How the West Destroyed Time

Perhaps the simplest answer to that ubiquitous question, "why do they hate us?" is this: they hate us because we destroyed time. "We" being the west and "they" being the types that will behead their neighbors for decadence if they use ice cubes. We must understand radical Islamism as a backlash against globalization, and we must understand globalization as the destruction of time.

Put simply, the West, and especially America, defines itself by looking forward. Progress is taken to be inherently good and, accordingly, the past is seen as inherently inferior to tomorrow. Much of the East, especially the radical Islamists, look back a millenium rather than forward a minute.

If one culture values the future while another reveres the past, this does not pose a problem to either as long as they stay on their own sides of the planet. The problem, however, is that one of the cultures, the West, must by definition spread its culture to the rest of the planet. The resulting backlash from elements of the East is as understandable as it is inevitable.

Until as recently as 100 years ago, time was what it was, regardless of how a culture happened to weigh the relative values of the past and the future. Regardless of how important and inherently positive the future was in the minds of western men, they could only get there so fast. Until the most recent sliver of time, the future arrived only as fast as a horse could run, regardless of how much a hurry one was in to get there.

This made for a sort of democratizing effect, a check on the west's expansion; so long as no technology faster or stronger than a horse existed, the west's infatuation with progress and futurism was tempered. But then...the west succeeded in destroying time once and for all.

The shift was quick, almost too quick to be noticed, but around the turn of the 20th century the west gained new technology which they already had the ideological underpinnings to use a certain way. As soon as cars and planes came along, the die was cast. The earth had, in the blink of an eye, contracted from a galaxy to a simple planet, whose oceans could be steamed or flown across in days or hours and whose land lay open to vehicles traveling ten times as fast as horses.

Each of these inventions led to scores of others, to thousands of miles of elevated and reliable roads, to passenger aircraft that could circle the world in a day, to weapons that could destroy a city in a second. This technological leap, so violent and sudden, made it utterly impossible for anyone to live outside of the west's definition of time.

Now, for better or for worse, we live in a global community. There are two considerations to bear in mind. First, we might not be better off, considering the harbringers of SARS and 9/11, two very limited examples of how globalization can bring instant global catastrophe. Second, globalization was forced on the globe by the west so, even if there are certain tangible material benefits, many in the east will inevitably resent the imposition nonetheless.

The only interests that clearly benefit from globalization are international corporate interests. The citizens of east and west are both left scrambling for peripheral rewards. Here is the dilemma that we in the west are currently dealing with, however: the future was forced on the radical Islamists before they were willing to let go of the past.

Now we have an enemy that defines purity as life before toilets and penicilin, that defines its ideal future as a reversion to the past, but which has learned to use the future to attack the west. This is the most dangerous adversary for the United States: one with the technological savvy of the west but with the infinite patience of the east.

This is the dilemma we have in Iraq. How can we be losing? American and Iraqi forces outnumber insurgents by at least 20 fighters to 1. They outspend the insurgents by 1000 dollars to 1. So why aren't we winning?

We are winning, and we'll be winning for the next 50 years if we have the patience, which we don't, but we'll never win. To always be winning, but never to win. And why can we not win? Because our enemy has time on his side. All the enemy needs to do is not lose. This is the power drawn from patience, which is lacking in the west since it destroyed time. If one beligerent is willing to wait 50 years, while the other is only willing to wait 5, the more patient one wins, even if he could never hope to win a single tactical engagement with the overwhelmingly superior enemy.

I am not proposing that we in the west start looking back. I am suggesting that keep looking forward, but learn to look forward more than 5 minutes. Or 5 years. The only way to outwit this enemy is to have as broad and sober an appraisal of the long-term future as they do of the long-term past.