One of the paradoxes of modern Western civilisation is that we are simultaneously the richest and most powerful civilisation ever to have existed while also being in a perpetual state of anxiety and discontent. This seeming paradox is resolved once we understand our strange orientation to time.
Let’s begin with the three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. The modern West has a radical preference for the future, which is usually captured in the concept of “progress”. Importantly, even our so-called “conservatives” worship at the altar of progress because industrial capitalism is also oriented to the future. The pollution, inequity, and poverty that industrial capitalism introduced to 19th-century Britain were justified by the argument that it would all pay off in the long run. In some sense, it did. That’s a big part of the reason why we got used to believing that things would always be better in the future.
Progressivism and capitalism’s focus on the future once had an aspect that we rarely think about nowadays, which is that they were both predicated on the dissolution of the socio-political arrangements that had been carried over from medieval times. This took the form of political movements squarely aimed at the destruction of the institutions of the church and the nobility. Since both of these derived their justification from the past (tradition), the default position of progressivism and capitalism towards the past and present became scepticism, if not outright hostility.
Let’s forget about politics for a second and ask the question: how do we attune ourselves to the past, present, and future in everyday life? There are two important ways that are relevant for this discussion.
The first is what happens when we lose something in the present. It disappears from the here and now and exists only in the past. The most important example of this is the death of a loved one. Lesser examples include the loss of a job, a home, a romantic relationship or a friendship. In all these cases, we feel grief. Grief is the loss (in the present) of what we love and care about.
The second way we attune ourselves to time relates to the future. This is necessarily much more light-hearted because the future hasn’t happened yet and any idea we have about it is just that: an idea. Ideas may come and go like clouds drifting across the sky. They have far less weight.
For that reason, when an idea about the future doesn’t come to fruition, we tend to forget it and move on with our lives. That’s the reason why professional pundits in the media can be 100% wrong in their predictions about the future and still keep their jobs.
There is an important edge case to mention here because, especially in the modern world, we are always chasing the future and we sometimes put significant time and energy towards ideas that never come to fruition. In that case, we may feel grief when the idea fails, but this grief is still predicated on having lived the ideal for a time. It’s because it became part of our lives in the present that we grieve its loss.
Let’s now consider how these two orientations to time play out in the modern West. On the one hand, both progressivism and capitalism are perpetually liquidating the status quo in service to the future. This involves the loss of the present in terms of institutions of society, technological change, and even our understanding of the world. When we lose something in the present and thereby relegate it to the past, this should trigger a grieving process. But that’s only true if we had actually loved whatever it is that has gone away. Sometimes, it’s not obvious that we did love it and we have to come to terms with our real feelings.
The reason why we call it a “grieving process” is because it takes time to understand what we loved and why we loved it and then to reorient ourselves to its loss. Modern society prevents the grieving process in two main ways. First of all, there are entire industries whose purpose is to produce propaganda to convince us that what has been lost was not worthy of love in the first place and therefore should not be grieved. In its most absurd manifestation, this dynamic promotes the idea that the West itself is fundamentally evil and should be replaced. If you’ve been taught to hate something, it follows that you won’t grieve for its loss.
The second way we prevent the grieving process from occurring is the frantic pace of modern life which marches ever onwards towards the glorious future. This also takes the form of the endless propaganda that promulgates new ideas about this or that technological breakthrough. While we focus on dreams of the future, we are not concerned with the present or the past.
Still, it may well be that these problems are not unique to the modern West. The grieving process is fragile and uncertain. It is also very much dependent on the individual. Shakespeare knew that because it’s one of the main themes he explores in the story of Hamlet. The young prince is grieving while everybody has already got on with life. There can be no question of a lack of time because there has been a one-month mourning period for the dead king. Nevertheless, even Hamlet’s own mother has failed to grieve. Shakespeare strongly hints that this is not due to a lack of love but a simple desire to avoid the pain. True grief is painful, and there is a natural tendency to avoid it.
So, perhaps the modern world is not fundamentally different to earlier times except in the sense that we have so much more to grieve because the frenetic pace of change is constantly sacrificing the present to the future, and thereby constantly relegating to the past things which we care about.
In theory, we have a much greater need for the grieving process. In practice, it seems we try to assuage that need by swinging to the other extreme, dancing on the grave of the past while keeping our eyes ever fixed on dreams of the future.
That’s the thing about grief: you can try to ignore it, but it sits at the back door like a hungry puppy dog scratching to come inside. That hungry puppy is the ever-present discontent that accompanies modern life.
Simon,
You talked about collective trauma from industrelization, but at this point in the game I think the bigger elephant in the room is the world wars.
My late grandparents remembrered what England was like pre WWI, and some WWII vets are still with us as well as Holocaust survivors.
I think this is why few people in the west keep chicken for example, even people with the yard and regulations, and even people who grow fruit trees mostly avoid chicken (I know you don’t, but are the exeption).
In the pre world war world, most people would not buy eggs in the grocery store unless they lived in big cities. The war effort required large armies to be fed, which gave rise to industrial chicken farming. And now people seem unwilling to go back. Recent salmonela cases in industrial eggs here do not seem to give people a clue either.
Bokbook – I agree. And we have to remember that the wars were prefaced by a long period of optimism where it really was believed that all problems had been solved.
On the specific question of chickens, I think that’s related to a larger trend. Industrial agriculture eventually pushed prices so low that it didn’t make economic sense to do it yourself. That goes for chickens, vegetables and fruit. A big part of the economic value of chickens is that their manure is great fertiliser. If you stop growing fruit and veg, you don’t need the fertiliser from the chicken manure, which then becomes waste instead of a resource. Thus, the locus of production moves to giant, centralised conglomerates and away from families, which is the broader pattern of post-war society.
Simon – Good point about pre war optimism. A lot of historians discussing the first world war talk about Bismark’s complex system of alliances that secured peace in Europe for a hundred years but broke down when he was not around to maintain it. So I guess while Bismark was alive, from his point of view he must have thought he solved the problem of European wars?
Exactly. War was supposed to be one of those problems that had been “solved”. That was one shock. Another shock was how enthusiastic everybody was for war when it did break out. In any case, there was lots to grieve for.
Hi Simon,
I’ve mentioned to you before the story of being hit up for mad cash from a charity mugger in the city long ago, purportedly from Greenpiece. He was requesting financial assistance for the Great Barrier Reef, which I’ve only once met once, and it was very pretty, and remarkably a surprisingly long way off shore – which Captain Cook also discovered to his detriment. Encountering a rather large reef shark whilst snorkelling there almost made me crap my bathers, and a little whisper suggested to me that I was out of my depth. Admittedly the same feelings surfaced when faced with a fresh water crocodile in the waters of the Katherine River up north. Stepping out of one’s known environment can be dangerous!
Oh yeah, the mugger. Right. He supplied a dream, which I didn’t want to buy (and for my pains was told that he felt sorry for me). That’s the thing about the future, which you lifted the veil on, the words have the solidity of fluff – which is why such folks can be wrong all the time, and nobody holds them to account. Yup.
Processing grief is a heavy burden, which has to be attended too in its own time. If I may, the easy path out from that load, is actually the harder path.
because the frenetic pace of change is constantly sacrificing the present to the future, and thereby constantly relegating to the past things which we care about.
Wow! I’m going to have to process on that, but I believe you hit the proverbial nail on the head. Respect.
I’d have to suggest that we’re pretty much the same folks today as we were ten thousand years ago, or longer. I have a bit of compassion from that insight, you know it’s probably very difficult to be confronted by the pomp, ceremony and bling, without a lot of confusion.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Bakbook and Simon,
On chickens, (and oh my gawd south of me is in lockdown again, far out!) the quality difference is night and day. I feed my lot varied high protein feed plus heaps of weeds and they’re not over stocked. The egg yolks are huge comparatively, and you can immediately tell the protein content of a cracked egg. When it is put into a fry pan (skillet in US talk), if the albumen has some solidity to it then it is about as good as you’ll produce. I’ve observed that commercial eggs will have albumen which splats and runs and rarely holds together.
Who was that ancient Greek medical bloke who made the astute observation that you are what you eat?
Cheers
Chris
Chris – in fairness to the charity mugger, it is a difficult task to make your dream somebody else’s. The movie The Wolf of Wall Street has the famous “sell me this pen” trope. But the real life Jordan Belfort once explained that the real art is knowing whether the person wants a pen in the first place and not even trying to sell it to them if they don’t. The diff between free market sales and political propaganda is that we are sold the latter whether we want it or not.
Chook covid 2026. Isn’t it funny, our governments treat humans the same way they treat chickens (or is it vice versa?)
Chris,
I bet the meat also tastes infinitely better as well. I try to get my lamb and beef grass fed when I can because you can taste the difference. Not much free range chicken here however, at least not reasonably price and attainable. I hope to move into a house with a yard at some point, and a chicken coop is the first thing I will set up.
I am sorry to hear about the lockdown, hopefully they will get a clue at some point.
Hi Simon, I guess wealth doesn’t equal happiness. I have long wondered why, when we are so wealthy as a population, do we spend so much time working. If we lived with less, our finite resources would last longer and we could have more time for recreational activities. Enshitification is another aspect to our wealth that I don’t understand – why have more wealth and tolerate a constant drop in quality. My experience of grief is that it can be for what was and is no more, but it can also be for what could have been but never was. These are both past options and I guess as an optimist I haven’t really grieved for the future. That might change though if we as a race really mess it up. Thought provoking blog as always! Sandra
Sandra – work is part of our orientation to the future. To stop working would give us time to think about the past and present and that is where grieving would come into play. There’s a saying in German “Arbeiten zum vergessen” which means “working in order to forget”. Shakespeare shows that in the story of Hamlet. All the other characters are eager to get on with the job so they don’t have to think about things too much.