Mumford's Clock

Lewis Mumford had a keen eye for observing. In his book Technics and Civilization he describes how the invention of the clock created "an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences". The world that was created by the ticking timepiece has become our home, unless you happen to be back county camping. Away from schedules and organized meetups you can enter back into the world where the natural rhythms of creation are rediscovered. It seems crazy to think human reliance on those natural rhythms has been interrupted by something as simple as the clock.

Mumford writes:

The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociation time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation for this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. (Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 15).

Understanding time through the lens of the clock is different than time in the absence of seconds and minutes. Without the clock time becomes less bound, less structured, and more alive. What about God? I wonder how much of our concept of God been shaped by the clock? I think that question could take some time...