In Defense of Daylight Savings Time

You'll get no defence from me. I grew up on a farm. Cows don't understnd DST. They want to be milked every 12 hours regardless of clock time.

From Front Porch Republic

By Brevin Anderson

Daylight Savings Time is a liturgical cycle calling us twice a year to mind how we mind time.

The debate over the strange ritual of Daylight Savings Time (DST) is as regular as the clock itself. Public opinion is very consistent. Ending Springing Forward and Falling Back is at least a seventy-thirty issue, though the masses and the scientific elites disagree on whether a permanent shift to Daylight Time or Standard Time is the preferable option. The technocrats support Standard Time and present arguments about circadian health, sleep deprivation, quality of life, traffic fatalities, lost productivity, and so forth. The forever Daylight Time populist position, represented by the Sunshine Protection Act (H.R. 139) bipartisanly passed by the House on July 14 of this year, depends on warm summer memories and the potential for more recreational winter daylight. If either gets their way, however, the outcome will be catastrophic for our civilization.

The myth I heard as a child was that DST was for the farmers. As a suburban, I felt a certain deference to those early-rising, earth-attuned figures I’d read about in Farmer Boy. These days, where DST seems an arcane rite of a bygone civilization, the false association with farming does not feel accidental. After all, DST’s seasonality and the traditional rhythms of agricultural life are similarly alien and distant. It’s not unreasonable for a layman to assume they are associated parts of a puzzling past we’ve left behind.

It was never about the farmers, though. Like so many sticky institutions, DST was the creation of war and the government’s rational forces of command and control to direct the whole of a population toward the defeat of a rival. While various proposals for DST can be found scattered through the early 1900s, its history in the United States can be quickly summarized as a World War One efficiency measure that was revisited for World War Two, and then cemented into place in 1966 under the Universal Time Act, though some states and territories opted out in favor of a stable Standard Time.

The bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act has been introduced in the last several Congresses to various levels of success, seeking to freeze the clocks in permanent Daylight Time. Other politicians have proposed permanent Standard Time, or a compromise which would advance Standard Time by 30 minutes and hold there. The hatred of changing clocks is unifying, with calls from all ideological corners to do away with it. One can find periodic screeds in the pages of National Review and Jacobin alike. Even in a world of smartphones where our digital alarms make the transition nearly seamless, the biannual resetting of ovens and microwaves has proven too much of a burden on our collective psyche.

At its inception, DST was contested on a number of grounds, some of which are familiar to us today. Early objectors protested the project as an arrogant bauble of scientific utopians and bureaucratic optimizers. Other objections are more anachronistic. Modern critics usually emphasize Standard Time’s closer alignment of clock and noonday sun; earlier critics warned that chasing sunlit hours through Daylight Time is a prideful offense against God’s (Standard) Time. Those early religious dissenters would, in the present, find themselves betrayed by traditionally allied right-wing politicians seeking permanent Daylight Time. In a parallel reversal, it is now the scientists and rationalizers who demand we re-fix clocks at Standard Time. Their passion against the inconvenience does not come from a reverence for God’s Time. Rather, it stems from perceived inefficiency. Whether for the sake of less-chaotic morning commutes or late tee-times, time itself has become the god to serve. And so, unexpectedly, the cause of a Godly Time is best preserved by the side no one wants to take: we should do nothing and keep DST exactly as it is.

There are many battlefields where the instrumentalizing forces of the “machine” must be fought, but DST should take precedence due to the unique character of the clock. Lewis Mumford, in his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, understood the machine’s origin as a “convergence” of instruments and habits. He asked, “Where did the machine first take form in modern civilization?” His answer was in the coordinated prayer of the monastery and the clock, the first machine that laid the groundwork for the rest. Mumford’s paradox is that the tyranny of the timepiece began as “the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions.” Community prayer necessitated an accurate and orderly routine. Benedictines did more than preserve civilization. They created its heartbeat.

When this timely coordination moves into the secular realm, the clock becomes a machine of production, literally creating minutes and seconds where they did not exist before, and through them severing time from the world of experience. It is hard to overstate, and perhaps impossible to truly understand, the world before and after a ubiquitous second hand. Before, experience was a sequence and flow of events; now, it is a collection of hours and minutes. The clock makes plausible belief “in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science.” Once it had a foothold, this rapaciously imperialistic world conquered the rest. The clock allows time to become a resource, and every moment becomes a calculation subject to instrumental rationality. Neil Postman, reading Mumford a mere fifty years later, reflected that “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.”

So how do we respond? The most important thing we can do is to enjoy regular season when we do not watch the clock. Such sabbaths rebel against productivity, noise, and the tyranny of a schedule. But the danger of clocks is only half that we are hemmed in and harried by calendar notifications. The real danger is we cease to notice that things can be otherwise. The experiential world does not tick with clocklike regularity; it includes variation, vivid moments where time painfully or beautifully slows, and others where it speeds by–it is feasts and festivals, saint days and seasons and eternal porch-evenings.

I argue the cumbersome maintenance of DST reveals that the clock is an artificial measure. The manual changing of the clocks becomes a small act whereby we collectively affirm that metrics need not be our masters. Like the slavishly rational metric system, an eternally unchanging clock smacks of the French Revolution: ten-hour days and ten-day weeks, rationalistic abstraction, and the guillotine.

Daylight Savings Time is a liturgical cycle calling us twice a year to mind how we mind time and to assert our rightful authority over its technical artifice. Ending Daylight Savings Time now, whatever its origins, would be another concession to the dark god of efficiency. Encroaching technological servitude wins via a long game of domino theory, so we beleaguered defenders must hold every outpost to the death, if only because we should fear what subconscious cost we will pay after its loss.

We need the whole inconvenient enterprise—the uncertainty, double checking clocks and appointments, dark morning heart palpitations and pleasant awakenings, the annual conversations—reminding us we are mortal and gifted with every moment. An hour lost: we remember we are sinners and the earth is hard and produces thorns; an hour gained, we recall that to those He loves, the Lord gives sleep. The irrationality and non-functionality of the tradition has become its best feature, making our invisible taskmaster hiccup. For the good of our souls, Daylight Savings Time must be preserved.