I notice this frequently, how each new event feels not entirely new, how the emerging present carries a familiar flavor, an oblique nostalgia, the covert recurrence of a prior moment from both yesterday and decades ago—neither memory nor déjà vu but something in between. But the awareness of this familiarity is fleeting. Western civilization’s insistence that time is linear, consumerist society’s obsession with newness, and the relentless intrusion of corporate-crafted distraction prevent it from sinking in, from reaching the maturity of full conscious expression. And so the present moment passes with both the source and the nature of its not-quite novelty left unanalyzed.
Late nineteenth/early twentieth century mathematician-turned-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is known for his “process theory,” a perspective on the nature of reality that is as famous for its incomprehensibility as it is for its originality. Whitehead says that there are no elemental particles in the universe, such as atoms, or even component parts of atoms, that exist as independent and autonomous units of matter. Instead, he claims, the elemental pieces of the cosmos are overlapping events that emerge in relationship with other overlapping events. Nothing that exists can be truly independent of everything else. Context is everything—literally. Elephants and electrons are equally contingent beings, existing not through the expression of some underlying material essence, but through their temporal-spatial relationship with the rest of the cosmos. Time plays a critical role in all of this. Time is the essential feature, the thread that weaves the connections among events—and a central part of the events themselves: events exist only through time.
But this, even if we accept Whitehead’s theory, merely sets the boundary conditions for our ability to engage the present moment. It makes the present moment something that continues to emerge even in its passing; it is not an isolated instant, but develops across time and possesses the quality of duration—the very source of duration—and its duration is not determined by the nature of the universe so much as it is by the limits to our capacity for attention and awareness.
Entirely missing in Whitehead’s notions is a place for the modern Western conception of progress. Movement and change are characteristics of experience but progress is not. Progress is a superadded feature of reality forcefully imposed from the outside. But more than that, progress is a conceptual harness whose sole purpose is to keep us yoked to the drivetrain of mechanical and inhuman forms of life collectively known as Western civilization. Even worse, progress is the open negation of our actual subjective experience. Progress denies the primacy of the emerging moment. Progress turns duration into a prison sentence, something to be endured only with impatience, something to be filled with distraction so that we aren’t burdened with the empty space each progress-gutted moment leaves in the interval of its passing.
Progress lies at the heart of my failure to connect with the ever-passing present. The nonsensical notion of progress, a ravenous and parasitic virus from the Enlightenment, clings fast to my neural tissue, an entrenched delusion consuming the hours and days and years as they emerge from time’s womb—so that even after over half a century of gestation the present moment falls forward stillborn, a mere staging platform for the moment to follow, a means to an end but never the end itself, entirely inert aside from the vague sense of recollection that trails in its wake.
Progress, like other reified abstractions—better to call them myths—is a useful tool for organizing our experience. But tools are never neutral. Their usefulness is always relative to a specific set of purposes, and always a function of the roles they play in the pursuit of those purposes. And our experience is not being organized by us. And it is not being organized around authentically human purposes. And it is not being organized for our own ultimate good. Progress is a tool of modernity, and, like most other modern myths, it is not a human tool.
The difficulty with engaging in the present moment emerges as a side effect of having a perspective that is saturated with progress. No, that’s not quite true. The side effects of a medical intervention are effects of the intervention that are not directly relevant to its goal. Side effects are peripheral to the main purpose. An antidepressant drug might disrupt sleep, for example, but sleep-disruption is not why the drug is being prescribed. Managing the present moment is a direct feature of the operation of progress as a conceptual tool. It is not a mere side effect, but rather the entire purpose of progress to denigrate the present moment, to make it a mere stepping stone to some mythical place on the path ahead. The infinitely thick now is purposely drained, made into an empty shell, rendered meaningless outside of its connection with a mythical future.
The tragedy in this is obvious to the point of cliché: now is all we’ve got, the present moment is all there can ever be. So with progress our lives become hollow husks filled with anticipation for future moments that will themselves turn out to be nothing but a string of hollow husks of anticipation for imagined moments to follow.
