7.
WHAT IS HAPPENING to us? Nothing to get worked up about. This is life in an industrial and postindustrial and post-postindustrial society. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,” Lewis Mumford wrote. Ever since the early fourteenth century, when Italian churchmen and city fathers began adorning their towers with publicly visible clocks, we have been governed by increasingly precise instruments of time measurement. It was public clocks, then household clocks, then watches, then stopwatches, and, ultimately, the atomic clock, that made it possible to coordinate and schedule more and more complex networks of manufacturing, labor, and trade.
One weirdly delightful fact about clocks is that they made possible a new crime: time theft. According to the British social historian E. P. Thompson, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century masters and managers stole time from their workers. They put the factories’ clocks forward in the morning and back at night, so that workers had to come in earlier and leave later without being paid for more work. One English worker told an investigating committee about a clock with a weighted minute hand that, as soon as it started on its downward slope, dropped three minutes at a time. It was used to shorten the dinner hour. Time was money, as Benjamin Franklin said, and had to be made to pay. The sharp use of time became the moral obligation of the businessman. “The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty,” Max Weber declared in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Two giants of temporal thrift, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, pushed us into the modern era at the turn of the twentieth century. Taylor invented time-and-motion studies. Ford standardized and quickened production by breaking down tasks for the assembly line. Postwar “post-Fordism” brought, among other things, “vertical disintegration”—subcontracting and outsourcing—as well as small-batch and just-in-time and globally networked production, electronic banking, computerized trading, and the more rapid pace of consumption that follows from a switch from a commodity-based to a service-based economy. (It takes less time to see a movie than to wear out a coat.)
It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that anyone noticed that all this time-saving didn’t make us feel less rushed. On the contrary. “We had always expected one of the beneficent results of economic affluence to be a tranquil and harmonious manner of life, a life in Arcadia,” the Swedish economist Staffan Linder wrote in his 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class. “What has happened is the exact opposite. The pace is quickening, and our lives in fact are becoming more hectic.” Linder’s theory was that as labor becomes more specialized and productivity increases, two things happen. First, each hour of work increases in value, which jacks up the value of hours spent not working. Non-work time has a higher “opportunity cost”—each minute not spent completing one’s work assignments equals more money squandered. Second, there are ever more products to consume.
Linder realized that these outcomes cancel each other out. He was the first to point out something that has since become obvious: To calculate the real cost of consumption, you have to factor in the real amount of time spent consuming. Consuming is not just buying. Not only do we need time to make smart decisions about our new cars, high-definition televisions, and lawn mowers; we also need time to read the instruction manuals or call the help desk in order to learn to use all our increasingly complicated gadgets. And we need to keep them in good shape or get them repaired. In short, as time becomes more valuable to us, our consumer goods become more expensive to us.
One solution to the problem of maintenance is to outsource it. In the decades since Linder’s book, outsourcing has expanded to include not just the upkeep and the repairs we used to do ourselves (laundry, lawn work, home repair, child care) but chores and roles once considered too personal or trivial to hire someone to do, from organizing garages to filling in at social occasions for the spouses we don’t have time to court and marry. From a financial point of view, though, outsourcing is not the answer. The price of personal services rises as more people buy them, which means those same people have to work more to foot the monthly bill for their in-house or subcontracted support staffs. The grueling hours endured by handsomely paid professionals, it turns out, don’t necessarily reflect work addiction. Putting in those hours may be the only way to stay ahead of the bill collector.
The other solution to the time famine is to cram more activities into the same span of time. Not long after Linder’s book appeared, Erwin Scheuch, a German sociologist who had conducted a time-diary study in twelve countries, noticed that the more industrialized the country, the more likely a person was to crowd more activities into the same twenty-four hours. Scheuch called this “time-deepening,” by analogy to the economic concept of “capital deepening”—getting the same output from a production process at a lower cost.
Time-deepening spares our pocketbooks, even if it reduces the intensity of our pleasure. In that sense, Scheuch’s phrase is misleading, because stuffing life with more things and distractions makes time feel shallower, not deeper. “Time-stretching” may be a better term. Whatever you call it, Linder accurately predicted how it would affect the texture of our lives. He anticipated the rising preference for fast food, quickie sex, drive-through banking, and so on, as well as the predictable rejection of such things by those élite contrarians who could afford slow food, old-fashioned courtship, and personal bankers.
Linder also foresaw subtler impacts. Lacking the leisure to research all the goods and services that we feel compelled to purchase, we rely more and more on what Linder calls “ersatz information,” or advertising, which lets people feel they’re still getting enough input to make a good decision. (Linder wrote his book before the explosion of “branding,” but he would have seen brand identification as yet another form of overreliance on ersatz information.)
Home is the place where we dream of escaping the time-and-motion calculus. Family time is best measured by the activity, not by the clock. You serve your stew when it’s ready, not when it has cooked for an hour. You put away your sponges and cleaning fluids when your bathroom is clean, not after five minutes. You nurse a baby until she’s full, whether that takes ten minutes or forty. This form of time measurement is known as task orientation, and it is the kind of time that is kept in less industrialized societies. Task orientation is also characterized by a tendency not to make overly fine distinctions between “work” (doing chores) and “life” (chatting, eating, relaxing).
People used to working a set number of hours often find the task-oriented approach to time scandalously wasteful, an attitude that can contribute to misunderstandings not only between industrialized and non-industrialized cultures but also between spouses, especially when one works out of the home and the other stays in it. “Despite school times and television times, the rhythms of women’s work in the home are not wholly attuned to the measurement of the clock,” E. P. Thompson wrote. “The mother of young children has an imperfect sense of time and attends to other human tides. She has not yet altogether moved out of the conventions of ‘pre-industrial’ time.”
But time in the home is still money. Feminist economics has taught us that the domestic sphere floated above the sordid dominion of the dollar only because it relied on the free labor and the forgone opportunities of women. Ever since women grew weary of the unwritten rule deeming their time worth what they were paid for it, it has gotten harder to find anyone—Linder would say, to pay anyone enough—to invest the time to meet our most intimate physical and emotional needs.
We all know what it feels like to give short shrift to ourselves, our families, and our children, not to mention the stranger in our midst. It feels disgusting. Our bodies, our houses, and our relationships spiral toward disorder and decay. Our nails lengthen because we forget to cut them. Our eyesight blurs because we can’t be bothered to visit the eye doctor. Slime accumulates on pantry shelves. The tone in our spouses’ voices hardens. Childre
n mutiny at times seemingly calculated to be inconvenient. Too busy to attend to our own needs, we lack sympathy for the needs of people who seem less busy than we are. That, too, has consequences. Before long, the underemployed become the unemployable, then the menacing mob.
8.
THE SABBATH—God’s claim against our time—implies that time has an ethical dimension. We rest in order to honor God and his creation, which suggests that not to rest dishonors both. So must we say that the speeding up of everything is not only psychologically harmful but morally wrong? What about the contravening benefits of super-productivity—the wealth, health, democracy, and philanthropy that come with it?
In 1973, the social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson performed an experiment that was meant to explore a dimension of the human personality, but along the way they stumbled onto something important about the ethics of time. Their question was, What makes a passerby decide whether to stop to help someone in distress? Is it personality, cultural conditioning, or the situation at hand? Darley and Batson wanted to know which of these variables had the greatest influence on whether a person acted like the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable of that name:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
Looking for test subjects who were likely to have made the message of the parable a part of their lives, Darley and Batson recruited students from the Princeton Theological Seminary. Their study proceeded as follows: First, the researchers ran tests to determine each student’s personality type. Then the researchers announced that they needed more information. The students would have to give a talk. Half of them were asked to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan. The other half were told to discuss the job prospects that faced them as future ministers and were instructed to report to another building, where their audiences would be waiting for them. As the students left the first building, a researcher urged about a third of them to hurry, because they were already late. He assured another third that they were right on time but shouldn’t dawdle. He told the last third that there was a slight delay in the proceedings but that they should wander over anyway. As the students walked to the second building, they passed a man slumped against a doorway in an alley. They didn’t know it, but this was the real test. As each student approached, the man coughed and groaned. If the student stopped, the man told them in a confused and groggy voice that he was fine but he had a respiratory condition; he had taken medicine that would begin to work any minute now. If the student insisted on helping the man, he allowed himself to be taken into a building nearby.
After the data was weighted and the variables analyzed, only one variable could be used to predict who would stop to help and who wouldn’t. The important factor was not personality type or whether a student’s career or the parable of the Good Samaritan was foremost in his mind. It was whether or not he was in a hurry. Personality had significance only among those students who stopped. Particularly empathetic students stayed with the man longer; those who were doctrinally rigid forced him to drink a glass of water even when he said he didn’t want one. As for the effects of culture, Darley and Batson pointed out that it would be hard to name a cultural norm more powerful for a seminary student than the example of the Good Samaritan, but it still didn’t make a student more likely to stop.
The study made it hard not to conclude, said Darley and Batson, “that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.” The psychologists weren’t quick to judge these seminarians. Even though all the students who hadn’t stopped admitted that they’d seen the man, Darley and Batson pointed out, several said that they hadn’t realized that he needed help until after they’d passed him. Time pressure had narrowed their “cognitive map”; as they raced by they had seen without seeing.
Meanwhile, the students who had realized that the man required assistance but had withheld it from him showed up for their talks looking “aroused and anxious.” Darley and Batson speculated that their subjects felt torn between their duty to help the man and their desire to live up to the expectations of the psychologists whose test they had freely agreed to take. “This is often true of people in a hurry,” Darley and Batson wrote. “They hurry because somebody depends on their being somewhere. Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”
9.
THE ONE THING I DO CONSISTENTLY on Friday nights is drink. I drink whether I’m at home or at a more traditionally laid Sabbath table or attending an entirely non-Jewish event that I couldn’t bring myself to pass up. I drink red wine, if I can, and right up to the line where looseness looks a lot like rudeness. Preferring not to think of myself as a weekly alcoholic, I tell myself that wine stands in for the Sabbaths I so rarely manage to keep. A full-bodied red wine is what a poet might call the objective correlative of the Sabbath, with the color of kosher wine I sipped as a child (though not the poisonous sweetness), the warmth of the candles, the mollifying effect on critical consciousness that Ferenczi said Sunday ought to have.
This is not precisely in the spirit of the Jewish Sabbath, but there is a family resemblance to it. The rabbis disapproved of drunkenness, but they also decreed that the Sabbath be a time for joy. “Call the Sabbath a delight,” the prophet Isaiah said. Not being nearly as impractical as they are often made out to have been, the rabbis knew that you couldn’t rejoice without good food and strong drink. “When the Holy Temple stood, there was no rejoicing without meat,” the Talmud says. “Now that the Holy Temple is not standing, there is no rejoicing without wine.” Note the logic of substitution at work in that saying: We ate meat when we brought sacrifices to the Temple, but now that there’s no Temple we drink wine. Religions evolve through a process of condensation—call it distillation. First there’s some primal spiritual experience, then it’s boiled down to a symbol; when the old symbol threatens to lose its power, we turn up the heat to intensify it. Jesus was fortifying an ancient symbol with a strong new spirit when he told his disciples at the Last Supper, “This cup is the new testament in my blood.”
Sometimes I think that drinking wine is the only form of religiosity I can consistently muster. This is slightly less crazy than it sounds. There’s an old habit in religious life of achieving joy by oenophilic means. Everyone swigs wine in the Bible, and a social historian named Elliott Horowitz has collected a remarkably large number of examples of ancient, medieval, and early-modern Jews pushing the Sabbath delights—drinking, copulating, and schmoozing—a lot further than you’d expect them to, at least if you’re foolish enough to believe the usual clichés about Jews being sober and law-abiding. In the first century, Plutarch speculated that the Jews had a Dionysian streak, since they were so eager to celebrate the Sabbath by urging drink on one another. Horowitz recounts tales of Sabbath drinking contests held by fifteenth-century Egyptian Jews; he tells of a seventeenth-century rabbi in Frankfurt who chided the young men of his synagogue for drinking brandy during the Saturday-morning service, “sometimes becoming so drunk they forgot to recite the musaf prayer.” The repetitive songs sung at the close of the Passover service—the Seder, in which one is expected to drink at least four cups of wine—are said to derive from nursery songs, but they also have the classic structure of drinking songs: the repeated refrains, the lengthening verses, the fixed rhythms, th
e simple lyrics. The same can be said of many of the songs sung—or, rather, roared—after dinner around a Sabbath table. “Work makes for prosperous days; wine makes for happy Sundays,” as Charles Baudelaire put it in an essay on wine and hashish. Wine is the Sabbath in a bottle. Wine steps in when religion loses force.
Rarely, if ever, do Americans encounter the so-called blue laws once enforced in most states, banning all behavior deemed non-Sabbath-like—everything from traveling to card-playing and pawn-broking. But when we do it’s usually because a checkout clerk in a grocery store has refused to sell us beer or wine before noon on Sunday. You can deduce that drinking was the norm on British Sundays from these Puritan bans on alcohol, which were never fully enforced, not even in the seventeenth century, at the height of Puritan power. Puritan efforts to legislate Sunday drinking out of existence have left on the record a pungent portrait of the raucous Sundays common when the laws were written. The Sunday Law enacted under King James VI in 1656 reads:
Every person being in any Tavern, Inn, Alehouse, Victualling house, Strongwater house, Tobacco house, Celler or Shop, … or fetching or sending for any wine, ale, or beer, tobacco, strongwater, or other strong liquor unnecessarily, and to tipple within any other house or shop; … and every common brewer and baker, brewing and baking, or causing bread to be baked, or beer and ale to be brewed upon the day aforesaid…. All persons keeping, using, or being present upon the day aforesaid at any Fairs, Markets, Wakes, Revels, Wrestling, Shootings, Leaping, Bowling, Ringing of Bells for pleasure, or upon any other occasion (save for calling people together for the public Worship), Feasts, Church Ale, May-Poles, Gaming, Bear-baiting, Bull-Baiting, or any other Sports and Pastimes … shall be deemed guilty of profaning the Lord’s Day.
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time Page 5
