As strange as it may seem, there are many cultures whose concept of ‘time’ literally do not include any recognition of a ‘future.’ While this may seem an innocuous and harmless notion, unfortunately it may be symptomatic of a dark cultural malaise.
Sounding an alarm about the danger this presents to Western culture, UK podcaster Connor Tomlinson recently warned that “we don’t understand how Africa thinks” and that “we don’t understand how the third world thinks.” In two separate presentations warning about the risks and dangers of immigration by people who fail to conceptualize any concept of a ‘future,’ his insights and analysis certainly do explain many behaviors and attitudes about such immigrants not previously understood.
Citing the African concepts of Sasa (Sasha) and Zamani as the two dimensions of time, he concludes that “we can’t have a civilization if people don’t think the future exists.”
Sasa is described by African philosophers as the “now, the recent past and the immediate future which can be experienced.” Zamani is the “vast endless past where all events eventually go on to live forever, but the ‘future’ in African thought barely exists.”
Central to this ‘timely philosophy’ is the belief that “time is made up of events. Time has to be experienced in order to be real, because we cannot conceptualize events tied to the distant future that we haven’t experienced yet. Therefore the future cannot constitute part of ‘time.'”
The flaw in this logic is that if ‘time’ has to be ‘experienced’ to be real, then it only follows that if there were no people around to have ‘experiences,’ time itself would not exist.
Alarmingly, ‘experiential’ views of time are completely self-centered, based on a form of Leftist thinking which operates on the primacy of consciousness and rejects the primacy of existence: “If I’m not here to experience reality, then reality doesn’t exist.”
Worse, this attitude is accompanied by a criticism of Western values that observes “the idea of time as a commodity is what drives the Western obsession with progress, development, and some promised future.” Yet this is not a vice but a virtue. Perhaps this accounts for the bizarre conclusion that “being on time, speaking English, and taking personal responsibility is white supremacy.”
How such thinking relates to a particular culture’s conception of ‘time’ may seem to be a non sequitur at first glance. But upon closer examination, the contrast between the concept of time as an ‘experience’ versus the concept of time as a ‘commodity’ may well lie at the root of many cultural conflicts and divisions.
Whether this theory proves to be Just Right or not, it’s certainly worth taking some time look at the evidence.
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