Clocks are everywhere because our modern economy needs to know the time.
Our
“regular measurement of time and the new mechanical conception of time arose in
part out of the routine of the monastery,” writes Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) in Technics and Civilization (University of
Chicago Press, 1934). It was long ago that Pope Sabinianus (d. 606) ordered bells
to be rung seven times per day to alert the faithful to the liturgy of the
hours.
As an urban economy eventually emerged, merchants demanded more precision. A public mechanical clock appeared in Belgium in 1188; more places followed in the 1200s. By 1345 the measurement of 60 minutes to an hour and 24 hours to a day became standard. By 1370 Paris had a well-designed modern clock suitable for urban life. In the 1600s many families in Holland and England acquired a mechanical clock for their homes.
Yet the
monasteries came first, according to Mumford. They “helped to give human
enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock
is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the
actions of men.” As the years went by, however, some began to think that a
“completely timed and scheduled and regulated” machine civilization “does not necessarily
guarantee maximum efficiency,” Mumford concludes. Sticking to the clock is not best for human development.
Meghan O’Gieblyn, drawing upon Mumford,
provides a reflection on routine for Harper’s
Magazine (1/22). Have people become machines, she asks? Is the routine
imposed by our economy dehumanizing? Or “is it possible in our age of advanced
technology to recall the spiritual dimension of repetition”? Does a spiritual
motivation lurk “in the gears of modern routine”?
High
tech and advanced automation enhance work and life, say its cheerleaders. Computers
and robots free us to set aside drudgery and bring forth our agility,
flexibility, creativity and spontaneity. However, “the rhetoric of
flexibility…despite its existential promise to make us more human frequently
undergirds policies that make the lives of workers more precarious,” O’Gieblyn
writes. For example, online retail and
the apps on our mobile device decrease variety by conditioning our choice of products
and services.
The goal
cannot be the elimination of clocks. Covid-19 previews an unstructured
existence within a total computer economy, a total gig economy and a total
do-it-yourself, round-the-clock life. What is the result of decreased regimentation?
Maybe too many naps. Excessive internet surfing. Heightened anxiety about
childcare and schooling. Unpredictable and/or lower wages. Spiritual
exhaustion.
Humane
work and a fuller life is not liberation from repetition. The old analysis
still applies: Despite talk about teamwork
and participation, workers are estranged
from one another, from the process and outcome of their labor and eventually
from themselves. That’s because too few workers—from warehouse workers to floor
managers to computer programmers to middle executives—are insufficiently taught
the process and the product of their labor. There just isn’t enough time to do
so, we’ve assumed.
As for O’Gieblyn,
she believes “there is [still] something transcendent in the pleasures of repetition.”
Tranquility is not simply the absence of structure. She cites St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) in saying that a full life requires habits aimed toward the
common good. A good habit is not slavery; it is a form of grace. And freedom, O’Gieblyn
concludes, is not “eliminating necessity from our daily lives.” Freedom is “the
ability to consistently choose the good.”
For more
from O’Gieblyn, get God, Human, Animal,
Machine (Knopf Doubleday, 2021).
Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102,
Chicago, IL 60629), a printed newsletter on faith and work.
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