Last year i started reading this short book about Time by a physicist (but one of those where it's physics blurring into philosophy blurring into mysticism - at least that's how it seems from a 'common sense' perspective, mystical/hallucinatory - and the guy has a very elegant literary style.) and this chap basically endorses the 'there's no such as linear time' stuff, he says it's proven (as much anything is ever proven in this realm - by the time ideas of i dunno superstrings or dark matter or whatever reach the colour supplements and the WH Smiths paperback shelf, the cutting edge of those fields has moved into something else completely, plus it's not like they all agree with other right now, there's as many factions as in music criticism / fandom). but anyway, yes, this guy - Italian chap, forgot the name - is very much "linear time - it don't exist, case closed" . there's no such thing as past/present /future. it's all an illusion. which people have been saying, like J.W. Dunne or whoever, in different fields for quite some time.
i had to stop reading this book after about half way through, it all made no sense to me, couldn't get my head around it - it had no correlation with anything i could relate to experience (e.g. he says that at the smallest level of space-time, the tiniest sub-division units, you can't get any smaller - space-time shouldn't be conceived of as fluid then, but as granular. Nutty stuff!
the thing is - it's all very well saying there's no such thing as Time, but on the plane on which we perforce must live, each day takes us a step closer to non-existence. (glum thought- apologies!) biological and personal time certainly seems to be linear and one-way and there's not a lot one can do about it. things grow, mature, die. cause leads to effect - if i bang my knee getting up from this desk, there'll be a bruise, and then it'll heal.
culture-time though, yes that is something else, and different perceptions of how it works reign in different cultures, in different periods. the forward-movement idea of time is quite a local one in the history of humanity. yes that's true, but isn't that fact itself an example of historical time at work? one set of ideas, an episteme, being succeeded by another... not necessarily as a progress, but as a linear succession of phases.