cognitive dissonance,” as Glieck puts it: “We live in one world while imagining the existence of another, outside: a heavenly plane.” Or, as Smolin worries: “We act inside time but judge our actions by timeless standards. . . . As

a result of this paradox, we live in a state of alienation from what we most value.” Here is Glieck again, in what strikes me as an amazing statement: “ . . . Newton's laws, the laws of nature, are meant to be timeless, true now and forever. Otherwise what good are they? We can hardly value the ephemeral.” It's that last sentence that I find so revealing and have thus highlighted. We, many of us, feel we cannot value the ephemeral because the ephemeral will always disappoint us. Loved ones will die; the body will age; a tree will fall on a home. How can we value what is so precarious?--not even precarious, really, but doomed! Surely it's smarter (not to mention easier) to value absolute, abstract ideals, like God and 2 + 2 = 4. So both the scientific mind and the religious mind to some extent seek solace in abstract absolutes, outside of the experience of passing time.

The difference between science and religion (in general) as I see it is that science ultimately works by induction, reasoning from the specific to the universal, from the real to the ideal. So, as the story goes, Newton is hit in the head by an apple and develops through reason the law of gravity. Religion, on the other hand, works for the most part deductively—it posits certain premises that must be accepted absolutely on faith by its believers, even if those premises contradict the actual sensory experiences in time of those believers. Religion relieves its adherents from trying to make sense of the world as individuals; it presents them with a pre-formed package of understandings, or at least attempts at answers. The problem with deduction is that it cannot evolve easily; thus in recent times we have had an arch-conservative Vatican that so far cannot even bring itself to approve of the use of condoms in a marriage when one partner has H.I.V.² In religion, values and beliefs are ultimately more important than experience in time.³ The sufferings of Christ as a man in this mutable world you would think would compel compassion for those of us living through time right now, but too often it does not. Science, at least, sees the fact of disease as a present reality and not an indicator of morality and thus can respond to real people in real time with efforts to help them heal or at least not suffer so much.

For Smolin as reformed scientist, being anchored in the real world, in real time, is the better alternative to living in the cognitive dissonance that results from aspiring toward a world of ideal laws. Here is how Glieck explains it:

We reenter time when we accept uncertainty; when we embrace the possibility of surprise; when

we question the bindings of tradition and look for novel solutions to novel problems. The

prototype for thinking “in time,” Smolin argues, is Darwinian evolution. Natural processes

lead to genuinely new organisms, new structures, new complexity, and—here he departs from

the thinking of most scientists—new laws of nature. All is subject to change.

On one level, we are dealing here with the difference between conservative and liberal mindsets. The conservative mind wants certainty and stability--as much as possible in this world of change, and so embraces what it conceives of as unchanging laws, even if those laws are arbitrary or potentially harm others. The liberal mindset is more amenable to accepting change and certainly diversity, with the faith that change is the surer way to improvement than stability. Social life has to be, obviously, some compromise between change and stability—and that's why the word “paradox” keeps coming up in this essay. Two viewpoints that are, in essence, mutually exclusive, must coexist somehow in a dynamic society. We must both respect the “law of gravity,” however we conceive of it now, but also be able to accept that we humans will probably understand it differently over time, perhaps even in our own lifetime. We humans are inescapably abstract thinkers—if we were not, we would not be able to piece together the discrete moments of our experience into an apparently comprehensible individual consciousness or collective culture. But we also have to understand that there are no absolutes in our experience—and also that absolute values, to the extent that they deride the temporal, can be downright life-denying. The Holocaust, as part of the Nazi effort toward racial purity, speaks for itself.

Have you heard the phrase “paradox is the only basket that can hold reality”? I heard it at a conference once but have never been able to find its source. Isn't it true, though, much as we might be uncomfortable with this truth? Life is paradox. An individual life is worth both everything and nothing, depending on the context within which you view it. An individual soldier's life is worth considerably less to the state he represents than the abstract goal toward which he is fighting. But to grieving parents, that individual life was virtually everything to them and they might even question the value of any ideal that would require the death of their son. Both are true, at the same time. Life is both real and ideal, depending on how you view it at any one moment.

Let me go back to Glieck's sentence “We can hardly value the ephemeral.” Perhaps he says this tongue-in-cheek. I hope so, but I can also understand if the sentence is earnestly intended. From my viewpoint, especially after reading this essay, it's obvious that we so greatly need to value the ephemeral and question the abstract—especially in these days when we have so much of the natural world under our control. Yes, the person we love will age and perhaps die before we do, perhaps in terrible pain. But if we do not love the ephemeral nevertheless, we will understand the world only through abstract reason and only the perfect will be lovable—which means that we ourselves cannot be, or at least “others” cannot be. How does Portia put it?-- “. . . in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.” I think also of the ending of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, when the intellectual Raskolnikov prostrates himself before the prostitute Sonia. As brilliant as our intellects are, they must always be tempered by the body, by the world of real time and suffering. We cannot live up to our own abstract ideals. That does not mean we have to reject them, but certainly it means we should question them more than blindly devoting ourselves to them.

I recently read in an historical biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine this passage regarding Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most renowned religious man of his era in Europe and now remembered as Saint Bernard: “As an adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond and remained there until his erection had subsided.”⁴ This domination of the abstract ideal over physical reality is no longer something we should revere. Wouldn't we admire Bernard so much more if he were able to accept the natural responses of his physical body and perhaps even so commit himself to celibacy—so that it would be a choice made not out of disgust for the mortal body but with understanding and free will and compassion for those who choose differently?--and so that he would not live “terrified of women and their possible effect on him” and thus at times revile them simply for being women, temptresses, descendants of evil Eve? Wasn't Augustine, with what is often judged as his hypocritical attitude of “God grant me chastity but not yet,” a more sane and healthy man?

Abstractions necessarily involve judgment and rejection of others who do not live up to our ideals and also hypocrisy on the part of the judgers, since they are as human as any of us. In a commencement address published in part in the New York Times, Jonathan Safran Foer says to his audience of college graduates: “Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.”⁵ We may pursue goals and ideals, but we need also always to be attentive to reality, to being in time, to human suffering. This is metaphorical thinking—the pairing up of the concrete and the abstract, a paradox. Christ is a metaphor, divine immortal and suffering mortal simultaneously—a paradox. I would go so far as to say that Christ is the epitome of metaphor, the consummate metaphor. Like Christ, to be fully alive, we need to carry together the real and the ideal, but the real should lead us, as the concrete image in a metaphor is sometimes referred to as the “vehicle” that carries the abstract idea—brings it to us in comprehensible form, as Jesus brought his fellow humans the word of God in his time. Striving to live this way is certainly a paradox and it demands courage and humility, but isn't that the real wisdom of time?

1http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/06/time-regained/?page=1

2The last I heard was that Pope Benedict allowed for the use of condoms by prostitutes who might develop compassion by avoiding passing disease on to others, but married couples may still not use condoms according to church doctrine, even if one partner is infected with H.I.V.

3We might recall the Indian woman in Ireland who died from septicemia not long ago because the Catholic hospital in which she sought help during a miscarriage would not abort her dying fetus until it was determined the fetus was positively dead.

4From Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (NY: Ballantine, 1999), pg. 44. There is no source reference to this particular passage in Weir's book, but she seems to be taking her information about Bernard from Galfredas Claras Vallensis, Vita Tertia: Fragments of a Life of Bernard of Clairvaux, in J.P. Migne, Patrologiae Latinae.

5http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-be-alone.html?emc=eta1