Time

So in the last post, I wondered in typescript where the notion of the "good life" as some sort of atemporal object emerged, and whether it was a fair rendering. For those of us who think about such things, it seems to require a solid idea of the rough outline of the "good life" even before we can start to make decisions about daily practices. That seems a little demanding (maybe impossible). On the other hand, while I'm not sure we should demand an account of the necessary framework of the good life, I think we also want to retain the ability to declare some vocations as lying off the path to realizing a good life. Who knows which vocations are which...

But let's back up for just a moment. I think the "good life" rests on a particular way of conceiving of time. Maybe we should have a look at that. At least in contemporary discussions (in the US to be specific) there is a great deal of implicit belief about time in any inter-personal exchange. Time is the sequence of events, measured in precise increments. It seems to me that we can thank Newton for this. Our notion of time is tied up with framework of the infinitesimal calculus, differential equations, and the like. Some are bold enough to proclaim that statement the wrong way around, that instead our notions of the calculus are driven by the "real nature" of time. Tenuous. I have more to say about Newton's insights and their "necessity", but some other time. For now, let's stay on time.

Science has given us a very precise notion of time based on the resonance of cesium molecules in their gaseous state (go here and if anyone is reading carefully, please tell me how we are sure we've gotten a 5MHz signal if we in the process of building the clock?). The parenthetical point is the naive observation that at some point our measurement of time relies on a definition of the basic unit. In this case we've chosen a certain number of resonant cycles of cesium as the unit (1 second). This makes some sense because it is "objective" at least in that it is an external (outside the human body) measure of time.

But again, let's step back. Why is time linear (meaning just that 2 seconds is exactly twice as along as 1 second, and 6 seconds is exactly twice as long as 3 seconds, etc. It could be that the "increments" of time go as some power, so that 2 seconds is 4 times longer than 1 second for example, or they might just be random increments)? And for that matter, if entropy introduces the arrow of time, why shouldn't it also act as the measure. Is there a way of measuring the rate of entropy increase in the universe (oh wait, what is a "rate" if entropy is intrinsic to the definition of time!? paradoxes abound!)? That's getting out of my depth. For now, let's take the answer to be that time is linear because we say so. We have chosen to look at time as if it were the regular ticking off of moments, and we've imposed this view in a very structured way (mathematics and physics). The assumption is one of uniform increments. That is, that seconds are the interchangeable parts of the progression of time. This has had all sorts of practical effects from the industrial revolution to scientific management (see the bio of Fred Winslow Taylor) to personal digital assistants. Treating time this way, one might argue, is even at the root of the "timelessness" of much of our experience today. Seasons are manifest by the climate control settings in our buildings, and perhaps by what we see outside (even if we perhaps see much less than we could), but not by the availability of foods, the challenges of the weather, or the work that has to be done. We experience time these days in much the same way that computers do, and not coincidentally.

So, what if we decided to buck this notion for a moment. Suppose that instead of seeing time as a thing which we could measure into a string of interchangeable and precise increments, we look at time a little more in the way that we experience it. Our time seems to move at varying speeds whether we are in the initial moments of a first date or eating dinner in our fifth year of marriage, whether we are playing the first minutes of a sporting event or the last tense seconds, whether we are driving comfortably down the interstate or swerving in the brief moments before an accident. There are cycles by which we measure time experientially. Those are the diurnal and seasonal cycles as well as the cycles put in place by our practices. The ticks of the experiential clock have a quality as well as a quantity. Seasons are mild or harsh, days are long or short, meals with others are comfortable, tense, short, satisfying, tender, etc.

It is precisely the notion of time as a thing that is the root of the fear that we do not have enough of it.

Instead of seeing time as a string of uniform increments, I think perhaps we should understand that what we do, the practices to which we remain faithful day after day, are what give us time. The scarcity of time lies in measuring always by the "watched pot" (that's what a cesium clock is, right??) and never by the holiday mealtime. It really matters little how many seconds are in a life.

This may sound like "it's not how much time you have, but what you do with it" but that's only a caricature of what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say something harder to imagine. I'm trying to say that how much time you have IS what you do with it. We're equivocating, of course, because in one sense we're talking about cesium-clock-time and in another sense we're talking about time-prior-to-a-measure (scientists balk!) or at least time by some other measure. I want to suggest that two people who live through the same number of cesium oscillations do not necessarily have the same time (particularly if one of them spends his/her life watching that cesium beam!).

Am I being touchy-feely philosophical? Well, you may think so, but I don't really. I think that science is a system of producing a highly effective economy of objects (that's what a computer is right, it just determines who gets which electrons, when, and how). That is not to say that science has a monopoly on describing the world, or even to say that it is right because it is effective. I can make a dog sit effectively with violence, but we could have serious words about whether this has anything to do with a deep understanding of the dog or oneself. And it may just be that science does a certain violence (if only conceptually) to the world for the sake of effectiveness. Regardless whether you think it better or worse, it is undeniable that science has impacted our understanding of time. I claim that this scientific understanding is impoverished and breeds a notion of scarcity. It is also my contention that when we talk about time, we needn't mean anything more precise than what we create by a set of living practices.

And in the end, God has given and continually gives us time via the practices of daily, weekly, and yearly worship. If the amount of time we have just is what we do with it, then time is redeemed by observing seconds in terms of the cycles of worship. By this means God gives us eternity.