Review of Time, Progress, Growth and Technology: How Humans and the Earth are Responding

Filipe Duarte Santos is a remarkable man. He is a modern-day renaissance scholar who is timeless in his expansive knowledge, yet fascinated by changing conceptions of time and progress. This extraordinary book explores the many features contained within the relationships between the evolution of Homo sapiens and its contorted concepts of time and progress. These are visualized through the lenses of scientific discovery, philosophical enquiry, the driving power of advancement, and the dynamics of technological inventiveness. All of this is presented as a magisterial and deeply scholarly exploration of where we have come from, who we are now, and where we might end up. At its heart, this journey is deeply troubling. For all of the achievements of the human mind and hand, the passage of time has seemingly led us to various abysses. The latter sections of this mammoth volume place us in the jaws of climate disruption, spiraling debt, increasing personal and collective danger, and disintegrating democracy. At the very center of this enterprise is the elusive search for sustainability: the holy grail of permanent survival of all life on Earth. What one interprets from all of his explorations is the inevitability of entropy, the onset of irrecoverable disorder, and the ephemerality of imagination. As we face the many abysses that we can discern as we draw ever closer to them, as if mesmerized and enthralled by their fascination, we find that the time necessary to restore ourselves and the regenerated habitability of the planet is frighteningly diminishing. The tragic irony is that the longer we delay, even when delay is so utterly tempting, the more difficult are the tasks of achieving restoration. Time and progress could become our downfall. These are not Duarte Santos’s conclusions; they are mine. Duarte Santos visualizes time as two framing phenomena. One is social operating time, where we evolve as we learn, connect, interact, and build cultural norms. The other is the time determined by physics, biology, and psychology, which shape how we interpret our place in the order of the cosmos, ecology, and the development of the mind. The first is very much in our hands, but we seemingly steer it into channels. The second is unchanging. But we cannot align the first with its potential for progress, with the second with its inbuilt rectitudes. Duarte Santos prepares massive chapters, most exceeding 100 pages. He begins by addressing the various conceptions of time from the insights of the physical sciences and the social sciences, to analyze the various efforts at manifesting time in many cultures. Most of this effort seeks to bridge their observations of the movements of the enduring cosmos and of the patterning of species mixtures and behavior with meaning and symbolism. All of these processes are tenderly explained through the eyes of the trained physicist and biologist, who is also an anthropologist, a radical ecologist, and a philosopher. What emerges from this narrative is that all human communities have sought to make sense of their external phenomena, which seem both unchanging and timeless, providing forms of imagining that place interpretive limits to their immortality and immaterialism. We seem to have created a universal need to overcome our ignorance so as to give us the confidence to progress. Nature is both indecipherable and somewhat fearful as a consequence, and has to be constantly reinterpreted to give us assurance of our place in the order of things. What is fascinating here is that the twinning of social and physical time drives us in an endless quest for understanding, for prediction, and for the capturing of the eventual social and economic benefits of such knowledge. Duarte Santos gives much attention to the measurement of time right down to extraordinary accuracies, to the evolution of social time preference formation and economic discounting, to the notion of prediction and the management of risk, and to the theories of relativity and quantum ephemerabilities. The exploration of spacetime as a unified concept in the quest for “the theory of everything” is a case in point. The emerging thinking is that spacetime is an outcome of the four axes of the cosmos (adding time to the usual three). Time therefore may be an emergent, not an actual, property. Time might possibly be a component and an outcome of a complex quantum geometry, which could include causality and the fleeting momentariness of virtual BOOKS OF NOTE