Time and Civilization
At first, there were no tools to measure time. Time appeared as a function of natural processes, like our traveling around the sun or the moon traveling around us. Units of measurement then emerged out of the rhythms of two processes, that is, tensions and relationships between the sun phase and moon phase like music chords.
Then some folks invented sundials, which measured time in variable units. The 12-hour idea came into being, but the length of those hours changed depending on the year. Day and night had 12 units each, regardless of how long day and night were.
Then standardization began. There were water clocks (“water thiefs”) which would drain at a standard rate. Then there were hourglasses, where sand would pass through at an even more standard rate; candle clocks, which melted at a standard rate; and oil clocks, which burned even more consistently. Then came mechanical clocks, the most famous of which was the pendulum clock. It needed to be twisted every once in a while, but it became the standard. Places that loved standardization, like England, even built gigantic ones that they worshipped and gave a name to: Big Ben. They built them tall for everyone in town to see. Time was standard, social, and local.
As infrastructure scaled, so did time. Arrivals and departures of trains needed to be standardized if things were going to keep working well. Clocks got smaller and could fit in everyone’s pockets. No need for Big Ben. Time zones were a kind of compromise between parochial senses of time (darkness at 1am) and universality.
But what explains this trajectory? Why did time evolve in this way? Why did time change this way?
One set of explanations places a lot of explanatory power on the transition from paganism to Christianity in Europe and then Europe’s eventual genocidal cultural conquest of the globe. I think there is a secondary line of questioning here: Why is Christianity this way? What way? Christian scripture is remarkably linear, cascading toward a final judgment. Indigenous European cosmologies were not this way. They were remarkably cyclical, agricultural, and naturalistic. Christianity, on the other hand, told of a reality that was a straight line between creation and judgment.
In medieval times, there was a tension between these two senses of time. Medieval agricultural time was uncertain, variable, slow, and epic. There was no unit of time smaller than the morning and afternoon. At the same…time…ror the Romans, day and night were divided into quarters, and the day eventually fell into seven categories: matutina (before sunrise), prima (early morning), tertia (morning), sexta (noon), nona (afternoon), vespers (sunset), compline (late evening). In this, we find the seeds of our modern world.
Modernization is often seen as the process of evolving institutions that manage the temporal, spatial, and social aspects of human behavior. Some scholars view the creation of a temporal order within social reality as a crucial aspect of grasping the development of social structures. To explain today’s standardized time reality, people have looked back to the medieval era for precursors.
Mumford found this in monastic routine, Sombart in the bookkeeping of Renaissance Italian merchants, and Weber in Calvinism and Puritanism. Weber introduced us to the idea that capitalism can only function in a world that is rationalized, disciplined, calculable, and precise about its dealings; to this list we might add synchronized. Many have taken Weber’s inclination and focused on monasteries as the original source of the kind of daily routine that has evolved into factory discipline and the work day that pattern contemporary urban life across the globe.
Some have called the transition from the monastic regimenting of time to the standardization of production the transition from “church time” to “merchant time.” Payments had to happen “on time.” We signed contracts for periods of time, and payment for work became structured by time rather than what was produced—wages (hours) and salaries (years). Marx said all of the modern world emerged from the clicking of the clock. Ben Franklin famously said, “Time is money,” and we still know what that means. In debt, we would owe interest that accrued over time, aggregating money and time into one dreadful poison.
As anxiety emerged, we described it by time: life was “too fast-paced,” there was a “lack of time,” or we felt “time pressure.” We felt we needed to overcome space and time, so we built technologies like the railways, telegraphs, photographs, video cameras, and eventually the internet. What happened over there right now could also happen here right now. What happened then could also happen now.
And so the civilizing process becomes a biological process of synchronization and coordination among the human species. This process relies entirely on a unified sense of time that is diffusely everywhere, like the Christian God, gravity, or like the second law of thermodynamics. The coordination of local patterns is extinguished with regard to this civilizing process.
Remember, before we had means of standardization, time emerged out of the covariance of two processes (in many cases, the sun and moon). In New Haven today, the fruit trees are on the precipice of blooming, and yet a cold storm has moved through and delayed their wonder. In another sense of time, nothing has occurred. The trees are just yet to bloom. When they do, all of the local Instagram influencers will flock to Wooster Square. There is coordination here that goes beyond some standard of time.
James Scott wrote that:
Vernacular measurement is only as precise as it needs to be for the purposes at hand…A case in point is the advice given by Squanto to white settlers in New England about when to plant a crop new to them, maize. He reportedly told them to "plant corn when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear." An eighteenth-century farmer's almanac, by contrast, would typically advise planting, say, "after the first full moon in May," or else would specify a particular date…What about farms near the coast as opposed to those inland? What about fields on the north side of a hill that get less sun or farms at higher elevations? The almanac's one-size-fits-all prescription travels rather badly. Squanto's formula, on the other hand, travels well. Wherever there are squirrels and oak trees and they are observed locally, it works. The vernacular observation, it turns out, is closely correlated with ground temperature, which governs oak leafing. It is based on a close observation of the sequence of spring events that are always sequential but may be early, delayed, drawn out, or rushed, whereas the almanac relies on a universal calendrical and lunar system.
And so, again, what explains our trajectory toward the time we’ve constructed? What are our purposes at hand? Why have vernacular times been slowly extinguished? Who is in control of these emergent properties of life on Earth?