Author: Peter Freilinger

Three years ago, my son’s godfather and I built a series of plywood and garbage 2″x4″ tables in my basement. My son’s godfather is a big model train guy – “there’s no scale like O scale” – and he and I have purchased quite a lot of track, rolling stock, and scenery for my son’s benefit over the years. I say for my son’s benefit but obviously, we’re buying stuff because we like it, and we’re hoping beyond hope that he’ll inherit our hobby, or obsession, or what we convince ourselves is a happy and healthy addiction, unlike our unhealthy addictions which are well known and need no restatement.

However, three or four months ago, my son started asking for Lego “modular” buildings, which are designed to be connected to one another to create Lego town landscapes. As a member of my town’s long range planning committee, I love this: he seems to intuitively understand that creating a coherent and lively, dense and connected townscape is one way that we get to celebrate the concept of community – far more than what Scarborough does in its personality-free high speed Route One and Payne Road corridors. My son in his Lego aspirations is showing a desire to be a part of a quietly and humanised urban landscape, with bookstores, Grand Emporium legacy department stores, boutique hotels, town halls, and police stations. And even a few suburban homes scaled in line with the town – and all located by a train station of our own, shared design, including a frequent traveler lounge (hanging out with his father through O’Hare and Newark and Sea-Tac has made the boy a keen observer of airline business class amenities) and a depersonalised train ticket dispenser which obviates the need for a local ticket office agent.

At a certain point in late November, the boy asked to put together the Lego town in place of the O Scale Lionel train layout. I was torn, because the model train stuff was a connection to the early 20th century that would be severed for my son, and I really want him to be as excited about that sort of thing as I am. But as I thought about it, he’s already there: he knows more about World War II than his teachers and his school mates, and if I’m honest, he knows more about pre-Civil War western US expansion than I remember from my undergraduate American history education at Harvard. He’s not rejecting anything: he’s trying to create something new of his own. And swallowing hard – and not telling his godfather in Massachusetts who loves O Scale more than he loves New Haven thin crust pizza – we destroyed the model railroad layout and started building the Lego town, complete with Lego trains but far more focused on the buildings, the minifigures, the road plates. We casually destroyed one world in order to create a new one based on a very different scale and purpose.

Two weeks ago, my son did roughly the same thing. We have what is called a Minecraft “realm”, which is an online world scape that I pay $6 a month for that enables the boy and his friends to build and create all sorts of stuff on line that, to me, has no meaning whatsoever, because video games are just about as meaningful to me as bitcoin, which readers of this blog will realise is to say, absolutely nothing. My son was getting a little annoyed at his friends’ creations – five other boys have access to the “realm”, three of which are particularly active but the other two boys have retained the right to come into the realm and be pests when they’re bored – so he reset the realm. Basically, he wiped it clean, much as we had wiped the plywood tables clean in the basement. The other boys still had access, and could still build whatever they wanted – but now on a new, clean tabula rasa.

The other boys descended into a kind of ten year old DefCon Five with a speed which should make anyone familiar with geopolitical conflict recoil in terror.

One boy threatened to hit my son in the face on the next day. Another cut him off from texting access. A third – frankly I’m not sure whether to be impressed or terrified – programmed an online bot to send my son text messages saying “Fuck you” every thirty seconds, and then told my son he would hack his school email account and use it to send bad messages to everyone at school.

My son did almost everything right – he let his parents know what was going on, he let his teachers know what was going on – and his parents intervened with alacrity but also with cool nerves. Other parents were informed, and on discovering their sons’ misbehaviour did all the right things. On discovering that the source of the civil unrest was the boy’s cavalier destruction of the realm, we realised that we hadn’t talked to him about stewardship – he was, in essence, the curator and protector of a creative sandbox which five other kids were using to explore their own creativity – and we hadn’t talked to him about the consequences of simply killing that world on a whim. He’s… well, I’m not sure he fully gets that yet, but on a certain level, understanding the power of global destruction is a lot for a kid who will turn eleven in early May. To the extent he’s absorbing any of this lesson is a huge step in his moral development; to the extent his friends are dialing back their own reactions and realising “wait, this is only digits in the cloud” is also a major step forward in their moral development as 21st century citizens. This whole episode, in other words, is going to create better adults out of this collection of five boys, united only by living in the same town in southern Maine, with parents who are both confused by the technology in which they live and at the same time are willing to open cans of whoop ass as appropriate when their kids text “Fuck you” to other kids.

But it does strike me that there is a creative element in human imagination which can be dangerous. The same instinct within us which drives us to paint, to sculpt, to write, to create, is at the root of the instinct to destroy. Not, per se, to destroy other people – our artistic impulse doesn’t motivate the Holocaust by any means. But our capacity to create makes it easy for us to destroy that which we have created without, really, feeling any obligation. I painted what I think is a very nice landscape painting of the Alberta foothills north of Calgary, which is now in the back of my car and, frankly, if it shatters in the -25C cold this evening and dissolves into atoms, I won’t really care about. But that unconcern also informs my feelings about four other paintings in the car – three by the ex-girlfriend, one by the boy – that also are as at risk to cold-driven destruction. In my mind, though, their continued existence or immediate destruction are both, well, “meh” events.

The boy and the ex-girlfriend might feel differently, though, just as the boy’s friends had a very different perspective on the instantaneous destruction of their Minecraft realm creations when my son hit “return” when asked “Are you sure?” by a dialog box a couple of weeks ago. I’m not arguing that our creations should be eternal: far from it. But we create all too easily, and we destroy even more readily than that. Yes, in most cases we create things that aren’t that good – my Alberta landscape is less than amateurish, it’s frankly just crap – but the ease with which we create and then can destroy leads to an impulse to destroy which really, frankly, isn’t healthy. It gives us a sense of power, that we can create, destroy, and create again – a sense that infuses our being from the earliest ages of awareness – which is at odds with the finite nature of our lives, of our existence in nature, of our experience of time and of being.

The O Scale railroad layout, fortunately, remains simply a deconstructed potential – it’s all made of plastic and copper, and has been put away neatly in cabinets, awaiting the construction of new, alternate plywood tables on which it can be created anew. The Lego sets, made of seemingly eternal hardcore plastic, can be taken apart and reconstructed at will, with enough patience and given that we’ve saved all the instruction manuals in a plastic storage crate in a corner of the boy’s room. As adults, though, we build, destroy, forget, and ignore the costs, all because the act of creation – and its mirror image acts of destruction – are all to easy to learn, back when we were children.

Ironically, then, my son’s deletion of the Minecraft realm taught a much more powerful lesson than the worlds of 19th and 20th century children with their playthings: when he hit yes to the question “Are you sure?”, the destruction was permanent. We can’t recall it – indeed, I called Microsoft; the boy really did permanently destroy the realm. His friends acted, therefore, quite rationally in their despair and confusion. The lesson is really for the adults: we destroy at our peril, and we can’t get it back when we say yes to “Are you sure?”

The paintings in the car – both the lousy landscape by my hand, the more practiced works by the ex-girlfriend that she abandoned years ago, and the nostalgic doodlings of the boy from back when he was four years old in a tiny apartment in Seattle – may not survive tonight. But if they do, I’ll make sure to preserve the son’s childish attempts at representing trains. And when I let my own work, or that of the ex-girlfriend, shatter in the February arctic cold, I’ll at least pause and reflect and think about the fact that destruction means at least as much as the act of artistic creation.

Stay warm, folks.

We live in a global world, whether most people acknowledge it or not. Even the states which reject it – North Korea, China in its more silly moments, Bhutan until recently – reject a globalised structure which, in their rejection, they acknowledge the universal reality. But as we slowly dismantle the liberal arts – not just those of the Western Enlightenment, but those of Confucian tradition, or of the Vedic sagas, or the stone inscriptions of the Mayans – we run the risk of forgetting that this global world is still new, and indeed, is not consistent in what it is to be global.

It is in this spirit that I wish to challenge Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, a professor at Cornell University, who recently wrote a piece in Aeon.co rejecting the idea of “pre-colonial” Africa. On the one hand, I understand what he’s talking about: he’s rejecting a historiographical tradition which privileges Western concepts of history – of primary sources in written form, of histories primarily of organized states or their equivalent, and in dealing with non-Western societies, in particular only their engagement with the West as being worthy of the concept of “history” at all. I’m not sure that’s worth argument: he’s right, that’s lousy historiography, but we’re not arguing with Hegel anymore. Hegel’s conception of racial identity has been dead for a long time, and using him as a straw man is child’s play, and I don’t think Taiwo is engaging in child’s play. However, the idea of a pre- and post-“history” is an important one, especially as we sit in 2023 looking at our imperfect and clearly incomplete global project as a human species.

It may be important first off to emphasise what I mean by “globalisation.” It’s not the interconnection of nation-state economies via increasingly all-inclusive trade agreements like GATT. It’s also not the increasingly unavoidable influence of social and media constructs across national, cultural, and linguistic borders: the universality of Disney and BBC and K-Pop and Latin American magical realism. Globalisation, rather, is the seemingly inexorable trend towards the human species being fungible across the surface of our planet. That process has been accelerated of late – by things like electronic media, and increasingly safe and easy transoceanic and transcontinental travel and trade – but it’s been going on for longer than our supposedly historical sources can remember.

It started through some sort of a diaspora which we only really can uncover today via mitochondrial RNA evidence found in ancient tombs or, more regularly, just ancient corpses who show up randomly. Hominids exploded out of Africa in multiple pulses over hundreds of thousands of years, and because of climate changes, varying levels of social organisation and curiosity, and who knows what else, modern Homo sapiens developed and settled in more or less isolated groups, isolated enough to develop unique and mutually incomprehensible language groups and folkways, with enough tenacity and wanderlust to populate every arable corner of the planet no matter how tenuously arable, and with enough sheer stubbornness to stick it out, everywhere.

We have no real knowledge of how long that took; it seems like the last bits of the New World in Patagonia were probably settled, or at least discovered, around 4000 years ago – the last bit of footwork, as it were – and the islands of the Pacific were finally taken over within the last 800 years. But the fits and starts in between, well, we’re pretty unsure. And the ebbs and flows in regional and local contexts are even more mysterious: to the early humans who lived in a valley, or ranged over what they thought of as “their” steppe, surely every encounter with another group was fraught.

Sometimes, it was simply a matter of moving into a new area which had been recently vacated; many of the non-Latinate Indo-European tribes who moved into Northern Europe merely displaced the waning elements of Rome, for example. In other cases, genocide did the trick: Mongols displacing the late classical Scythians and Bactrians. And sometimes it was a mix of both: the Aryans, the Greeks, and the Mongols represented waves of peoples who invaded, but ultimately intermixed and blended into, the world of South Asia.

But it’s somewhat hard to dispute that by the Axial Age – around 2400 years ago all over, in the river basins of East Asia, the isolated peninsula of modern India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Fernand Braudel’s greater Mediterranea, and the three distinct regions the New World, North, Meso, and South America, if you’ll excuse the anachronism of calling it by the name of a 16th century Italian guy; and the three African core kingdoms of the West, Ethiopian, and Great Lakes – the world had sort of settled into segregated cauldrons of humanity that only very, very peripherally knew of one another’s existence. Was there contact? Yes, sort of, but it was rare and strange enough to be in the realm of magic and myth, of the “there be dragons” kind of legend even as coins and spices and the occasional slave was shifted across the sands or seas or mountains that separated these cauldrons of human development.

I use that term deliberately: these areas were isolated cauldrons and human development was taking place in all dimensions: social, moral, ethical, military, technological, whatever. They were hotbeds, moving forward the potential of what it was to be “human” in the way that complex, isolated systems anywhere play out the evolutionary potential of said system. Their isolation – which lasted in all cases for centuries or, more relevantly, for scores of generations – allowed social and ecological absurdities to play them selves out to exhaustion, and also to play themselves into a kind of local optimisation. The sense of regret we now experience for the disapperance of those local optimisations – whether Renaissance era European notions of beauty, or Song Dynasty notions of beauty, or Poiynesian conceptions of celestial navigation – sing to the idea that we, as generalised human beings, can still recognise that perfection can have been achieved locally even if it failed to be transmitted globally.

And that, indeed, is the real revolution we’ve experienced as a species in the last millennium. Starting with the first basic navigational revolutions of what to the West was the late Middle Ages (and to the Chinese was the Song Dynasty, and to the real originators was the Mamluk Sultanate), the peoples of Eurasia slowly eroded their cauldrons, and gradually became aware of one another. Words were exchanged, goods, eventually peoples; with the technology of sail it accelerated, and the contemporary revolution of moveable type accelerated it even more, on different dimensions.

The New World and Africa lagged in this bubbling over of the cauldrons, purely because of transportation issues. Until long-distance over-the-horizon sailing became reliable, sub-Saharan Africa, the New World, and even Japan were far more isolated from the other cauldrons than, say Europe or India or the Far East. And so Eurasia became our reference point – by the time of the real wall-tearing-down events of the 15th and 16th centuries, Eurasian globalisation was already self-referential.

So then the Columbian Exchange happened: a massive trade of humanity, culture, art, wealth, disease. Perhaps the purest anthropological cliff event in human history, recognising that by the time Austalasia and New Zealand were settled, the pathology of most human disease was widely distributed in the genomes of the people who made the rough sea journeys to get there. The New World’s intersection with a global humanity is defined not by a colonial event but by a holocaust. A group of people in the Western Hemisphere, isolated for hundreds of generations, had fewer deadly pathogens to which they were immune compared to the Petri dishes of people coming from the Eastern Hemisphere (which, even if only the Europeans were the initial contacts, were already a homogenous global sub-species with shared immunities).

Compare this with Africa: the equivalent of the Columbian Exchange was decisively against the Eurasians in terms of disease and immunity, even if the advantage of technology and tools were decisively in favor of the Eurasians. That is to say, the boundary event of globalisation for Africa – the historical century or so where they were both forcibly, gradually, and violently introduced to a global human experience – is both distinct, and unique. And therefore worthy of study – just as the Columbian Exchange is worthy of study, and just as the late classical / early medieval / Song / Mamluk / Mongol event is worthy of study.

Which is to say, Taiwo is correct rhetorically – this is not pre-colonial or post-colonial as an event, and to speak in terms of colonialism incorrectly privileges a subsequent political event, the subjection of African societies by European military powers, over and above the really interesting anthropological event, the final tearing down of the pre-modern barriers between regionalised peoples. But he’s wrong to think that something didn’t really happen here, and that isn’t worth an independent – and yet also cross-cultural – exploration. The pots and kettles that, for millennia, bubbled up the dominating and yet essentially irrational social mores and folkways of human society really did exist, and over a shockingly short period of centuries, the lids came off and the stew of humanity boiled into the strange (and often distasteful) brew of our 21st century experience. When, and how, and why those pots boiled over is an essential topic for human exploration. Admittedly, it should be examined from every perspective – not just that of some white guys on the western edge of Eurasia who had a slight edge in small group organisation and firepower. But understanding how those guys got the edge, even as all of humanity plunged into a truly new world order of constant and unstoppable intermixing, and how and what happened when others got sucked into the fray, is surely central to how we can understand who were are today and where we might go in the future, for good or for ill.

Professor Taiwo wrote a phenomenal thought piece; I hope he can see, as he reflects on it, that in eliminating a colonial foundation, it is essential to lose the mystery of what happened when the barriers between an isolated Africa and the rest of the world – whether it be Eurasia or the New World – came down. The emergence of colonialism and imperialism are of separate interest, and if only for the moral damage they caused, demand further critical examination – but the real question is why Africa, and the New World, and India, and Han China, and Japan, and Europe, remained separate for as long as they did, remained independent and isolated cauldrons for as long as they did, and what caused them to spill and to create the messy global world in which we live in 2023.

In a perfect world, the game coming up on Wednesday would be played in the Free French garrison in Brazzaville – but we’ll have to settle for Bayt Stadium in Qatar.

Morocco was one of the holdouts in the imperialist game; it only lost its independence in 1912 when the Germans spooked the other European powers and led to its carving up as a “protectorate” (what a farcical term) of France, losing its southern areas to Spain. If you’ve not been to Morocco, you’re missing out; the food is good-ish – way too sweet for my palate – but the tea is amazing, and the people are just fun. Some of them even drink, which is a plus.

But in the last week, Morocco’s young soccer team has defeated the Spanish side, and to complete the Iberian humiliation, today beat Portugal.

Becoming the first African team to make the semifinals of the World Cup.

Facing off against France on Tuesday.

Its highly cynical, highly egotistical, and underrated as a racist post-colonial power former imperial overlord, France.

The ones who folded like a cheap deck of cards to the Nazis, making Casablanca – the neutral port, the haven of resistance, and most importantly the inspiration for the movie, possible.

The French.

Again, one always hopes for the best possible settings for when those who have been wronged get a chance to show up those who have done the wrong. My son’s friend wasn’t allowed to go to court yesterday to testify against his father, who beats him as a course of being, and because of that silence he’s still at risk, but I long for him to have his day in a proper court, to say what needs to be said. It would be better if the game on Wednesday were in Brazzaville for the young men of the Morocco team – to beat their former oppressors on African soil – but I have no doubt they’ll speak up solidly in a small autocracy in the Arabian Gulf next week.

I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess which team Rick, and Ilsa, and Sam – and yes, even Louis, despite his police loyalties – would be pulling for.

Round up the usual suspects, and let’s watch some footie next week.

One of Gertrude Stein’s most famous quotes – and she has many of them – is about Oakland, the other city by the bay in Northern California. She was born outside of Pittsburgh, but her father – wealthy and well-connected – moved the family to Oakland so he could run streetcar rail companies. Asked later about being from Oakland, she said in essence, why should I say I’m from there, because there is no there there.

The quote came to me vividly while listening to the pundit class – and many of my friends – talk about the collapse of FTX recently. What occurred to me is that all of the conversations have, at their core, a fundamental belief that there is something real, something something, at the core of cryptocurrencies. But there isn’t, and the more people behave as though there is, the more glaring the absence becomes.

Oakland, by the way, was always a town in search of a purpose. The problem, really, was that San Francisco was so perfectly situated for a pre-railroad era: a narrow peninsula that guarded the best anchorage on the west coast of a continent. As long as sail and steam ships were the supreme ways of communicating with the outside world – say, the way Santiago, Chile or Lima, Peru lived – then San Francisco was self-sufficient, even after gold was discovered at Sutters Mill. But then the world changed, railroads trumped all, and San Francisco was a pain in the ass: it was stuck on a narrow and difficult to access peninsula for iron horses. And so Oakland was invented: a convenient end point to the eastern rails, with decent (if not perfect) harbours, and a good spot to send ferries to the real place anyone really cared about, San Francisco.

Cryptocurrencies – we’ll call them “crypto” because it’s a pain in the ass to type the whole word – are much the same as Oakland. The real destination already exists: it’s called “the real economy”, which uses dollars and euros and pound sterling and yen. It’s the economy that most of the readers of The Essence of Water will recognise as “their economy”: a world where we trust contracts, and therefore trust the money denominator of those contracts, and on the basis of that trust, we innovate things like new semiconductors, and new derivative contracts, and new craft beers, and new brands, and new electric vehicles, and so on and so forth. What enables all of this clever innovation – some of which is real, some of which is just silly human imagination – is trust, not so much in the currency we use but in the social underpinnings of everything we use, namely contracts, agreements, and because of that, yes, the currency we use to denominate those contracts and agreements.

In the nineteenth century, contracts existed but if you wrote one in San Francisco – say, at the Carlton Hotel – you’d be hard pressed to know whether it would be honoured in Pittsburgh, which is where Gertrude Stein was born. Ideally you’d find some way to guarantee the contract – say, with gold, held in escrow by a trustworthy law firm in San Francisco or in Pittsburgh, who had a correspondent in the other city that could be used to vouch for the guarantee. In other words, you probably wouldn’t have trusted dollars back in the day – you would have trusted something else, but that something else wasn’t really what you trusted. You trusted the agents: law firms, banks, the Wells Fargo Company, or once the wires were up, the Western Union Telegraph. At no point did you really trust the units – those were just temporary proxies. What you trusted were the agents.

Today, you trust your bank, which is a lot like living in San Francisco back in the day. You probably have money back east, but you also have trusted agents – indeed, trusted agents make up much of your life, because you live remotely from the main sources of value exchange and creation. You and I don’t live closely to how value is defined – and, interestingly, no one does; value is defined in money markets whose only participants are insanely, incomprehensibly large institutions who exchange billions every minute and on the basis of those exchanges is how value is defined. We all live in San Francisco: a place where we depend on agents, on whom we trust – and against whom we hold contracts which protect us – to preserve and hold our value, even as the define it in their activity as banks, as brokers, as speculators on their own behalf even as they trade on our behalf.

In our brave new world of crypto, though, we give you an option of living in Oakland: a place where value only exists with relation to San Francisco, but isn’t really San Francisco at all. You can trust your agents – who, by the way, will only accept payment in the currency of Pittsburgh and San Francisco and, more importantly, Washington DC, to whom we all owe the burden of tax assessments – or alternatively, you can try your luck in Oakland’s currency, which is variously dollars, or community bank notes, or bad whiskey, or gold dust. Not so different from Tether – community bank notes, as it were – or Solana -bad whiskey – or gold dust – which, interestingly is the same thing as it always was, gold dust.

Crypto is a means of redefining society, where trust among agents and the power of enforcing agreements among them and us, to be on the basis of a fundamental lack of trust. Where the railroad ends, in other words, is where we fight and wrestle to redefine value which was obvious on the New York end of the iron trail. If you think trust is wrong, if you think trust is impossible, by all means, go to Oakland. There is no there there. There is nothing there. No trust, and by no means is there value. But crypto lives there and is traded actively. If you wish to turn your back on trust, on civil society, by all means, take the ferry. See you in Oakland. But if you want to enjoy the promise of a future, of a place which not only looks out towards the future represented by the Pacific horizon but also imagines new horizons on our shores, might I suggest you head to San Francisco. And keep your bank account denominated in the currency of the continent, which trusts Pittsburgh as much as anywhere else.

It’s been an odd year, no two ways about it. Here in the states, the pandemic has been quietly but no less officially declared to be over: either you have your booster shots, and you’ll be as fine as anyone can make you, or you haven’t, and you’ll get sick soon enough to prevent you from voting Republican in the next election, and that’s all fine, as the midterm results proved out. On the home front, the boy is doing beyond great in fifth grade despite his mom moving to Maine. All other systems are go.

But I haven’t been writing, and it’s been bothering me because I haven’t quite known why. It’s not the day drinking – hell, that’s been here since I started the blog more than five years ago – and it’s not the general amount of spare time I have on my hands, which also hasn’t changed much since I stopped travelling around the world on a weekly basis for Barclays Group Treasury (and yes, for those who know me, that means that the amount of actual time required to run Barclays Restructuring Group was roughly twenty hours a week).

I think I’ve figured it out, and I have to thank Stuart Kirk, the former editor of the Lex column for the FT, for helping me. He wrote a savagely idiotic essay in this weekend’s edition which is wrenching me back to a reality in which it’s worthwhile to talk about the moral consequences of one’s daily choices – which, after all, is the whole point of this blog, and the whole point (to me, at least) of all intellectual and aesthetic choices.

Mr Kirk’s thesis, essentially, is that the only thing that matters is the now. He presents a straw man of what he claims preoccupies the world, the improvement of some future space – which we must prevent from being 1.7C warmer than today, with not too many people who will be potentially harmed – and posits an imaginary future state of today in which potholes exist, where real people who we could know (if we got on a plane and went to find them) are dying, which is far more – 100% certain, to use his verbiage – reliably existent as moral cases to be solved.

That’s not it at all, though.

It’s not to say that Kirk is wrong about the existence of immediate, tangible examples of horror against which we should be railing. He’s right in that sense: there is a high percentage chance that New Delhi will be uninhabitably hot in 50 years, but there is a 100% certainty that a decent greater than 25% ish proportion of its population is living in indecently horrid conditions today. If we focus on the future non-100%-but-close-to-95% likelihood of New Delhi’s future complete failure at the expense of today’s 100% certain failure to help somewhere between 25% and 50% of its population live at a base standard of hygiene and health and education, we are in essence privileging the future potential humans of earth at the expense of the actual current citizens. He’s right to point that out.

Mr Kirk, interestingly, is “former head of responsible investment at HSBC Asset Management and previous editor of Lex“, Lex being the premium column discussing corporate doings in the FT. In other words, it’s not like he’s just coming out of nowhere: this is the kind of thing that bubbles within someone who’s otherwise churning out pablum for institutional investors and occasional columns on random company quarterly earnings. This is his columnist cri du coeur.

But he is guilty of exactly the problem that I think is preventing us from being able to move out of the Enlightenment trap, which is to say, he fails to see human culture as a continuum. The Enlightenment – from Voltaire to Smith to Ricardo to Marx – see the human landscape as a series of set pieces, a series of time scapes, transitioning from one to another. Even Darwin does this: his tree of life concept allows for – indeed depends upon – the idea that you can take a slice of the tree at any moment across the aeons and see “what is”. Darwin does the best of the bunch in that he doesn’t pretend to predict the next step, but the rest of his age are more arrogant, and assert in various ways what must occur, the predictable linear path that must be drawn given the snapshot we capture of today and the strings of the past we observe behind us.

Kirk doesn’t fall for this but he does fall for a related intellectual rabbit hole, the notion that the inherent randomness that impacts our ability to predict the future from the combination of our past “certainties” and our current snapshot ensures that efforts to steer towards future good states or avoid future bad states has too much volatility to bother with, so let’s simply focus on today. He’s inching closer to a better solution, but he’s still caught up in a dangerous separation of the past – which in both his view and in the classical Enlightenment view is “known” – and the present, which is a photographic image, somehow imagined as being complete and precise – and the future, which is a collection of linear extensions of the current state process which vary only by degrees, because they are still just processes.

That view, though – that we live on a process surface, and simply choose between different pathways via the intersection of our choices with those of others – while at the core of most of post-Enlightenment thinking (be it east, west, or post-colonial – there isn’t a real differentiation any more if we’re honest with ourselves), is false. We do not live on a process surface; we are embedded processes, acting both individually, acting within agglomerations of others, acting as part of a species with certain consumptive and reproductive imperatives, acting in the broader drama of life as a process on a mineral and gaseous and aqueous planet, acting in the broader drama of stellar evolution, acting on the background of quantum processes which are (to all intents and purposes to us) infinitely constant and yet wholly unpredictable in the background. Our perception of history as a timeline is false – the timeline seen by someone in Botswana is unrecognisable to me in Maine, let alone how stunningly beautiful and incomprehensible the historical timeline of a Metis in northern Quebec would look to me – but Kirk and others still live and, indeed, their lives depend on positing that simple differentiation of time past, known; time today; knowable; and time future, uncertain.

Accuracy, meanwhile, would hold that the past is knowable, but diverse and irreconcilable. It would hold that the present is no where measurable because there exists a lag in communication even in having my brain know what my toes experience in the moment. And the future is not a process from the past and the present; it is a both perfectly unknowable, and at the same time, we exist as sentient beings on a certain level to sort and compare and choose what future we will construct. That is to say, the future isn’t a process drawn from us: it is a constant choice, made instantaneously by an effectively infinite number of actors – subatomic, mineral, living, sentient – and crunched, waveform-collapsed, and reinitiated every single moment, and since every moment is across space, occurring with effects that also require the time movement of events as they ripple across the cosmos.

The potholes and the indigent and the sickly that Kirk points out are all deserving of our individual concern – but that isn’t to downplay or ignore the future generations who will be crying out from thirst or disease or heat on a warming Earth. And it’s not to ignore or move past those who came before us and were enslaved or ignored or oppressed or kept in silence. Thinking holistically as a moral individual requires thinking not just across spaces – not just being concerned locally – but also to be aware of the dynamics of time and space in motion, and to avoid the easy privileging of any one frame of either time or space.

Does this make it simple? Of course not. Does this give any of us individually the opportunity or hope to effect real change? Of course not. Does this excuse any of us from the effort of doing our best, given the tools and opportunities that come to hand? No, of course not.

We don’t get to focus on the potholes and congratulate ourselves, which is effectively what Kirk tells us. We get to fix the potholes and realise the inadequacy of our efforts, and we get to view the whole and give ourselves only the damning certainty that our efforts will always be in vain. We get to step away from the concept of glamorous self-congratulatory virtue, and step into the shoes of Sisyphean effort which has no end. In a universe which is, essentially to us within it, infinite, we have only the promise and the reward of infinitesimal improvement. There is no solace, and yet, the opportunity to be part of the adventure is what we have – all we have.