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.

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?