Yuri Tarnopolsky ESSAYS 2. On
the
chronophages or time-eaters
competition for time. competition for
limited resource. reverence for life. Albert
Schweitzer. Kenneth J. Gerge Use Firefox browser or see essays-complete.pdf |
![]() ![]() Essay 2. On the
chronophages or time-eaters
This Essay
on chronophages, or time-eaters, is a distant echo of
Montaigne’s Essay 30, On the
Cannibals, with which
it has nothing to do on the surface. A droplet of
water from a pond and even from a tiny pool left by the
yesterday's rain is full of life. It is both an aquarium
and a cageless zoo populated with bacteria, protozoa,
and algae. One needs a microscope to enter this zoo . There is
some distance from the puddle to ABC or CBS TV networks,
but we will get there pretty soon. The droplet
could be an excellent starting point to understanding
life in all its manifestations, from hot water bacteria
to whales and from earth worms to sequoia. Actually, it
is a good starting point for many other things that have
nothing to do with each other at the first look. Plants
and algae build most of their matter from carbon
dioxide in the air, but they still need some minerals. All the species
in the pool compete for matter to build their bodies and
for energy to keep them alive. This alone still does not
reveal the essence of life. We have to add
the word multiply to any description of any kind
of life. If all
creatures start multiplying, the resources of available
matter and energy will be sooner or later exhausted. The
creatures themselves will be the only remaining food,
tempting, well balanced, and concentrated. And so they
will eat each other in a certain pecking order. Those at
the top can attack the live food, while the underdogs
have to wait until the kings, emperors, and czars
die to get their bite at the funerals. Fortunately
for life, there is the blessing of death: everything
dies in due time, and therefore everybody has a chance
of surviving until its own due time. The matter can be
recycled. Death provides nourishment for life, and we,
liberal humans of good intentions and meek hearts, are
not exception. Matter is conserved: life turns not only
into dead matter or other life, but also into stone, for
example, limestone and coal, or gas, like methane and
carbon dioxide. Energy,
unlike matter, cannot be completely recycled. That was a
stunning discovery of the nineteenth century, of
the same magnitude as Darwinism and genes. Energy exists
in two forms, work and heat, and work keeps living
bodies alive, while excessive heat can only destroy
them. The ultimate source of work for organic life on
earth is light, which is an organized, ordered, refined
form of energy, unlike the chaotic heat. It would be
wonderful if we, humans could live on solar energy like
plants, the only politically correct and green to the
bones creations on earth, endowed, in addition, with
everlasting beauty. Until that
time of bliss comes, only we, humans, can produce work
from heat in our heat engines, but part of it is always
lost with heat. No other known life form but humans can
do the trick of turning part of heat into work outside
their organisms. The invention of
heat engine launched the Industrial Revolution and a new
super-biology of Things that are made not by human touch
but by other Things. If we keep
the mini-zoo in the dark, it will not die, will it? Some
of the small creatures will produce their spores, the
seeds of new life that do not need energy and matter for
their existence because they are almost as dead as rocks
and sand, but not quite: they are both dead and alive,
more exactly, potentially alive. They are like a
blue-print of a bicycle: it can be stored for years and
even centuries, but somebody will be able to reconstruct
the ancient bicycle from the blueprint. The modern
bicycle is also a product of long evolution, still
bearing the family resemblance to its wooden patriarch
born in 1690 in France, which can also be reconstructed
today from its blueprint. The
potential future life and destiny of the spores, as well as
the past of their species, is written into
their genetic code, which is just a long sentence or,
rather, a novel in a language that all forms of life
speak to themselves. What is not written there is the
sound of the last rain, the shadows of the slow clouds
and swift birds, the loose leaf fallen from the nearby
tree, and the dog's paw hitting the puddle like an
asteroid from the space. What is written is the result
of the millions of life cycles during which the forms of
life gradually changed from their ancient predecessors
to their present appearance because of their
ability to multiply, but not exactly reproducing their
ancestry. And now let
us turn on the morning news on any network. We are
invited into the world of beautiful smiles, elegant
dresses, soft light, friendly jokes, and happy talk.
Everything is designed to infuse our morning coffee with
confidence and optimism. Nobody seems to be in a hurry.
No broadcaster's face is distorted with hatred and
cruelty. There is blood and suffering of strangers
on the screen. There are other channels to see a shark
devouring a seal and the lion clawing an antelope. There
are even more channels to watch humans murdering and
maiming each other. But we are safe and there is enough
electricity to run the show. Yet if we
are in a certain, rather morbid, frame of mind, we can
find really brutal struggle for existence right behind
the glimmering
surface of a TV screen. The episodes
of a live show fight for a limited resource,
which in this case is neither energy nor matter, neither
food, nor money: it is time, the nourishment of
poets, philosophers, and working moms. The episodes of
the show try to slash and slice each other, piece
by piece, to cut nose and ear off, to chop
off a hand and a foot, and often even to hack
somebody's head off. The struggle displays
right before our eyes: we see interviewed people cut off
in the middle of a sentence, their point insufficiently
clarified, important issues muddled, unimportant
expanded, and reminders “you have twenty seconds”
intruding. With rare
exceptions for rare events, the the
time of the commercials is untouchable and the
total time cannot be stretched even for a millisecond. The outcome of
the struggle for time is not predetermined because the
show is mostly live. That's it: live. The TV
news as they exist today is a product of not so long a
history and it has evolved right before our eyes from
its black-and-white mix of information and advertisement
to the present colorful mix of entertainment and
advertisement sprinkled by information. The source
of energy is advertisement, the time share of which is
ever growing even beyond the strictly commercial time,
finding new forms of spreading through the cracks,
especially, on a computer monitor. The internet is a
shark pool. The food for eyes pushes the food for
thought off the screen into the garbage bin. In no sense am I criticizing
the TV network industry, and for a simple reason: we
cannot criticize life. All life is sacred, and so is the
life form feeding on time. All evolution is sacred, no
lion is better than a hyena, and amoeba is no worse than
whale. From the evolutionary point of view, no
Charlie Rose show is better (or worse) than Jerry
Springer one because all this is life of TV, and TV is a
form of life, like all technology. The sanctity of
life means that all its forms are equal from a certain
point of view. And by life here I mean meta-life:
all forms of competition for a limited resource
involving a code transferred from generation to
generation and subject to mutations. Here it seems
appropriate to recall Albert Schweitzer and his
philosophy of reverence for life. While for Schweitzer
life meant a phenomenon of strictly biological nature,
we still could apply the principle of reverence to all
forms of life based on competition for a limited
resource, all the more, they are still run exclusively
by humans: life of weaponry, TV, corporations, toilet
paper, aviation, music, poetry, transportation,
religious fundamentalism, and birth control. Should we? Unlimited
spread of life leads to competition for matter and
energy. The principle of reverence for life, therefore,
if applied unconditionally, is in fact irreverent to
life. As result of competition, some forms of life will
suffer and others face elimination. The shocking
side of such reverence for meta-life, i.e., life as
evolution of forms, seems to be that we have to embrace
war, struggle, conflict, aggression, terrorism,
expansion, corruption, politics, and even robbery and
murder as much as the stinky ugly hyena mangling the
beautiful defenseless baby antelope. Actually, this is
what we, the humanity, have been doing since our cave
times. The apparent dilemma follows only from mixing up
ethics and science. Both, however, are forms of
meta-life, too. The stele of Hammurabi, created in
the eighteenth century BC, is one of the earliest forms
of the genetic code of law and ethics. On the one
hand, it protected the weak and poor from
injustice, but, on the other hand, punished the guilty
by maiming and death for minor (from modern point of
view) offenses. Reading the laws of Hammurabi, I always
hoped that their cruelty could have been mitigated
by bribe.
All we can do,
before making an ethical or logical judgment, is
to look at the issue from the point of view of the laws
of nature. Is it a form of life or not? If it is,
is it alive or dead? What is its source of energy? What
is its source of matter? What is its code? In what way
it procreates? How fast is it changing? Such an
open-minded approach could reveal some things usually
hidden from the focus of attention of network TV news
and even the public TV, which is also a form of life
with its sources of energy and matter, and its own
claws, fangs, and means of mimicry.
After that, we
can decide whether something is good or bad for us. The
rock is dead (is it?) and we have the right to crush it
into gravel. The tree is alive and let us think hard if
we really need to cut it. The man with the rifle is
alive. Do we really need to kill him? Maybe we do. The
fetus is alive (is it a human like you and me?).
What is that we can and cannot do with it as compared
with what we can and cannot do with our own ailing hand
or foot? As soon as we expand the notion of life,
the unavoidable pro-life/pro-choice controversy arises among the host
of new intriguing questions.
I would put
understanding before the emotions, although from my own
experience I know how difficult it could be. The Russian
poet Alexander Pushkin once noted that the habit is a
heavenly gift: it is a substitute for happiness.
Emotions are a substitute for reason, but hardly a gift
from hell: happiness is an emotion. I suspect
that most our ethical ideas first occurred to the
ancient Greeks who had wars instead of TV serials,
with a lot of time on hand for exercising their
minds between the wars. Free time is a necessary
condition of freedom. Competition
for time has been created by the human production of
Things: objects designed to serve humans or be consumed
by them. They all compete for the shrinking pool of
human time consumed by commute, increasing workload,
checking junk mail and email, reading junk documents
designed by computers, and waiting at the airports. Competition
for time is shaping our life. All this is obvious. But
could any new forms of meta-life originate from
this overpopulated pool of time? Emotion, or
heart versus reason, is a great gift, too, whether from
hell or from heaven. In our mind, as well as in
our heart, the same competition for a limited resource
goes on between contradicting impulses and logic, as
well as between hundreds of reasons and a dozen
emotions. The pool of outcomes, however, is of the size
of 1: a single action. This competition looks more like
a Miss Universe Beauty Pageant: there is only one
crown. We can think in thousands of ways but
act only once. It is worth remembering that the
chronophages feed not just on each other's time, but on
our own time, too, although most of us will never be
seen on TV network shows. The digital bacteria, like
junk calls, email, ads, games, videos, and never looked
at twice photos are most potentially fatal types of
chronophages because they multiply and infect with the
speed of light possible only in an electronic medium and
never in water, air, or on land. We are luscious green pastures for
the time-eaters, and there are many species of them.
Remarkably, we, the omnivores, cannot respond with
taking a bite of them! In the world of time we are
the grass and all we can do is to savor this new
refreshing and humbling feeling of being a low form of
life and looking up to the Things that trample us and
feed on us (see Essay 6). NOTES:
1. More
on chronophage
on the Web. 2. On
intellectual competition, see Randall Collins, The
Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of
Intellectual Change, Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
and London: The Belknap Press, 1998. 3.
A
brilliant picture of the competition for time and its
implications can be found in:
From time to time,
the media publish a few obituaries of pleasures of
our life that iPhones killed, but killing time is
celebrated on a massive scale: 5
Ways to Kill Time on Your iPhone Without Playing
Games 10
Apps
To Kill Time - Silicon UK Google:
best
time killing apps 2017 . About 12,000,000 results
Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting
Amid a historic
spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the
danger of distracted driving are getting worse.
By Kyle Stock , Lance Lambert , and David Ingold , |
Page created:
2001
Revised: 2016, 2017 <<< To ESSAY 1 To ESSAY 3 >>> Website: spirospero.net To contents email Essays 1 to 56 : http://spirospero.net/essays-complete.pdf Essays 57 to 60: http://spirospero.net/LAST_ESSAYS.pdf Essay 60: http://spirospero.net/artandnexistence.pdf |