Summary: Throughout the course of history humanity often had very different notions of time compared with we have now.
As I’ve already considered in Blog 11, humanity throughout 99% of its history therefore seems to have lived in a relatively timeless state. Our remote ancestors knew nothing of hours, minutes, seconds – nor likely were often accurate about some individual’s age. They didn’t let time intrude on their lives too much, nor give it time the high importance we do nowadays. But neither could they have much idea of how due time management can make life more efficient and tolerable - though only if not carried to extremes.
As I’ve already considered in Blog 11, humanity throughout 99% of its history therefore seems to have lived in a relatively timeless state. Our remote ancestors knew nothing of hours, minutes, seconds – nor likely were often accurate about some individual’s age. They didn’t let time intrude on their lives too much, nor give it time the high importance we do nowadays. But neither could they have much idea of how due time management can make life more efficient and tolerable - though only if not carried to extremes.
All of which means that the chronocultural attitudes of our primitive forebears must have been very different to our own.
There are also some grounds for suspecting that western time attitudes, may have taken much of their present form from the Indo-European language family which originated about 8,000 years ago. This was the style of thought expression that later evolved into Greek and Latin, and then into their various modern descendants like English, French, Spanish, Italian, German.
Importantly too these were the languages through which most later science was expressed.
But the Indo-European language system is unique in being such a highly tensed one. That is to say Its grammatical structures are replete with finely tuned notions of past-present-future, and further fine verbal distinctions of tenses between them all. So that we can now readily express ideas on ‘sooner or later’, ‘was-is-will be’, ‘will have been’, ‘might have been’, ‘could happen’ and so on.
Seldom however do we stop to analyse what such expressions may imply. So that in reality we are expressing time notions through largely unexamined language, and with thoughts handed down without much checking from those primitive Indo-Europeans so long ago.
But various other less developed languages - for example Innuit (Esquimaux) - often lack our fine tense discrimination between future-present-past. This can seem to leave their users in a sort of perpetual present, where future may only be denoted by pointing forward, and past by pointing back! So that, as again I’ve already stated, such peoples can hardly regard time as we are accustomed to.
TIME’S START, TIME’S END?
In any case evolving western chronoculture received another important input when formal counting and writing began in ancient Sumer ca. 5,000 BC. Thereafter the written record – preserved on baked mud, stone or later paper - could inform future generations about what their ancestors had been, or claimed to have been, doing.
Henceforth therefore human memory could be extended far beyond the lifetime of one individual, or perhaps a few generations of fallible oral tradition at most. Such was the start of historic, as distinct from prehistoric, times.
Western chronoculture gained another important input around 600 BC when the Jewish Old Testament formalised the Creation fable, soon dating it to some 4,000 years before. Creation was believed to have started the entire Universe and all things in it – which also meant a tidy starting point for time.
Hence came our western idea of linear time stretched out from past through present to future – a notion not always found in oriental societies.
Judaism’s main offshoot of Christianity later put an equally tidy end to this linear process. For from about 100 AD the first Christians began to believe that all things would come to an end on the dreaded Last Judgement Day – so also implying a clear final boundary for time.
Devout early scientists like Newton (1643-1727) believed this ending would occur on or near the significantly tidy date of 2000 AD. After which everyone who had ever lived would participate in an eternity (lit: timeless state) of Heaven or Hell.
Stripped of such religious connotations, this Judaeo-Christian notion of time - with clear progression from definite start to future conclusion - therefor became the western chronocultural norm. It was formalised into science by Newton with his erroneous definition of Absolute Time (somehow supposed to ‘flow’ onward all by itself!), and later just partially displaced by Einstein’s Relative Time of 1905.
Time linear, bounded and progressive in this way, still finds expression in the widely accepted Big Bang theory of current cosmology. An idea first suggested by Belgian cleric Abbe Lemaitre in 1926, the Big Bang theory can be seen as the latest version of the Creation story: it holds that time itself began along with everything else some 14 billion years ago.
Likewise cosmologists can logically speculate that time must also come to an end eventually, when matter itself may have ceased to exist uncountable billions of years ahead.
But whether the entire Big Bang theory may just turn out to be the latest version of old religious thinking, seems a question best left to future generations to decide.....
RELIGION WAS THE ‘GUARDIAN OF TIME’
In any case and as also already considered in Blog 11, organised religion has always served as the “guardian of time” since very ancient days. Like formal counting and writing, its role can be traced at least as far back as 10,000 years ago. Then agriculture was introduced and settled societies began.
And the main original practical function of those astronomer-priests appointed to watch the heavens may have been as agricultural advisers: they could best anticipate the changing of the seasons and when crops should be sown.
Sky-watching of course was also almost readymade for more mystical methods of controlling society. For example it could readily pretend to divine communications from the gods supposed to rule the realms above. Astronomy, agriculture, time and religion have therefore always been intimately related since settled societies began.
This also meant that one of religion’s functions was to serve as the “guardian of time”, and up until recently in the western world.
To some extent also this ancient role of religion as “time’s guardian” still persists. For example our current western calendar, which parallels Nature through years and leap-years, was introduced at Rome by Pope Gregory 13 in 1587. And Gregory was just modifying Julius Caesar’s calendar of 47 BC, which in turn derived from religious practice in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years before.
Another striking survivor of the old domination of time by religion is the public holiday of Easter, still wandering across the calendar on all dates between March 20 and April 25. Easter Sunday remembers the day when Christ was said to have risen from the dead. Strangely however the anniversary of this momentous occasion never had a fixed date, rather being calculated through an ancient formula linked to the variable risings of the moon!
This complex formula was known as computus (lit: calculation) and from it the modern term computer has derived.
THE INTRUDING CLOCK
But with the invention of mechanical clocks in mediaeval Europe – probably by some unknown monk around 1280 AD – the old traditional dominance of time by religion began to fade. Those first ticking clocks were large affairs constructed by the local blacksmith, and may have derived from SuSung’s Chinese design of two centuries before. His clock progressed by slowly inflowing water which gradually filled up one bucket on a mill-wheel, which then advanced by one click every time.
But in any case all over Europe in the late mediaeval era, municipal boroughs like Prague and Cologne began building public clocks of ever more intricate design. These also implied a challenge to similar clocks being installed on church steeples: commerce had started to contest religion for control of time.
As clocks began to shrink and grow more portable, they intruded ever further into everyday affairs. Queen Elizabeth 1 of England (d.1603) is said to have had no less than six portable clocks or primitive watches, some with skull motifs warning of time’s intimate link with religion, fate, destiny. Similar concerns are voiced by her contemporary Shakespeare, who frequently wrote of time in portentous or doom-laden terms.
PROGRESS IS A RECENT IDEA
But with the onset of The Industrial Revolution after 1700 AD, time started to become ever less a matter of religion and more of commercial concern. So that, as historian Lewis Mumford first clarified, the clock was just as important as the steam-engine for the new industrial regimes. Indeed the very idea of social progress - which implies advancement towards better living standards - stems from this era.
Before the Industrial Revolution therefore, most people broadly expected to live their lives much as their ancestors had done for generations before. But afterwards, through making best use of personal time, they could reasonably aspire towards a higher standard of living than their fathers knew.
Time therefore became viewed as another commodity which could be bought and sold. A merchant could buy, and a labourer could sell, an hour or a day’s work, so assigning specific monetary value to the latter’s time. Wherefore Benjamin Franklin’s (d.1790) dictum that “time is money” has come to rule much of the modern world.
However Franklin’s famed statement must be essentially wrong. For, as any physicist of dimensions will readily realise, time is certainly not the same thing as money in any shape or form. What Franklin should really have said – though perhaps not so pithily – is that “time (worked) is proportional to money (earned)”.
But the widespread acceptance of his original dictum is just one of those many confusions which still cloud most popular thinking about time.........................
