No Time To Think

...beginning in the fourteeth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as [Lewis] Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

[Mumford] is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment to moment." He attends to the philosphy of clocks, to clocks as a metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clockmakers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measureable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death,
referencing Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization