Reflections

The clock is indispensable
Lewis Mumford was an American sociologist and city planner, whose lifelong interest
was in understanding the cause and effect relationship between cultural attitudes and
technology. That is how some cultural attitudes in the western society gave rise to
certain technologies, which in turn, effected the cultural attitudes, indeed the whole
life pattern of the society.
He wrote several books, including 'The Culture of Cities'and'The Conditions of Man'.
But perhaps his most seminal work is 'Technics and Civilization' written in 1932,
which still holds tremendous relevance, for it deals with the very basic issues involved
in the embiotic relationship between man and machine. And what fascinates me most
in this book is a brief chapter called The Monastery and the Clock.
According to Mumford, it is the clock and not the steam engine, which is the key
machine of the modern industrial age. And it all began in the monasteries of the West,
where the desire for order and power first manifested itself after a long uncertainty and
confusion,that followed the breakdown of the Roman Empire. To enforce order, it was
decreed that the bells of the monastery be rung seven times in the twenty fours to
punctuate the seven periods of devotion of the day. The monastery became the seat of
a regular life. The habit of order and the regulation of time had become its second
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