Wanted: Time to Think

In her biography of the Nobel Prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller asks, “What enabled McClintock to see further and deeper into the mysteries of genetics than her colleagues?”1 Keller answers that McClintock was able to take the time to look and to hear what the material had to say to her. The material, in this case, was corn, and McClintock studied each of her corn plants with great concentration, patience, care and even love; she knew each of them intimately. Her method was to “see one kernel [of corn] that was different, and make that understandable.” After giving a lecture at Harvard, Keller tells us, McClintock “met informally with a group of graduate and postdoctoral students. They were responsive to her exhortation that they ‘take the time and look,’ but they were also troubled. Where does one get the time to look and to think? They argued that the new technology of molecular biology is self-propelling. It doesn’t leave time. There’s always the next experiment, the next sequencing to do. The pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance.”2

McClintock’s meeting with graduate students took place in the early 1980s. If questions could be justifiably raised more than two decades ago about the pace of life and its consequences for looking and thinking, how much more urgently might such questions be raised today? For in the intervening years, we have inarguably witnessed a further speedup in the pace of life. Books with titles like Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything and No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life now attempt to document the phenomenon,3 and movements such as “Slow Food” and “Take Back Your Time” have arisen to mount a response. The academic world has hardly been shielded from this acceleration, as today’s academics can readily attest. Today’s pace of research would make the Harvard students’ practices seem leisurely by comparison. Yet during this same period of time a remarkable suite of tools has been developed for research and scholarship. Thanks to networked digital computers, e-mail and the World Wide Web, access to scholarly information and research results has never been easier; and thanks to the vast computational power now readily available, whole new areas of investigation have been opened up. (It is impossible, for example, to imagine the decoding of the human genome without the use of such tools.)

We would seem, then, to be losing the time “to look and to think” at the very moment we have produced extraordinary tools for investigating the world and ourselves and for sharing our findings. How might we understand this seeming paradox?

More-Faster-Better

It would be naïve to think that the acceleration of life and work was simply inaugurated by the latest technological developments, for widespread social and economic acceleration emerged well before the computer era. As Hartmut Rosa has noted, “the feeling that history, culture, society or even ‘time itself’ in some way accelerates is not new at all: it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity itself. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a ‘speedup’ has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the 18th century. And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speedup of all kinds of technological, economic, social and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life.”4

In his book The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, James Beniger documents the roles played by new technologies and organizational practices in speeding up the American economy, beginning in the 19th century. Thanks to the invention of steam power, it became possible to mine raw materials, to manufacture finished products and to distribute them more quickly than ever before: “Until the Industrial Revolution, even the largest and most developed economies ran literally at a human pace, with the processing speeds enhanced only slightly by draft animals and by wind and water power, and with system control increased correspondingly by modest bureaucratic structures. By far the greatest effect of industrialization, from this perspective, was to speed up a society’s entire material processing system. …”5 With increasing speed, of course, came new challenges. By the late 19th century, existing management methods, largely based on on-site, face-to-face interactions, were no longer up to the task of controlling the new faster-moving, distributed organizations, such as the railroads. This precipitated what Beniger calls “a crisis of control, a period in which innovations in information processing and communications technologies lagged behind those of energy and its application to manufacturing and transportation.”6

JoAnne Yates fills out this story of late-19th- century crisis and innovation in her book Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. She traces how, over the course of several decades, a new management method emerged, called systematic management, that “promoted rational and impersonal systems in preference to personal and idiosyncratic leadership for maintaining efficiency in a firm’s operation. This general philosophy spawned many specific techniques and movements. Systematic management attempted to improve control over — and thus the efficiency of — managers, workers, materials and production processes.”7 The new management methods arose hand in glove with new information and communication technologies, such as the typewriter, carbon paper and vertical files, and new genres of business communication, such as the memo, the fill-in-the-blank form and the executive summary. The result was a new form of institutional structure, the modern hierarchical organization, which was capable of exerting a much greater degree of “control through communication.”

These late 19th- and early 20th-century innovations may have resolved the immediate control crisis, but their very success precipitated the next one: By the early 1920s, there was growing concern about overproduction. Industry was indeed able to produce more faster, but consumers apparently felt no need to consume larger quantities at a faster pace. As one observer at the time noted, “we are equipped to produce more of the goods that satisfy human wants than we can use”; another commented that “experienced businessmen all over the world realize that the market does not expand rapidly enough to keep up with demand.”8

What followed was a vigorous debate among business and labor leaders about how to resolve this crisis of production. For labor, it was an argument for reduced hours and greater leisure time: If more was being produced than was needed, why not slow down? Business, however, balked at this suggestion, fearing that more time off would encourage vice and sloth — and, of course, reduce profits. John E. Edgerton, president of National Association of Manufacturers, spoke for many in the business world when, in 1926, he said: “[I]t is time for America to awake from its dream that an eternal holiday is a natural fruit of material prosperity, and to reaffirm its devotion to those principles and laws of life to the conformity with which we owe all of our national greatness. I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance … the emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work, instead of upon leisure — more leisure and worse leisure … the working masses … have been protected in their natural growth by the absence of excessive leisure and have been fortunate … in their American made opportunities to work.”9

The debate was ultimately decided through a new understanding of consumption. The naysayers who thought that human needs had reached the saturation point were wrong; the desire to consume could be further stimulated. The 1929 report of Herbert Hoover’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes captured the tone of gleeful discovery: “the survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”10 Even if consumers’ primary needs for food, clothing and shelter were met, “optional consumption” was virtually limitless, “optional in the sense that this portion of the income may be saved or spent, and if spent the manner of this spending may be determined by the tastes of the consumer or the nature of the appeals made to him by the industries competing for his patronage.”11 From this fertile soil modern advertising was born, and thus was the crisis of production, reframed as a problem of consumption, resolved.

Viewed in this historical light, today’s concerns about busyness, about the accelerating pace of life and about the surfeit of information and the difficulty of managing it are a fairly straightforward extrapolation of past trends — the latest manifestation of a “more-faster-better” philosophy of life. Digital technologies have clearly made possible a further acceleration of the pace of production and consumption. And once again society is wondering if it has hit some sort of inherent limit, or if we will once again find clever solutions that will allow us to proceed even faster.

The problem of information overload may well be amenable to a combination of social and technological solutions, much like the management crisis of the late 19th century that Beniger and Yates describe. The innovations in social and organization practice (hierarchies of jobs, formal reporting relationships, etc.) and information and communication media and technologies (the typewriter, vertical files, the memo, etc.) created institutions that could not only manage but further accelerate the pace of production and consumption. Already today, we see a range of innovations that to varying degrees have helped people deal with the tidal wave of information, including “do not call” telephone lists, e-mail filters and cell-phone-free zones. We may at some future time look back on today’s crisis of information overload as a transitional phase, the incunabula period of digital materials, which preceded the development of social and institutional practices capable of imposing greater order.

Yet solving the problem of information overload will not address the problematic aspects of acceleration; in fact, it may only further exacerbate them. We will still be faced with the question: How much faster can we, or do we want to, go? For some human projects the answer is clear: The faster we can cure AIDS or cancer, the faster we can eliminate global hunger and poverty, the better. But as Thomas Hylland Eriksen has pointed out, not all human activities can or should be speeded up. In The Tyranny of the Moment, he makes a distinction between “fast time” and “slow time,” between activities that can or must be done quickly and those that can’t or shouldn’t. The problem in today’s society, he suggests, is that “[w]hen fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for things like thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships.”12

It is also really bad news for thinking. Thinking is by its very nature a slow-time activity. Aspects of thought — its more routine dimensions — can perhaps be automated and accelerated. But its more creative aspects — both the “work” of concentrated reasoning and the “leisure” of sudden insight — generally require substantial investments of sustained attention, which cannot be truncated or rushed. New technologies have primarily been used, in the spirit of more-faster-better, to accelerate production and consumption to new, previously unimaginable levels. We are all now expected to complete more tasks in a smaller amount of time. And while the new technologies do make it remarkably efficient and easy to search for information and to collect masses of potentially relevant sources on a huge variety of topics, they can’t, in and of themselves, clear the space and time needed to absorb and reflect on what has been collected. At times it feels like the new technologies are “self-propelling,” as the Harvard students attending Barbara McClintock’s talk suggested, urging us on to ever greater speed and productivity. But what are the costs of allowing ourselves to be so propelled?

A Future for Reflection?

Barbara McClintock understood that deep reflection couldn’t be hurried, that lightning-like insights couldn’t be forced, and she cultivated a life that allowed her the time to look and think. She had an intimate understanding of each of the individual corn plants she grew. It was possible to grow two corn crops a year, but “after a while, she’d found that as slow as it was, two crops a year was too fast. If she was really to analyze all that there was to see, one crop was all she could handle.”13 Describing the intimacy she developed when viewing corn chromosomes through a microscope, McClintock said: “I found that the more I worked with [the chromosomes] the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes — actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.”14

McClintock was certain that her deepest scientific insights came not simply from logical calculation but from some other mode of thought: “When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer — before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened too many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I’m so absolutely sure. I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to tell anybody about it. I’m just sure this is it.”15 Often she “saw,” or intuitively grasped, the answer she was seeking in a flash, but still needed hours or days afterwards to “work it out.” Such understandings aren’t confined to the sciences, but are equally present in the arts and humanities; indeed, it can be argued that all creative work has an immersive, contemplative element.

I began this article by noting a seeming paradox: that we are losing the time to look and to think at exactly the moment when we have produced a remarkable new set of tools for scholarly investigation and communication. Certain activities associated with education and learning — searching for information, collecting and superficially reviewing it — can be speeded up, while others — sustained reflection and contemplation — simply cannot. In a world that privileges, and even celebrates, 24/7 availability, it is becoming harder to secure the space and time needed to think. This is a problem for society to the extent that it values reflection as a right and a responsibility of citizenship. It is also a problem to the extent that acceleration and overload are causes of physical and psychological illness, for which there is increasing evidence.16

If there is a positive side to the developments I have been reporting, it is that the intensification of our more-faster-better practices may be forcing us to see their destructive character. The extent and potential consequences of global warming seem finally to have reached public awareness in ways that may well lead to corrective action. It is possible that we may yet realize the dangerous consequences of the loss of time to think, and find ways to welcome back this most remarkable dimension of the human experience.