Time Discipline in Western Societies
In more urban societies, some of these natural phenomena were no longer at hand, and most were of much less consequence to the inhabitants. Artificial means of dividing and measuring time were needed. Plautus complained of the social effect of the invention of such divisions in his lines complaining of the sundial:
- The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy
My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why, even when I have,
I can't fall-to, unless the sun give leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials,
The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.
Plautus's protagonist here complains about the social discipline and expectations that arose when these measurements of time were introduced. The invention of artificial units of time measurement made the introduction of time management possible, and time management was not universally appreciated by those whose time was managed.
Read more about this topic: Time Discipline
Famous quotes containing the words time, discipline, western and/or societies:
“An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which it is destined to receive thence.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)