The "Leap Second" and the Flatness of Modern Time

Today's New York Times reports on a contentious issue looming at a UN-related agency known as the International Telecommunication Union: should the world do away with the "leap second?"

The leap second is an additional second that the keepers of the atomic clocks have added every few years since 1972 to keep those extremely precise clocks in line with the earth's rotation "which [as the Times reports], sadly, does not  run quite like clockwork."

Who knew that such an obscure practice of timekeeping could be divisive?

It turns out that U.S. experts are worried that inserting an occasional extra second could mess up global computer networks. Even that one second could crash servers around the world, and computers don't like such randomness. Therefore, the U.S. wants to stop adding the leap second.

But their opponents--including China, the U.K., and Canada--worry that abolishing the leap second would create a divergence. By the year 2112, they contend, there would be a full minute gap between the official, atomic clock and the earth's rotational one. And eventually, after 100,000-plus years, the official atomic noon would occur at sunrise. Sounds like a crisis, eh? It's keeping me up at night!

On a more serious note, the whole debate illustrates how the world has become flattened and globalized through increasingly precise measurement, standardization, and networking. As chapter 1 of my book points out (and as the Times story reports), this movement to standardize time took off in the late nineteenth century, with the advent of railroads. The effort culminated in the global system of time zones that still governs us today. And the current system goes a step further, down to worrying about the effects over millennia of adding a second of time every few years.

I probably won't be watching on June 30 of this year when the atomic clock gains a second. But I'll continue to be amazed at how humans have taken time--a precious gift of God, a mystery of fullness--and flattened it into an object that they can precisely measure and seemingly control at will.

Despite our brilliant ability to fathom the complexities of earthly, chronological time, we need to grasp the fullness of kairos time if we are to live peaceably during our days and years on earth.

Chesterton's Defense of Repetitious Rituals

The British writer G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of the most eccentric and famous twentieth century converts to Christianity. After a brief sojourn in the Church of England, he ended up in the Roman Catholic Church, a counter-cultural perch that informed his quirky views of just about everything toward the end of his life.

In researching my book, a friend recommended that I read a volume of his collected writings on economics, including a book he published under the title Outline of Sanity, which I did read and did enjoy. There, Chesterton defends his philosophy of Distributism, which he and his friend Hillaire Belloc framed as an alternative to both socialism and capitalism. In Chesterton's view, there was little difference between the two, because both led to giant bureaucracies with monopolies. (A contemporary Chestertonian would challenge anyone to identify major differences between navigating through government red tape and cellphone or computer companies' red tape. Both are giant, anonymous, remote, and have you over a barrel.)

The true alternative to these concentrations of power, for Chesterton, was to foster small, local forms of ownership and proprietorship, as in the Middle Ages. Although he could be accused of idealizing the peacefulness of the medieval economy, he was quite well-read in history, and his criticisms of modern economics are often trenchant (and occasionally tinged with nostalgia). Distributism's solutions are not always realistic, but its critique is spot-on.

More recently, I picked up a library copy of an earlier volume of G.K.C.'s collected works, composed of his writings on his conversion to Catholicism. In a book entitled The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic (1929), he responds to one of the common Protestant objections to Catholicism: the charge that it relies on empty, repeated rituals in its prayer and worship or what Chesterton calls "mechanical repetition." His response is worth quoting extensively, since it is so lively:

[A critic] says that we repeat prayers and other verbal forms without thinking about them. And doubtless there are many sympathizers who will repeat that denunciation after him, without thinking about it at all. But, before we come to explaining the Church's real teaching about such things, or quoting her numberless recommendations of attention and vigilance, or expounding the reason of the reasonable exceptions that she does allow, there is a wide, a simple and a luminous truth about the whole situation which anybody can see if he will walk about with his eyes open. It is the obvious fact that all human forms of speech tend to fossilize into a formalism; and that the Church stands unique in history, not as talking a dead language among everlasting languages; but, on the contrary, as having preserved a living language in a world of dying languages. When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are good many people in church who really do say Kyrie eleison [Lord have mercy] and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with "Dear Sir" means what he says. "Dear" is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. Now, life, ordinary, jolly, heathen, human life, is simply chockful of these dead words and meaningless ceremonies. You will not escape from them by escaping from the Church into the world. When the critic in question, or a thousand other critics like him, say that we are only required to make a material or mechanical attendance at Mass, he says something which is not true about the ordinary Catholic in his feelings about the Catholic Sacraments. But he says something which is true about the ordinary Court levee or Ministerial reception, and about three-quarters of the ordinary society calls and polite visits in the town. This deadening of repeated social action may be a harmless thing; it may be a melancholy thing; it may be a mark of the Fall of Man; it may be anything the critic chooses to think. But those who have made it, hundreds and hundreds of times, a special and concentrated charge against the Church, are men blind to the whole human world they live in and unable to see anything but the thing they traduce. (The Collected Works G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3, [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990], pp. 216-217).

We can boil G.K.C.'s points down to four: 1) the charge of "mechanical repetition" overlooks Catholic tradition, which acknowledges and deals with this very problem; 2) ordinary human societies also have many empty rituals, such as addressing a letter with "Dear" or the rituals of government; 3) many of these secular rituals are quite empty in comparison to repeated practices in worship, which believers find meaningful; and 4) the people who make this charge (ironically enough) are themselves repeating this charge without thinking about it.

To this, one can add another point: all worship practices involve some element of repetition. No low-church evangelicals would propose getting rid of sermons, even though sermons are given every week (empty ritual!). All worship is liturgical in the sense that it involves a set of patterns and practices; and most churches repeat these patterns and practices weekly.

For anyone interested in the liturgical year, this is an interesting defense against the church of "mechanical repetition."

The Father of Counter-Globalization Experiments

It's funny how some books lead you to other books. Earlier this summer I read Wendell Berry's Long-Legged House and Susan Maushart's Winter of our Disconnect--both of which referred to Henry David Thoreau (left) and his famous living experiment on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachussetts. So I decided to follow the lead of these other authors and read Walden (published in 1854 and based on Thoreau's experiences between 1845 to 1847).

Having never read all of Walden, I was able to fill a gap in my education and discover that Thoreau could easily be credited with inventing a genre of non-fiction that has exploded in recent years: the counter-globalization-living-experiment-turned-into-a-book.

One of my Advent 2010 posts listed several examples of these books, with Sara Bongiorni's A Year Without "Made in China" serving as a typical model. A new and notable model of the alternative living genre, though, is Susan Maushart's experiment, aptly described by the lengthy subtitle of her book: "How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale."

Maushart is the first author I've encountered in this genre who openly turns to Thoreau for inspiration--an appropriate move, since Thoreau is famous for his experiment move to the woods on Walden Pond, which even then was not exactly in the wilderness. But the turn to Thoreau is also appropriate because he has an eye on global economic trends (among other things).

The reader expecting a simple chronological account of Thoreau's two years in his little cabin will be surprised to discover that he opens the book with a lengthy and digressive chapter entitled "Economy," in which he points out that modern people depend heavily on others for transportation, clothing, and shelter. In the name of economy and efficiency, the division of labor supposedly frees us. But Thoreau believes that such dependence on others actually enslaves us. And he even shows us his financial accounts, to prove that his simple way of living is actually cost-effective.

Furthermore, contends Thoreau, the desire to connect disparate parts of the globe through technology often goes unexamined, and questions about the purposes of such connections go unasked. As he puts it,

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already too easy to arrive at . . . . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has a whooping cough. ("Economy," Everyman's Library edition, p. 46)

All this global media technology provides instantaneous updates to everyone all over the world, all at once. And we await important newsflashes . . . about Lady Gaga's outfits or Lindsey Lohan's misdeeds or George Clooney's new movie. We have iPhones, iPads, Twitter and Facebook, but do we communicate any better now than we do sitting face to face? Or is all this noise and distraction making it harder to communicate about important matters? Thoreau would have us ask such questions.

One benefit of living a simpler life, says Thoreau, was that

life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without end. ("Sounds," p. 100)

News Flash: Simple reality can often be more engaging than the diverting dramas on television.

In his chapter, "Sounds," Thoreau muses about railroads (a symbol of the creeping modernization and industrialization and globalization that Thoreau was resisting). One particular point echoes the introduction to chapter 1 of my book about railroad time:

The startings and arrivals of the [railroad] cars are now the epochs of the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? . . . To do things "railroad fashion" is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. ("Sounds,"p. 105)

In the second half of the book, Thoreau closely observes nature in and around Walden Pond. Even the earth itself, he says, is

not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit--not a fossil earth, but a living earth . . . . ("Spring," p. 273)

It is this section of the book that Wendell Berry clearly echoes in The Long-Legged House, with his evocative descriptions of the landscapes on his family's land near the Kentucky River. Attachment and attention to a particular place is a powerful and healthy antidote to the placeless landscape of globalization.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that a whole generation of people worried about the unsettling processes of globalization have consciously or unconsciously emulated Thoreau's desire to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life" and "live deep and suck all the marrow of life" ("Where I Lived," pp. 80-81).

Can You Gain Time by Giving Up Devices?

I'll start with a confession: this Christmas, I've had dreams of smart phones, iPads, and Kindles dancing around in my head. One reason these devices are so alluring is that they promise more time. I'd really like to be able to access every book ever written, immediately, with a small touchscreen machine in my hand. Forget all the time walking through libraries, all the hassles of checking out books, all the delays while waiting for them to be shipped. It's a dream!

In my waking hours, I've read a couple of old-fashioned printed books--a technology I still adore--that share stories of giving up modern technology.

Can one forsake time-saving technologies and gain back time? That's the lesson from these two authors.

Colin Beavan, in No Impact Man, spent a year scaling back his ecological footprint. After giving up cars and taxis, he tells a story about walking around New York City in the rain with his young daughter Isabella:

And on this rainy day, here is what happens when I treat my body as something more than a means to transport my head, when I finally learn to treat the landscape as something more than the space that stands between where I am now and where I want to be later: 

I take Isabella down from my shoulders and let her jump in a puddle, soaking her shoes and pants. For fun, I jump in the puddle, too. Isabella laughs. She stretches out her arms with her palms facing up to catch the rain. She opens her mouth, sticks her tongue out and leans her head back. I try it, too.

When did the child in me disappear? 

People are running past. They look desperate, miserable, trying to get out of the rain. What has happened to us (pp. 87-88)?

Slowing down, connecting to the weather, to natural rhythms, can open up time. As Beavan puts it,

The mechanized boxes that transport our brains from here to there and the portable electronics that keep us constantly connected have robbed us of the ho-hum. Those periods that interrupted the everyday rush, like a red light constantly bringing the quiet of stopped traffic, have been excised. Now peak moment follows peak moment, and they have all been accordioned together (p. 89).

My translation: we can't experience the fullness of time or kairos time as a constant succession of peak moments. Peak moments can't be engineered to happen constantly. Kairos time (deeply meaningful time) normally emerges in cracks, gaps, or interruptions of chronos (24/7 clock) time, and we need to savor those cracks, gaps, or interruptions.

This might sound a bit pie-in-the-sky, but Eric Brende made some hardheaded calculations during his year without technology (as reported in Better OFF: Flipping the Switch on Technology).

Having committed to 18 months of farming Amish-style, with minimal technology, he was a bit overwhelmed by the high point of the summer threshing season, which was spent picking up sheaves of wheat with a pitchfork and pitching them into a threshing machine under a hot sun. In fact, he got heatstroke in his first day of threshing, much to his neighbors' delight (and they worked communally on all such large tasks).

But he did some time-motion calculations and estimated that he and his neighbors spent "nine hours and twenty minutes actual labor in the [threshing] peak season," which "lasted approximately two to four weeks" (p. 162). Combine this with the frequent breaks during the work, the pleasure of working with others, a pleasant off-season filled with down time, and the fact that all the farmers in the community were debt-free, this seemed like a pretty good bargain to him.

Later in the book, he waxes poetically about this discovery of more time (gained with the elimination of allegedly time-saving devices):

Even in the busy season we had more time. This was another way to say that we had fallen in time, taking our time. The relaxed rhythms of manual labor, like some unseen conductor's beat, coaxed into synchrony the oddest array of harmonizing parts. We had drummed our wooden spoons against the kitchen kettles, mingled with the brass and winds of the barn animals and soared cerebrally to the accompaniment of string beans. And after much arduous polishing and practicing, we had finally struck a chord with the whole collection.

The secret lay, much as in anything, in simultaneity. Things that technology had separated were reunited. The results were more than efficient; they were symphonic. In an orchestral performance an oboe warbles beside a viola and the two produce a lush blend. On the porch of a working household, you visit with your mother-in-law while pushing the centers of tomatoes into a bowl, and the breeze brushes against your face, and the leaves rustle--and likewise music emanates. And when your part is done, there is plenty of time to breathe during the rests (p. 217).

Although I could never express it so eloquently, I have experienced this kind of grace--beauty, time abundance, connection to others--when I've turned off my devices and taken a sabbath nap, when I've worked with others, when I've taken time to enjoy the weather, and when I've just been open to God's presence.

Even if we could download a "kairos time app," we'll never be able to schedule the Fullness of Time with our devices. And that's good news.

Kierkegaard on the Fullness of Time

I've been reading the philosopher Kierkegaard this semester, and I recently discovered this wonderful description of the Incarnation in Philosophical Fragments:

And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the Eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.

 Hmmm . . .