Flight from Temperance
Can You Spare a Cyber-second?

By John Horvat II

There simply aren't enough cyber-seconds in the day. And it only seems to get worse.

Everywhere we go, something or someone is soliciting our time.

The cellular phone rings in the middle of a meal. Advertisements beg attention for the latest model car. Mountains of mail crowd our desks. There are shopping trips, commuting, and traffic jams. There are the children's activities, sports, and television programs. Before we know it, an innocent surf on the Internet lasts two hours. A thousand interruptions break up the normal day of modern men.

For most people, there simply aren't enough cyber-seconds in the day. And it only seems to get worse.

Ironically, we live in a society that prides itself on its speed and efficiency. Everything is supposed to save time. Our cars connect us quickly to the most distant places. We express our mail overnight across the country. We microwave meals in moments. Countless gadgets are presented to us as timesaving devices. Advertisements promise us things that are ever-bigger, faster, and better.

Yet time is more elusive than ever.

A Dream Turned Sour

Truly, things used to be calmer and simpler. In the past, many people had stronger preferences for leisure over money. But at a certain point something happened.

People entered a frenetic pace of life that today is taking its toll on the psyche and health of our nation. A process of ever-increasing agitation took hold in modern man and now threatens the country's social fabric.

This process has its origins early in our history. From the very beginning, America was born in the restless frontier, fostering a lifestyle unfettered by tradition. Before settling down and developing new traditions, America was taken up in a revolution that was in some ways as important as the War of Independence itself: the Industrial Revolution.

Hard Labor

The Industrial Revolution started innocently enough. In 1760, Englishman James Watt invented the steam engine. What followed, however, was a boom of inventions and changes that literally transformed the world.

Juliet B. Schor, in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, claims that the Industrial Revolution introduced a pace of life that was unknown to pre-industrial society. The regular fifty-two week work year was essentially a modern invention.

The average work year of the medieval peasant, for example, was between 120 and 150 days per year. There was time for leisure, reflection, and socializing. There was also an explosion of vitality that led those same men to construct medieval castles, cathedrals, and the whole of Christendom.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the calmness of city-life was lost in the hustle and bustle of factories and smoke stacks.

With the introduction of steam-driven factories and the time clock, all that changed. Professor Schor says men were subjected to a most intense "life at hard labor" which was "the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."

The young United States embraced the Industrial Revolution with great enthusiasm. Big cities soon hustled and bustled around factory smoke stacks. Such developments were not without benefits. The standard of living rose significantly. But the frenzy of industrial society marked the modern mind.

Losing Balance

Among the most harmful aspects of the Industrial Revolution was the introduction of excessive speed in the lives of men. In itself, speed is a means toward an end, and it is determined by the activity that must be done. The temperate man has a taste for velocities that are proportional to his ability to grasp things. There are speeds which man can legitimately enjoy and also slow leisurely speeds where man can be recollected. Temperance presupposes a balance between different activities.

The Industrial Revolution introduced a type of adoration or mania for speed. It broke the equilibrium by spurring appetites to desire action for action's sake, sensation for sensation's sake, speed for speed's sake.

Means Become the End

With every phase of this revolution, the ever-quickening pace of life carried with it a euphoria and enthusiasm. From the Erie Canal to the transcontinental railroad, the speed of transportation fascinated the masses. The invention of the telegraph removed the dimension of time and space from normal communications. News stories that once took days to reach distant destinations became available almost instantly.

The very concept of time became a commodity. "Time is money" was the cry that attached a value to getting things done quickly.

Curiously, the inventions that highlighted speed especially captured the twentieth-century imagination. Collateral discoveries, such as medicines, proved less exciting. It was the automobile, the airplane, and the jet, that acquired exaggerated importance and elevated their inventors and producers into modern heroes.

A Culture of Speed

The mania for speed has invaded every aspect of modern life, and today there is a veritable culture of speed.

The world of dance, for example, ran parallel to the Industrial Revolution. Dancing evolved from the slow, structured minuet to the waltz, the Charleston, jazz, the Jitterbug, the Twist, rock 'n' roll, and Rap. Each successive dance reached a new height of uninhibited exuberance, reflecting the mounting mania for speed and excitement.

The mania for fast food typifies this culture, boasting of identical assembly-line hamburgers produced and consumed in minutes, if not seconds. Fast food specialists design their products to produce explosions of taste and instant sensation with the least effort. They set up sterile and uninviting environments made to discourage lingering customers. The idea of savoring food and dining reflectively is cast out.

The latest wonder of modern technology for speeding up life is the computer world. Conservatives and liberals alike marvel at modems that permit sending two bibles a second or downloading the contents of the whole Library of Congress in eight hours. Every six months, a new computer product line offers ever-faster processors, ever-larger hard drives, and ever-better performance. For the cyber-second conscious, today's multipurpose computers perform several functions at the same time. Interactive computer games mix speed and violence. The Internet spews forth oceans of information at lightning speed.

The culture of speed also invades the world of business. Business writer and guru Tom Peters, in his book Liberation Management speaks of surviving in the nano-second nineties. He maintains that success in the future will depend upon a company's ability to adjust to a fast-changing world where companies and markets will appear and disappear at unnerving speeds.

A Psychiatric Revolution

It is no surprise that fast-paced modern life finds a companion in the world of drugs, with explosions of whirling unreality. Nor is it surprising that it affects adults, children, and society as a whole. Today's widespread mental unbalance and neuroses are due in part to the inability to cope with a whirling and incomprehensible reality.

Worse yet, the appetite for ever-greater and faster sensations prepares man for the ultimate of sensations: the shocking, the hideous, and the Satanic.

Flight from God

The mania for speed went so far as to destroy the recollection and ceremonial which formerly surrounded the Liturgy.

As a tendential revolution that neatly sidestepped theological matters, the Industrial Revolution created conditions for a secular society that relegated God to a secondary plane. Religion became a kind of psychological oasis for the weak who failed to adjust to the dazzling speed of technology and progress.

Moreover, the mania for speed has an equally destructive corollary for the Church: It created aversion to recollection. Modern man is horrified with the prospect that regions of his soul will cease to be solicited by some form of impression or action. He does not want to be alone or recollected. He does not like ceremony and silence. His liturgy must be devoid of prayer, recollection, and ceremony; rather, it must have noise, handshaking, and spontaneous outbursts.

In the constant agitation of modern life, everything is moving, sensational, exciting, and hurried. Is it any wonder that most people, and especially youth, are not prepared for the true joy of recollecting themselves in God for study and prayer?

Nurtured in the culture of speed, modern man, having lost the compass for true happiness found in the Catholic Church, accelerates uncontrollably toward chaos.