Spring Forward, Fall Apart
The Consequence of Tampering with Time
Are you anywhere near Loughborough? I only ask because I’ve just updated my website with dates for my touring stand-up theology show, God, the Bible and Everything (in 60 Minutes). And I’ll be in Loughborough on Friday 1st May. I’m also in Carlisle on 10th April, and near Coventry on 16th May. Other dates here.
You can book tickets for that Loughborough show here:
The icy claws of winter are slowly losing their grip on the country. Spring is in the air. And the days are getting longer. So we should probably tamper with the clocks in order to make ourselves far more efficient, right?
That is what is happening this weekend in the UK when the clocks will go forward, moving us onto British Summer Time. Although that sounds pleasant and optimistic – summer, for me, means cricket – it represents our human habit of tinkering around with time, demonstrating how quickly and willingly we denature ourselves.
I can still remember the heyday of the Innovations catalogue that I would gleefully peruse in the 1990s. The catalogue was bursting with ingenious inventions that would make your life generally more convenient. In fact, it would not just save you time, but allow you to keep time in a way that was more accurate than the earth itself, offering to sell you some kind of atomic clock. It seemed absurd, but it appeared to be serious.
Yet we do not derive our sense of time from the obvious heavenly beings in the sky – sun, the moon and stars – placed there by the Lord to mark seasons. The turning of the earth itself is of little consequence to us. That is because we have the clock. That will tell us what time it really is. The clock, along with coal, oil, gas and electricity, means we can live lives completely out of kilter with nature and, one may say, reality.
We can leave the land, live in cities and work 12 hour days in factories (now called offices) for 365 days a year, should we so choose. And so we choose, now we have phones that allow us to check our email at home.
The work itself is closely monitored by managers with watches and clocks, seeking efficiency gains with time and motion studies. The human has become Homo Economicus, a unit of productivity. Only now are we beginning to realise that this might be a problem.
Where did we go wrong? We must go back much further than you might think. How about 530AD? That was the year that a monastery was established according to the Rule of St Benedict, written around 530 AD. He wished to sanctify every part of the day with prayer, echoing Psalm 119:164 which says “Seven times a day I praise you”. Therefore, Benedictine monks observed seven canonical hours, like Prime, Terce, Vespers and Compline.
I came across this notion in the work of Lewis Mumford who wrote Technics and Civilization (1934). This book was mentioned in Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, who observes that the we are shaped by technology. It is easy to overlook a machine as basic as a clock, but it has vast implications for civilisation. Mumford writes:
“One is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries – at one time there were 40,000 under the Benedictine rule – helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine.”
St Benedict could not have foreseen the effect of his rule on Europe. Benedictine monasteries were powerhouses of productivity. I have written before about St Dunstan and his work in Glastonbury Abbey. The monks transformed the local marshes, making them so productive that Glastonbury, like many abbeys in Europe, became immensely, embarrassingly wealthy. Undoubtedly the regular prayer was a factor. But the clock played its part in making the whole religious enterprise efficient.
The clock itself was made more efficient and reliable. In 1656, Christiaan Huygens invention the pendulum. Soon afterwards, clocks that could operate at sea were sought to aid with navigation at sea. After a thousand sailors of the Royal Navy died in 1707, when the fleet misjudged its position and was wrecked on the Scilly Isles, Parliament offered a £20,000 reward (worth millions today) for any method to find longitude accurately.
John Harrison, a self-taught English clockmaker, rose to this challenge, creating the H4 marine chronometer, a portable timekeeper that finally met the accuracy needed to solve the “longitude problem.” You’ll find a fascinating history of the H4 chronometer here.
The Age of the Train
The advent of the railways in the 19th century demanded a uniform time across a network so that you didn’t miss the 12.04 to Paddington because the clock on the town hall or the church said it was 11.52. Time mattered, becoming money. The industrial age had been well and truly established. Mumford observes:
“The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous.”
British Summer Time is merely the latest, and most obvious, recent development.
A Terrible Waste of Daylight
In 1907, William Willett, furious at the waste of daylight during summer mornings, self-published The Waste of Daylight, a pamphlet about the benefits of moving the clocks forward to create ‘longer days’. This would also save on fuel somehow: I still can’t fully understand the benefits, but they were sufficient to convince Germany to adopt Daylight Saving Time in 1916. Only then did the UK do the same. Now, around 70 countries do something similar, mostly in Europe and North America.
So when you adjust your clocks on Sunday, consider the words of Lewis Mumford who wrote:
“Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.”
That whirring you hear might not be the clock, but the sound of St Benedict spinning in his grave.
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Homo economicus. Love it!