You know all those folks who are so worried about "one world government" and the US losing primacy and all? It occurred to me that we're already under the thumb of something far more insidious and binding than some kind of unitary world gummint.
How did the entire globe ever come into agreement about years and months and days and hours? Really. Think about it. The world went along for a long time with everybody pretty much doing their own thing simply in response to nature ---- light and dark, growing seasons, lunar cycles, weather events. There weren't any trains to catch. The work was sufficient for the day at hand, and one day melted into another. I'm sure there are still people who live like that, more or less, but the world as a whole has embraced one calendar, one set of time zones. And it has to be that way because of the interconnectedness of travel and communication.
Who won? I guess Europeans/Western societies. And Americans. The universal language for all this coordinated timing, for airports especially, is English. There were, and are, alternate calendars, but if you want to deal with other people in other places, you're going to have to use the One World calendar. And if the planes aren't all using the same times, there are going to be some terrible tie-ups and crashes.
We had a New Year's Day program at UU on Sunday about the Japanese celebration of the new year. That's what got me started thinking. You can be pretty sure that it wasn't always called "January First" in Japan. I don't know what kind of calendar developed before this one was adopted, but I doubt that this Roman-based Christian-descended calendar was it.
And how is it that the naming of years that has been adopted around the world is based on the Christian religion? There are a ton more people who are not Christian, than are. And there were people in Asia keeping track of the days and years long before Europeans were counting up from the birth of Jesus.
So here we all are, slaves to the clock. The New Year advances around the world, one zone at a time, as if it were something real and immutable, instead of an arbitrary division. Don't you think it's weird when you're driving across country and one minute you're in one time zone and then you're in another? Doesn't that kind of blow your mind?
And this stuff matters. We're bound to it. Your birth certificate has a time on it, to the minute. That's always baffled me. Birth seems a bit more of a process than can be recorded in a definite minute. Deaths are to the minute as well, but really? Isn't that a process, too?
If you come into school a minute after the bell rings, you're tardy. If you clock in at work late, they'll dock your pay. Arriving at the theater five minutes late can leave you cooling your heels in the lobby till the end of the first scene. But all of these things are arbitrary. I'm not saying it's bad. It's actually pretty slick. How else do you get a bunch of individuals, each with their own concerns and priorities, to show up at the same time for something. It would be hard to have a symphony concert when the musicians come sidling in whenever they finished that last cup of coffee over dinner.
So, like it or not, we've already got the blueprint for One World Government. We're already being governed by the tyranny of the clock and calendar, at least if we want to play with others.
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