Conscious Choice Seattle: Think Slower

June 2004 | Back Woods

Think Slower

Our democracy needs less speed and more free thought

by Ellie Winninghoff

Did American democracy die before it was ever born?

It was 1748, after all, when Ben Franklin coined the aphorism “Time is money.” Money, as we all know, is inextricably intertwined with issues of power and control. But have we thought about time, or rather speed, in the same vein?

We should.

In his fabulous new book, “In Praise of Slowness,” Canadian journalist Carl Honore points out the clock, a seemingly innocuous timepiece, is the “operating system” of industrial capitalism. He calls it “the thing that makes everything else possible — meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts.”

Before the clock, of course, humans lived by what Honore calls Natural Time. Our internal rhythms determined when we ate, and time was set in individual towns by the solar noon, that time of day when the sun was directly overhead and no shadows cast. As late as the 1880s, he reports, New Orleans was 23 minutes behind Baton Rouge, which was only 80 miles away. Not until 1911 was most of the world on the same clock.

It was no easy task getting workers to live by the clock. According to Honore, the ruling classes set out to turn punctuality into a moral virtue and civic duty. In the late l800s, the Electric Signal Company sold a clock called the Autocrat.

Corporations, of course, are not democracies. They are centrally planned economies, something Bainbridge Island author David Korten pointed out in “When Corporations Rule the World.” Ironic, isn’t it, when you consider all the “free” market propaganda these institutions exhort? The World Trade Organization, after all, does not manage “free” trade. That is an oxymoron.

According to Honore, real freedom and democracy in the workplace had a major setback in the early l900s when Frederick Taylor, a management consultant for the Bethlehem Steel Works, implemented “scientific” management to determine how long each task should take — to the nearest fraction of a second.

“In the past, the man has been first,” Taylor is said to have declared. “In the future the system must be first.” Taylor became a pariah of the unions and was later fired. Workers quit, complaining of stress and fatigue. But as Michael Schwarz, who produced a television documentary about Taylor, told Honore, “[Taylor’s] ideas about efficiency have come to define the way we live today, not just at work but in our personal lives as well.”

In our personal lives as well. That’s the hitch. Face it: If we don’t have time for one another these days (and many of us don’t), you can be sure we don’t fulfill the requirements of citizenship in a democracy either. How can you trust the vote of somebody like my father, who recently asked: “What is the Patriot Act?”

Not that it’s all our fault. On the contrary. There is an element of control here. And yes, it begins with corporations, who expect those of us lucky enough to have jobs to work 24/7.

Part of the problem, of course, is the news. As an investigative reporter, I can report that editors (or perhaps more accurately, their bosses) don’t favor my kind of journalism. You know, journalism, where you dig for the facts. Investigative journalism is slow journalism, often painstakingly so. Too much journalism today is fast and “efficient.”

How I hate that word, efficient, the most abused word in the English language. “So what if you can make t-shirts in six seconds,” a French friend said. “How many t-shirts do you need?”

Amen. Efficiency is too often confused with effectiveness. They are not the same thing.

Of course, opining is also popular these days in the “news” biz. It, too, is fast. But opining is only hot as long as you KISS — keep it simple, stupid. Forget complexity. Forget subtlety and nuance. Editors don’t have time for that. Nor, for that matter, it seems, does the reader.

If we’ve studied economics, we know that a successful “free” market requires transparency and full disclosure of information. And yet these corporations that promote “free” markets and “free” trade don’t want to label food consisting of genetically modified organisms. They cook the books by “managing earnings,” even now, three years after the dot-com bust. Did you know that between l992 and 2000, corporate officers transferred — to themselves — ten percent of the value of publicly traded American corporations?

If we don’t have this kind of information as consumers or investors, you can bet we don’t have it as citizens in this increasingly corporate-dominated society.

Yet for us as citizens, the issue is not just sound-byte journalism, which is arguably little more than a form of propaganda. In this hurried-up world, we also think too fast. Which is to say, we don’t reflect at all — we react.

Honore cites the work of Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, professor of child psychology at Temple University. Her studies indicate children in nursery schools that stress a playful — and slower — approach to learning outperform those taught by drill-sergeant types. The playful kids turn out less anxious, more eager to learn and better able to think independently.

An important point: Honore distinguishes between Fast and Slow Thinking. Fast Thinking, which is linear and logical, is what we do under time pressure. But it is Slow Thinking, which we do in the shower or walking the beach, that results in insight and creative epiphanies. Slow Thinking is alive. It is uncontrolled and unpredictable. Free. It is, in other words, a key element required for independent thinking — the true recipe for a true land of the free.

Please slow down and smell this June’s roses. Our future as a democracy depends on it.

Ellie Winninghoff’s brother once said she “walks fast, talks fast, eats fast — probably even sleeps fast.” She still talks fast, but is pleased to report she has otherwise reformed.

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