Clocks and Flowers and Daylight Saving - by David Coleman
In between plans to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama (but not, for some reason, Puerto Rico), Donald Trump has declared war on Daylight Saving Time. This will probably be the most popular policy position of his presidency 1 , because changing our clocks twice a year is one of those things that makes less sense the more you think about it.
DST is an attempt to marry two conceptions of time, what the Ancient Greeks called Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is technological clock time, while Kairos is when the sun rises and the flowers open. The rise of the railroads largely shifted our society from Kairos to Chronos, replacing all those sun-calibrated local city times with just four corporate-mandated time zones, disconnected from local conditions.
Coming out of WWI, the US government decided that it just had to do something about Americans not waking up early enough. Americans wake up about 5 hours before noon and go to bed about 10 hours after noon, an asymmetry that led to wasted daylight hours and coal. These days, we would send in the behavioral economists to convince people of the virtues of waking up early. In 1918, the height of patronizing Taylorism, they went with the technocratic solution that actually worked 2 : just lie to everyone about what time it is.3 If people are waking up at 7am, and the government wants them awake at 6am… just tell them it’s already 7am at 6am. Voila.
