Time, Conflict, and Human Values (review)

Time, Conflict, and Human Values. By J. T. Fraser. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. 306. $34.95.

This is a dense, complicated, and at times illuminating book. J. T. Fraser, founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, has produced a study in which human efforts to escape the ravages of time provide an explanation for all that we accomplish in seeking truth, developing morals, and creating and discovering beauty. Ultimately, each of these endeavors is an attempt to outrun mortality. This is an ambitious undertaking, and Fraser does not entirely acquit himself. But the book is a marvel of erudition, observation, and insight into human affairs and behavior. That alone makes it worth reading--and more than once.

On a rudimentary level--and by way of analogy--Fraser is attempting to explain what Keats was doing and why when he felt impelled to compose "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In our own lives we all are doing what Keats was doing, although perhaps not so artistically, and without such a high degree of self-awareness. Fraser's book is meant to be a Rosetta Stone. Accept what he has to say and the unarticulated motives behind human activity become unmasked.

The book is constructed much like a philosophical treatise. Later chapters build, mathematically so, on what is said and demonstrated earlier. The essential thesis is that "values have been and remain revolutionary forces that promote change. They give rise to and maintain certain unresolvable conflicts rooted in the human awareness of passage and dream of timelessness" (p. 3). What this means is that our search for truth is at heart destabilizing, and leads to a tension between life as we find it (finite life), and life as we wish it to be (permanent). This dialectic forms the core of the book. Fraser believes that the world is in constant flux (Heraclitus), that there is a ceaseless and rhythmic give and take going on within organisms and between them and the environment in which they exist (Darwin, Robert MacNeil, George Leonard), and that time plays an integral and active role in how this all works out.

Fraser begins by outlining the natural history of the relationship between biology and human values; moves from there to a sustained critique of truth, belief, good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly; and rounds out with a discussion of life in a "global laboratory." In this long last chapter he discusses the global economy, the Internet, and where he thinks our scientific and technologically predicated economy is going to take us. He has reservations about using mass consumption as a roadway to "techno-utopia," and he doubts a "workless paradise," a grail for many these days, will ever come about (pp. 182-83).

"Hurrying," Fraser insists, has narrowed "temporal horizons," so much so that short-term results and "instant economic gratification" have undermined the "long-term viability" of many an American corporation. According to Fraser, American companies have four years to bring a product to market, whereas "foreign competitors" "may have as much as twenty years to commercialize the same technology" (p. 183). Work and "urgency," Fraser tells us, have come to characterize the American workplace, as never before in our history. But this is only a cursory analysis of contemporary economic and technological trends. Otherwise, what Fraser gives us is an extensive philosophical treatment of time and values, based as much on literature as on science, that is strangely oblivious to the role technology plays and has played in bringing us modern life.

Fraser's major claim, and the basis for his thinking, is that "time should not be regarded as background to reality or be equated entirely with the human experience of passage," but should rather "be understood as constitutive of reality" (p. 41). Like other philosophers who have written on the subject--Plato, Augustine, Bergson--Fraser rejects a linear theory of time, that is, time as most of us...