Third Monday Musing

Que sera, sera

By Rolf Dumke

“That mysterious flow,” wrote Paul Davies about time in the February 2006 Scientific American. We all experience it as an unstoppable flow from a given past to a flighty present, onwards to an unknown future. But, he argues, for physicists this is a mere illusion: time does not fly or flow. It merely exists. See Davies’s book, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1995, Simon & Schuster).
    It should be added, that since the CERN proof of the existence of the Higgs boson a couple of years ago, we now know that space-time has a beginning in the early Big Bang.
    Albert Einstein wrote to a friend, “Past, present, and future are only illusions, if stubborn ones,” a view derived from his theory of special relativity, whereby events and things of all times coexist. Rudolf Carnap stated in his Intellectual Autobiography (1963, pp. 37-38):

Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously...[T]he experience of the Now means something special to men, something different from the past and the future, but [Einstein said] that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation.

    In contrast, William James wrote in his Principles of Psychology, 1890, of the special importance of the present to men:

The prototype of all conceived time is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.

    In our consciousness, enriched by great poets and writers, time flies like an arrow, flows like a stream, or returns again and again like an Indian’s karma. (There’s a humorous article in Wikipedia: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”) Tenses differ; they are important and have severe consequences, contra Einstein.
    Heraclitus (circa 500 BC), argued that no man ever steps into the same river twice; Italo Calvino wanted to swim against the stream of time to erase the consequences of bad events and restore initial conditions. [If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1979]
    In his carpe diem poem, To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) wrote of “time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” making leisurely courtship a crime:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.

    And Robert Herrick (1591-1674) warned in his memorable poem, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

    Shakespeare said famously that time is not a merry carousel: “The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” [Twelfth Night (Act 5, Scene 1)] This karma-like prediction of the return of bad times resulting from previous infringements is unusual in the Western World. It opens up an Eastern view of an indefinitely long purgatory of repeated lives lower than the present one. Thus, living honorably now is of great importance for diminishing bad karma in the future and securing ultimate salvation.

Our brains are apparently organized to perceive subjective time by metaphors. Ian Phillips recently reviewed studies of temporal consciousness in “Time Perception without Metaphors, or Down the Stream of Consciousness without a Saddle,” in Procedia - Social and Behavioral Science (March 21, 2014), arguing to do without them. Yet, his examples are helpful to understand the uses of different metaphors for the present.
    Among them are snapshot theorists who declare that experience is atomized and fragmentary, packaged in isolated slices [Francis Crick & Christof Koch, 2003]; extentionalists who argue that we think of experience as a duration-block with dynamic content [Barry Dainton, 2010]. William James, 1890, created the idea of the specious present, which recognizes that the present is not a knife-edge, but a

saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.

    It was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who first saw that when we discuss the time-constituting flow, it cannot be described other than metaphorically. [On the Phenomenology of Internal Time, 1991 translation by J.B. Brough]
    The now is thus defined widely by theorists of consciousness as existing between a knife-edge and a broad saddle-back.
    Metaphors of passing time and for the future – carousel, circus, gypsy, thief, trap, reef, storm, street, river, a bark on the river, money, prison, arrow – are mainly negative, indicating that the various authors we might google see fate as a threat.

How did America view the future in the last half-century? A good sign would be the title of popular songs. I recall Doris Day’s recording of the song Que Sera, Sera, which was hugely popular in the late 50s to early 70s. It is worth analyzing to feel the pulse of the American psyche during the “golden years” of the post-war boom.
    That 1956 song by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans reached the Billboard magazine charts in July 1956 and won the Academy Award for the Best Original Song in 1956. Doris Day’s recording for Columbia Records made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the UK Singles Chart. It became the theme song for the popular Doris Day Show, 1968-73. [See Wikipedia on “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).”]

Que Sera, Sera

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother what will I be
Will I be pretty, will I be rich
Here’s what she said to me.

Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera.

When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will there be rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said
Que sera, sera ....

Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be
Will I be handsome, will I be rich
I tell them tenderly
Que sera, sera ....

    An axiom of American life is a life of self-determination that is not ruled by an anonymous fate. The refrain, which brushes off self-determination as irrelevant, is actually a laconic and unfriendly statement for Americans that fate can throw anything into your face, in congruence with the googled metaphors of the future and passing to it from the present.
    How such a song could be cherished by Americans initially seems a mystery. On the one hand, the song presents three “snapshots” – or are they “saddle-backs”? – of two different generations and three different-age cohorts who ask the same basic questions about future attractiveness, wealth, and love and get the same vague response. Nothing has changed. Is this a symbol of stasis?
    On the other hand, we can view the song as an unusual and recurring “whirligig of time” in America, where the passage of time has NOT “brought in revenges.”
    Somehow all are reassured by the optimistic-sounding mantra que sera, sera, and the evidently good outcomes. The little girl became pretty enough to meet her sweetheart; he was rich enough to found a family and marry her; love continued to bring the rainbows and at least two children, one boy and a girl; there was enough wealth for a stable, intact family, whose children could again ask the usual questions and get the usual comforting answers, the future will provide, just like in the past.
    Whatever will be, will be okay. Why did this sound comforting then? In the unusual “golden age” of economic growth in the postwar period, what possible economic troubles could happen? The economic outcomes could only be positive. Then, there was no possible sting to time in que sera, sera. [See Wikipedia's article, “Post-World War II economic expansion,” which refers to the “Golden Age of Capitalism.”]
    In today’s very different economic environment, not everything will be okay. The economic future is framed by gray clouds. [See Binyamin Applebaum, New York Times, December 11, 2014, “The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind.”] Today, que sera, sera means that we will possibly get bad paying, insecure jobs in the future, unstable families, and a shrinking middle class. There is little chance of a resurgence of Doris Day's happy days, where we will all serendipitously sing Que sera, sera.

Copyright © 2014 by Rolf Dumke