In brief, time is important.
 
I know, I know. This website’s entry page declares that place is primary and time is secondary, and to prove that statement asks you to think of ten minutes ago without any spatial or material reference. The proposition of the priority of space or place suggests that in the context of our current understanding, time did not exist before there was a universe, which is the place for its unfolding--progressing and passing if those are more appropriate terms. (Let’s discount for the sake of this argument that only the present exists; thus negating through an “eternal present” any unfolding, passing, or progressing. But, I’ll finish with that thought. So, time’s “arrow,” as physicists like to say, is a one-way flight for us, and it always occurs in our realm of daily living among things that occupy space, that is, in a place)   
 
Space-time seems to belie my claim about space, of course; Einstein’s understanding implies that space AND time had a conjoined birth, making my argument weak in the minds of scientists that accept the Big Bang explanation of the Big How of existence. But since time could not pass BEFORE THE UNIVERSE, then WHERE THE UNIVERSE originated takes precedence, and not only do I know the place where the universe originated, but I can also point it out to you. Rather, you can point it out to yourself just by looking in the mirror. Yes, you are the center of the universe and the site of the Big Bang because all that is was together in the singularity. Not to burst your significance bubble, but I am also that site as is everyone and everything else. 
 
It’s also significant for my argument that time varies under the influence of velocity and matter (gravity), both of which occur in “place,” a fact that weakens the argument that time and space are “equals,” the latter serving as the context or matrix for the former. By any measure, we know time by material existence, by the movement of objects in space—everything, after all, is moving relative to something else, even a binge-watching couch potato sits on a couch on a spinning planet orbiting a sun that orbits the galaxy that moves through the universe. Because that couch potato still ostensibly moves more through time than through space from his and our perspective, he ages, we say, without movement. 
 
I’ll continue to hold space’s priority on the basis that we cannot think of a personal “when” without a personal “where.” Place is, if not the cause, certainly the circumstance or the environment under or in which we pass time, and it is a significant control on us: I’ll whisper in a sanctuary but shout in a mosh pit regardless of time. I’ll use extreme caution in a minefield and practically no caution in a La-Z-Boy recliner, save that of not spilling my drink on my torso. Yes, place determines much for me regardless of, for example, my age, my time, and the clock hands turning, the quartz crystals vibrating in a watch, or that atomic clock that “keeps precise time.” 
 
I cannot, in spite of my assumption about the priority of place—and thus, space—over time, escape that time is what I often use to locate myself. True, I know location by dividing space, using, for example, those grid lines we know as longitude and latitude or those segments of Earth’s orbit we call the seasons. In an era of navigation systems, Einstein’s spacetime dictates a consideration of Relativity for accuracy, those satellites operating in a different gravitational frame at a different speed from the earthbound person seeking a previously unvisited address. Clocks onboard those satellites must be adjusted for the difference in time’s passing; otherwise, navigation systems in our cars would be useless, or at least, misleading because of accumulating inaccuracies, so strong is the effect of Einstein’s Relativity.
 
NASA uses earthbound atomic clocks to know the whereabouts of distant spacecraft. And now it is developing a deep space atomic clock that would eliminate the delay in navigation caused by increasing distance and acceleration. After all, radio/light waves have a finite speed. To know about a spacecraft’s location, NASA currently sends a signal from Earth, awaits its return, and then sends another signal to the spacecraft. Timing the trips to and from yield a location. Trips like that in our big Solar System take minutes to hours at the speed of light. An onboard atomic clock synchronized with an earthbound twin would cut some of the time by eliminating at least one leg of the message’s journey. 
 
So, what’s all this have to do with you, especially if you’re not involved in spacecraft location during space travel? On the simplest level, we might think of a wristwatch as a personal portable atomic clock. All those smart watches give us that kind of accuracy. So, your friend and you want to meet in a certain space simultaneously. Although you don’t need atomic-clock accuracy, you meet as you said you would thanks to those watches you carry. On a more complex level, we might think of a “distance” in time from an important event, like leaving the home of your youth to live on your own. Do you think of time’s passage in spatial terms? “That was in the distant past.” History books’ timelines give us the same kind of metaphor. Do you think of your life’s events as being either closer to or farther from your present? Think, now, of time’s passing. Do you see a clock, a pendulum, the rising and setting sun, or the progressively downward movement of eye bags and wrinkled skin? All matter and space, right? You frame time in spatial metaphors. You locate in place by time and vice versa. You even carry your own biological clock.
 
But there is one version of the clock we carry that doesn’t record any change regardless of our movement through space, that is, from place to place. That’s the Grudge Clock. Many people carry such clocks with them, making the interaction that precipitated the “grudge” occur always in an eternal present. They locate themselves on the basis of that grudge clock. Everywhere they go, regardless of time, they can hear the ticking of the grudge that locates them in a specific place at a specific time, and makes everything relative to that event, much like a spacecraft’s leaving Earth and being located by those homebound atomic clocks that send out and receive signals. Grudge clocks, unlike regular clocks of any kind, are unaffected by movements in and away from neighborhoods, cities, states, or even countries. I suppose even astronauts might identify where they are in life or space by a grudge clock. 
 
So, yes, time is important, and yes, it apparently stops in an eternal present, an eternal grudge. Are you locating yourself on the basis of a Grudge Clock? If you are, you might consider that the person or group against which you hold the grudge isn’t wearing the same watch, isn’t locating on the basis of the same time, and isn’t necessarily even aware of the beginning of the time you use for locating yourself, of identifying your whereabouts in the Cosmos. And as for place? Well the place where your significant grudge-time began might not even be the same as it once was. Einstein’s Relativity explains one kind of relationship between space or place and time; your personal relativity explains the human analog. 

Social experiments often engender controversy. And the reason is simple: No matter how many data on human behavior one collects in support of a behavioral hypothesis, someone somewhere sometime will express an individuality, either because of creativity or because of defiance for the sake of defiance, producing that exception to the rule. No better example exists in fiction than that portrayed by Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s murderer in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s motives for killing a pawnbroker include his desire to prove he is “the exception,” a motive derived from his poverty-driven despair and pride. When I say “no better example,” I’m hyperbolizing, of course. Yes, there are numerous examples of defiance in every generation of both fictional and real characters. James Dean comes to mind for his portrayal of fictional Jim Stark in the film Rebel without a Cause. * Every generation has its rebellious teens and young adults, all determined to demonstrate their individuality, often by breaking the bonds of propriety. Thus, societal experiments run counter to a drive toward individualism, much like playing “chicken,” as Jim Stark and Buzz do in racing a car toward a cliff in the film. One wonders. Are we going to escape going over the cliff like Jim or go over it like Buzz? 
 
The fashion of any time determines propriety. In 2020 and 2021, for example, wokeism has become an “acceptable behavior,” and as such, it has led to another and become part of yet another societal experiment. But why should I simply declare this in a prose statement? Let’s talk about it, instead. Maybe you disagree.
 
I’ll start: 
 
“You would think that methane comes to the surface from sources like buried decomposing microorganisms and rotting vegetation in anoxic conditions good for anaerobic bacteria. But guess what someone just discovered.”
 
You: “It doesn’t.”
 
“Well, no, it does, but there’s a newly discovered source, also: Aerobic Acidovorax bacteria in Yellowstone Lake water. That means methane producers have been hiding in plain sight. We’ve been thinking rotting vegetation, animal life, and anaerobic bacteria all these years. We’ve been thinking methane escaping from melting permafrost and methane hydrates bursting from the ocean floor. Now we have to monitor a previously unknown source of the greenhouse gas that was always visible but never seen.” **
 
You: “So?”
 
“It’s that fact of hiding in plain sight that interests me.”
 
You: “What about it.”
 
“It’s so apropos to today’s political stuff. We have a bunch of people in places like Portland, New York, and Baltimore running around saying, “Defund the police and replace them with social workers,” and then we have a bunch of people saying crime’s rising in those cities. And the people who backed the people who favored defunding the police supposedly to make their places safer can’t figure out why there’s a rise in crime, especially violent crime. It’s not that one of the causes is out of sight; it’s in plain sight. Same goes for tens of thousands of people illegally crossing the southern border of the US. A wall, which would have been in plain sight and which would have deterred at least some, if not many, from crossing the border has been replaced by a gap that the people can plainly see. It’s like sources of methane hiding in plain sight in surface water.”
 
You: “You might have valid point that applies to people. I guess we often don’t see what’s in plain sight, especially when it comes to contentious politics and social reforms imposed on the general population. We go looking for some deep meaning like some deeply buried bacteria and vegetation, when right on the surface where we can plainly see, we miss the obvious. Same goes for public education policies. People say, ‘The kids aren’t learning enough. They are behind the kids of other countries.’ Then they institute some ineffective and unproven methodology that supposedly addresses the causes of failure, like that once fashionable outcomes-based education that actually lowered standards. Remember that one? Or how about this one: Back in the seventies, people tried the “open classroom,” a wall-less school with different teachers and different grades all gathered in a large room, all the classes carried out simultaneously. Yeah, cacophony everywhere. Great learning environment, that. We know that there’s no substitute for hard work when it comes to personal accomplishments, and we know that multitasking is a myth proved to be so by numerous car crashes by distracted drivers. 
“I think all this looking for deeper causes when causes lie in plain sight stems from the proliferation of popularized psychological and social ‘theories,’ though they’re more like hypotheses than theories. Too much popularizing going around, like the one about police being inherently the cause of the nation’s inner-city woes. Used to be the role of newspapers and magazines to spread popularizations. Now everyone with a smartphone or computer can spread an easily understandable, but often wrong or unsupported or untested hypothesis. And all those accumulating hypotheses create a culture of propriety.”
 
“Yep. And you know where I’m headed with this.”
 
“You: I’m guessing you’re going to say something about those who rebel against today’s propriety.”
 
“Wokeism foisted on the masses. Government agencies, big-box stores, social media platforms, educational institutions—even higher-ed institutions—all attempting to impose a general propriety on everyone over which they believe they have control. And anyone who rebels is Jim Stark. Anyone who can’t understand that societal reforms often produce the opposite of what they are intended to produce, runs to the explanation that ‘there must be a deeper cause,’ and that’s the cause we need to find and address. So, they think, ‘After all, what we hypothesize should work, and we’re going to keep forcing it on people until it does work.’ 
            “That thinking usually ends up producing rebels. The current government, for example, has decided that it can go into the depths of Central American political and economic systems to find a solution to hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. They believe the root causes of immigration are the causes they have identified by ‘digging deep.’ They see the rotting vegetation underground without seeing the aerobic sources of methane clearly visible in a lake on the surface. And it’s not just the matter of immigration. It’s education, it’s retail, it’s social media, it’s justice, it’s…Everything everywhere all the time. And for all those ‘rebels,’ there’s a dire consequence. Act with the propriety of the times, or suffer the consequences of public condemnation, which is that universal reaction to those who differ from the norm. Today it’s called cancelling, but black-balling, ostracizing, shunning, also work.”
 
You: “So, what can you do about it?”
 
“Not much. Most of these social experiments die on the vine. People tire of fertilizing those vines that intertwine through the society. Hybrids will grow in their place as the ensuing generation says the time has come for a new set of hypotheses because the last set didn’t achieve the desired effect. Rebels will arise within the system. Fashion and reform prune the vines of a previous season’s growth. The grapes of wokeism will probably produce a vinegar, and not a fine wine appreciated by the next generation’s social connoisseurs whose tastes will differ. Another social experiment will fail, and so on.”
 
Notes:
*The film was derived from Robert Linder’s Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944).
 
**Montana State University. 2 July 2021. Research team publishes groundbreaking methane synthesis discovery. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-team-publishes-groundbreaking-methane-synthesis.html   Accessed July 5, 2021. Accessed July 6, 2021. 

Let’s start with an old joke, the source and exact details of which I cannot remember.
 
The bells of a church were stuck. The bell ringer, who plied his trade rather anonymously in the dim light of the bell tower, was befuddled. The townspeople didn’t know when to attend Vespers. The village vicar was getting angry. Nothing the bell ringer tried seemed to work. He tried using WD-40; he yanked hard on the ropes; he even threw a hammer at the headstock to loosen the full-circle wheel. Finally, he got as far away from the carillon as he could in the narrow bell tower’s bell room and ran full force at the bell, jumping onto the bells. Unfortunately for him, he slipped just as he jumped, hitting his head on the bell. He fell to his death as the bell rang. Finding his body at the bottom of the tower, one of the parishioners asked another, “Who is that?” The other parishioner responded, “I don’t know his name, but his face sure rings a bell.”
 
I’m tempted to relate other recognition jokes, so easy to do in an age of AI, smartphones that recognize their users, and the ubiquitous CCTVs. Okay, I’ll cite one other: At a meeting of vegans, a woman approaches two men, engages in conversation with one of them, and then walks over to the buffet of vegetables. One of the men says, “Who was that woman who talked to you? She seemed to know you.” The other says, “I don’t know; I never met herbivore.” 
 
Enough. 
 
Some neuroscientists recently reported finding the part of the brain that recognizes familiar faces. * It’s a group of neurons in the Temporal Pole. They make up a collective “grandmother neuron,” a hypothetical, but never found, face-recognition neuron. If their finding is correct, they might have discovered a region of the brain responsible for prosopagnosia—face blindness.
 
Not many people suffer from the problem, but some do. According to the neuroscientists who did the study, the TP region is one that appears to link sensory and memory domains. Obviously, lacking the connection is something we associate with Alzheimer’s, and that condition is heartbreaking for family members who lose their long-term relationships with loved ones. 
 
Being recognized by our faces isn’t restricted to our species, of course. The study conducted by Sofia Landi, Pooja Viswanathan, Stephen Serene, and Winrich A. Freiwald, involved macaques. We can reasonably assume that the human TP plays a similar role, possibly leading the way to studies that might effect a cure for prosopagnosia someday. But, of course, the brain is complex, so much is left unknown about perceiving and remembering.
 
You might consider that you have tied your memory to people you have never seen, and consider all those you recognize not by their faces, but rather by their accomplishments, the authors whose works you might have read, the composers whose music you have heard, and the philosophers whose thoughts you have adopted. Their works, and not their faces, are what you recognize. Our memories are filled with such “faceless” people whom we know because we recognize their contributions to the formation of our own identities. Next time you look in the mirror and recognize your own face, take a moment to see how those many others, those people you never saw but who indirectly and directly influenced who you are, have shaped what everyone you know now recognizes in you or as you. In “Ulysses” Tennyson writes, “I am a part of all that I have met.” It is equally true that “All that I have met are part of me,” and that “Many I have not met are also part of me.” 
 
*Landi, Sofia M., et al. 1 Jul 2021. A fast link between face perception and memory in the temporal pole. Science. DOI:10.1126/science.abi6671. Reported online in MedicalXpress by Rockefeller University 1 Jul 2021 at    search.anysearchmanager.com/?_pg=40AD8F32-8C74-50EB-B3F5-5719CEABBE8A&affid=A172R_set_bcr_H&type=h  

Ah! Ringo. Wisdom pounded out by a drummer of considerable fame, maybe as much fame as that of percussionists Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, and, to include a female, Sheila E. Anyway, Ringo sings “It Don’t Come Easy,” in a kitschy video that has him playing a piano in a snowfield, learning to ski (badly), and driving a snowmobile about five mph. * And what doesn’t—sorry, Ringo, “don’t”—come easy? Why it’s trust. 
 
And now we have a study about trust we had for leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. But first a word from yours truly. I remember the current (2021) Vice President saying that if “Trump developed” a vaccine, she wouldn’t take it, and then I remember her getting that injection before cameras. Hmmmnnnnn. Seems that trust is dependent upon a utilitarian philosophy, at least a philosophy of utilitarian self-interest. And now, what’s the message? Well, as Ringo sings in that song, 
 
            I don’t want much, I only want your trust,
            And you know it don’t come easy.
 
First, the obvious, politics somehow got mixed into healthcare. That, as you know, happened quite some time ago, arising with nanny states like the UK and before that Socialist/Communist countries. Oh! Yeah, Canada and the US. Talk about drumbeats, about drummers! Is there an election cycle in the twentieth- or twenty-first century without at least some politicians pounding that healthcare drum? Drum? Maybe tympani, Ō-daiko, or The Purdue Big Bass Drum would be more appropriate references here. Boom!
 
Second, because politics became intertwined with medicine, a number of nations have placed their healthcare in the hands of political leaders and bureaucrats. We’re talking about our lives here, folks. So, the question comes to this: Do we trust political leaders, most with medical expertise limited to applying a Band-Aid strip to an accidental scratch by a paring knife, with our health? The paradox of 20-21 was that a candidate politician said no until she became the politician in charge. Again, hmmmmmnnnn.
 
Third, now we have a study on trust based on public policies set by “leaders.” In “Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis,” Jim A. C. Everett and others surveyed people in 22 countries to discover which of two utilitarian approaches instilled more trust in populations. ** One utilitarian approach adopts the philosophy of instrumental harm, whereas another adopts one of impartial beneficence. The former allows for choosing to save those most likely to be saved while sacrificing others; the latter, saving across a demographic regardless of the potential of individuals or special groups to be helped. Take ventilators, for example. They were the device of choice during the early days of the pandemic, and shortages were rampant. So, the question became one of using the ventilators on a population less prone to survival regardless of treatment, that is, the elderly, in favor of a population more prone to survival with the aid of ventilators, that is, the young. Instrumental harm would support saving the young and sacrificing the elderly. Impartial beneficence would support a shotgun scattering of resources—ventilators—to people regardless of their potential outcome. Throw into that mix of two choices the question about whether or not an affluent country should give away ventilators to noncitizens, that is, to people in developing countries. What do you think, Ringo?
 
Ordinarily, I would note the results of a study, but here, I believe your own thinking is important. Are you a utilitarian? If you are, which kind of utilitarian? An “instrumental harm” or an “impartial beneficence” kind of utilitarian? And in which kind of leader do you place your trust, in the one who says the country needs to share its resources with the world or the one who says the country must first tend to its own? The kind who proposes a policy of helping those most likely to be helped or one who proposes a policy that throws help into the general human wind even though that wind blows over those least likely to be helped? The one who says saving young people whose lives lie mostly before them or the one who says that saving old people whose lives lie mostly behind them? Here are some ventilators. You decide. ***
 
            It don’t come easy.
 
Notes: 
 
*Starr, Ringo. “It Don’t Come Easy.” Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvEexTomE1I  Ringo, the drummer for the Beatles strangely plays the piano (with gloves on) and not the drum in the video. George Harrison reportedly helped Ringo in composing the song, but Ringo gets the credit.
 
** Everett, J.A.C., Colombatto, C., Awad, E. et al. Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01156-y  
 
***Trying not to make this political, but I have to ask whether or not the same issue of instrumental harm vs. impartial beneficence isn’t the crux of border immigration problems (crises?) in Europe and the US, especially in light of the not-so-long-ago emigrations from the Middle East and African developing nations and the ongoing emigrations from Central America.