Modern Man Has Become Enslaved by Time :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Modern Man Has Become Enslaved by TimeIn no characteristic is existing society in the western hemisphere so sharply distinguished from the earlier societies, whether of Europe or the East, than in its conception of time. To the ancient Chinese or Greek, to the Arab herdsman or Mexican galley slave of today, time is represented by the cyclic kneades of nature, the alternation of day and night, the passage from season to season. The nomads and farmers measured and still measure their day from sunrise to sunset, and their year in call of seedtime and harvest, of the falling leaf and the ice thawing on the lakes and rivers. The farmer worked according to the elements, the craftsman for as long as he felt it necessary to sinless his product. Time was seen as a process of natural change, and men were not concerned in its exact measurement. For this reason civilizations highly developed in otherwise respects had the most primitive means of measuring time the hour glass with its trickling sand or dripping water, the sun dial, useless on a dull day, and the candle or lamp whose unburnt remnant of oil or wax indicated the hours. All these devices were approximate and inexact, and were often rendered unreliable by the weather or the person-to-person laziness of the tender. Nowhere in the ancient or mediaeval world were more(prenominal) than a tiny minority of men concerned with time in the terms of mathematical exactitude. Modern, western man, however, lives in a world that runs according to the mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his movements and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or than any other machine. It is therefore valuable to trace the historical process by which the clock influenced the tender development of modern European civilization. It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilization develops the device that will later be used for its destruction.