As I have noted before, I think it is important to have long and medium term idealist visions of what a better society would be like even as we engage in pragmatic strategies and tactics to resist tyranny and improve lives in the short and medium term.
I think a large majority of modern citizens (not all of course) would agree that a less forcibly-hectic everyday life with more FREE TIME would be a positive change in our society. The potential for a supermajority agreement on such an issue is one of the reasons I think a crucial part of the progressive vision of society should include identifying and addressing THE POLITICS OF TIME.
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THE POLITICS OF TIME
Temporality — the way people exist in time — is one of the basic frameworks of any sociocultural reality. The way we or any sociocutlural group practice/enact time is just that – a particular historically-located practice, a particular a way of doing things, and one that can be done differently. In other words, since we enact our form of being-in-time, we have the capacity to enact it differently – we can use our democratic right to organize society to change our temporality. So how about a politics of time aimed at increasing free time?
If we had an open, honest debate, one not dominated by self-interested elites and con-people, what percentage of USAmericans do you think would be interested in trying some social policies aimed at increasing the amount of free time in everyday life? (What if it became clear that we had to cut back on our materialism in order to get more free time? I think a lot of people would be willing to seriously consider this…)
THE 20-HOUR DAY
Idealistically hurtling past straightforward approaches like a 32-hour workweek, and aiming for a more radical (“to the roots”) approach to a better temporality, here is one, perhaps ridiculously immodest proposal for a policy aimed at reorganizing the way we exist in time to make it more relaxed, enjoyable, and humane- we switch to a 20-hour day. In doing so, we adopt a whole new clock — a clock that goes up to 10 twice a day (rather than 12), with fifty minutes in an hour and fifty seconds in a minute. As a democratic society, we are free to do this! Doing the math shows that one second in ‘new time’ would last for 1.728 seconds in ‘old time.’ Theoretically, in a deep sociocultural and even bodily way, this slower second/minute/hour would eventually structure a more relaxed everyday life – since time would be slower, we would slow down with it.
I would further propose we do not place minutes marks on the new clocks – this would tend to undermine the compulsive modernist habit of some of us (me) to sometimes find ourselves concerned with the different between, say 3:15 and 3:18. A no minute mark clock would loosen up coordinated timing and we would find ourselves satisfied to schedule events within a minimum approximate range of five minutes (the temporal distance between any two numbers on the new clock.)
As a corollary change, we could make the work day 5 ‘new hours’ (1/4 of the day, so the equivalent of 6 old hours), so that people have more free time. If people wanted even more free time, we could try to make the work day even fewer hours so people could have more time to pursue whatever they enjoy doing when not pressed for time.
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So, two questions for anyone who has gotten this far (and thank you):
(1) do you think a politics of time aimed at increasing free time should be apart of the progressive agenda?
(2) as an idealist, long term vision, what do you think of the 20-hour day?
