On March 9, the Sunshine Protection Act was introduced in the Senate. The bill would abolish forever what one sponsor calls “the antiquated practice of clock changing.” [1] Instead of springing forward and falling back, we would spring forever forward and be done with it. Daylight Saving Time would no longer be Daylight Saving Time. It would just be time.
The bill’s supporters cite several benefits: reducing car crashes, curbing seasonal depression, combatting childhood obesity, saving energy, and boosting the economy. Even if it ends up delivering on those promises, however, I suspect that a permanent shift to Daylight Saving Time would be a bad idea. Indeed, I suspect that our current use of Daylight Saving Time is already a bad idea.
To see why, I want to table talk of clocks and calendars for a moment and turn to something deeper: I want to think about our fundamental posture towards reality. Better, I want to introduce two possible such postures. The first posture looks at the world and sees chiefly a realm of objective realities whose meanings we don’t control. The world is already there, and it is already good—very good. Better than anything we could make or invent. The second posture is different. It looks out and sees a world chiefly of our own making. It sees a world where we decide what things are and what they mean, and where things are endlessly open to whatever we might decide to do with them. According to the first posture, the world is studded with objective points of reference which we can recognize and by which our words and actions are to be measured and judged. According to the second, it is not. [2]
For a long time now, the second posture has been gaining ground. Its rise can arguably be traced back at least four hundred years to Bacon’s triumph of art over nature and to widespread rejections of formal and final causality. It might have roots back even further in various medieval nominalisms and voluntarisms. In any event, its presence can be discerned throughout much of contemporary culture, both on the right and on the left. On the left, recent redefinitions of marriage seem to suggest that there is no stable meaning of marriage beneath social construction and collective agreement. Marriage is what we decide it is: no objective reference. More recently, developments in gender identity seem to suggest that my maleness does not precede my choice, but follows upon it. My gender is what I decide it is: no objective reference—at least not one that ultimately matters very much. On the right, the logic of capitalism seems to suggest that a loaf of bread or a house is worth whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay at a given moment. That price could be obscenely high, it could be obscenely low, or it could be anywhere in between. No matter. Value is what potential buyers decide it is: no objective reference.
It might sound strange to lump Daylight Saving Time together with these obviously weightier matters. Indeed, it might sound strange to suggest that the question of Daylight Saving Time touches on anything so highfalutin’ as our fundamental posture towards reality as a whole. It might sound especially strange to those of us raised within liberal societies. For the great promise—and the great premise—of liberalism is that we can bracket our basic philosophical commitments as we go about ordering our common life. From one direction, we need not draw on or invoke any fundamental commitments as we sort through particular pieces of public policy. From the other direction, no concrete policy decision need commit us to, or so much as nudge us in the direction of, any particular stance on ultimate questions. Our basic commitments are tucked tidily away in one corner, our public order in another.
If this liberal premise holds anywhere, then one might reasonably expect it to hold in the question of Daylight Saving Time. Other policy questions might be more obviously slippery. My position on the question of government-provided health insurance, for example, might hinge on whether I believe healthcare to be a human right. Yet my answer to that question might be determined by whether I think that there are any rights which inhere in all human beings everywhere, and by how far I understand those rights to extend. This last question, however, brings me perilously close to my assumptions about what a human being is in the first place—which might open up to my assumptions about whether there is a God, about Who such a God might be, about His relationship to the world, and so on. Daylight Saving Time seems different. It seems cleaner: no such fundamental anthropological, theological, or ontological commitments are quite so obviously in play. My contention, however, is that, even here, in the most trivial and technical piece of public policy, those commitments are very much at work and at stake. Specifically, my contention is that a permanent shift to Daylight Saving Time would take us one more step away from a world of intrinsic meaning and goodness, and one more step into a world that’s empty until we fill it up.
* * *
To see why, I’d like to imagine what might happen if my three-year-old daughter were to ask me what time it is. Let’s say I respond that it’s six o’clock in the evening. Then let’s imagine that she asks me—which, for the record, she might very well do—what six o’clock means. Under standard time, I could give a fairly straightforward answer. I could say it’s been six hours since the sun was at its highest point in the sky for that day. Or I could respond that, for six hours now, the sun has been sinking down from its high point and approaching its low point on the opposite side of the earth. I might explain further that, when it gets to the very bottom of its descent, the clock reaches midnight and starts over. If she were to ask what “midnight” means, I could tell her that it is literally the middle of the night. If, at 9:33 the next morning, she were to ask me what 9:33 in the morning means, I might explain that it’s been nine hours and thirty-three minutes since the sun was at its lowest point, or that the sun has been inching its way up the sky for nine hours and thirty-three minutes.
Such a conversation might strike most of us grownups as fairly mindless. Yet more is at stake here—and more is communicated—than bare information. For, in offering these answers, I would convey that our words mean something. They refer us to a reality beyond ourselves. In this case, they refer us to a cosmic rhythm that gives order to our days and nights—a rhythm which we neither control nor invent. We don’t decide how long it takes the sun to run its duly appointed course. We don’t decide when it starts or when it stops or where it goes. It belongs to an order that precedes us. Indeed, as the rising and setting of the sun manifest so magnificently, it belongs to a beautiful order: an order which ought to fill us with joy, with wonder, and with gratitude. More deeply still, it belongs to an order which, as the sun again makes particularly manifest, points us towards the Love that grounds all true order. In this case, Plato already identified the sun as the best created image of divine generosity: the sun reminds us of the non-envious and self-giving overflow of goodness on which the entire cosmos is founded. [3] As the custom of building churches ad orientum testifies, Christian thinkers followed suit. They saw, in the falling and rising of the sun, whispers of the dying and the rising of the God-man. [4] They saw that this dying and rising is not confined to private belief or to personal opinion or to irrational emotion. Nor is it confined to an hour or two on Sunday. Instead, it goes to the foundation of the world. It is written into, and it is anticipated by, the structure of the universe as it concretely presents itself to us. The sun tells us so.
Of course, not all of that would be communicated, even implicitly, to my daughter. But something would be communicated. Even if only implicitly, it would be conveyed that the words “six o’clock” mean something. They refer to a reality beyond the two of us. They point to an ever-fixed mark. And, if my daughter sees as much, even if only implicitly, then our conversation might later bear fruit. It might make her a tiny bit more likely, one day, to give a free and conscious “yes” to a world whose goodness precedes her decisions.
Now imagine the same conversation during Daylight Saving Time. My daughter again asks me what six o’clock means. If I am being truthful, I say, “Well…Hmm. Let’s see…It used to mean that it’s been six hours since the sun was at the top of the sky. But it hasn’t actually been six hours. It’s been five hours. Because people decided, for all sorts of good reasons, that we should all move the clock forward an hour.” What’s communicated is very different. The words “six o’clock” no longer refer to the high point of the sun. They may still do so indirectly. But, directly, “six o’clock” now refers to our decision to make “six o’clock” mean something different. If the words refer to anything beyond or before that decision, they refer to the sun’s position one hour before its summit. Yet they refer to this particular point in the sun’s arc not because there is something in this point itself which makes it beautiful, important, or otherwise a fitting moment from which to measure our hours. Instead, they refer to this particular point because, given our needs at the moment, it was the most useful point we could come up with. It reduces car crashes. It helps the economy. It was chosen not for what it is, but for what it can do for us. Should we see fit in the future, we might move the clock up another hour. Or another two. Or back seven. We might cease referring even indirectly to the position of the sun in the sky. We can do whatever we want. It’s entirely up to us, governed by the needs of the moment—or the needs of the moment as we perceive them. In Daylight Saving Time, six o’clock is now essentially a convention. It’s whatever we decide it is.
In short, under Daylight Saving Time, when my daughter seeks after the intrinsic meaning of things, she’s implicitly told that there is no intrinsic meaning of things. She’s taught that “midnight” is not actually the middle of the night. She’s taught that, if we have a good enough reason, words can mean whatever we want them to mean.
Standard time, then, may be aptly named. For it is “standard” not only insofar as it is customary or uniform. It is standard also insofar as it bears within itself a standard. It refers to a reality beyond itself: a reality which we do not invent, and a reality by which our language and our claims can be measured and judged. Daylight Saving Time obscures that standard. It does not, admittedly, forget it entirely. But it overlays it with a film of convention—and it thereby suggests that the whole thing is mere convention.
The more basic point, however, is that the question of Daylight Saving Time is not sealed off from such questions as what reality is and how we are to engage with it. Instead, the move to Daylight Saving Time arises from a very specific stance on those questions, and it very subtly nudges those who adopt it towards assuming that stance.
* * *
I should clarify three things before continuing. First, there is nothing magic or sacrosanct about pre-1966 American standard time. Great Britain’s shift in the 1850s from local mean time to Greenwich mean time may have already been a step away from reality, and the standard time which I am defending—offspring of a rapidly mechanizing society and midwifed by railroad tycoons—might already be problematic.[5] Still, a shift from standard time to Daylight Saving Time would be one more step away from reality. Be that as it may, the more basic point is that the high and low points of the sun are not the only markers from which a culture might legitimately take its temporal bearings. Indeed, an example of another system goes deep into our culture. In Matthew 27:46, we read, “About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice.” This “ninth hour” is not our nine o’clock. It is three o’clock. It is not the ninth hour from the sun’s high point, but the ninth hour from its rising. There is a difference, therefore, between our time and the Evangelist’s time.
Yet there is also a similarity. Our three o’clock is pegged to the objective order of things: it takes its bearings from the high point of the sun. The Evangelist’s ninth hour is pegged no less to the objective order of things: it takes its bearings from the rising of the sun. The rising and setting of the sun, like its highest high and lowest low, are obviously prominent points in the course of a day. Indeed, the sun’s rising and setting, even more than its high and low points, are privileged places of beauty, often of peace. One need not think long as to why a culture would mark its time in reference to such a point.
Other reference points, of course, could be imagined. Some such points might not seem immediately obvious to us. Yet they need not be any less fitting for that. Indeed, there could be reasons that a given culture is particularly drawn to—or particularly able to see the beauty or sacredness of—a particular point along the sun’s arc. And that culture might come to peg its time to that particular point. Such cultural diversity is, in the main, precious and beautiful, and it ought not be steamrolled into an abstract “standard.” Daylight Saving Time, however, is different from any such system. Yet it is not different because it chooses still another reference point from within the cosmic order. It is different because it assumes that any such reference point is irrelevant so far as the ordering of our common life goes. All that matters are things like car crashes and energy savings. And those things certainly matter. Some of them matter a lot. But are they all that matter?
Second, my point is not that human invention, creativity, convention, or making are inherently suspect. It is that invention, creativity, convention, and making cease to be human—and they cease to be truly inventive, creative, convenient, or productive—if they ignore, replace, or destroy the original order of things. We can—indeed, we must—work to perfect nature. Yet we can only perfect nature if we presuppose it: we can only work rightly in and with the world if we accept its basic order as given and as inviolable. [6] In the concrete case of Daylight Saving Time, I do not prefer standard time because it offers us a sort of “pure nature” preceding convention. It is itself obviously a convention. Yet it is a convention rooted in the pre-conventional order of the cosmos. [7]
Third, and most deeply, I don’t care all that much about objective reality merely insofar as it is objective. I care about gift and love. I care about the claim that the world is a gift from a loving God—a God Who Himself is Love—and that love and gift therefore provide the key for understanding reality as a whole. Gift and love, however, cease to be gift and love if they are exhaustively controlled. To be sure, I am intimately involved in the gifts I receive. But those gifts must be freely given, and if I alone decide what I receive, how I receive, and when I receive, then nothing I receive will ever truly be a gift. Just so, I certainly help my beloved become herself. Yet if she becomes only what I decide that she should be, then love is dead. [8] To the extent, therefore, that we lose sight of the world as objectively ordered and meaningful, we lose sight of the world as a gift and as an education into love. If, therefore, Daylight Saving Time makes us even a tiny bit less apt to orient ourselves towards an objectively ordered and meaningful world, then it’s a big deal.
* * *
One might object, however, that I’m making too much of a few winds of the watch. This objection is far from baseless. For we are dealing here with, at most, a very small step in our long march away from a meaningful world. Yet a step is still a step, and I might not be alone in situating these questions of measurement within that larger march. As witness, I call George Orwell, whose 1984 begins, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” [9] Orwell makes no mention of Daylight Saving Time. Yet the very first thing he tells us about Big Brother’s world is that the measure of time has changed. 1984 was published in 1949. Then as now, Great Britain used a 24-hour clock in some settings, but a 12-hour clock in most. In dystopia, the 12-hour clock is abolished. Orwell never explains why this particular change was made. Yet it seems safe to assume that the Party ushered in the new clock for the same reason it does everything it does: to tighten its chokehold on humanity.
Something similar surfaces later in the novel, when Winston overhears a conversation between a bartender and a poor man old enough to remember life before the Revolution:
“I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?” said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. “You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?”
“And what in hell’s name is a pint?” said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
“’Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pints the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ’Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.”
“Never heard of ’em,” said the barman shortly. “Litre and half litre—that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.”
“I likes a pint,” persisted the old man. “You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man…
“’E could ’a drawed me off a pint,” grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. ’A ’alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. And a ’ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.” [10]
One more stamp of Big Brother’s boot on the face of humanity: decently sized beverages are a thing of the past.
Yet there may be more at work here. [11] Again, the novel was published in 1949, at which point the UK still used the standard system of measurement. They went mostly metric in 1965. The Party’s shift to metric, then, would have been a shift for Orwell and his audience. Even more, whereas Orwell had mentioned the change from a 12-hour to a 24-hour clock only in passing, he identifies the jump from standard to metric as a source of pain and frustration for the common man. And well he might. For the standard system is perhaps akin to standard time: it retains, at least in part, a memory of a word full of objective referents. Older measures—“stone” for weight, “hand” for length, and so on—may have harbored even more markers. Yet the standard system has not forgotten them entirely. Take a foot. Not every human foot, of course, is twelve inches long. But some are, and no human foot is 120 inches. Just so, not every cup we use to drink is the size of a standard “cup.” Nor is every spoon used at table the size of a “tablespoon.” But some cups and some spoons are just that size, and no cup is the size of Lake Superior, just as no spoon at any human table is the size of a shovel. In feet as in cups as in tablespoons, there is variety and range within the objective point of reference, and the precise standard may be arbitrarily chosen from within that range. Yet there is an objective point of reference, and its range is fairly narrow. The units of measurement take their bearings from concrete realities: the same concrete realities from which they take their names, and which they continue at least loosely to resemble. The words mean something.
Not so a “meter.” The word “meter,” like the word “metric,” comes from the French mètre, which itself comes from the Greek μέτρον, both of which mean “measure.” The metric system, then, gives us a unit of measurement which refers only to—measurement! It points to nothing beyond itself. Based on its intrinsic meaning, a “meter” could just as easily be the length of a football field as the length of a football as the length of a quarterback’s eyelash. There is nothing at all intrinsically 39.37 inches about it. It means whatever we want it to mean.
1984 mentions these shifts in measurement, but it never dives into their logic. It does, however, probe the underlying shift from objective reality to mere invention. When Winston is being reeducated by O’Brien, O’Brien tells him: “You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.” [12] The Party believes otherwise. When Winston insists that two and two are four, O’Brien enlightens him: “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at the same time.” [13] They’re whatever the Party says they are. And the reason is clear. The Party’s ministers are self-described “priests of power” who are “interested solely in power,” in “power entirely for its own sake”: “only power, pure power.” [14] They are restless so long as their power remains less than absolute. Yet less than absolute it must remain so long as its citizenry remains rooted in—or so much as believes in the existence of—a world which precedes the Party, and which the Party neither controls nor invents. If the logic of gift needs objective reality, then the logic of power-for-power’s-sake abhors it.
And so back to feet and cups. To say that a “foot” means 120 inches or that a “cup” means 3,783 gallons might be an exercise in doublethink that would tickle Orwell’s overlords. Yet, try as they might to stifle it, there still might be a whisper in the heart of some citizens: a whisper which no one dares heed, but which suggests, “Wait a minute…No foot I’ve ever seen is even close to that long.” With “meter,” there is no such whisper to stifle. A meter is whatever Big Brother says it is because a meter has always been whatever we’ve said it is. No objective reference.
* * *
I introduced 1984 in response to the objection that I’m making too much of this whole Daylight Saving Time thing. It might seem now that I’m making way too much of it. I should clarify, then, that the sponsors of the Sunshine Protection Act are not proto-Big-Brothers. Big Brother, for one, intentionally alienates us from reality in order to torment us; real-life leaders seem unwittingly to alienate us from reality in order to pursue legitimate ends. That difference matters. Still, alienation is alienation, and roads paved with good intentions ought not always be followed.
Be that as it may, I bring up Orwell for two reasons. First, he has thought deeply through one possible direction we might take if we abolish all objective referents whatsoever—which, thankfully, we have not. Second, he at least hints that certain ways of measuring time and space might make it slightly more difficult to forsake reality, whereas others might make it slightly easier. But, again, he only offers hints: references to measure are there, but they remain undeveloped. Yet if the scarcity of these references suggests that we ought not to obsess over measurement, then their presence perhaps suggests that we should be at least a little concerned about it. To admit that a hill isn’t worth dying on is not yet to concede that it should be surrendered without a fight. Even the smallest step away from reality is a step worth not taking.
In the end, then, perhaps we shouldn’t care all that much about Daylight Saving Time. But we should care whether humanity takes its bearings from the concrete world that precedes us. We should care about our basic posture towards reality. And we should recognize that our basic posture towards reality is implicated in—and that, at least in subtle ways, it is at stake in—even the most seemingly trivial policy decisions. Liberalism might tell us otherwise. Yet, at least so far as the question of Daylight Saving Time goes, the promise and premise of liberalism turns out to be an illusion: we cannot bracket ultimate questions as we sort through this particular piece of public policy. Not even the question of Daylight Saving Time, which initially seems so technical and trivial and uncontroversial, can be cleanly separated from our most basic questions and commitments. And if we cannot draw a neat line even here—if we cannot draw a line around a question which seems so far removed from those fundamental questions and commitments—then it may be that we cannot draw a neat line around any policy question. Instead of pretending to craft policy in a philosophical and theological vacuum, then, we might begin thinking carefully through the philosophical foundations and implications of our political decisions, and we might try privileging the sorts of public spaces and structures which are likely to recenter us in reality. Or, if that’s too ambitious, we might start by at least acknowledging that our fundamental questions and commitments are pervasive and inescapable, and we might begin engaging with them squarely—not only in private, but at the center of our common life as well.
About the Author
Michael Higgins After graduating from Duke University, Michael spent a year sharing life with the poor as a missionary in Brazil, and another working with the homeless in Philadelphia. He earned his MTS and PhD in theology from the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America. Michael taught theology at Loyola University Maryland, Georgetown University, and the Academy of the Holy Cross, and now teaches Humanities at the Saint Jerome Institute in Hyattsville, Maryland.. His work has been published in such theological journals as New Blackfriars, Irish Theological Quarterly, Gregorianum, and Angelicum.
Footnotes
[1] See https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/3/rubio-colleagues-reintroduce-bill-to-make-daylight-saving-time-permanent.
[2] Others have explored the difference between these two postures at great length. See, for example, Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 58-66; Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 106-114.
[3] See Republic, 508c.
[4] See Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 74-84.
[5] It is therefore not surprising that mainstream criticisms of the Sunshine Preservation Act have tended to proceed along strictly utilitarian lines: Daylight Saving Time, for example, disrupts our sleep patterns; it is unpleasant for children to wait in the dark for the bus on cold January mornings; and so on. See Binyamin Appelbaum’s op-ed in the New York Times of March 12, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/opinion/daylight-saving-time.html.
[6] David L. Schindler had already made this point in dialogue with the neo-conservatives of the 1990s: see Heart of the World, Center of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 114-142.
[7] Turning to the nitty gritty of the Sunshine Protection Act, there could be ways of achieving the legislators’ goals without dispensing with the objective order of things. If, for example, we were to judge it desirable to begin and end our days an hour earlier, then schools or businesses or individuals might be incentivized to open their doors an hour earlier in the morning and close them an hour earlier in the evening. I do not know whether such a move would be possible, or even whether it would be wise. Yet it hopefully gives a flavor for the sorts of intervention which would work within the cosmic frame instead of bending it or disregarding it.
[8] For a profound meditation on this point, see Stefan Oster, “Thinking Love at the Heart of Things: The Metaphysics of Being as Love in the Work of Ferdinand Ulrich,” Communio 37 (2010), 677-680.
[9] George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1961), 5.
[10] Orwell, 5.
[11] Indeed, Orwell seems to have known it, at least in part. He was very deliberate about having the Party use the metric system, to the point of pushing back when his American publishers converted some texts to the standard system. Orwell may not have recognized the precise points I will make here; yet, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, he was convinced that the metric system “was somehow ill-suited to humans” (see Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters [New York: Basic Books, 2002], 128-129).
[12] Orwell, 205.
[13] Orwell, 207.
[14] Orwell, 217.