Technology as the accelerator of time

Through the lens of Rene Guenon's "Reign of Quantity"

This is a post about the accelerating nature of time and the increasing “solidification” of the world where reality becomes more material and less spiritual at an ever-increasing rate.

Time as we experience it is not a static thing. Depending on our circumstances and perspective it can feel long (put your hand on a hot stove and it will feel like forever) or short (watch an exciting sports match, play video games, have fun with friends). The nature of time also changes as we age; for a three year old a five minute time-out can feel like eternity, while in adulthood whole years go by in a blur.

One under-discussed aspect of time is how technology accelerates it.

Take the smartphone or computer. If you have a salaried wagecuck job or your own business, you are expected to respond to texts, emails or calls at any hour of the day including weekends. The “job” transitioned sometime in the past twenty years from a 9-5 to 24/7. Even if you don’t have such a job, the smartphone is a constant temptation to pull you out of whatever you are doing in the real world to engage in the virtual world. By serving as an attack on our down-time, on the empty space between events where silence and boredom develops (which is the fertile ground where imagination is born), it serves as an attack on time itself: life blurs together and every day feels the same and you blink, waking up 50 years later with your life over.

Life passing by staring at screens

This is a nightmare many of us are barreling towards, including myself, and we seem almost powerless to resist it no matter how hard we try.

This brings to mind a Kenny Chesney song:

This post by

The Obsolete Man

makes a similar point: we are frenetically speeding into the void.

It didn’t always use to be this way. Before the smart phone and the internet life was slower. There was downtime between events; one was not expected to be tethered to work outside of office hours. Each successive iteration of communications technology sped up human communications and altered the flow of time itself: from carrier pigeons to the Pony Express to the telegraph to payphones to landlines to faxes to the internet to non-smart phones to smart phones. When communication was limited to mail and ideas by book, when the family lived in small agricultural communities instead of the hustle-and-bustle of urban living, time itself was slower, and it was even slower before the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago.

Consider travel as another example - the world shrank and accelerated as humanity brought forth the automobile, the train, the airplane, leading to a claustrophobic lack of breathing space. The horizons of the unknown shrank; the sense of adventure died. Poet Charles Upton argues that the agitation caused by technology annihilates spacial dimension:

“When we are in a state of deep calm, space is more real than time; when we are agitated, time becomes more real than space. And it shouldn’t be too hard to see how faster modes of travel, and especially the electronic media, which disturb and agitate consciousness, also annihilate space; cyberspace, in particular, is the annihilation of all spacial dimension. In these latter days, nothing has a stable form. Everything moves faster and faster, until all form - including the Human Form itself - becomes a shapeless blur.”

Paradoxically, even as our lifespans have grown in the modern era our life experiences have shortened. Did a thirty-year-old hunter gatherer have more life experiences than a sixty-year old modern man who spends his waking life staring at glowing screens, with two weeks off a year for “vacation”?

Of course it is impossible to really separate mankind from technology (defined as the creative impulses we experience to make processes more efficient). In a fundamental ways man is technology. Use a rock to split open a coconut is technology. Use fire to cook food is technology. One can’t separate man from his impulse to innovate; that’s a part of what makes us human. It’s just that technological innovation and therefore the change in the perception of time has parabolically sped up.¹

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The process of solidification

It’s not just time that has sped up as technology advances. There is an increasing intensity toward “solidification” by which the material world increasingly becomes more real and the spiritual world is increasingly disconnected from life. Traditionalist philosopher (not to be confused with conservative) Rene Guenon discussed this in his The Reign of Quantity & the Sign of the Times, which is a very challenging read due to its dense and pedantic style and its reliance upon prior works, including by Aristotle, Neoplatonism and Scholasticism. You can see a summary of the book here if you like.

Guenon was a French-Egyptian intellectual who studied occultism and Hinduism before converting to Islam and practicing Sufism in Cairo until his death. He has been influential in both Islamic and far-right circles, although his name is not widely known.²

A strange and lopsided physiognomy, suggesting both knowledge of mysteries and eccentricity. He looks a bit like Doctor Strange.

Guenon argued that this process - the speeding up of time, the solidification of the world and the disconnection of esoteric connection to the Divine - is all part of what the Hindus consider to be a cosmological cycle, and that we are approaching the end of a particular age - the final age, the Kali Yuga, before the cycle restarts.³ He assigned the following length of time to each age⁴:

• Krita Yuga or Satya Yuga (Golden Age): 4, corresponding to 25,920 years.

• Treta Yuga (Silver Age): 3, (19,440 years).

• Dvapara Yuga (Bronze Age): 2, (12,960 years).

• Kali Yuga (Iron Age): 1, (6,480 years).

Each age is a a “fall” from the previous one, per Upton,

As the cycle progresses, or rather descends, the very nature of time and space changes. In earlier ages, space dominates; the forms of things are more important, more real, than the changes they undergo; time is ‘relatively eternal’. As the cycle moves on, however, time begins to take over, melting down space and the forms within it until everything is an accelerating flow of change.

The cycle has a 4:3:2:1 configuration where each Age is shorter than the prior one.

In the Kali Yuga humanity descends from a focus on quality and connection to the Divine down to crass materialism, a focus on quantity disconnected from anything greater. It has devolved into mere consumption.

“[Guenon] explains that we have reduced work to something merely quantitative. Ancient craftsmen saw themselves as involved in something of cosmic significance. Someone who made a table for example, wasn’t trying to merely satisfy an industrial purpose of assembling four legs to a tabletop by pressing levers on a machine. The traditional table maker was rather participating in the communion of the family that would eat at this table. This communion of the family would itself fit in the communion of village, which would ultimately fit in the communion of the whole world. The table maker wanted to make it beautiful with that cosmic purpose in mind. Art and craft were one.”

The industrialization process dehumanizes workers, making them mere unthinking automaton in an assembly line. Even the corporate focus on providing “experiences” to its customers to ensure repeat business is but a form of standardizing quantity.

Ektropius

argues that materialism offers a better consensus mechanism than religion which is why it has caught on so strongly.

In other words, this intensifying, ratcheting cycle crushes the quality out of everything (bringing to mind the egalitarian ratchet effect), forcing materiality down to the lowest common denominator in order to turn everything into quantifiable widgets including humanity itself. During this descent the process intensifies and time speeds up faster and faster until it hits a hard limit: it can eventually speed up no more, and therefore the energies suddenly reverse themselves, a cosmic cataclysm that changes the look of heavens and earth occurs and a new cycle begins. As Upton explains:

Time, the "devourer" ends by devouring itself. At the end of time, Time will be changed into space again. [...] This ultimate timeless point is simultaneously the end of the cycle of manifestation and the beginning of the next.[...] Before this ultimate transformation, in the latter days of the present cycle certain final developments must take place. Since quantity has particularly to do with matter, the Reign of quantity must also be the reign of materialism. The age of miracles ceases, the world becomes less permeable to the influences of the higher planes of reality; the very belief in such planes, as well as in the eternal and transcendent God, becomes harder to maintain.

The very heaviness of materialism, however, ultimately results in a sort of ‘brittleness’. The cosmic environment, heaving lost much of the flexibility which allowed it to be moved by the Divine Spirit, begins to crack, like an old tree that can no longer bend to the wind, and ends up being uprooted in the storm. But these cracks in the cosmic environment, in the ‘Great Wall’ separating the material world from the realm of subtle energies, first happen in the ‘downward’ rather than the ‘upward direction, letting in a flood of infra-psychic’ forces, either neutral or actively demonic….[We can all feel these Demonic, dark energies growing, can we not?]

However depressing this may sound, the truth is that such developments are entirely lawful given the lateness of the hour. The lowest possibilities of manifestation must also have their day in the course of the cycle; fortunately, since they are inherently unstable, being based not upon Truth but solely upon power, that day will be short. ‘There needs to be evil,’ said Jesus, ‘but woe to him through whom evil comes.’ And there are certain spiritual possibilities of the highest order which could never be realized except in the face of this most demonic of challenges to the integrity of the human spirit.

This last point is one that Solzhenitsyn dwelled on at length in The Gulag Archipelago: the horrors of the Gulag led to spiritual heights that would have been unobtainable in a less oppressive environment. And Evola states in Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 432 - the end of the cycle "is not even perceived as a sense of capitulation", to the point that the "final collapse may not even have the characteristics of a tragedy". This hints at the source of some on the far right’s accelerationism position…

I like this framing because it puts even deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth “secular” and viciously anti-white shitlibs in a frame where one may (reluctantly) accept it, perhaps: they too have their role in the cosmic game to end the cycle and start the next.

Guenon believed that humanity was close to the end of the Kali Yuga; you can see how he calculated this in 1931 here, but he arguably put the end of the cycle at either 2,000 AD or 2,030-2,031 AD although he refused to give an exact date (correctly, as everyone who’s made such a prediction has been wrong so far). Hindus believe that the end of the Kali Yuga is brought about by the return of Vishnu in the form of Kalki, the avenger. This seems similar to the Christian eschatology of the End of Days and the Messiah ushering in a new “Golden Age”, and even Nazi Savitri Devi urgently wished for the return of Kalki.⁵ But note Cioran had nothing but scorn for this perspective.⁶

In an interview with Ernst Junger at 90 years old, as recounted in Julien Hervier’s “The Details of Time”, Junger stated⁷:

For the moment, we are going through an era of transition, of chiaroscuro, in which sharply defined phenomena are few and far between. The ancient values no longer obtain, and the new ones have not yet been imposed. It is a world in the shade.

You can observe a ubiquitous ambivalence of opinions. Some people maintain one thing, others the exact opposite: the two sides cancel each other out, even on the highest level…Let us hope that the transitional period is ending…

For the prophets: once we have crossed all the deserts, something new will eventually transpire. In all great visions, like those in the Edda, in the visions of divinity, the titans revolt against the gods, and the gods initially lose; but in the end, they return….In the hymns of the good era, [there] were still Christians who lived their faith in the full metaphysical sense of the word. That mentality is extremely rare today. People are cut off from transcendence, transcendence is vanishing. But if someone somehow still preserves this relationship to transcendence, he is “ultimately” safe from fear. He can have the feeling of participation, he can tell himself that horrible things are happening, but that behind them a great light is dawning.” (134)

John Martin, “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah”, 1852

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What is to be done?

Guenon believed that the best path through this process for an individual was initiation into an existing formal religion, performing consistent practice within it, while being open to intellectual, metaphysical intuition as discussed here. As Guenon explains:

"[...] initiation is essentially the transmission of a spiritual influence, a transmission that can only take place through a regular, traditional organization, so that one cannot speak of initiation outside of an affiliation with an organization of this kind. We have explained that 'regularity' must be understood to exclude all pseudo-initiatic organizations [such as the theosophists and the New Age movement], which, regardless of pretention and outward appearance, in no way possess any spiritual influence and thus are incapable of transmitting anything."

But his approach seemed to only partially work for him. As Jean-Philippe Marceau writes:

In fact, Guénon himself became increasingly paranoid and deranged throughout his life. For example, he came to see himself as the victim of repeated magical anti-traditionalist attacks and accordingly chose to avoid contacts with Westerners. You can even find a lot of anecdotal evidence of people becoming insane after diving too deep into his work. One way to see it is that Guénon indeed tries to fly too high. He relentlessly demolishes our modern, ordinary epistemology, but he doesn’t manage to replace it with something viable before going crazy. He spends his time analyzing perennial religious patterns in different traditions, studying the signs of our times, but he can’t really connect it down to his own life. He disconnects his head from his own body. And even his very devout involvement in Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, did not suffice to keep him grounded.

Guenon’s approach, then, disconnected him both from humanity and to an extent from life itself.

Instead of such extreme action, it’s my hope that one takes away from this post an understanding of the connection between time and technology use, and that if we hope to live longer via our experiences then we should be more mindful of limiting our use of technology. It’s also to note that increases in materialism and technology seem to decrease our connection to God, and to take note of the possibility of cycles where it may become “darkest before the dawn” - in other words, we may have to see the full blossoming of evil in its worst form before it can then be effectively opposed (but hopefully this is not the case): right now, at this moment, we are seeing its increasing intensification and manifestation blossoming in grotesque and shocking ways such as the transsexualism push (especially targeted to children), the increase in debt by a trillion dollars every hundred days, extreme and increasing censorship, completely open borders and funding/supporting endless foreign wars. Perhaps with this understanding we may better steel ourselves mentally and spiritually for what may be worse things to come. Or as Junger wrote in the quote above, “if someone somehow still preserves this relationship to transcendence, he is “ultimately” safe from fear.”

Thanks for reading.

1. One may theorize this is due to the ongoing genetic changes brought about by the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago which supercharged creativity and innovation.

2. He is most widely known for The Crisis of the Modern World about the falsehoods of so-called “democracy”, wonderfully discussed by

A Forest Rebel ☩

here.

3. Indeed, seeing history as cyclical as others such as Oswald Spengler believed is antithetical to the Whig history-as-progress model which permeates the West. The question is one of timeframe and scope. As Junger explained in The Details of Time, 63: “If we believe, or accept the hypothesis, that a cyclical order exists, this hypothesis goes beyond the notion of progress. Progress is linear, while cyclical movements return to their starting points. One could therefore say that a kind of panic recurs once every thousand years. Around the year 1,000, people feared the end of the world. This is again the case today, when the omens are technological, while in earlier times they were religious: people are afraid of the atomic bomb. For my part, I don’t believe in any great danger.” But Guenon believed the cycles were much longer than 1,000 years.

4. Hindus believe each age lasts between hundreds of thousands to millions of years, but Guenon thought that the additional zeroes were added on so that they wouldn’t be used by the unenlightened to make false predictions. As such, he removed the extra zeroes from his calculations.

5. Devi initially considered Hitler to be the return of Kalki, but following his disastrous defeat she modified her position to considering him only the precursor to his return. She elucidates her concept of "Men in Time," "Men above Time," and "Men against Time" using the lives of Genghis Khan, Akhnaton, and Hitler respectively, in her book The Lightning and the Sun which I didn’t think was written well. Hitler is used to illustrate a "Man against Time" who seeks to fight historical decay of the Hindu cycle. Hitler had himself leaned into type of comparison, styling himself after the figure in the painting The Wild Chase a dark, grim and somewhat unnerving portrait that depicts the Germanic god Wotan, the highest of the Germanic Gods, completed in 1889, the same year Hitler was born:

6. See Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 75: “What a preposterous notion, to draw circles in hell, to make the intensity of the flames vary in its compartments, to hierarchize its torments!… You can champion some idea or other, have a place or crawl—from the moment your actions and your thoughts serve a form of real or imagined city you are its idolators and its captives. The timidest employee and the wildest anarchist, if they take a different interest here, live as its function: they are both citizens internally, though the one prefers his slippers and the other his bomb. The “circles” of the earthly city, like those of the one underground, imprison beings in a damned community, and drag them in the same procession of sufferings, in which to look for nuances would be a waste of time. The man who acquiesces in human affairs—in any form, revolutionary or conservative—consumes himself in a pitiable delectation: he commingles his nobilities and his vulgarities in the confusion of Becoming….

To the dissenter, within or outside the city, reluctant to intervene in the course of great events or small, all modalities of life in common seem equally contemptible. History can offer him only the pale interest of renewed disappointments and anticipated artifices. The man who has lived among men and still lies in wait for a single unexpected event—such a man has understood nothing and never will. He is ripe for the City: everything must be given him, every office and every honor. So it is with all men—which explains the longevity of this sublunary hell.”

7. Also see Ernst Junger’s connective work “At the Wall of Time” (unfortunately untranslated into English as of yet, although

ormulus

has started), which is discussed along with a Guenon, Spengler, Evola and Herodotus connection here.