Dictating Time and Space

            Measurements create boundaries and oppositions, summations and divisions. Some societies have measured the meaning of life or nature or other peoples in terms of how nature, life or people relate to an overarching system of abstractions or gods.  In the Bible important measurements are made by god himself, who dictates the length and breadth. With the elimination of gods and their replacement by even more abstract categories of mathematic and scientific thought, greater possibilities of power and control have been created. Insurance Companies calculate the "dollar value of a man", by various complex statistical modes, just as the Church once weighed souls by sins and calculated the cost of buying one's 'sins' back for a certain price called an "indulgence". Our systems of measurement descend from more 'magisterial' ages when the gods, speaking through priests and kings, measured out the meaningful units of space and time, thus delimiting the universe in accord with their  vastly universal ambitions. Our system derives from the English, where the King, protected by divine right, guaranteed weights and measures, which was called the "Imperial system": feet, inches and pounds. Now it is called the "customary system", with a certain euphemistic inaccuracy that cloaks its imperial legalistic origins. The metric system, born of the French Revolution, is a replacement of divine right with that of the righteousness of science.

            The Imperial system traveled with Imperialism and the metric system follows the same path. Echoing the vainglory of Plato's Protagoras, first the Spanish and Portuguese and then the Dutch and English, declared themselves "Man, the Measure of all things". And they set forth to conquer and bloody the earth to prove it.  To measure and delineate all of creation with a view to mastering the earth and its peoples was both a scientific and an imperial ambition. There are no clear lines of demarcation between the ambitions of scientists and those of imperial landlords and colonizers. The scientists and explorers delineated the territory and the landlords and colonizers exploited the findings, rewarding the explorers with fame. The man that was to measure everything, it turned out, had to be European, white and Christian, and preferably wealthy or at least providing knowledge, going on expeditions or exploring areas that were of interest to the wealthy.

            The Native Americans had no science, at least in the  totalizing and world conquering Western sense, and this was held against them. [1] For instance,  In 1622 a British colonist justified the expropriation of Native lands on the grounds that they "are not industrious, neither have [they] art or science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it". [2] It is not true that the did not use the land, rather they did not have the exploitive ideology of greed and use that still dominates European conceptions of property. The mentality involved in Native culture is completely different that of Western science. Their understanding of plants and animals was prodigious, but it was an understanding based on identity, not exploitive drives. These differences are usually minimized by Western writers on these subjects.

            European mathematical systems, from Descartes and Newton to the present have the control of change, through calculus, vectors, coordinates, triangulation, Riemaian geometires, game theories and hundreds of other mathematical strategies, as their purpose. Since Plato had it written over the door to the Academy that those who do not know math need not enter his school, math has been the ontological basis of western drives to dominion. The effort to turn  the earth into a navigational field of longitude and latitude that would enable traders to maximize distances and profits was one effect of the mathematical drive for power and conquest. Another was the effort to turn the French Provinces into a system of square allotments or the even more manifestly imperial effort to force the Native Americans on Reservations to accept  the concept of private property and  allotments. Both of these attempts, which were largely successful in western terms, were rationalist efforts that benefited the central organization of state and business hierarchies much more than the French peasantry or the Native American.  The forcing of Native Americans onto allotted property played a major role in their dispossession and marginalization. It enabled American government and business people break Treaties and gave them easier access to resources, profits and lands. Many Native Americans were murdered and impoverished in this process. This was little better than when god was the measure of everything and when god said to kill, swords were bloodied, and benign deities looked down with approval on fields of  gore.

            The world is measured now, primarily by those who profit from it. Decisions are made to benefit stockholders, even if they destroy communities or result in the death or suffering of children. Those who control  how things are measured, assessed, rated and analyzed control time and those who control time control change- and thus controlling and measuring change, as Descartes knew when he created a coordinate mathematics, is a means to power and the control of space, ultimately over the earth and beyond.  Those who dictate time largely control the world, be they priests or corporate executives. Just as the religions used the ideology of eternity to control behavior and dictate lives useful to religious and monarchic institutions, so corporate CEO's dictate work patterns, pay scales and time clocks. If a job can be done by America workers at ten dollars an hour, and the same job in Mexico for 75 cents a day, they move to Mexico.

             Anthony Aveni concludes his study of the historical conceptions of organizing time among the Aztec, Mayan, Greeks, Chinese and today's "empire of the clock", with the observation that the  power of a civilization depends largely on "who is in charge of time and what purpose it will serve"[3] Controlling time maximizes change and maximizing change generates greater power and profits. [4] Norms,  standards                                                  

and measures create criteria of legitimate knowledge. In today's world, history is largely assessed, not by gods, shamans, prophets or priests, but by the criteria of political, mathematical and economic concerns. [5]If, for the Mayans or Augustine, time was a shadow of the greater reality of an eternal god, in our society "time is money", and money, like god, provides a kind of abstract security and immortality to the wealthy. There  is no doubt some truth in the belief that all social phenomena are ultimately economic, at least insofar as one believes this because one is concerned with those with the least economic or political power. But the concern with the political is the concern with power and the concern with the economic is the concern with wealth, and human life is not circumscribed by the drive for power and wealth any more than it is circumscribed by gods and myths.  No doubt some lives are thus circumscribed, especially among our contemporaries. But the political-economic concerns of the elites of today, which are largely determinate of how much of history is viewed, is not the whole story.

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