About Time Out of Joint
Our culture shapes us long before we have anything to say about it. Its expectations soak in through language, habit, ritual, and silence. Before we make choices, we inherit stories. Before we speak, we are spoken of, for, and about.
This has always been the guiding thought for Time Out of Joint. When I began this project last year, my intention was to engage in admittedly esoteric questions of how time and experience are entangled in the cultures that make us.
Since then, much has changed. Time is coming apart at the seams. Turbulence has increased beyond what most imagined possible. This once-esoteric project seems to have an urgency that wasn’t fully visible several months ago.
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder writes about time being out of joint. His Epilogue to that work captures much of what I’ve been experiencing in the last several months. The nature of time itself is undergoing profound change, and we need to learn how to creatively deal with it.
We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty (118)
Snyder uses ‘repair’ and ‘renew’ where I’ve been using ‘rejuvenation’—the capacity to navigate the radical contingency of our time out of joint.
It seems that we’ve given up on these aspirations. The left is stuck in well-intentioned ideas that have become divisive platitudes—inclusiveness, diversity, equity. The left’s speech acts navigate always back to these terms as if they are obvious. They are not.
The right monopolizes patriotism and freedom, but it simply is using them to suppress our long traditions of dissent and free speech.
The Constitution bears the weight of our stuck time. Since Scalia popularized ‘Originalism’—the belief that the true meaning of the Constitution is embedded only and forever in the ‘intentions’ of those who wrote it—our most sacred document has become an ossified relic incapable of rejuvenation.
This is a far cry from Jefferson’s vision of a Constitution that keeps pace:
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy…
This is not likely to be renewed and repaired anytime soon. The speed at which the vitality of our economy moves—especially in an era of AI—is simply too fast for our Enlightenment-based institutions to keep up.
If we are to find rejuvenation in the turbulence of our time, we are going to have to reimagine what it means to live by ‘the rule of law’ and the ‘balance of powers’ that the founders, especially the Federalists, imagined.
More of the same is not going to lead the way out of stuck time.
Our time out of joint requires, paradoxically, returning to history—not merely as an educational exercise. I don’t offer ‘history lessons’—there are plenty of people who write history with credentialed authority.
I offer essays that explore new ways of thinking about how we can compose time that leads to more liberty, more abundance, more creativity in dealing with the unprecedented challenges our species faces.
This exploration will make ‘old’ authors into our contemporaries. What did Homer have to tell us about the problems of violence? What did Lucretius have to say about orienting ourselves to a universe that no god made for us? What does the New Testament have to say here and now about lifting the weight of a culture that had become mired in its own certainties? What do the Federalists have to tell us today about the ‘violence of political faction’?
All of this and more is on the table as we navigate our turbulence.
Getting Started
If what I’ve just said resonates with you, a good place to start with Time Out of Joint is my essay series on Rejuvenation. This series is the heart and soul of rethinking my own moral compass as I navigate turbulence. Here you’ll find good examples of how I try to engage ‘old’ authors as my contemporaries.
About Greg Laugero
Back in 1995, I completed a dissertation called Infrastructures of Enlightenment. It focused on the wholesale transformation of the British landscape over the course of the eighteenth-century. The island was blanketed with turnpike trusts (leading to newly paved roads), printing presses, lending libraries, postal networks, newspapers, book advertisements, novels and romances, among other interlocking systems. In my way of thinking, the Enlightenment could be a moment in the history of Ideas only once it became a vast material transformation of the landscape — not only of that relatively small island nation, but of the entire world.
My career has largely been in the software industry, though what that means is difficult to pin down. Software is a meta-industry that has infused itself systematically into all industries. I’ve also spent a lot of time and effort serving on boards for nonprofit arts organizations in Colorado. In the intervening decades, I have sought to weave together all of these interests. Time Out of Joint and my blog, Time as Practice, are my current outlets for what I have to say on such matters.
Pace
Time Out of Joint does not have a pace. I will probably publish a handful of posts per year, so that I can take a deep dive into a single issues. The posts will be long because I’m not interested in discussing one topic at a time. That’s far too Cartesian for me.
I welcome you to be part of a ressentiment-free community of people who share these interests. Participate in the comments and chat, ask questions, or support this work with a subscription.
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