“… The clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s… the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded… Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to’ say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.” – Neil Postman.

It’s very early morning. The black canvas of the night sky nestles the stars which are in full bloom at this hour. Inside a hut, water stops flowing from a small hole at the bottom a clay pot being held up by a two-tiered metal frame. There is a pot on the bottom tier catching the water. The frame suspends the pots with two metal rings that fit snuggly beneath the rims of the pots. The bottom pot has five large wooden beads floating to the top and then over the edge of the overflowing receptacle. The beads smack on the floor of the hut. A man on a cot wakes up. He exits the cot and mounts his horse. The man rides off on the ancient dirt road that sits beside an irrigation canal. He reaches an intersection of the canal, lifts a large wooden board that was laying on the ground and slides it down two grooves carved into the sides of the entrances where the canal paths intersect. Just like that he redirects hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to another farm. He rides off again.

A married couple is in a deep sleep on their ancient cot. The man on the horse rides up to the farmstead and knocks on the door. He yells, “You have the water!”

The farmer jumps out of bed and slips on his sandals. He grabs his water bladder and walks out to his field. The large irrigation canal runs beside the main road at the edge of his property. He lifts up a board, opening the path to a smaller, private canal that runs along the top of his field. Small openings blocked off by wooden boards line up with even smaller dirt canals, or ridges, dug into the soil in between the many rows of his several dozen date palm trees. He lifts the first board leading to the first row of trees and follows the water with a shovel. Making sure the water reaches the base of every tree in that row.

The man on the horse returns to the irrigation manager’s hut. He transfers the water from the bottom pot back to the top pot and adds a bit more water to make up for the overflow. He then places the beads back into the empty pot. He has to do this three times before his shift is over. This ancient mechanism for timekeeping is called a clepsydra, or water clock. And it’s widely used throughout the institutions of the ancient Persian empire. The guards outside of the satrapies use it to time their shifts. The government officials, or satraps, time their meetings inside with it. The universities and the churches use it for consistency. They all use it for either consistency or fairness.

As the population of this society grew, so did the complexities of organizing it and providing it with resources in a fair way. Daily life for the individual living in these metropolises also grew in complexity, responsibilities, and possibilities, so it was decided that, in the interest of fairness and consistency, it was necessary for our time to be treated as a resource. Like writing and mathematics, imagination birthed a physical mechanism to communicate to people something that might have remained abstract. Although time might have been something that was supposed to remain abstract.

The people in this ancient society have been living life in this way for many generations. Every generation carves out their own unique identity. They undoubtedly recognized that they were different from their ancestors, but I wonder if they knew that, psychologically speaking, they were a completely different species from the humans that lived without this technology. This social programming had spread as far east as China, and to the Roman empire in the west. No matter who sat on the thrown or in the government building, your upmost loyalty was to a rhythm dictated by a social structure that had been increasingly dominated by a handful of religious, academic, industrial and administrative institutions.

As we all know by now, we are creatures whose behavior consists of fragmentary pattern development to satisfy our biological needs. For example, when our metabolic system begins to run out of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins; our brains and our bodies begin a process of preparation. What that process is- depends on the pattern you have imposed on your system, and that pattern depends on your idiosyncratic experiences.

If you were living in extraordinarily ancient times, it could be as simple as your metabolic system calibrating when your levels hit that threshold where you still have enough energy to go out and hunt or graze but recognizes that the brain needs to know the levels are decreasing. When that threshold is met, the myriads of messages crisscross our brain and body. All to kickstart the patterns that will eventually lead to getting food into your stomach.

Sometime before the end of the paleolithic period, humans began adding patterns on top of the basic hunger patterns. Shifting the majority of the labor of the patterns from our bodies onto our short-term memory. Recognizing that we were hungry yesterday, we’re hungry today, and probably will be hungry tomorrow, we entered a kind of societal homeostasis. Archeologist Antonio Gilman theorized that multiple tribes may have gathered at a favorite hunting spot. Maybe a narrow pass which herds of late Pleistocene fauna and proboscidean reliably migrated through season after season. These proto communities got the brilliant idea of monopolizing the site. This might have been our crossing of the Rubicon to the structural patterns of our modern hypersocial incarnations.

As the seasons passed, we might have probably noticed that our favorite spot to hang out and eat the pears that we picked from the forest a couple miles away was sprouting new plants. As the years passed, we had a grove of delicious pears growing alongside a natural pipeline of meat. The bitter little pebbles inside of the fruit were a resource. We had taken the leap towards agriculture and began stockpiling food by drying, smoking, and freezing to preserve meat and plants. Which meant that when our levels dropped, we no longer had to prepare our bodies for an exploration. We merely looked around our storage pits, or caves, or frozen streams for something to ingest. Our brains then adjusted to this new corporal freedom by occupying it with new patterns.

Presumably, an adjusting to the months of free time between seasons inspired and fostered an impulse towards innovating the aesthetics of information exchange. In other words, we developed imaginative narrative to program the best practices for hunting and farming by deifying animals and the changes in seasons. Developing rituals to cement the importance of efficient hunting and cultivation into future generations with stories and making those practices second nature to the entire community. These innovations alone made the community unique, because they all told their unique stories. But, as the community grew, it probably recognized the need to keep transient nomadic tribes out. Maybe they subconsciously realized that a development of a collective identity was also required. A uniform of sorts. Turning themselves into something alien from the surrounding wanderers and other proto communities competing for the same resources. The isolation, the idiosyncratic teachings, and need for social uniformity as a defensive weapon might have birthed what we now define as culture.

Due to the increasing size of their civilization, they developed a system to differentiate between a fellow tribe member you rarely had the pleasure of meeting, and a potentially dangerous intruder looking to steal from the community. Bruce Bower, in an article titled “Africa’s Ancient Cultural Roots” for the December 2^nd, 1995, edition of Science News wrote that as early as 130,000 years ago proto humans in Africa had collected colored pigments and rhinestones apparently to use in ceremonies which showed just how different one group was from another. 60,000 years later some were upping the ante by elongating their children’s skulls, filing their teeth, or circumcising them to advertise their community’s uniqueness. Between 77,000 and 60,000 years ago early humans in Australia began engraving rows of symbolic circles in the local stone. Primordial writing showed up carved in animal bone as early as 27,000 B.C. Sculpture and cave paintings may have driven home the differences between one group and its enemies.

The larger communities divided even further. Developing subcultures between upper and lower classes. Randall White, a professor of anthropology at NYU and one of the world’s leading specialists in the study of Paleolithic art and personal adornment, found that the decorated clothing, jewelry, body ornaments, and hide-covered homes distinguished the loftier members of a tribe from the low. A hierarchy developed inside of what should have been an egalitarian system. How? What took us from a collection of tribes with an abundance of food to a culture that ritualized everything? Was it a byproduct of isolation, xenophobia, innovation or some individuals instinctual drive towards power and authority within the group?

Humans have something inside of them that compels them towards a belief in an inner sense of autonomy. A survival mechanism that helps the self- believe that they are immune to the gargantuan three headed dog of social, cultural, and institutional pressures- and participate in their society voluntarily. All of this to retain a scrap of what some might call the “soul”.

Developing a network of uniformity would require a disarmament of said autonomous impulses through the advent of ritualistic behaviors— and to introduce that, you must be able to communicate a concept. You must induce a commitment to action through a connection between their needs and your novel belief system. To reinforce that belief system, they instinctually triggered the synapses corresponding to the visual cortex with symbols and accessories. Probably because they intuited that we define most environmental threats, sources of nourishments, and sources of protection through our eyes.

Whether altering one’s physical appearance or altering their physical surroundings came first, the progenitor first had to define the concept of change. Define its purpose, benefits, and sacrifices. For a society with a primitive communication system, connecting an abstract philosophy to the practices used to produce the intricate body decorations or modifications would be like your manager trying to convince you that you could make more money if you taped paper airplanes all over your body every day. You might have some questions. You might offer some alternatives. The trick was finding a way to make the exercise appeal to the person’s existing environmental motivators. The need for safety. Your manager could just make it the uniform for new employees and tell them it’s required for security. In order to know that you belong.

Connecting basic cognitive drives to a belief system that would be passed down generationally probably began with influencing and indoctrinating the future generation first. The people who’ll ask the least number of questions. Whatever the surface motivations for the invention of culture, and whatever the vast amounts of cohesive benefits, it seems we always overlook how culture functions as an exclusive evolutionary weapon for humans to protect themselves against other humans.

The surplus in goods in also enabled two societies to trade and adopt aspects of each other’s cultures. Which society you could coexist with depended on the hierarchies of both. Even though our behavioral patterns gained complexity through the explosion of technology, writing, long-distance communication, and the influences of the other societies in the region; it sometimes did so with the primitive act of warfare. And at the end of any absorption, be it violent or peaceful, the culture always homogenized under the one adopted by the ruling class and always used as the fuel to ignite conflicts with any geopolitical foe by painting their alien culture as evil.

Intergroup tournaments between political, religious, and economic ideas and their best practices continued to shape the ultimate form of the collective consciousness, and the individual one. Into all of this, we injected the pattern of time as a commodity.