Time

Various attempts have been made to explain how the sense of time in modern societies has come to be dominated by the concerns of rationality, which relegates to the peripheries of social life such other sources of social order and allegiance as loyalty to kinship and ethnic groups, or commitment to mythical versions of the past and of the future. The move toward utilitarian time in Europe may be due to the marginalization of traditional time, in which the present is both embedded in the past and mortgaged to the future, from the social life of the nation. The causes of this development have been variously attributed to a number of sources, notably: the legacy of the church as a source of rational social control; the tendency of the Protestant Reformation to displace traditional time, in which the departed were still intimately linked with the ongoing life of the community and were a source of authority for kinship and ethnic groups; and the early dissolution of the feudal system and the resultant ordering of production and of relationships between employers and employees, even in late medieval agricultural communities, along rational lines.

Some scholars have focused on the monastic, highly rational ordering of temporal sequences as the source and model for the increasing regulation of the temporal sequences of public life in the Western city from the twelfth century onward. Others, following this line of argument, have traced the concern for the rational ordering of everyday life and the self-perfection of the individual to the attempt to turn Purgatory into a this-worldly state of mind, in which individuals have to take on a rational self-discipline in their use of time for the purpose of spiritual perfection. Max Weber credited the church in the Western city with breaking open the communities based on familial or ethnic ties and replacing them with the more inclusive ties among coreligionists. It is also widely understood that utilitarian time was advanced by the administrative rationality and control of the Christian Church in Europe as it took on a wide range of functions after the collapse of the Roman Empire from the fifth century onward.

When Latin was replaced, the newer vernaculars took on the function of providing the extended present for nations and a sense of sharing in a common time as well as space. They provided a common language that was exclusive of the dialects and other traditional sources of loyalty and solidarity. The vernacular, carried by the media and especially by the broadsheets, established a present and defined "the times" in which people were living, while relegating Latin to the past, to an old world that was passing away.

This strategy for relativizing and marginalizing is easily seen as utilitarian when it occurs under the auspices of the modern nation-state, as in the case of England under Henry VIII and Elizabeth, who replaced traditional religion with a more abstract or generalized form of ascetic belief and practice: from Scholasticism and systematic theology to science and public affairs. Here again, the broadsheet became the sacrament of a secular society.

If utilitarianism relegates traditional sources of solidarity, which rely on traditional time and its mediation of the past and the future to the present, utilitarian time construes an extended present, in which the various pasts of ethnic and kinship, racial or national groups are irrelevant to a discourse on precedents, conditions, and consequences of effective and legitimate action. Social processes are thus ordered in terms of sequences that link means to ends, causes to effects, and precedents to procedures: not in terms of priorities based on a wide range of collective memories and aspirations for the future. A major gulf thus opens up between discussions of social policy and the unsatisfied longings of minority or subordinate groups and communities, along with their aspirations for a redress of grievances in the future.