Polaris: Editorial

Space and time are closely linked together both from a physical and from a philosophical point of view.  In theory, both are measurable in objective and rigid terms, but in practice they change in our perception and in the effect they have on us.

Quite different is the concept of time that we experience in places of ample spaces, like the desert, the tundra, the frozen wastes, from the one we experience in a megalopolis.  Time for who is tied to the land scans cyclically, instead it punctuates with hectic and diachronic rhythms the life of city dwellers.  The spaces vary depending on the concentration of humans and are dealt differently on the coasts of Normandy or in Chinese urban hovels.

These differences coexist in what we can properly call a Age of the World that, albeit in  different ways, enforces its rules.  Our Age is the one of satellites, dominated by recent Entities that have an impact on space and time as well as on the entire human anthropology and have even flipped the relationship with sky, and control us from above in a configuration that appears to be an update of the Hollow Earth Theory: the Earth’s surface has indeed become the inside and  it has become “shallow” compared with its numerous external centres.

In this new Age, also known as the Age of Globalization, time is compressed and space shrinks, as expected already in 1945 by René Guénon in “The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times”.  All of this leads to a loss of centrality and of references, anguish, acceleration, to a frantic rush to nowhere in a scenario that has been masterly illustrated in the  “child’s fable” Momo that Michel Ende wrote in 1973.

With a series of meta/physical actions and reactions all changes.  The gaps widen, the centers that were once those of the poleis, and which became after national, today become continental.  For a compensatory effect Localism resurfaces and, in the States, while on one side take place entwined Entities  that transcend them on the other the trend towards local autonomy strengthens.

All of this takes place in the political and institutional wrap of pre-satellite era because there is still no awareness of how the advent of satellites has influenced all human anthropology, far beyond what happened with the electric revolution.

Prisoners of Pavlov’s reflexes, we have great difficulties to keep pace with the times in which we live; while time and space shrink as  foreseen by Guénon, we are caught up by an emptying anguish that has been well described by Ende.  So while the whole geography transforms itself, with earthquakes, tsunamis and mass migrations, we still stick to unsuited criteria.

In a short time Man will perhaps be supplanted by the Android, a mix of biology, biochemistry, cybernetics and robotics.  If he will survive, he will have to recapture space, both the inner and the vital space : from domestic to stellar.