Traditionalism, Presentism, and Futurism
The Microeconomics of Attention
“Energy grows where energy goes” goes the mantra. This is a variation on you are what you think, itself a variation on you are what you eat.
Given that our sense of self is largely determined by where we put our minds, where should we put them? To ask this question is already to imply we should put them on the future, for every should implies action. I could have asked where is your attention now (presentism) or where has it been typically (remembrance).
The premise of economics is that everything has an opportunity cost. To be in the now as Ram Das and his ilk propose is necessarily to see past and future as distractions. To be concerned with the preservation of a family story, a tradition, a legacy or lineage, or to be immersed in a sense of guilt or debt or even gratitude for a past event is to see the future and present as distractions. To be a futurist one must have the attitude that the present is behind the times and the past is already gone.
Of course, experience is more complex than this neat typology allows. As Heidegger describes, temporality involves an intersection of all three modes. Remembrance is itself future oriented, just as futurism involves a receptivity to and appropriation of tradition. Presence—in the meditative sense—need not preclude awareness of past and future.
Still, it’s worth wondering what masters of each mode miss. The contemplative focused on the breath cannot be as concerned with the transmission of tradition (though perhaps they can transmit it intuitively); the traditionalist risks antiquarianism if he becomes disinterested in the present or the future oriented task it bequeathes. The futurist, in the sense of the one concerned with predicting and/or realizing the future, risks antiquarianism in reverse. Often he sacrifices an appreciation for origins or a sense of responsibility for the here and now.
By framing temporal focus as a matter of trade-offs, we come to see with humility that no system, spiritual or anti-spiritual, can achieve it all. One might counter the wise do know how to find the synthesis or the balance. But this only begs the question of what this balance should involve and why.
If I were being crude, I’d say that traditionalists are past oriented; spiritualists are present oriented; and scientists (and moralists) are future oriented. The question then becomes how traditional, spiritual, and/or scientific you want to be. (A final reminder that asking it this way skews the framing to the scientific.)
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