The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  The calendar continues to play an important role in contemporary culture. Its political significance has been greatly reduced, however, with the introduction of the schedule. The schedule exerts far greater control over time allocation than the calendar. While the calendar regulates macro time—events spread out over the year—the schedule regulates micro time—events spread out over the seconds, minutes, and hours of the day. The schedule looks to the future, not the past, for its legitimacy. In scheduling cultures, the future is severed from the past and made a separate and independent temporal domain. Scheduling cultures do not commemorate; they plan. They are not interested in resurrecting the past but in manipulating the future. In the new time frame, the past is merely a prologue to the future. What counts is not what was done yesterday, but what can be accomplished tomorrow.

  The calendar and the schedule differ in still another important way. While modern calendars have become increasingly secularized, throughout most of history their social content was inseparably linked to their spiritual content. In traditional calendrical cultures, the important times are sacred times and are observed through the commemoration of special holy days. The schedule, in contrast, is associated with productivity. Sacred values and spiritual concerns play little or no role in the formulation of schedules. Time, in the new scheme of things, is an instrument to secure output. Time is stripped of any remaining sacred content and transformed into pure utility.

  George Woodcock has observed, “It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilization develops the device that will later be used for its destruction.”30 The schedule, more than any other single force, is responsible for undermining the idea of spiritual or sacred time and introducing the notion of secular time. Needless to say, the Benedictine monks never for a moment intended the invention of the schedule to be used for any purpose other than to better arrange one’s time on Earth in preparation for eternal deliverance. Little did they suspect that it would become the primary tool of modern commerce.

  The Benedictine order was founded in the sixth century. It differed, in one important respect, from other Church orders. St. Benedict emphasized activity at all times. His cardinal rule, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” became the watchword of the order.31 The Benedictines engaged in continuous activity, both as a form of penitence and a means of securing their eternal salvation. St. Benedict warned the members of his order that “if we could escape the pains of hell and reach eternal life, then must we—whilst there is still time—hasten to do now what may profit us for eternity.”32

  Like the merchant class that would follow in their shadow, the Benedictines viewed time as a scarce resource. But for them, time was of the essence because it belonged to God, and because it was his, they believed they had a sacred duty to utilize it to the fullest in order to serve his glory. Toward this end, the Benedictines organized every moment of the day into formal activity. There was an appointed time to pray, to eat, to bathe, to labor, to read, to reflect, and to sleep. To ensure regularity and group cohesiveness, the Benedictines re-introduced the Roman idea of the hour, a temporal concept little used in the rest of medieval society. Every activity was assigned to an appropriate hour during the day. Consider the following set of instructions from the Rule of St. Benedict:

  The brethren . . . must be occupied at stated hours in manual labor, and again at other hours in sacred reading. To this end we think that the times for each day may be determined in the following manner. . . . The brethren shall start work in the morning and from the first hour until almost the fourth do the tasks that have to be done. From the fourth hour until the sixth let them apply themselves to reading. After the sixth hour, having left the table, let them rest on their beds in perfect silence.33

  To make sure that everyone began each activity together at the prescribed moment, the Benedictines introduced bells. Bells pealed, jangled, and tinkled throughout the day, hurrying the monks along to their appointed rounds. The most important bells were those that announced the eight canonical hours when the monks celebrated the Divine Offices.

  The Benedictines ordered the weeks, and the seasons, with the same temporal regularity as they did the day. Even such mundane activities as head-shaving, bloodletting, and mattress-refilling took place at fixed times during the course of the year.34

  The Benedictines introduced more than a new temporal orientation when they introduced the “schedule.” Eviatar Zerubavel wisely observes that, in appointing prescribed hours for specific activities and in demanding rigid obedience to the performance of these activities at the appropriate time, the Benedictines “helped to give the human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythms of the machine.”35 Political scientist Reinhard Bendix has described the Benedictine monk as “the first professional of Western Civilization.”36

  To secure proper compliance with the prescribed schedule, the Benedictines developed a tool that could provide them with greater accuracy and precision of time measurement than could be obtained by reliance on bells and bell ringers. They invented the mechanical clock. Lewis Mumford once remarked that “the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the Modern Age.”37 The first automated machine in history ran by a device called an escapement, a mechanism that “regularly interrupted the force of a falling weight,” controlling the release of energy and the movement of the gears.38

  At first, this new invention was used exclusively by the Benedictines as a means of assuring greater conformity with the daily schedule of duties. The clock allowed the clergy to standardize the length of hours. By establishing a uniform unit of duration, the monks were able to schedule the sequence of activities with greater accuracy and synchronize group efforts with greater reliability.

  It was not long, however, before word of the new marvel began to spread. By the late fifteenth century, the mechanical clock had stolen its way out of the cloisters and had become a regular feature of the new urban landscape. Giant clocks became the centerpiece of city life. Erected in the middle of the town square, they soon replaced the church bell as the rallying point and reference point for coordinating the complex interactions of urban existence.

  Just a century earlier, the grandeur of the Gothic cathedral had marked the status of a community, but now, the erection of the town clock became the symbol of city pride. In 1481, the residents of Lyons petitioned the city magistrate for a town clock, justifying the expenditure of city funds on the grounds that “more people would come to the fairs, the citizens would be very contented, cheerful and happy, and would live a more orderly life.”39

  The first clocks had no dials. They merely sounded a bell on the hour. Indeed, the term “clock” comes from the Middle Dutch word clocke, which means “bell.” By the sixteenth century, clocks were chiming on the quarter hour, and some were being constructed with dials to demarcate the passing of each hour. In the mid-1600s, the pendulum was invented, providing a much more exacting and reliable timing mechanism. Shortly thereafter, the minute hand was introduced. The second hand did not make its debut until the early 1700s, when it was first used by astronomers, navigators, and doctors to record more accurate measurements.

  The idea of organizing time into standardized units of hours, minutes, and seconds would have seemed strange, even macabre, to a peasant serf of medieval times. A day then was roughly divided into three sectors: sunrise, high noon, and sunset. The only other reminders, says Lawrence Wright, were “the seeding and harvest bell that called them to work, the sermon bell and the curfew bell.”40 Occasionally, one might hear the sound of the “gleaning bell, the oven bell when the manor oven was fired to bake the bread, the market bell, and the bells that summoned them to feast, fire, or funeral.”41 Even in these instances, time was not something fixed in advance and divorced from external events. Medieval time was still sporadic, leisurely, unpredictable, and, above all, tied to experiences rather than abstract numbers.

  “By its essential nature,” observes Lewis Mumford, the clock �
�dissociated time from human events.”42 It is also true, as historian David Landes, of Harvard University, suggests, that the clock dissociated “human events from Nature.”43 Time, which had always been measured in relation to biotic and physical phenomena, to the rising and setting sun and the changing seasons, was henceforth a function of pure mechanism. The new time substituted quantity for quality and automatism for the rhythmic pulse of the natural world.

  The emerging bourgeois class of merchants embraced the mechanical clock with a vengeance. It quickly became apparent that the increasingly complex activities of urban and commercial life required a method of regulation and synchronization that only the clock could provide.

  The clock found its first use in the textile industry. While textile production predated the rest of the industrial revolution by two centuries, it embodied many of the essential attributes that were to characterize the coming age. To begin with, textile manufacturing required a large, centralized workforce. It also required the use of complex machinery and great amounts of energy. The new urban proletariat congregated each morning in the dye shops and fulling mills, “where the high consumption of energy for heating the vats and driving the hammers encouraged concentration in large units.”44 This type of complex, highly centralized, energy-consuming production technology made it necessary to establish and maintain fixed hours for the beginning and end of the workday.

  Work bells, and later the work clock, became the instrument of the merchants and factory owners to control the work time of their laborers. Historian Jacques Le Goff remarks that here was the introduction of a radical new tool to assert power and control over the masses. He writes, “The communal clock was an instrument of economic, social, and political domination wielded by the merchants who ran the commune.”45

  Whereas in the craft trades and in farming, the workers had set the pace of activity, in the new factory system, the machinery dictated the tempo. That tempo was incessant, unrelenting, and exacting. The industrial production mode was, above all else, methodical. Its rhythm mirrored the rhythm of the clock. The new worker was expected to surrender his time completely to the new factory rhythm. He was to show up on time, work at the pace the machine set, and then leave at the appointed time. Subjective time considerations had no place inside the factory. There, objective time—machine time—ruled supreme.

  It was not only in the factory that the clock played an important new role. The bourgeois class found use for it in virtually every aspect of its daily life. This was a new form of temporal regimentation, more exacting and demanding than any other ever conceived. The bourgeoisie introduced the clock into their homes, schools, clubs, and offices. No corner of the culture was spared the reach of this remarkable new socializing tool. Lewis Mumford took stock of this transformation in time consciousness and concluded that

  the new bourgeoisie, in counting house and shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted routine: so long for business; so long for dinner; so long for pleasure—all carefully measured out. . . . Timed payments; timed contracts; timed work; timed meals; from this time on nothing was quite free from the stamp of the calendar or the clock.46

  To become “regular as clockwork” became the highest values of the new industrial age.47 Without the clock, industrial life would not have been possible. The clock conditioned the human mind to perceive time as external, autonomous, continuous, exacting, quantitative, and divisible. In so doing, it prepared the way for a production mode that operated by the same set of temporal standards.

  The metamorphosis of nature from God’s creation to man’s resources, the change in the usury laws, the shift from fair price to market price along with the birth of the money economy, and the introduction of the schedule and clock all profoundly transformed Europeans’ sense of space and time.

  The American Contribution to Space and Time

  The new concepts of space and time migrated to America with the early settlers. But, in the New World, the Enlightenment schema took on a somewhat different persona, one more suited to America’s frontier spirit. Americans introduced a new tool to harness space and time. Although the idea of efficiency is age old, its modern guise was developed in America in the nineteenth century and soon spread to the rest of the world, changing the way human beings organize the details of daily life. While human beings have used tools for thousands of years, the shift to coal and steam power in the nineteenth century afforded enormous new opportunities to manipulate space and duration. As we mentioned briefly at the beginning of the chapter, for the first time, human beings could break through the upper limits imposed by the rhythms of nature and begin to turn space and time into an ever quickening productive force for material advancement.

  Even though Europeans—especially the English and Germans—were quick to use the new steam-driven technologies, it was the Americans who created the intellectual and conceptual mechanism for aligning human performance with the rhythm of the new machines. Efficiency was transformed by American engineers into a set of methodological practices that, in turn, became an all-encompassing tool for organizing space and time. And, it is the modern notion of efficiency that has done more than anything else to shape the contemporary American character and provide the juice to propel the American Dream.

  Efficiency meant something quite different in the early eighteenth century. In Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, published in 1755, efficiency still had a theological frame of reference. God is defined as the most efficient first cause. In the biblical account of creation, God commands the heavens and Earth into existence—the perfectly efficient act.

  Efficiency metamorphosed into its current form in the late nineteenth century. Scientists and engineers were working in the new field of thermodynamics, measuring energy inputs and outputs and entropy in machines. In the process, they redefined efficiency, transforming it into a purely machine value. Henceforth, efficiency was to be regarded as the maximum output that can be produced in the minimum time, with the minimum input of labor, energy, and capital. The new definition of efficiency migrated quickly from the machine bench to the factory floor, front office, the home, and personal life, to become the measure of human performance and the criteria for determining the value of human activity. More than that, efficiency became the indispensable tool for assuring personal success and the realization of the American Dream. He who is the most efficient, and therefore most productive, goes the reasoning, is the most likely to rise to the top—to make something out of himself. While the new interest in efficiency found its way back to Europe and eventually to Asia, it was taken up more selectively in the work arena, whereas in America it became an all-embracing behavioral norm, conditioning virtually every aspect of life.

  Americans are in love with efficiency. It has become our defining attribute and is engrained in our very being as a people. To understand how we came to transform a machine time value into a human behavioral norm, we need to go back to America’s Calvinist roots and to our deeply held belief of being a chosen people.

  Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had argued that being self-sacrificing and industrious was a sign that one had been elected for salvation. John Calvin, the French Reformation theologian, denounced the Church doctrine of salvation through good works, confession, and absolution. God can’t be lobbied for a place in heaven, said Calvin. The Reformers believed that every human being is elected or damned at birth and that doing good works could not change one’s fate. The lingering question, however, for every Christian, was how to know whether, in fact, one had been saved by God’s grace. While no one can ever really know, Calvin argued that those who have been saved will fulfill all of God’s commandments with zeal, not because it will secure their salvation but rather simply because God wills it. Moreover, everyone has an obligation to believe they have been chosen and to act accordingly. Constant performance serves as a kind of partial proof, or at least a sign, one can look to for hope that he or she has been saved. />
  Calvin demanded even more from the faithful. He claimed that it wasn’t enough just to continue to do whatever one did in the world the best way one knew—that was Martin Luther’s concept of calling. Calvin argued that each person is called upon to constantly improve his or her lot in life by increasing their productivity and, in the process, elevating his or her station, if they were to serve the glory of God.

  In Calvin’s doctrine, each individual was forced to live from moment to moment, continually reassuring himself against his own gnawing doubt, by constantly performing God’s will. Even a momentary lapse from a total earthly ascetic commitment could undermine one’s personal belief and confidence that he or she is one of the elect.

  John Winthrop and the Puritans, and the other Protestant sects that followed on their heels to America, were, in many ways, the most faithful adherents to the Reformation theology. Long after the religious fervor ebbed in Europe, its flame was kept alive in the American colonies by waves of religious asylum seekers anxious to maintain the purity of their beliefs.

  Here, the religious zealots faced the sober reality of a wild, untamed continent where physical survival was at least as important as eternal salvation. By combining Calvin’s doctrine of relentless productivity with the Enlightenment emphasis on rational behavior, technological prowess, and pragmatic utilitarianism, they were able to eke out an existence and live out their beliefs at the same time.

  The new notion of efficiency was ideally suited to the unique American temperament, with its emphasis on Reformation theology and Enlightenment science. Efficiency is a rational, technologically mediated way to continually improve one’s productivity. The more efficient one becomes, the more sure one is that he or she is improving his or her lot, all to the glory of God. Being ever more efficient, in turn, becomes a way of convincing oneself that one has been elected to salvation.