The European Dream (19 page)

“By its essential nature,” observes Lewis Mumford, the clock “dissociated time from human events.”
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It is also true, as historian David Landes, of Harvard University, suggests, that the clock dissociated “human events from Nature.”
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Time, which had always been measured in relation to biotic and physical phenomena, to the rising and setting sun and the changing seasons, was henceforth a function of pure mechanism. The new time substituted quantity for quality and automatism for the rhythmic pulse of the natural world.

The emerging bourgeois class of merchants embraced the mechanical clock with a vengeance. It quickly became apparent that the increasingly complex activities of urban and commercial life required a method of regulation and synchronization that only the clock could provide.

The clock found its first use in the textile industry. While textile production predated the rest of the industrial revolution by two centuries, it embodied many of the essential attributes that were to characterize the coming age. To begin with, textile manufacturing required a large, centralized workforce. It also required the use of complex machinery and great amounts of energy. The new urban proletariat congregated each morning in the dye shops and fulling mills, “where the high consumption of energy for heating the vats and driving the hammers encouraged concentration in large units.”
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This type of complex, highly centralized, energy-consuming production technology made it necessary to establish and maintain fixed hours for the beginning and end of the workday.

Work bells, and later the work clock, became the instrument of the merchants and factory owners to control the work time of their laborers. Historian Jacques Le Goff remarks that here was the introduction of a radical new tool to assert power and control over the masses. He writes, “The communal clock was an instrument of economic, social, and political domination wielded by the merchants who ran the commune.”
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Whereas in the craft trades and in farming, the workers had set the pace of activity, in the new factory system, the machinery dictated the tempo. That tempo was incessant, unrelenting, and exacting. The industrial production mode was, above all else, methodical. Its rhythm mirrored the rhythm of the clock. The new worker was expected to surrender his time completely to the new factory rhythm. He was to show up on time, work at the pace the machine set, and then leave at the appointed time. Subjective time considerations had no place inside the factory. There, objective time—machine time—ruled supreme.

It was not only in the factory that the clock played an important new role. The bourgeois class found use for it in virtually every aspect of its daily life. This was a new form of temporal regimentation, more exacting and demanding than any other ever conceived. The bourgeoisie introduced the clock into their homes, schools, clubs, and offices. No corner of the culture was spared the reach of this remarkable new socializing tool. Lewis Mumford took stock of this transformation in time consciousness and concluded that

To become “regular as clockwork” became the highest values of the new industrial age.
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Without the clock, industrial life would not have been possible. The clock conditioned the human mind to perceive time as external, autonomous, continuous, exacting, quantitative, and divisible. In so doing, it prepared the way for a production mode that operated by the same set of temporal standards.

The metamorphosis of nature from God’s creation to man’s resources, the change in the usury laws, the shift from fair price to market price along with the birth of the money economy, and the introduction of the schedule and clock all profoundly transformed Europeans’ sense of space and time.

The new concepts of space and time migrated to America with the early settlers. But, in the New World, the Enlightenment schema took on a somewhat different persona, one more suited to America’s frontier spirit. Americans introduced a new tool to harness space and time. Although the idea of efficiency is age old, its modern guise was developed in America in the nineteenth century and soon spread to the rest of the world, changing the way human beings organize the details of daily life. While human beings have used tools for thousands of years, the shift to coal and steam power in the nineteenth century afforded enormous new opportunities to manipulate space and duration. As we mentioned briefly at the beginning of the chapter, for the first time, human beings could break through the upper limits imposed by the rhythms of nature and begin to turn space and time into an ever quickening productive force for material advancement.

Even though Europeans—especially the English and Germans—were quick to use the new steam-driven technologies, it was the Americans who created the intellectual and conceptual mechanism for aligning human performance with the rhythm of the new machines. Efficiency was transformed by American engineers into a set of methodological practices that, in turn, became an all-encompassing tool for organizing space and time. And, it is the modern notion of efficiency that has done more than anything else to shape the contemporary American character and provide the juice to propel the American Dream.

Efficiency meant something quite different in the early eighteenth century. In Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, published in 1755, efficiency still had a theological frame of reference. God is defined as the most efficient first cause. In the biblical account of creation, God commands the heavens and Earth into existence—the perfectly efficient act.

Efficiency metamorphosed into its current form in the late nineteenth century. Scientists and engineers were working in the new field of thermodynamics, measuring energy inputs and outputs and entropy in machines. In the process, they redefined efficiency, transforming it into a purely machine value. Henceforth, efficiency was to be regarded as the maximum output that can be produced in the minimum time, with the minimum input of labor, energy, and capital. The new definition of efficiency migrated quickly from the machine bench to the factory floor, front office, the home, and personal life, to become the measure of human performance and the criteria for determining the value of human activity. More than that, efficiency became the indispensable tool for assuring personal success and the realization of the American Dream. He who is the most efficient, and therefore most productive, goes the reasoning, is the most likely to rise to the top—to make something out of himself. While the new interest in efficiency found its way back to Europe and eventually to Asia, it was taken up more selectively in the work arena, whereas in America it became an all-embracing behavioral norm, conditioning virtually every aspect of life.

Americans are in love with efficiency. It has become our defining attribute and is engrained in our very being as a people. To understand how we came to transform a machine time value into a human behavioral norm, we need to go back to America’s Calvinist roots and to our deeply held belief of being a chosen people.

Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had argued that being self-sacrificing and industrious was a sign that one had been elected for salvation. John Calvin, the French Reformation theologian, denounced the Church doctrine of salvation through good works, confession, and absolution. God can’t be lobbied for a place in heaven, said Calvin. The Reformers believed that every human being is elected or damned at birth and that doing good works could not change one’s fate. The lingering question, however, for every Christian, was how to know whether, in fact, one had been saved by God’s grace. While no one can ever really know, Calvin argued that those who have been saved will fulfill all of God’s commandments with zeal, not because it will secure their salvation but rather simply because God wills it. Moreover, everyone has an obligation to believe they have been chosen and to act accordingly. Constant performance serves as a kind of partial proof, or at least a sign, one can look to for hope that he or she has been saved.

Calvin demanded even more from the faithful. He claimed that it wasn’t enough just to continue to do whatever one did in the world the best way one knew—that was Martin Luther’s concept of calling. Calvin argued that each person is called upon to constantly improve his or her lot in life by increasing their productivity and, in the process, elevating his or her station, if they were to serve the glory of God.

In Calvin’s doctrine, each individual was forced to live from moment to moment, continually reassuring himself against his own gnawing doubt, by constantly performing God’s will. Even a momentary lapse from a total earthly ascetic commitment could undermine one’s personal belief and confidence that he or she is one of the elect.

John Winthrop and the Puritans, and the other Protestant sects that followed on their heels to America, were, in many ways, the most faithful adherents to the Reformation theology. Long after the religious fervor ebbed in Europe, its flame was kept alive in the American colonies by waves of religious asylum seekers anxious to maintain the purity of their beliefs.

Here, the religious zealots faced the sober reality of a wild, untamed continent where physical survival was at least as important as eternal salvation. By combining Calvin’s doctrine of relentless productivity with the Enlightenment emphasis on rational behavior, technological prowess, and pragmatic utilitarianism, they were able to eke out an existence and live out their beliefs at the same time.

The new notion of efficiency was ideally suited to the unique American temperament, with its emphasis on Reformation theology and Enlightenment science. Efficiency is a rational, technologically mediated way to continually improve one’s productivity. The more efficient one becomes, the more sure one is that he or she is improving his or her lot, all to the glory of God. Being ever more efficient, in turn, becomes a way of convincing oneself that one has been elected to salvation.

Even after the concept of election fell from favor in the Protestant churches by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the notion of being ever more efficient and thus more productive had a Salvationist quality to it that was absent when modern efficiency standards were taken up in Europe and elsewhere. We Americans still tend to equate efficiency with good moral values and are often judgmental toward people who are grossly inefficient. Their behavior is seen as slothful—sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. That Salvationist ring is what made Americans not only the first and most willing converts to the modern idea of efficiency but also its greatest champions in the twentieth century.

Europeans often wonder why Americans live to work rather than work to live. The answer lies in our deep metaphysical attachment to efficiency. Being more efficient is being more God-like. God, recall, is the most efficient of all actors. He spoke the world into existence without expending any time, labor, energy, or capital. He created the heavens and Earth de novo. To the extent that human beings can increase production—and create our own earthly Eden—with the exertion of less and less time, labor, energy, and capital, we edge close to the awesome powers of God himself.

With efficiency as the new guide, Americans set out to recondition space and time with an almost evangelical fervor. An American, Frederick W. Taylor, is widely regarded as the father of modern efficiency practices. His principles of “scientific management” were taken up by American industry in the early twentieth century and shortly thereafter by the rest of society and became the foundation for an efficiency ethos that would eventually change the whole world.

If the town clock was the signature of Europe’s transition into a new time era, the stopwatch became the American moniker. Using a stopwatch, Taylor divided workers’ tasks into small operational components and then measured each activity to ascertain the best time under optimal performance conditions. By studying the minutest details of a worker’s movements, Taylor could make recommendations on improving his or her performance to reap ever greater efficiency. Often, time savings would be measured in fractions of a second.

Taylor reduced human behavior to that of a machine and judged performance by the same criteria—that is, how well each worker maximized output in the minimum time, with the minimum input of labor, energy, and capital. Man and machine, for all intents and purposes, became one. By the twentieth century, Americans had so assimilated the new machine value into their lives that they began to describe their own behavior and well-being in machine terms. People were said to be “geared up” or “revved up” when motivated and “stressed,” “overloaded,” and “burned out” when depleted. We “tune in” to things of interest and “turn off” to things that repel us. Being “connected” or “disconnected” has become a surrogate for engaged or detached.

Soon, efficiency experts were fanning out across America, introducing the newest efficiency methods to the factory floor, front office, and retail establishments. The efficiency craze quickly spilled over into the wider society, where the new value became the litmus test for progress in all areas of life. Progressives brought efficiency into the political arena and began to call for the depoliticization of government and the establishment of scientific management principles in all government agencies and programs. (We will touch on this in more detail in chapter 10.)

The efficiency crusade even reached down into the homes and schools. In 1912, Christine Frederick wrote an article in the influential
Ladies’ Home Journal
entitled “The New Housekeeping,” urging the nation’s housewives to adopt more efficient methods for running the household. She confessed to her readers that she had been needlessly wasting precious time because of inefficient homemaking practices. She wrote, “For years, I never realized that I actually made eighty wrong motions in the washing alone, not counting others in the sorting, wiping and laying away.”
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Frederick asked her readers, “Do we not waste time by working in poorly arranged kitchens? . . . Could not the housework train be dispatched from station to station, from task to task?”
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