Philosophers tell us that “the arrow of time flies in only one direction”, but when you think about it people actually live with quite different subjective views of time.* It is striking that at Christmas time people seem to fall into a view of time as circular. This was really brought home to me in the run up to Christmas, when people were asking whether the current pandemic was going to prevent them from doing what they always do at Christmas. Not surprisingly, politicians became preoccupied with the perceived need to respond with assurances that it was going to be so. (That is, until they were scared stiff by the statistics into reneging on that promise.) What a pity that Christmas couldn’t be “just like the ones we used to know”! We’re at it again as we await the arrival of the New Year. Shock horror! We will not be able to see in the New Year with the sociable festivities we have come to take for granted!
When you think about it a good deal of our experience is bound up with a succession of expectations that “here we go again”. We rather like that, and indeed rely upon it. Anniversaries are only more heavily marked examples of our heavy dependence upon a sense of normality, defined in terms of recurring routines. For a lot of us the “arrow of time” actually goes round and round in circles.
Am I strange because I don’t look at the world like that? Despite the fact that I can and do enjoy customary things, like gathering evergreens at Christmas, I hope that the world into which we are moving will be different from that to which we are accustomed. This frame of mind is not just the residue of our experience of the pandemic. I think I have always been like this. I want things to be made new. This afternoon I spent time planning activities for the coming year that will surpass the things I’ve done in the past. Hope is pretty near the top of my list of moral virtues, and by that I don’t have in mind only the hope that things will not be worse and preferably the same as before.
So: for me the point of celebrating the New Year is not the sentimental reaffirmation of “auld acquaintance”, and a commitment to ensuring that they are not “forgot”. Rather it is an affirmation that it is possible to “make all things new”. It is conventional to wish one’s friends a “Happy New Year”. I wish you a “Hopeful New Year”.
*Henri Bergson hated that concept, and rebelled against the whole idea that time could be treated as analogous to a spatial dimension….but that’s an argument for another occasion.