20 April 2022
I don’t remember where or when I first heard the word Zeitgeist, but I do remember it as one of those lovely mind-widening moments that permits a different view of life and the world. If you accept Heraclitus’ fragment LXXXI, commonly recalled as No one steps in the same river twice [“Into the same river we both step and do not step” (Patrick, 2013, p. 53)] then you believe that life is, at all times, in motion. Zeitgeist is a German word for spirit (geist, ghost, spirit) of the time (zeit). Different times have different characters, and the zeitgeist is a description of that character. This blog is a desperate grasp at characterizing the spirit at the time of writing (12 April 2022).
It is interesting and telling that, much more so than at other times, I felt it necessary to provide the precise date at which I began this blog. Few readers will be surprised as one of the attributes, maybe the character-defining attribute of this time, is the seemingly ferocious rate of change we are now experiencing.
As someone born in 1959, I have also experienced a time that was much slower and necessarily more conservative. The demographers seemed to get it right as those amongst whom I was born are known as the baby boomers, the boom occurring with the return of life to post-WWII “normalcy.” I emphasize normalcy because I think norms, average tendencies, are themselves deceptive. Like my revered fellow philosopher, Heraclitus, I see any moment of time containing thinning strands of the past—entwined and disentwining from emerging strands of the future—their transitory simultaneity is what we experience as this moment, today, our deceptive normal.
Our normal, that is, a Southern Ontario, April 2022 normal, feels to me like it is moving faster and faster every week. If that’s true, the strands above are less accurately read because our glimpsed time is lesser as is our lived time within that moment. I think such times of turmoil are hugely unsettling to human beings who crave, but never attain, stable constancy. That said, there are slower and faster rates of change and my (tinged and flawed) recollection is that the slow times were better. Here’s why I’m probably wrong.
Greater change means greater opportunity. By definition, if you accept the fabric-based metaphor above, strands or threads in greater motion are less cohesive. Social, cultural i.e., human cohesion can quickly become stultifying. Why did early historians call the period after the fall of Rome—more than 1,000 years—the Dark Ages? Apparently because Petrarch looked back and compared Greek and Roman times (approximately 600 BCE-300 CE) to those described above (Dr. Wikipedia, 2022, April 14). He saw enlightenment in art, philosophy, literature, architecture, politics...and much less light in the subsequent millennium. While being alive in Greek or Roman times, especially as a slave, was hazardous indeed, being alive during the Western Dark Ages was to know unending and dogmatic rule by the Christian Church. (If this seems too judgmental, read about the zeitgeist experienced by Galileo or Hester Prynne, in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.) The point is that constancy can come at a high price.
We are in a hard-to-grasp moment of what appears to be world upheaval. The fall of the Berlin Wall, then thought to be an earth-quaking seam in history now seems a quaint, news-at-eleven story. From Trump, Putin’s Russian Federation, COVID, and social media’s fake news we have experienced a blur of hysteria, misinformation, death, and heroism. So how can this be better than the slow cold war movement of the 1970s?
Ask yourself this: If a proper measure of civility is the treatment of each fellow human being as an end in herself, and not as a means to the ends of others, has that principle been more clearly and brazenly betrayed since 1938? The optimistic view is that the West is finally seeing what is at stake. I will not implicate others but only my own ancestors. I know, from at least one immigrant generation, that we came to the New World because we were tired of being told when to go to war and when to live the lives we wanted to live. They wanted the latter and they crossed an ocean to make it happen. And then they put on Canadian uniforms and fought for Canada—by choice, not conscription.
Most of us arrived in the New World because our ancestors rightly believed that this would allow them and their descendants a freer life, more education, and a higher standard of living. These “bourgeois” values are not to be scoffed at. These are the values Ukraine is rightfully seeking to enshrine. The optimistic view is that the swirling, raging, and confusing spirit of our time is a harbinger of clarity—a clarity demonstrating that the voluntary sacrifice of the lives of others—for your own means—is wrong. Yes, Mr. Putin, wrong. Every day of every week of every month.
If you find this difficult to deal with, turn to the Stoics and recall the Serenity Prayer: G-d, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. As the accompanying image attests, Michiel Sweerts, nearly four hundred years back, was as mystified by time as we are. Acceptance is one stress-reducing option in the face of our apparently accelerating zeitgeist.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Schama, S. (2019, 30 September). Twitter: https://twitter.com/rembrandtsroom/status/1178760080826802176
Wikipedia, (2022, April 14). Dark Ages (historiography). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
Patrick, G. T. W. (Tr.). (2013). The Fragments of Heraclitus. Digireads.
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