8
Popular Culture Review
for an arrow to fly through the air because in order to get from point A to
point B it must first go half of that distance, and this takes time. But in
order to get to that midway point, it must first move half of that distance,
which also takes time—less time, to be sure, but still some amount of
time. And in order to get to that quarter point in space, it must first move
half of that distance—again taking some time. The time chunks, like the
chunks of space, get smaller and smaller, but they are infinite in number
and thus would seem to add up to an infinite amount of time.
Consequently, for the arrow to move at all would require an infinite
amount of time. All change, concluded Zeno, must be impossible.
Heraclitus was fond of the second sort of change problem. His
claim that no one can ever step into the same river twice was essentially
a worry about the way in which change calls into question stable identity
over time. Put one foot in a river, Heraclitus argued. The river keeps
rushing on, some water added to it, some evaporating, the shape of the
riverbed slowly changing, etc. By the time you place your second foot
into the river, that river is no longer itself It’s changed so much that it is
no longer really the same river you first stepped into. And given that all
things are constantly changing over time, what right do we have to think
that anything truly is anything from one moment to the next?
In both of these cases, the essential problem is one of deciding
how change and stability can coexist. The crisis is not really one of
gradual change, though that is often how philosophers look at it. Gradual
change is just one manifestation of the problem, though it is, to be sure, a
challenge. Part of NASA scientist James Hansen’s difficulty back in
1988 was that he was warning us about a gradual change in the climate
that was hard to see at the time. Global warming tends to take place
slowly, though if we had been looking, the signs were already there, and
they continue to multiply around us today.
Gradual change, then, is a worry. But the real concern is that
change in general seems to be incompatible with permanence even as
each requires the other. If we see the Crystal Light Aerobics
Championship as strange and outdated, that must necessarily be because
something has remained constant over these last years against which we
measure 1988. But what is the permanent background here that makes
the change appear? It cannot be the culture itself because that’s precisely
what’s doing the changing.
There is a tradition of attempting to answer this question by
appealing to a comparison: 1988 is compared to today, and the two years,
the two moments in time, are found to be different. It was in this vein, for