Timothy Wilken, MD
Time-binding is the power to understand—to observe and remember change over time. This power distinguishes humans from all other forms of life. We humans are Time-binders. Our human ability to understand comes from the awareness of time—an awareness that allows us to experience time as sequential or linear.
Tomorrow follows today as today followed yesterday. Time always moves from the past to the present, from the present to the future. Change is bound in time. And time-binders understand change in space because they are aware of time.
Time-binding is a way of thinking—analytical thinking. The Time-binder can make decisions based on understanding changes in his environment over time. Time-binding analysis is sequential analysis—linear analysis—focused on the parts rather than the whole.
Analytical thinking recognizes cause and effect. Time-binders are the masters of cause and effect. When humans understand cause and effect, they make scientific discovery. They make knowledge. When humans make choices based on knowledge, they make inventions. They make technology.
Time-binders are the creators of knowledge and technology. When knowledge is incorporated into matter-energy, it becomes a tool. Humans are above all else toolmakers.
Time-binding is also that unique human ability to pass that ‘knowing’ from one generation to the next generation. Both animal and human offspring begin their lives in nearly total ignorance. The differences that exist between them are small, but what advantage in knowing that does exist belongs clearly to the animal.
While the animal seems to begin life with a greater store of inherited knowing, it possesses little ability to learn from its parents. The animal is condemned to rediscover over and over, every generation must discover anew the knowings of its parents. The wise old owl may know a great deal, but he has no way to pass what he knows to his offspring and they have no way to receive it.
We humans are very different in that respect. We can and do pass our knowing from one generation to the next. As Alfred Korzybski, the scientist who coined the term Time-binding, explained:
“Human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them—I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the inheritor of the bygone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define humanity, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the Time-binding class of life.”
We humans bind time and are bound together in time.
The record of our time-binding is everywhere. It is in all that activity that we so innocently call progress. It is the very motor of obsolescence. It is imbedded in just about every thing associated with humans and yet most humans are unaware of the very power that makes them human. We humans catalogue and store our various knowings in libraries, universities, colleges, data banks, and information services. We store our knowing in many formats—books, tapes, films, movies, newspapers, magazines, video, microfilm, photos, computer files, etc., etc., etc. We are time-binders and the mark of human power is everywhere.
Alfred Korzybski was the innovator who coined the term Time-binding in his classic Manhood of Humanity published in 1921. I have featured essays from his book this past week at Future Positive because humanity is rapidly approaching a “breakpoint” in our species’ history. We will learn to work together as one community or we will perish. Read Korzybski. Although his words were written 80 years ago, he was one of the wisest humans who has ever lived, and God knows we need his wisdom today.