Now Is Not the Time

What’s so special about now? To maintain perspective, we need to be aware of our past and alert to the future.

Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown. But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success.

However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues, is to engage in tempocentrism. More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves comparing and judging the past in relation to the present, with the tendency to assume that the present isn’t only materially and qualitatively different from the past but also superior to it, often morally so.

Yet tempocentrism, a mistaken belief in the unprecedented nature of events going on around us, brings with it a skewed perspective loaded with bias and prejudice. Requiring just as much ignorance and arrogance as Eurocentrism - tempocentrism implies that the present is somehow superior to the past because we live in it now. The point, however, is not to suggest that there is not something special about the present - there might well be - but now is not the time to decide whether it is more significant than previous moments, or those still to come. Depending on the issue or event in question, the time for that is later … possibly hundreds or thousands of years later.

Brett Bowden is Professor of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at Western Sydney University, Australia and an international Mercator Fellow in the DFG Research Training Group based at TU Darmstadt and Goethe University Frankfurt. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) and the Royal Society of New South Wales. Key publications include the monographs The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago UP), Civilization and War (Edward Elgar), The Strange Persistence of Universal History in Political Thought (Palgrave), Direct Hit: The Bombing of Darwin Post Office (Rosenberg), and the 4-volume edited collection Civilization: Critical Concepts (Routledge). He has co-edited volumes on international law (Cambridge UP) and international political economy (Routledge), and served as Associate Editor for the second edition of the 6-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, edited by William H. McNeill. Brett has published more than fifty scholarly articles and book chapters and has been a regular commentator in print and electronic media. His research monographs have been awarded the Norbert Elias Prize, the APSA Crisp Prize, and the GW Symes Award. Brett is the recipient of a Distinguished Alumni Award from Flinders University of South Australia for his contributions to scholarship and the wider community.