where the future is behind you

 Why do we talk about the future as ahead of us and the past behind us? 

Among the Aymara, an ancient Andean people, it's the other way around. For them, the past is before them, the future behind. That is, the past, which we know with some certainty having actually experienced it, is what can be seen in front of us. The future, which we aren't certain of, is the unseen. Given that our vision is our paramount sense, and, like predator species our eyes are both facing front (unlike vegetarian species like squirrels and goats whose eyes are set to the sides of their faces so they can see the focused predators approaching them), this distribution of information -- certainty of the past before us versus uncertainty of the future behind -- makes perfect sense. It makes so much sense that you wonder why we think the future is ahead of us and the past behind. 

A moment's thought provides a good answer. Since we are a predator species, we want to see our prey in order to capture it. We're goal-oriented, desire-oriented. It's all about what we want and how to get it. Our notion of time is a self-interested one. Time, for us, is the answer to what we want. 

The common word "progress" -- a basic notion of time for us -- always means future and always good. By definition! It's more than just a deep cultural bias towards time, it's a cultural value. Think about fashion. Fashion is this progress-value stripped bare of any other good. The latest in clothing, architecture, art, trendy ideas -- they are not improvements in any value except that they are not yesterday's style. In the 50's the coolest ties were thin and skirts were long. In the 60's hip ties were thick and skirts very short. Are think ties and improvement on thin ones? Is there some benefit to a thick tie? Is there any practical use in these trends? Culture critics like to analyse the meaning of these differences, but they forget that a) what's most important is the mere difference from the most recent past and b) meanings are typically justifications after the fact. Fashion is progress without any other good than newness -- mere difference, to use the semiologic word. 

What about the Aymara, then? What is time the answer to, for them? 

An odd feature of the Aymara language is its grammatical encoding of degrees of certainty. It's impossible to say "It's raining" without including a grammatical piece of the verb indicating whether you know it's raining because you have direct evidence (like "I see it is raining now"), epistemic conclusion (umbrellas are open therefore "it must be raining") or various degrees of uncertainty ("I think it's raining', "it's probably raining"). Now, obviously, English speakers can express all these degrees and types of certainty too -- look at the glosses I just gave. But they are not grammaticalized. They are separated into individual words like "might", "must", "know", "probably" and "I think" and are included at the speaker's will, optionally. Certainty -- degrees of knowledge and evidence -- are grammatically inseparable in Aymara.

You can see where this is going. It suggests that these degrees of knowledge grammaticalized in their language have a pervasive influence on their perception and maybe their attitudes and culture. For us, information is self-oriented. To the Aymara, information is not desire, but understanding, the gradations from ignorance to belief to knowledge and certainty. To them time is not the answer to what they want, it's the answer to what they can know. 

Maybe it's too much to suppose that our time perspective is all about individual wants. After all, there are many cultures that are collectivist and not so individualist as ours in the US, and their view of the future is just as predatory as ours is. Roman architecture showed no sign of fashion or progress. They thought their style was optimal so why change? That was generally their attitude towards their culture: "We're the greatest in the world, we rule, why change anything?" including their agriculture, one reason for their collapse. Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine around the 2nd or 3rd century, but did the Romans use it to improve their agriculture or their transport? They used it to impress visiting barbarians with statues that had moving limbs and wings. Not a progressive vision. It would be unfair to compare their clothing fashions since production was so much slower than ours. But it does seem that their sense of civil virtue contrasts with our individualism. How many prominent Romans fallen out of public favor chose suicide as a noble and dignified choice? For us suicide is all about solitary personal despair. Does George Bush even hide his face in shame much less sit on a sword? 

On the other hand, the Romans did love any new religious mystery and semper prorsum -- always forward -- was a common Latin motto. 

Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By shows that these orientation 'metaphors' -- the future is before us the past behind, or good is up, bad is down -- are arbitrary, and their justifications are post hoc. So you might say that the stock market goes up when it's value increases on analogy with a pile of dollars increasing with its height, but on the other hand, if you pile up a pyramid of gold bars, the greatest value will be at the bottom layer and the very top the very least. Hades was the richest of the gods, his realm the deep down source of all precious metals and gems. "High" frequency mouse squeaks are down and thunder, the "low" frequency, is up. It's all arbitrary and you can find a justification after the fact for any so-called metaphor. 

I do wonder, though, how much different we'd be if we spoke Aymara and admitted that the future is unseen and unknown. Our individualist future seems short-sighted and narrow. How many physicians will admit that what's understood today will be tomorrow's ignorance, today's cure tomorrow's harm? How many of us, knowing how foolish we were in the past are willing to admit that given what we'll know tomorrow, we must be wrong now?