“… 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irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded… Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.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 early morning. The black canvas of a clear night’s sky nestles the scatter of stars which are in full bloom at this hour. Inside of a palm wood and thatch hut, a small stream of water stops flowing from a small hole near the bottom rim of a clay pot. It’s been designed with the small hole in mind, adorned with a small spout baked on when the whole pot was still raw. The two-tiered wooden frame holding this pot, and the one below catching the water, is also specially designed for this task.
The frame is essentially a short table in front of a taller table, some really ornate models had bronze rims to hold the pots. Some made of polished stone. The posts were sometimes engraved with a sort of “timer”. This version is simple. Wooden. 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 dirt floor of the hut. A man on a cot wakes up. He calmly exits the bed and hut, mounts his horse and rides off.
A steady pace on the ancient dirt road that sits beside an irrigation canal. He reaches a small bridge marking the intersection of the canal, lifts a large wooden board that was laying on the ground and struggles mightily against the surge of water to slide it down the two grooves carved into the sides of the entrances where the canal paths intersect. He gets it a third of the way down and finishes the job with a large wooden mallet. One down, two more boards to go to block of the entire opening and redirect hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to another group of farms awaiting irrigation.
As crude as the mechanism is, it has already been refined and developed through the many generations of incrementally more innovative Mesopotamians.
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 shovel, walks down the long road, and out to the intersection. The large irrigation canal runs beside the main road at the edge of a neighbor’s farm, three properties down the road. He lifts up the boards, opening the path to a smaller canal that runs along the top of his and his neighbor’s fields.
He gets to his field. The gradient dawn. The fresh morning air. Small openings blocked off by palm wood boards line up with small dirt canals, or ridges, dug into the soil in between the many rows of his several dozen date palms. He lifts the first board leading to the first row of trees and follows the rushing water with a shovel. Making sure the water reaches the base of every tree in that row. Just like the cells in our bodies, we built veins out of mother nature’s ventricles so our societies’ blood could travel further and further as the collective body grew.
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. The alarm clock version with the overflow is a work of fiction. But the real version was 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 itself might prove to have been an aspect of our existence that was supposed to remain abstract.
The people in this ancient society had been living life in this way for many generations. It was an organizing principle in their way of life. Every generation carves out their own unique identity within a few foundational social structures. Structures built long ago by early intuited developments in the sociolinguistics and philology birthed by individuals who had specialized in the imagining of narratives that theologized imperatives. The first imperatives being the dates essential for seasonal preparations.
The system they lived. The one we were born in. The one developed by the generations who existed before the invention of writing, and the ones before them. The one that is dying before our very eyes. Is a Pavlovian type of programming which evolved for surviving harsh winters during the last ice age and was hijacked by those who could see its power.
But we’ll get there. Because even in this place in ancient Persia, psychologically speaking, they were a completely different species from the humans that lived without this “rudimentary” version of our technology. The mass programming that this “clock” had already inflicted on society 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 buildings, 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. We are constantly preparing or priming our brains for the next task or preparing to find the next task. For example, when our metabolic system begins to run out of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins; our brains and our bodies begin a symphony of developed programming that ends with me sitting in front of my computer eating a quesadilla. What that process is- depends on the pattern you have imposed on your system, and sure, a portion of that pattern depends on your idiosyncratic experiences. The recognition and execution of actions that result in fixing this issue are programmed by the society we live in.
Imagine, if you will, living in ancient times. The last kill’s bones have been picked clean. Your metabolic system has calibrated when your levels hit that threshold, but you still have enough energy to go out and hunt or graze. The brain knows the levels are decreasing. When that threshold is met, the myriads of messages crisscross our brain and body. All to kickstart the same patterns that will eventually lead to getting food into your stomach. The major difference is the time it would take.
Sometime before the end of the paleolithic period, humans began adding patterns on top of the basic refueling programming. Shifting the majority of the labor from our bodies onto our short-term memory. Maybe, recognizing that we were hungry yesterday, we’re hungry today, and probably will be hungry tomorrow, we consciously entered a societal homeostasis. We wanted back the time we threw away hunting and gathering.
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. Maybe the first wars were fought here. This might have been our crossing of the Rubicon to the structural patterns of our modern hypersocial incarnations.
For now, 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. Or maybe that’s where we defecated the seeds we ate. As the years passed, we had a grove of delicious pears growing alongside a natural pipeline of meat.
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, some of us no longer had to prepare our bodies for an exploration for an exploration for nutrients every day. 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. But all of these necessary exercises to produce our food surpluses were time sensitive.
Presumably, our ancient cousins in the clearing developed a curiosity about the seasons. During the ice age this would probably be the time we spent drawing on cave walls. Preparing, thinking, imagining, dreaming. We developed imaginative narratives 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. So much so, that anyone who questioned the stories were questioning the tribes very chances for survival.
These innovations 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. People with different stories as those who ensured your survival were the enemy. Eventually we saw the benefits of living alongside people with different stories. By then, they all followed the rhythm of the society. They had to. Maybe inclusive countries, even back then, subconsciously realized that a collective identity was not the stories they believed about anything, but the amount of time they were willing to sacrifice to the beast of theologized proto bureaucracy. Through their offerings, or employment, or service. A uniform of sorts. To pray at certain times, not eat or not eat meat at certain times.
In antiquity, the attunement to the rhythm of your society turns you into something alien from the surrounding 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 xenophobia. But this separate identifying rhythm, or uniform, was a type of tractor beam pulling individuals into a subconscious bond or social synchronicity under the dictated pulse of our governmental systems and corporations. Something that said, I have you for this amount of time, and there is nothing you can do. A subserviency continued through the rhythmic physical interactions with our environment under their terms. I’m getting ahead of myself.
All of this started with a small civilization, they developed a system to differentiate between a fellow tribe member you never 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 2nd, 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 helped in displaying 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 their genitals 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.
The larger communities divided even further. Societies made the leap to a multicellular organism. Developing subcultures between upper and lower classes and subcultures within those. 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. And every multicell organism needs a brain. In seemingly every successful tribe, a hierarchy developed inside of what could 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 according to the whims of a central authority?
The individual, knowing that they have a unique experience in the world, acquiesces to this paradigm anyway. A belief that they are immune to the gargantuan three headed dog of social, cultural, and institutional pressures- and participate in their society voluntarily. A blissfully ignorant way to retain a scrap of what some might call the “soul”. Because it’s true. We each have a unique experience. But the individual is more like a marionette, gravity makes our movements lifelike, but the connecting threads, the all-encompassing social rhythms of our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, control us. A beat set by those who controlled how we satisfy the truly universal directives in our brain long ago. And how the society interpreted and utilized those controls. Basically, the individual’s loyalty to the institutions and religious zealotry provided them with the opportunity to eat, sleep, feel safe, and multiply. It provided them with time.
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. At the end of any cultural absorption, be it violent or peaceful, the culture always homogenized under the theological morality and idiosyncratic sensibilities adopted by the ruling class and always subject to be used as 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. All the while, it was the beat of society, the waking, the being at shcool at a certain time, and for a certain time. The rhythm of the crops. The rhythm that kept you fed, housed, and sexually satisfied inside of the seemingly random chaos of this society was the one trully in control of everything.
In the next part of the series, I will go into how Christianity tied its authority to certain hygienic ritual and as a result, formed the basis for centuries of moral judgement.
The Beautiful Panic.com 
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