Beyond Earth (ATWG) - Chapter 9 - Tennis Time and the Mental Clock by Howard Bloom

From The Space Library

Chapter 9

Tennis Time and the Mental Clock

I long for an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one's life a person devotes to the present,'how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being, depending on which variety o'f 'time was dominant.

Milan Kundera

"A turning of our states of consciousness toward the future...[makes] our ideas and sensations succeed one another with greater rapidity; our movements no longer cost us the same effort."

Henri Bergson

"If man's reach does not exceed his grasp then what's a heaven for?"

Robert. Browning

We visited a peculiar creature: the spade-foot toad of Arizona. During long dry spells, the toad nursed the stores of moisture and food packed away in its cellular structure by crawling under the sand, shutting down its metabolic systems, and slipping into slumber. Lethargy was the life-saver that allowed the snoozing beast to go for months—perhaps even years—without a sip of water.

On the other hand, when an infrequent shower soaked the desert floor, the toad shook off its torpor, wriggled to the surface, cried out for company, listened for the croaked sounds of a gathering crowd, then headed for the nearest puddle. There, it leaped into a frenzy of action, wooing females at a rapid rate, then grappled with them in sexual ecstasy. Its manic eroticism was as much a survival mechanism as its former inertia. For only by coupling quickly could the toad sire a new generation that might grow to maturity before the pools of moisture could be sucked away by the desert sun.

The habits of the toad show up in one form or another over and over again. They appear in the hibernation of squirrels and bears, the seasonally fluctuating fat deposits of woodchucks, and in a wide variety of human annual rhythms. (1) They even show up in the moodswings of societies. When there's little to be gained, nature slows an organism down. When opportunity arrives, she speeds it up. One consequence is the strange gyration of your mental clock.

See if this sounds at all familiar. On a work day when I'm under extreme pressure, I rush through one task, hurry on to the next, then move quickly from that job to the one after it. I see my allotted hours as time in which I can easily accomplish a lot. But on a day when I have less work than usual, my mental clock readjusts. Suddenly, instead of seeing the day as a period in which I can easily perform a plethora of tasks, I get the sense that it'll be a struggle to finish anything at all. My mind grows sluggish. It's the phenomenon behind the common sense expression, "Work expands to fit the time available to it."

In a person with little to do, the mental clock slows down. In a person with a great deal to accomplish—or a person excited about what she's doing—it speeds up. Take, for example, the athlete who sees every eighteenth of a second (2) of a tennis ball's motion and calculates in a wink exactly where the ball is going to be when she attempts to swat it. For her, every micro-instant is filled with meaning. But for the person lying on a beach catching some rays, a whole morning can go by without a single meaningful moment. (3)

For the athlete under high stimulation, there is more time. Her world is richer. Far more data is processed by her brain.

One difference between a society on the rise and a society in decline may be that the rising society is on the fast clock. It sees each impediment as a challenge, absorbs information quickly, and finds new ways to overcome its obstacles. It operates on tennis time.

But the society that has peaked has moved to the slow clock. It has ceased to absorb data rapidly. It is on beach time. Tennis time is the clock of the newly-emerged toad, spending energy in a frenzied burst. Beach time is the clock of the dormant toad, hoarding every gram of substance on his bones.

Superorganisms on the trail of growth gravitate toward chemicals that speed the system up to tennis time. The British, when their Empire was enthusiastically seizing new possibilities, were fueled by a new import called coffee. The English commercial conquest of the world was planned in the coffee houses of London in the late 1600s and early 1700s. (4) The Chinese, during the roaringly successful years of the T'ang Dynasty (AD 618-907), filled their lives with another beverage that set their mental clock to "fast." They expanded their empire under the influence of tea. (5) In the 1980s, when the Japanese were the fastest-charging competitors in the world, they showed the same predilection for chemicals that turbo-charge the system. The leading drug problem in Tokyo's nightlife neighborhood during the late 1980s was not heroin or marijuana—the drugs that slow you down. It was amphetamine. (6)

With perceptual shutdown, we put on our eye-protectors and crawl into the stupor of beach time. But exploding societies like those in today's India and China may well be racing on tennis time, a clock that allows them to outrun us as we sit in front of our television sets, cradling a can of beer in our hands, cozy in the low-stimulus, low-challenge life.

How can America put itself back on tennis time? By focusing on the trigger that moves the toad from torpor into overdrive—opportunity. Nearly 100 years ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed his influential Frontier Hypothesis. (7) The existence of the American frontier in the 19th century, he said, had invigorated the American mind. The possibility of unending resources just over the horizon had filled Americans with zest, imagination and exuberance.

America was not the only nation thrown into high gear by the presence of a new frontier. England was a puny and somewhat pathetic power up to the time of Henry VIII. Nonetheless, the country had its dreams of glory, and those dreams were associated with the notion of expansion. The single form of expansion the English could imagine, however, was conquering some of the only world they knew—Europe. The British vainly bumped their heads against a brick wall, attempting to saw off pieces of France in the futile bloodbath known as the Hundred Years War. They had their share of victories, suffered humiliations at the hands of folks like Joan of Arc, and were utterly thwarted in their efforts, eventually losing even the one scrap of territory they'd managed to cut out for them-selves—Calais. Meanwhile, they mauled five generations of French peasants innocently trying to plant the next year's crops. (8)

Historian A. L. Rowse, a leading British expert on the Elizabethan age, considers Henry VIII's final failure to conquer the French one of the luckiest embarrassments England ever endured. (9) It forced the English to turn their attentions away from the Continent and made them focus on a sphere in which England would eventually make a fortune—the New World.

The Old World England reluctantly turned its back on was a land of little opportunity. Hungry Italians were reduced to eating songbirds off the trees. Tourists in southern Europe 200 years later would be puzzled by the eerie silence of the countryside. Melodious warblers like robins, titmice and wrens had disappeared into the cooking pots of the area's humbler citizens. (10) Meanwhile, the average French peasant lived so close to starvation that in the fairy tales he recited to his children, the hero was rewarded—not with a pot of gold, but with a decent meal. (11)

At first, the New World looked equally unrewarding. Christopher Columbus was bitterly disappointed by this hulking mass of landscape. He had set off to find the riches of China and ended up in a territory no one had ever heard of. The poor sailor insisted for years that this had to be some previously unreported part of the Chinese Empire. (12)

But Columbus' disappointment became England's New Frontier. The British missed out on the easy pickings. The Spanish beat them to the Aztec and Inca lands, where a few hundred Europeans armed with steel swords, muskets and cannon could overwhelm ten thousand Indians wielding wooden paddles and make off with a king's ransom in gold. (13) But Englishmen settled a land that seemed barren and forbidding, a land that had killed its first British settlers in the Roanoke Colony of 1583. (14) The British saw opportunity in catastrophe, settled the North American continent, planted cotton in its southern regions, and set up sugar plantations in the Caribbean Islands, bringing back a bounty that boggled the mind. The new economic horizons utterly transformed England. In the 1400's, the country had been a barbaric backwater, producing almost nothing in the way of literature, art or science. But charged with the energy unleashed by a whiff of fresh resources, Britain became a cultural dynamo. The era in which she awoke was The Age of Elizabeth, and it gave us, among many other things, the plays of Shakespeare. (15)

America has a host of new challenges available to it—biotechnology, nanotechnology (the construction of microscopic machinery from units a few hundred molecules in size), expansion of the cybersphere, renewable resources, next-generation energy, and the construction of intelligent self-replicating devices (16) to name a few. But in the long run, another more daunting frontier awaits us...one that looks as bleak at first glance as our land once seemed to Columbus. Like Britain under Henry VIII, the country that sucks its energy from that next frontier will not necessarily be the one that manages to conquer some small swatch of the world we know. Instead, it may be the one that first finds a way to mine mineral-rich asteroids the size of Manhattan. It may be the country that first "terraforms" another planet—turning its atmosphere into breathable gas and its surface into a place where humans unencumbered by pressurized suits could take a pleasant stroll. It may be the country that relinquishes dreams of conquest in lands where the birds no longer sing...and turns its eyes toward space.

Space could provide a new rain of resources...or it could bankrupt us. But its habitation does offer two other advantages.

The first: international cooperation. No single nation can afford the price tag for full-scale extraterrestrial development. To turn the wastelands of asteroids and planets into lands of plenty would involve consortia that pull together the European Union, Russia, Japan, India (which has been developing space technology since 1969), (17) and China. Some of those partnerships are already underway thanks to the clumsy mistake known as the International Space Station. But when it comes to establishing a manned presence on the moon, building moon processing plants capable of turning lunar water into fuel, erecting moon construction centers able to turn lunar dust into interplanetary vehicles, and heading for Mars and beyond, we are still trying to go it alone. (18)

The second, and perhaps more important advantage of following in the footsteps of Captain Kirk is this. Man has as yet invented no way to prevent war. We have found no method for shaking the consequences of our biological curse, our animal brain's addiction to violence. We cannot free ourselves from our nature as cells in a super-organismic beast constantly driven to pecking order tournaments with its neighbors. We have found no technique for evading the fact that those competitions are all too often deadly.

Many optimists feel that the mere threat of nuclear annihilation will weld us together as one human race. If only the great communicators can shrill at us loudly enough about the threat of holocaust, all nations will see themselves as brothers, realizing their common stake in the survival of the species. Unfortunately, these peace advocates—much like you and me—have been known to quibble harshly with others who share their goals but differ in beliefs. Even the peace-makers cannot entirely restrain the urge for battle.

Nor can human beings as a species stop their inexorable itch for war. We're like a teenager in the days before the sexual revolution of the 1960s who has been told that masturbation will drive him insane. His guilt makes him feel nearly suicidal, but he still can't stop himself from the unspeakable act. We've found ways to halt illnesses, we've invented means to leapfrog continents in hours, and someday we will find a way to stop war. But only if we survive long enough. Until then our task is to outlast our own impulses. Our task is to outwit The Lucifer Principle.

You could think of us as a species trapped in a car hurtling out of control toward a tree, the steering locked, the brakes frozen. We could sit behind the wheel and pretend that if we felt enough guilt the tree would disappear. Or we could throw ourselves out of the auto's door and live. For us the equivalent of hurling ourselves to safety is moving a few humans off this planet. It's putting enough of our kind into colonies in space so that if the rest of us down here on earth disappear, those left in the rotating habitations above could keep the species going. Hopefully, the survivors could carry on the knowledge we've acquired so far, and with that wisdom and their own fresh discoveries, someday learn to overcome what we could not.

We need a new horizon, a new sense of purpose, a new set of goals, a new frontier to move once again with might and majesty, with a sense of zest that makes life worth living, through the world in which we live. One of the most challenging frontiers left to us hangs above our heads.

References and Notes

(1) David McFarland, ed., The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, pp. 479480. Joseph Altman, Organic Foundations of Animal

Behavior, p. 425.

(2) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Memes Vs. Genes: Notes From the Culture Wars," in The Reality Club, John Brockman, p. 117. For the

fraction of a second of light an eye can discern as a discrete flicker, see J.A. Deutch and D. Deutch, Physiological Psychology, p. 350.

(3) A few rare athletes can actually glean a message from a mere hundredth of a second of a ball's trajectory. Baseball player Ted Williams

at the age of 50 demonstrated that he could register exactly where the seams were on the ball as it smacked into his bat at eighty miles an hour. Williams smeared pine tar on the bat's barrel and called out the part of the ball he'd hit. A sample call: "one quarter of an inch above the seam." When the ball was checked to see where the tar had left its mark, Williams was right five out of seven times. (Dr. Arthur Seiderman and Steven Schneider, The Athletic Eye, Hearst Books, New York, 1983, pp. 1718, 91.)

(4) "In these coffee houses you could borrow money, lend it, invest it, or spend it." In fact, one coffee house owner actually began selling

insurance to his merchantcapitalist clientele. In time, the insurance venture proved more lucrative than serving cups of Java. The coffeehouse proprietor was Edward Lloyd, as in Lloyd's of London. (James Burke, Connections, pp. 193194. See also Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th18th Century, Vol. 1, trans. Sian Reynolds, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York, 1981, pp 254260; Mitchell Stephens, A History of the News: From the Drum to the Satellite, Viking, New York, 1988, pp. 4143.)

(5) Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, pp. 169, 196. E.N. Anderson, The Food of China, pp. 5556. Philip D. Curtin, CrossCultural

Trade in World History, pp. 104105.

(6) Robert Christopher, The Japanese Mind, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1983, p. 163.
(7). Frederick Jackson Turner first presented his thesis, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in 1893. The concept wasn't

published in book form until Turner put out his The Frontier in American History (Henry Holt, New York, 1920). For a modern variation on the frontier hypothesis, see Daniel Boorstin, Hidden History: Exploring Our Secret Past, pp. ixxxv.

(8) For the Hundred Years War, see: Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, pp. 48594; and G.M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England,

Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1959 (originally published 1942), pp. 181188. For the loss of Calais in 1558, see: James A. Williamson, The Evolution of England: A Commentary On the Facts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1944, p. 179; and The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 2, p. 731.

(9) A.L. Rowse, The Expansion of Elizabethan England. Cambridge University historian Eric Walker agrees with Rowse's assessment. (Eric A. Walker, The British Empire: Its Structure and Spirit, 14971953, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956, p. 2.) For the futile campaigns against the French with which Henry nearly bankrupted his government, see: J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, University of

California Press, Berkeley, California, 1968, pp. 3335, 453456, and virtually the entire rest of the book; J.D. Mackie, The Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors, 14851558, Oxford University Press, London, 1962, pp. 410412; Kenneth O. Morgan, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984, p. 256; and The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 5, pp. 840841.

(10) Keith Thomas, Man And The Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, pp. 116117.
(11) When granted anything they wished, the heroes of these tales chose such items as "a bun, a sausage, and as much wine as he can

drink," "white bread and chicken," or "crude wine and a bowl of potatoes in milk." Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Vintage Books, New York, 1985, pp. 22, 2434.

(12) Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, pp. 236244.
(13) On March 12, 1519, Cortes landed at Tabasco and overwhelmed an Aztec army that outnumbered his tiny force 300 to one. (Hammond

Innes, The Conquistadors, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969, pp. 4252.)

(14) # Page name: Roanoke Island, # Author: Wikipedia contributors, # Publisher: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia., # Date of last revision: 21 December 2005 00:17 UTC, # Date retrieved: 21 December 2005 00:28 UTC, # Permanent link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roanoke_Island&oldid=32171948, # Page Version ID: 32171948
(15) G.M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England, p. 206.
(16) See Steven Levy, Artificial Life: a report from the frontier where computers meet biology, New York, Vintage Books, 1993, 35-42.
(17) Department of Space: Indian Space Research Organisation. November 10, 2005. Retrieved March 5, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.isro.org/
(18) For NASA's latest go-it-alone plan, see: NASA. Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The Vision for Space Exploration. Retrieved March 5, 2006, from the World Wide Web http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/explore_main.html

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Beyond Earth (ATWG) - Chapter 9 - Tennis Time and the Mental Clock by Howard Bloom

From The Space Library

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