Pathologies and Policies of Time: Part I
Posted Wed May 23 02:10:41 2001 by orooney |
By Brian Davey
To
every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die a time to plant, and a
time to pluck up that which is planted A time to kill, and a time to
heal a time to break down, and a time to build up A time to weep, and a
time to laugh a time to mourn, and a time to dance A time to cast away
stones, and a time to gather stones together a time to embrace, and a
time to refrain from embracing A time to get, and a time to lose a time
to keep, and a time to cast away A time to rend, and a time to sew a
time to keep silence, and a time to speak A time to love, and a time to
hate a time of war, and a time of peace. Ecclesiastes 3
Remember
that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour,
and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends
but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that
the only expense he has really spent, or thrown away, five shillings
besides. Benjamin Franklin
Introduction - natural time and clock time
Time
is our orientation to the experience of change. In addition to our use
of clock time we all have a broader sense of temporality - an awareness
of flow and transcience beginnings and endings durations and phase
length periodicity with amplitude tempo, speed, acceleration and
deceleration the cycle of birth, maturation, decline, death and decay -
as well as rebirth, seasonality and cyclical return. Time and temporal
consciousness are our means of orientating ourselves to natural
processes (the seasons and the cycles of day and night) and human
processes. Since the beginning of human history the routine patterns of
social and individual activity have been orientated to the natural
cycles - our work and domestic activities have been organised around
day and night hours, around the twenty eight day menstrual cycle,
around the seasons.
The argument of this paper is that there
is a growing deviation between natural time and clock time. Put in
another way - our temporal orientation, our time consciousness, has
been distorted by an undue reliance on clock time organised for money
making and for economic purposes. We are unaware of, and pay too little
heed to, crucial dimensions of the temporal organisation of nature and
ecological processes, of our own bodies, of our unequal social
organisation and of our minds. Instead we have an undue fixation on the
temporal organisation of the money economy. In this essay I will show
that this matters for the health of the ecology of the planet, it
matters for the health of our social structures, for our interpersonal
relationships and it matters for minds and our bodies.
By
natural time I mean the natural cycle and periodicity of our bodies
which evolved inside the cycles of nature and of the seasons. These
biological cycles are wrapped in the cosmological ones - as the earth
turns on its axis and spins around the sun. We cannot escape the fact
that our biological evolution has evolved us, like other species, to
respond to the cycle of day and night for example - our body
temperature, our blood pressure, our concentration, memory, our levels
of attentiveness and innattentiveness, glucose levels, activity levels,
urine production, capacity to digest fats, hunger signals, sexual and
other hormones, as well as our sleep patterns, all function on a
circadian (day and night 24 hour) rhythms.
These cycles are of
very great importance for our physical and mental health. As we shall
see, however, modern time management is beginning to exact a toll on
our health as these rhythms are increasingly ignored and abused.
By
natural time I also mean the temporal features of Nature, of the
ecological process. A great deal of study has been made of the spatial
dimensions of ecology but, in recent years, there has been a dawning
realisation of the need also to understand the temporal dimensions of
Nature.
For example, flooding around the world has led to
study of the time patternings of flows in river systems which have
considerable local and regional planning applications. The behaviour of
a river system displays a rhythmic space-time relationship between
landscape and climatic conditions. River depth and shape the absorption
capacities and run-off features of catchment areas and surrounding
countryside and towns, with their different vegetation and biotop
features the seasonal cycles of rainfall and snow melt etc. - all these
effect the amplitude, the durations, the periodicity of low and high
water and river speed.
In short, rivers have time
characteristics. In a variety of ways, human effects on the environment
in general (global warming and its effect on rainfall), as well as
specific time-space adjustments to rivers for human economic needs
(like river deepening and lengthening for all year navigability)have
led to profound effects on the temporal dimensions of rivers and their
flood patterns. (M?ller - Wohlfeil D.Mi?achtung nat?rlicher Rhythmen in
Adam B., Gei?ler K. and Held M. (eds.) Die Non-Stop Gesellschaft und
ihr Preis Stuttgart 1998 pp 149 - 169)
The industrial economy,
as I shall show, is blind to many of its temporal dimensions. Of
course, it is aware of the time it takes to make things, to market
them, and the time that they remain in use. All these are relevant to
the calculations of money making and households. However, after "use"
the material substances that make up products, with all their chemical,
physical and biological properties, remain in existence as part of the
ecological process. Obsolescent and used products have a temporal
character of great importance - even if we turn our back on them and
render them out of sight, out of mind. A starting point for sustainable
production is the recognition that the longer human created/processed
substances remain in the natural ecological process the greater the
danger that they will have a destrutive effect on the ecological
process and its organisms.
In this respect laboratory based
science, based on short term experiments, under controlled conditions,
can tell us little about the long term effects of the presence of a
great many industrial products left in the environment - as it is only
over time that the effects can be known. (Sabine Hofmeister "Zeit der
Erneurung" in Adam B., Gei?ler K. and Held M. (eds.) Die Non-Stop
Gesellschaft und ihr Preis Stuttgart 1998 pp 185-200 )
|
|
|
|
