THE THIRD WAVE
We speak of “standard” time. Pilots all over the globe refer back to “Zulu” time—i.e., Greenwich Mean Time. By international convention Greenwich, England, became the point from which all time differences would be measured. Periodically, hi unison, as though motivated by a single will, millions of people set their clocks back or forward an hour, and whatever our inner, subjective sense of things may tell us when time is dragging, or conversely when it seems to be whizzing by, an hour is now a single interchangeable, standardized hour.
Second Wave civilization did more than cut tune up into more precise and standard chunks. It also placed these chunks in a straight line that extended indefinitely back into the past and forward into the future. It made time linear.
Indeed, the assumption that time is line like is so deeply embedded in our thoughts that it is hard for those of us raised hi Second Wave societies to conceive of any alternative. Yet many preindustrial societies, and some First Wave societies even today, see time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation.
The idea that time was like a great circle is found in the Hindu concept of recurrent kalpas, each one four thousand million years long, each representing but a single Brahma day beginning with re-creation, ending hi dissolution, and beginning again. The notion of circular time is found in Plato and Aristotle, one of whose students, Eudemus, pictured himself living through the same moment again and again as the cycle repeated itself. It was taught by Pythagoras. In Time and Eastern Man, Joseph Needham tells us that “For the Indo-Hellenic . . . time is cyclical and eternal.*’ Moreover, while in China the idea of linear time dominated, according to Needham, “Cyclical time was certainly prominent among the early Taoist speculative philosophers.”
In Europe, too, in the centuries preceding industrialization, these alternative views of time coexisted. “Throughout the whole medieval period,” writes mathematician G. J. Whit-row, “the cyclic and linear concepts of time were in conflict The linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy. For as long as power was concentrated in the ownership of land, time was felt to be plentiful and was associated with the unchanging cycle of the soil.”
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