Overview: Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present by author Brett Bowden asks the question What’s so special about now? For to maintain perspective, we need to be aware of our past and alert to the future.

Verdict: Human beings have an overwhelming tendency to overemphasize the significance of the present without considering context or historical perspective. For many, here and now is as good as it gets - we have steadily progressed from a savage past, and all we have to look forward to is the great unknown.

But if our literature and cinema are anything to go by, many are convinced that the future will indeed be dystopian. At the same time, arguments abound that living in the moment is a key to happiness and success. However, to privilege the present over the past or future, Brett Bowden argues, is to engage in tempocentrism.

More than a mere preoccupation with the present, tempocentrism involves comparing and judging the past in relation to the present, with the tendency to assume that the present isn’t only materially and qualitatively different from the past but also superior to it, often morally so.

Yet tempocentrism, a mistaken belief in the unprecedented nature of events going on around us, brings with it a skewed perspective loaded with bias and prejudice. Requiring just as much ignorance and arrogance as Eurocentrism - tempocentrism implies that the present is somehow superior to the past because we live in it now.

The point, however, is not to suggest that there is not something special about the present - there might well be - but now is not the time to decide whether it is more significant than previous moments, or those still to come.

For depending on the issue or event in question, the time for that is later … possibly hundreds or thousands of years later.

Deep diving for a hot second, and according to Omnilexica, the suffix “-centrism” refers to the “focus on, or belief in the superiority of, one culture, people, place, or other thing.” When the suffix is added to “temporo-,” which is a reference to chronological time, the resulting word concerns the belief that one’s own time period is better than those past.

And so in what is a most engrossing new prose from author Brett Bowden, one most dutifully sculpted to bring forth the will in us to think forward, to think bigger, to ask more incisive questions and to grasp a better understanding of our future, simply put, tempocentrism/temporocentrism - which can be ascertained from the word’s etymology and contextual references - is a concept generally recognized in sociology and anthropology to refer to a cultural bias that views historical times as inferior to present day.

Thus, here within these pages we are asked how we ourselves think about our relationships between the past, present and future, how we ponder our lives with and without, perhaps, not only seeing, but determinedly not engaging in the seeing of our existence thoughtfully forward.

About the Author - Brett Bowden is Professor of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at Western Sydney University and a multi-award-wining author. He lives in Moonta Mines, Australia.

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