Book Review : Humans Fall Out of Sync With Technology’s Pulse

The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables by Michael Young (Harvard University Press: $25; 301 pages)

Among the many interesting but unanswerable questions that people have struggled with over the centuries is the problem of time, namely, what is it?

“Time is as invisible, untouchable, inaudible, unsmellable, untasteable as the idea of God, and as indissolubly part of everything,” Michael Young tells us in “The Metronomic Society,” an odd but original look at the question of time with a large dose of sociobiology thrown in.

More about the sociobiology in a moment. First, note that Young’s observation about time is far short of an explanation, much less a definition--which is not surprising, since interesting questions tend not to have answers, the characteristic that makes them interesting in the first place.

Looking for Answers

The best answer to the question of time is still probably the old line that time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. And leave it at that. Like Potter Stewart’s clear-eyed observation about obscenity: He may not know what it is, but he knows it when he sees it.

Young’s purpose in asking about time is not simply to engage in a philosophical discourse on the subject. The subtitle of his book, “Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables,” gives a clue to what he has in mind.

In his elegant, well-structured, lucidly presented argument, Young, who is director of the Institute of Community Studies in London, maintains that human beings are genetically programmed to live cyclically, to learn and repeat behaviors both as individuals (which we call habits) and as groups (which we call culture).

Further, he argues, evolution favors this habit-learning gene. It has survival value. Habits have given “a vital selective advantage to the species,” Young writes. “Human beings . . . do not have to relearn what they have already learned. Habit is a means of making it stick.”

In addition, having habits to handle routine matters enables people to use their thinking and creating power to do other things. “This manner of dealing with the predictable frees the always limited resources of mental energy for the opposite but complementary task of coping by means of reason and memory with the risks and delights of the unpredictable,” Young says.

Environmental Trigger

Having opened the door to a genetic explanation of behavior, Young worries that he will be thought a strict determinist, which he insists he isn’t. “Holding genes partly responsible for the prominent place of habit in human behavior does not necessarily make my approach more deterministic,” he hastens to assert. “A genetic component of behavior can be expressed only if there is an environmental component as well, and frequently will not manifest itself at all without the right environmental trigger. “Whenever genes are mentioned people think of a completely fixed, wired-in mechanism without any choice or plasticity about it, like the mechanism which produces blue or brown eyes or eyes at all. But a genetic mechanism can also produce a potential such as the power of thought or the capacity for habit, which is only manifested in the course of experience. . . . People can use potential in an immense number of ways, releasing energy for thought and deliberation by employing the devices of habit and custom for locking away that which has worked before.”

Now, you may reasonably ask, what has all this got to do with time? Young argues that our basic genetic disposition to cycles and repetition is out of sync with the demands of modern industrial and technological society, with its straitjacket of clocks, minutes and hours--”The Metronomic Society,” to invoke the name of the book.

Setting Ourselves Free

To make a long argument short--and I realize that I’m doing an injustice to the rhetorical force of the argument by condensing it--Young argues that technology has alienated people from the natural rhythms of their genetic dispositions. But, he says, it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Technology does not have to remain the prime mover,” he says. “Machines, instead of being masters, can also be liberators, freeing people not just from work which is harsh by reason of its physical arduousness but from work which is harsh by reason of its temporal imperatives. Machines could enslave themselves to their own master machine, the clock, so that we should no longer be required to treat ourselves as though we were machines. They could hum in their metronomic society, leaving us free in our more human rhythmic society. . . . “

The tyranny of the machine over human beings is hardly a new observation. Even Charlie Chaplin made that point. But Young does present it in a novel and forceful way, and his book proceeds like an argument out of Euclid, point by point by point.

The strength of the book is Young’s ability to weave together genetics, sociology, history, philosophy and anthropology into a sustained argument, which, if not correct, is intriguing nonetheless. Behind the book is a multitextured, multilayered, multifaceted mind at work.