One notion that has been discussed lately by some in the news media with regard to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan has been how the Americans and the Taliban have such different conceptions of time. For the Americans, and in particular now for Joe Biden, the twenty years that Americans have spent fighting the war in Afghanistan is a long time. Biden’s contention has been that if the Americans and the Western-oriented Afghan government have been unable to make any meaningful headway in defeating the Taliban after twenty years of conflict, then it’s time to pull out. For the Americans, twenty years is almost too long of a period of time. And, in fact, the war in Afghanistan has been America’s longest war.
For the Taliban, however, twenty years is a drop in the bucket timewise. They would have been willing to fight on indefinitely to achieve their goals. For them time is a flowing blendable continual stream that goes on endlessly. And if one wills something like taking over Afghanistan, one will flow into it eventually. The flowing blendable continual stream is the way time is perceived in a more traditional natural society.
On the other hand, Americans, like most Westerners, perceive time as a series of defined discrete points on a line. The focus is on measured time, the time of modern technological society, where there is a beginning, a middle and an end. Time is something that Americans have become increasingly conscious of in the war in Afghanistan. When was it ever going to be won so that it could be said to have ended? And after twenty years, when no defined discrete victory was in sight, the Americans decided to impose a defined discrete ending on the war, in order not to be swallowed up in what they perceived as a swamp or quagmire of time.
Israel, to some extent, has had an analogous situation in Gaza. Hamas is willing to fight on forever, because it also perceives time as a flowing blendable continual stream, where even obvious defeats on the battlefield can be turned into victories, if only because Hamas has survived. Hamas is hoping to have the same kind of break the Taliban have had. Except that the Israelis don’t think like the Americans, because they would have no place to which they could withdraw in defeat. They live in the Middle East and they have adopted the timeline of the Arabs and other neighboring peoples in order to keep persevering. So hopefully, Hamas is out of luck in its mental scheme.
Bringing this discussion home, as modern technology takes over more and more aspects of daily life in modern society, the lives of people in it become more and more influenced by modern technological measured time. People become increasingly conscious about how much time it takes to get things done. They are mentally floating in a vacuum between the starting point of a particular task or project and the end point. And the more their consciousness is elevated as they float in their numbing experiential vacuum, the more impatient they become and the more they want things done very quickly. Immediate gratification rules the day in our modern times.
But one point on a line of immediate gratification doesn’t provide the grounding that modern people crave as they live their lives in an experiential vacuum. So, they try to bundle together many points to create a surrogate grounding by demanding immediate gratification in many different areas of life. And they experience an ongoing impatience with every situation in their lives as a means of generating abrasive stimulation to pull themselves out of the numbness they constantly experience from the experiential vacuum in which they are living. The more that people obtain in terms of products and services from modern technology, the more they want and need to pull themselves out of their experiential vacuum. Plus, the impatience itself provides an abrasive stimulation to temporarily shock them out of their numbness.
As new technological inventions accelerate the process between wanting something and obtaining it, the perception of time continues to change dramatically. More precisely, what was previously considered to be a relatively short time between want and satisfaction, increasingly is perceived to be a long time. And the old temporal distance increasingly is experienced as a long time, not only because the new technologies make the process for satisfying wants shorter, but also because the cumulative effect of all the different technologies impacting a person during the same time period is to drive the person deeper and deeper into numbness resulting in the person trying to pull himself out of his numbness through his abrasive impatience and through shocking himself out of his numbness through satisfying many wants quickly. In other words, the products and services that are desired in today’s world are desired not only because of their own merits, but because of their transitory effect of pulling a person out of his numbness. The problem is that as more and more modern technologies impact a person’s life, he sinks deeper and deeper into numbness, which, in turn, increases the number of satisfied wants that he needs in order to feel fully alive. And as the person has difficulty satisfying his increasing number of wants, he pulls out of his numbness not through satisfaction but through the abrasive stimulation of growing impatience which can lead to growing dissatisfaction with himself and self-destruction as well as growing dissatisfaction with others and conflict. On a larger scale, this could lead to destabilization of society.