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.

When Time Slows Down

Third in a series (first post on Christmas)

It's the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, a time when many (though not all) Americans can lay around the house guilt-free. You get a chance to pause and spend time with family or friends. And much of the time you are feasting, eating all kinds of goodies in between large meals and festive parties. Time slows down during these holidays.

Like Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day is one of the only society-wide feast days in the United States. Feast days are those that break from the normal 24/7/365 work world of Western consumer society. Even fast food chains and gas stations close on Thanksgiving Day and December 25. There are no other days where this would fly. But on these days we understand and make an exception.

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Over the break, I've been reading several of the books that I mentioned in my last post. Among them, Colin Beavan in No Impact Man talks about eating dinners with his grandparents who were both extremely frugal and extraordinarily attentive to the natural world around them.

 They insisted I climb back up the stairs to the bathroom to turn the light of if if I'd left it on. They taught me to take only what food I would eat and never to throw trash on the ground. They wore sweaters and kept the heat down low (p. 36).

They also took their time eating dinner, waiting until after sunset to start. After dinner,

when my grandmother washed the dishes, I would stand beside her and we'd look out the window together at the New England stone wall in her backyard. Chipmunks had burrowed there. "That's the father," my grandmother would say. "Those are the babies." The birds would come. A red-winged blackbird, Grannie would tell me. A goldfinch (p. 42).

Looking back, he thinks that gratitude connects their frugality and their attentiveness toward Creation:

My grandparents' no-waste rules seemed pointless when I was young. You should this. You shouldn't that. And for the sake of . . . what? Piety? Sanctimony? But something about their intention not to waste and their emphasis on cultivating gratitude--Depression-era thoughts or not--seems connected to making time to watch the sunset and the chipmunks (p. 43).

The slower time of a feast season like Christmas brings us closer to the fullness of time--kairos time--where we can appreciate more deeply the gifts of God's Son and God's Creation given for us and for our salvation. Thanksgiving is the general posture of the entire twelve days of the Christmas season.
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Today, December 28, is the Feast of Commemoration of the Holy Innocents, which reminds us of how those gifts are not to be taken for granted. When Herod's soldiers slaughtered the young children of Bethlehem (see Matthew 2:13-18), they created a stark reminder in the Christian calendar that our gratitude for the gifts of God necessarily involves concern for others. The Episcopal Collect for this day makes this link explicit:

We remember this day, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

This emphasis--mercy for innocent victims, justice for the oppressors--builds on the Advent theme of the Kingdom. Even as we celebrate during this season the good gifts we have received, we long for the day when there will be no more injustice, when God's Kingdom will reign here on earth.

Do Social Media Promote Narcissism?

In a previous post reviewing Judith Shulevitz's book The Sabbath World, I touched on her contention that cellphones promote more flexible ways of being in time. Instead of fixing our social engagements on the calendar grid, we may "play it by ear" more. I've noticed that my kids tend to do this with their friends. We get calls or texts from them as their "hanging out" shifts from place to place. But maybe this is just what teens do. Are new communications technologies shaping adult society?

Yesterday's New York Times helps answer the question affirmatively, with an excerpt from a new book Nick Bilton, one of their technology writers/bloggers. While Bilton may overstate the case, I think he's touching on a pretty profound shift that technology allows--a shift that may change how we experience time. The opening paragraphs of the story grabbed me right away (the bolded passages especially):

If you pull out your smartphone and click the button that says “locate me” on your mapping application, you will see a small dot appear in the middle of your screen.

That’s you.

If you start walking down the street in any direction, the whole screen will move right along with you, no matter where you go.

This is a dramatic change from the print-on-paper world, where maps and locations are based around places and landmarks, not on you or your location. In the print world people don’t go to the store and say, “Oh, excuse me, can I buy a map of me?” Instead, they ask for a map of New York, or Amsterdam, or the subway system. You and I aren’t anywhere to be seen on these maps. The maps are locations that we fit into.

But today’s digital world has changed that. Now, we are always in the center of the map, and it’s a very powerful place to be.

When people want to know how the media business will deal with the Internet, the best way to begin to understand the sweeping changes is to recognize that the consumer of entertainment and information is now in the center. That center changes everything. It changes your concept of space, time and location. It changes your sense of community. It changes the way you view the information, news and data coming directly to you.

Now you are the starting point. Now the digital world follows you, not the other way around.

Wow, if Bilton is right, then all that talk about postmodern society might really be onto something. If our experience of space is that "we are always in the center of the map," then how can we understand the idea that we are to "fit into" God's glorious Creation? We risk losing sight of the grandeur of this big world.

If "you are the starting point," then how do you experience time? Isn't it yours to control? Traditional Christian teaching holds that time is a gift from God that we must receive and give back (see Dorothy Bass' wonderful book, Receiving the Day). This teaching has been the most important, most transformative lesson I've learned in my adult life.

While I don't want to insist that the old school print world/map world is absolutely God's technology, I appreciate Neil Postman's argument about how print technology disciplines our thinking (as opposed to the superficial, image-based communication fostered by television--see Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death).

As a Christian, I think we need to learn how we "fit into" the world. If technology makes it harder for us to do this, then I think we need to be careful in how we let it shape us. We may need to learn from the Amish, who practice discernment with technologies and avoid those that threaten community.

The German philosopher Heidegger was fond of saying that "man is not the lord of beings; he is the shepherd of Being." He hated technology, because he thought it made humans think that they were in control. This humble dependence on something outside ourselves seems like the proper posture for humanity in a world that is much bigger than us. We may feel that we are in the center, but in reality we are just a speck of dust in the universe.

If Bilton is right, then we'll be facing whole generations of narcissists who really believe that they are the center of it all. I hope he's wrong. But, if he's right, I hope the Church can still inculcate humility in its members. I'm just not sure how one teach teach a person about the God who is really at the center when that person thinks that he or she is God. 

Durkheim on Sacred Time

In a previous post, I reviewed Judith Shulevitz's The Sabbath World, a lovely book on the personal and corporate meaning of Sabbath practice. While reading it, I noticed that Shulevitz draws on the work of the late 19th/early 20th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, specifically, his classic text The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

My office neighbor, the wonderful sociologist of religion Mal Gold, lent me his copy so I could track down Shulevitz's references. Now, if I were a real scholar, I would have read the whole thing cover to cover, but instead I looked up Durkheim's reflections on time. (Mal assures me that even sociologists of religion don't enjoy plowing through the entire 450 page, densely packed tome.)

The book summarizes research on traditional, aboriginal religions of Australia, which Durkheim considers a good baseline for comparison with other forms of religion elsewhere. Leaving aside the validity of his methods and his larger thesis about religion, I found several of his points about time to be interesting (as did Judith Shulevitz). Durkheim helps us discover what the fullness of time might mean.

1. Time is a social and collective reality first and foremost 
This contention is central to Durkheim's whole thesis about the collectivity of societies defining what religion is. He argues that individuals alone would not have consciousness of time. Instead, the regular intervals of time marked out by society give rise to time consciousness. All the divisions of time come from social life (p. 9-10).  "Every call to a feast, hunt, or military expedition implies that a common time is established that everyone conceives in the same way" (444). Society comes first, constructing how individuals think.

2. Divisions of time into sacred and profane are basic in aboriginal religion and therefore in all religious practices
Durkheim says that Australian aborigines divided all of life into material pursuits (hunting/fishing/war) or religion (p. 311). Separate holy days for religious life allowed the time to be marked as different. "Ritual cessation of work is thus no more than a special case of the general incompatibility of that divides the sacred and the profane . . . (p. 312). As he puts it,

Religious and profane life cannot coexist at the same time. In consequence, religious life must have specified days or periods assigned to it from which all profane occupations are withdrawn. Thus were holy days born. There is no religion, and hence no society, that has not known and practiced this division of time into two distinct parts that alternate one with another according to a principle that varies with peoples and civilizations. In fact, probably the necessity of that alteration led men to insert distinctions and differentiations into the homogeneity and continuity of duration that it does not naturally have (p. 313).

3.  Religious festivals and holy days instill a collective "effervescence" (p. 385-86)
As Durkheim puts it, religious ceremonies "set collectivity in motion; groups come together to celebrate them" (p. 352). During ordinary times, we focus on "utilitarian and individualistic affairs. Everyone goes about his own personal business; for most people, what is most important is to meet the demands of material life" (352). By contrast, on feast days the people focus on "the beliefs held in common: the memories of great ancestors, the collective ideal the ancestors embody--in short, social things" (352). People feel "reborn . . . reanimated . . . reawaken[ed] . . . regenerated" (353). But this energy cannot be sustained forever, so society must return to ordinary times.

Seasons of feasting and fasting go way back to aboriginal practice. However, we've moved away from that practice. The philosopher Charles Taylor believes that the rejection of such "higher times" eventually led to a flatter kind of secular time (see chapter 1 of my book). I argue that we have flattened our experience of time to one dimension, cutting off our collective connection to higher, sacred times.

4. "The more societies develop, the less is their tolerance for interruptions that are too pronounced" (354)
In other words, the higher times of feasting and the lower times of work are less extreme in their highs and lows, "the contrast between them is less marked" (354). In the modern world we preferred less of a roller coaster and more of a flatness in our experience of time, with fewer highs and lows. Homogeneity, rather than differentiation between sacred time and secular time, became the norm.

But, as I noted in my post on Shulevitz, postmodern time, organized by cellphones and mobile electronic devices, may become more fluid than modern time. So are we headed back toward a more individualized experience of time, or are we opening up spaces for collective interruptions again? How are we experiencing time these days?

"Glimpses of a Different Order of Time"

A review of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, by Judith Shulevitz

My wonderful colleague Jane Hoyt-Oliver lent me her copy of this new book by freelance writer Judith Shulevitz. It's a deeply thoughtful compilation of semi-autobiographical reflections on her practice of the Jewish sabbath, mixed with some thoughtful research on the history of sabbath-keeping and brilliant speculation on its wider significance. I'd like to share some of my favorite quotes as a way of glimpsing what Shulevitz does so well, with beautiful prose (I wish I had read this book before completing my own!).

The difference between modern standardized time and holy time: 

Holiness scandalizes, as well it should. It's the very incarnation of unreason. Once Isaac Newton convinced us that time was a mathematical quantity, wholly measurable, infinitely divisible, and expressible in numbers, and economists showed us that time could be a commodity, exchangeable for money, we were bound to find implausible the notion that certain times were holy while others weren't. How could some points on a graph be charged with supernatural power while others rest inert? Where, precisely, would the holiness lurk? If it can't be measured, how do we know it exists (p. 61)?

The importance of apocalyptic time in creating narrative
Shulevitz describes the importance of sabbath keeping to the Maccabean rebels against Rome (c. 167 B.C.), and points out that some of them may have felt that if they were martyred for keeping the Sabbath, "the end of time would come and they would rise again . . . . [T]hey felt that to keep the Sabbath, was to assert that time had a beginning, a middle, and an end." This kind of apocalyptic imagination echoes New Testament scholar/theologian N.T. Wright's view of Judaism at the time, which he argues was crucial for understanding the New Testament imagination. The gospels and epistles were written with this kind of urgency, with the authors inspired to believe that the events of Jesus' life were indeed the inauguration of God's rule in history, the fulfillment of Israel's longings.

The contrast between modern time and the Fullness of Time

Marx was the first to point out that divorcing time from context and commodifying it as money leads directly to temporal compression. When time is money, speed equals more of it (p. 97). [I say something very similar in the book in chapter 1.]  . . . [But] the fullness of time is the moment when God (through Christ and the Holy Spirit) invades the present and fills it with his presence (p. 98, after describing kairos time and citing both Paul and Kierkegaard).

I would argue that Christians need to rediscover this notion of the Fullness of Time from both Paul (Gal 4:4) and Kierkegaard (The Concept of Anxiety [Princeton, 1980], p. 90). I really wish I had come across her Kierkegaard reference earlier! I knew he had used the phrase but couldn't find it in his writings.

The shift from modern, railroad time to postmodern, cellphone time
One of her most striking observations, based on a book by Richard Ling entitled The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society (2004), is that our practice of time is becoming more fluid, so a static concept of a one-day Sabbath may be harder to embody and live (pp. 194-96).  "In the embryonic progressive [flexible cellphone or Facebook time], nothing ends. The Sabbath, by contrast, demands of us a hard and tragic sense of beginnings and endings" (p. 197). She's onto something here. It will be harder to maintain practices like Sabbath-keeping with their temporal rigidity. Yet we need this kind of rest so badly (see chapter 6 of my book on Lent).

Her final words on why we need the Sabbath

We could let the world wind us up and set us to working, like dolls that go until they fall over because they have no way of stopping. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember (p. 217).

Take a 24-hour break this weekend. It's a way of living in the story that we are called to enter.

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 . . .