And if we’re going to reimagine and reinvigorate hope in ways that help us, we must think carefully about the relationships between time, imagination, possibility, and prediction.
We may indeed be passing through what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a “time of troubles,” the period of challenge and difficulty that precedes the disintegration of a civilization. Toynbee argues that a civilization in peril reacts in specific, recognizable patterns. One is to seek safety by a “return to the past,” by reviving a “primitive,” “archaic” way of life. The various “back to nature” and fundamentalist philosophies that have emerged in the last fifty or so years suggest something of this sort.
We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon.
Niccolò Machiavelli: "Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions…."
[F]or [Sherlock] Holmes, education means something more. Education in the Holmesian sense is a way to keep challenging yourself and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether—even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It’s a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and of never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think we are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do.
Nothing inherently exists, with its own parts and attributes, independently of our conceptual designation.
[T]here is no escape from necessity. It will not yield, cannot submit: ne + cedere. Kant defined necessity’s German equivalent, Notwendigkeit, to mean that which “could not be otherwise.” This makes the understanding of our lives remarkably easy: whatever we are we could not have been otherwise. There is no regret, no wrong path, no true mistake. The eye of necessity reveals what we do to be only what could have been. “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (T. S. Eliot) [Burnt Norton]
As we perform an act, make a choice, we believe there are options. Options, Personal Agency, Choices, Decisions—these are the catchwords Ego thrives on. But if we look up from the engagement for a moment and speculate, Necessity’s implacable smile says that whatever choice you make is exactly the one required by Necessity. It could not be otherwise. At the moment the decision falls, it is necessary. Before it is decided, all lies open. For this strange reason, Necessity guarantees only risk. All is at risk in each decision, even though what is finally decided upon at once becomes necessary.
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