Time and Culture

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Time is change. I think that this is all that people are referring to when they use the word "time".

Natural time is the passing of one change to the next. We use the natural changes around us to mark time. It's the relations of these changes that mark time. If we lived in a vacuum where no change occurred, there would be no sense of time passing.

If lightning strikes a tree and splits it down the middle then that is a change that becomes a reference point. We could speak of something that "happened before lightning split that tree" or "happened after lightning split that tree". We could place all events either on one side or the other side of that natural change.

That would be natural time as measured in relation to natural change.

Artificial Time is the act of counting units of space.

Natural time is the change that comes with natural events. In the instance of the lightning splitting the tree we have several problems.

1) The magnitude of change. To what extent does this event have influence? Certainly if the tree is in the yard of a farm then this is an event that can be a center of reference for the family. But is it of great enough magnitude to influence a calendar? The magnitude of the tree splitting is of local influence.

We mark our modern, western calendar BC and AD. The calendar places every event before or after the birth of Christ. Even if the birth of Christ is questionable, no doubt something of magnitude happened to the civilized world about 2000 years ago. There was a social and political revolution. The magnitude is global.

2) No event is repeated identically. An event is singular therefore we can only use it to separate before from after. In order to count continuous units we would need recurring events. We must settle for the recurrence of similar events.

Each day is similar but not identical. a morning is more similar to another morning than an evening. A night is more similar to another night than it is to a day.

Humans perceive distant events as being more identical. The sun rising or a year passing is more uniform. the lunar phases appear identical to the naked eye.

These natural changes are more uniform and therefore become centers of reference. For we know that the sun will rise but do not know if another tree will split.

A.D. is the abbreviation for Anno Domini - Latin for The Year Of Our Lord - used in the Gregorian Calendar to refer to the current era. A date such as 1945 A.D. literally means 'the 1945th year of our lord', the lord in question being Jesus Christ, providing a religious context and clearly distinguishing the time from an earlier era, where B.C (Before Christ) is used. The use of A.D. was popularised by Bede.

Of course, before all of that happened, the human race was using other natural time measurements, the solar day and the solar year, the lunar months and year, seasonal changes etc.

BTW, these are mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. I was from this reading of Genesis that I first thought of the terms "natural" and "artificial" time. Because Genesis talks about signs and seasons and times but when it comes to the seven days of the week, in Gen 2:2 it says "On the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made."

A seven day week has no natural foundation. Or it may be that the battle to explain this with an Act of God overlooks the possibility that the 28 day Lunar cycle had evolved into 4 parts of 7? In which case it may be natural. If it is that organized human activity naturally needs a rest or "breath" every 7 days, then it would be natural time also.

We might be tempted to classify seconds, minutes and hours as artificial but a second could correspond to the average walking pace of humans. 1 step per second.

Still, the act of counting these units is artificial time because each is singular.

History is a document of natural time, natural events and changes. Artificial time is counted out to natural events so as to enable the cataloging of events. Otherwise we would have to juggle an infinite number of events.

We would be saying "It happened before the tree was split by lightning which was after the neighbors moved to the other side of town which was before the first baby was born and of course that was before the second baby but it was after the the new neighbors bought the vacant house that was left by the old neighbors moving away now was that before or after the new highway came through?"

"You're talking about that again you old fool?"

A.M. and P.M. refer to Ante Meridian and Post Meridian. The sun moves in an arc through the sky. The meridian is that arc bisected. When the sun is on the meridian it is Noon. All the time before it arrives at the meridian is called "Ante Meridian" and after it passes the meridian it is called "Post Meridian".

This is a problem as it is a local reference. The time is not the same for everyone and even locally the arc changes from day to day. At the poles, it takes 6 months for the sun to arrive at the meridian. So the word "day" is stretched quite a bit.

The longest unambiguously documented lifespan is that of Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), who was aged 122 years. She met Vincent van Gogh when aged 14, and in 1988 this led to her, at age 113, becoming noticed by the media. Subsequent investigation found that her life was documented in the records of her native city of Arles beyond reasonable question. More evidence for the Calment case has been produced than for any other supercentenarian case, which makes her case a "gold standard" among the "oldest people" recordholders. This is contrasted with the now-disputed claim of age 120 for the oldest man ever, Shigechiyo Izumi. While currently still recognized by Guinness World Records, even the Japanese authorities have hinted that his age was not certain. This claim was accepted in 1978, but subsequent additional research (as early as 1984) has raised doubt as to whether his birth date was confused with a brother's who died at a young age.

Currently (since 29 January 2007), the oldest living person is 114-year-old Yone Minagawa of Japan, born on 4 January 1893.

The word "generation" is also a measure of natural time. A generation would include the youngest infant born and the oldest person to die today. This varies but probably averages around 100 years. For practical calculations we count 100 years to a generation.

Who was the oldest person that you can remember meeting in your life? I remember meeting a man who was 100 years old. I attended his birthday party. He played a song on a saw!

I also met someone who was about 94. He helped build the first airplanes that were constructed for World War I.

I first got interested in the concept of "Natural and Artificial Time" from a reading of the first 5 or 6 chapters of Genesis. The Book of Genesis could be it's own topic but I want to cite a few verses that deal with time.

Quote:

Genesis 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 1.16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 1.17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 1.18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 1.19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Natural time was the first method of counting time. Not until humans developed the ability to count could Artificial Time exist. Natural time is not uniform or regular. It only appears so from a distance. Because every change is unique and singular, humans looked to distant events that appeared to be uniform such as the movements of the sun and moon.

This passage also talks of day and night and seasons. a day and a night is a the same thing as a change of season. If you are at either one of the Poles, a complete cycle of one day and one night equals a year. At the Equator the day and night are equal and you can feel all four seasons in one day.

But I want to separate the ideas of Natural and Artificial Time. The names of the days of the weeks and the names of the months of the year and the numbers of years are artificial. There are no "Sundays" or "Mondays" or "Junes" or "Julys" or year numbers in natural time.

Quote:

Genesis 2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

It seems that the narrative in Genesis is dealing with some fundamental philosophical questions about life and culture. The things that it can not explain are attributed to Acts of God. For example, the calendar can be explained as being based upon solar or lunar cycles. But what do you tell someone who asks the Rabbi "Why is there a seven day week?" Since there is no natural change that measures seven days. So to explain the custom of working six days and resting on the seventh the story was told that God rested on the seventh day.

Incidentally, Genesis later goes on to record generations from Adam and they are much longer than what we moderns think. I think of a generation as being from grandparents to parent to siblings, making a generation about 20 years. The whole generation is about 100 years from birth to death of every member of the generation.

Here are a few generations in Chapter 5

Chapter 5:

Quote:

5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 5:2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. 5:3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth 5:4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. 5:6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos: 5:7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died. 5:9 And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: 5:10 And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:11 And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.

Here the generations from parent to child is around 100 years and the life of a person 1000.

So a generation would be about 1000 years. This is a ridiculous proposition for the Western mind but in the East and Middle East they still think this way.

Another way to think of a generation is the time that most of the people in a certain period are alive. That would be the time of peak activity when that generation is in it's prime. In the USA, that happened in the 20's and again in the 60's and again in the 90's, didn't it? This is frequently called "The Thirty Year Thing".

Telling time is difficult to learn. People assume that it's simple after they learn it. But how many times do you ask yourself what time it is? Quite often I have to stop and count something like days and months and years.

This is another topic for our next forum meeting. How did you learn to tell time?

This is the order that I learned. First I learned the difference between "day" and "night". that is probably the most obvious difference because when you are a child you are up in the day and go to bed at night. I then learned that one sequence of a day and a night was a "Day". So the word "day" took on two meanings, the daylight hours and a period of a day and a night.

After learning that I learned "morning" from "afternoon" not because of where the sun was but because of mealtimes. "Morning" was before lunch and "afternoon" came after lunch. Then "evening" was around dinnertime. Evening could be before, at or after dinner depending on whether it was summer or winter but I didn't know this until much later which is probably why I grasped "morning" and "afternoon" much easier.

About the same time I learned the difference between "today" "yesterday" and "tomorrow".

I was also confronted with what I call the "dead years". This happened when I was confronted with sights and sounds from the year of my birth that could not be interpreted when received. There was a period that existed before I was born. But I didn't know it existed until I was about 5 or 6! I was dead before being born but never considered it that way. Those years themselves appeared dead to me. The present was alive and in colors but the dead years were only a skeleton.

Next, I learned the days of the week and the rollover after 7 into another week. About that time, I learned the names of the months and their order and the rollover after 12.

Then I learned the concept of a year and reading the clock, the hour, minute and second.

I was in my teens when I was presented with World History and the concept of a "century" and "millennium". Yes, they were mentioned before that but it wasn't until about age 13 or 14 that I was challenged to separate the period of Homer from Chaucer. I don't think it really sunk in until I was about 22!

So how did you learn to tell time?