My interest in errors of mechanical thinking is part of a broader curiosity. There are many ways to look at the world, as I see it. While treating its constituents, especially the living ones, as machines and expecting them to behave the same way in response to the same treatment is problematic, there are other errors that feed like tributaries into this way of thought from older sources. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that mechanical thinking is the little stream joining a main body that has its headwaters in our language and in habits of western thought that precede English (but belong to the Indo-European family.)
I find it difficult to discuss the mechanical, and modern life in general, without bringing in the way we conceptualize time. If it surprises you to hear that there might be more than one way, well, that’s indicative of how deep and unconscious our biases can run. Our way is as good as any, but far from the only game in town.
As an appetizer, I’ll offer an example from Benjamin Whorf. We speak of days as if they are neat little squares lined up in rows, as on a calendar. They are individuals that can be amassed and dealt with in quantity. So I can leave on the tenth day. But in Hopi, days can’t be separated from one another and gathered like bricks. Instead, in the grammatical sense, someone might say that after the tenth time the day has come, they will leave.
A day, then, isn’t a float in a parade. It can’t be arranged in groups, or lost forever. It’s more like a friend—let’s call him Hank. If you met Hank for lunch three days in a row, you wouldn’t refer him in to the latest meeting as the third Hank. It’s the same Hank, changing in subtle or obvious ways based on everything else that happens. But it’s a reunion, not a new arrival.
The day returns in slightly altered character as many times as we’re here to see it. We spatialize time when we separate it into distinct blocks and line it up. The Hopi would see it more like the Sun, which is roughly the same Sun, back for another round. English is noun-heavy, and prefers to define objects with eternal forms. Some languages rely more on verbs.
Time, which we can’t see or feel but we hold to pass constantly, lends itself well to verbs. It takes a leap of abstraction to make it solid, with depth and breadth. Thus like money, we can “have” time, “waste” it, “spend” it, “save” it. Though ten minutes on hold with the DMV feels like an eternity and a joyful hour passes before we know it, we measure time precisely and hold each unit to be the same. It is such a solid thing for us that we “sell” our time for a wage, rather than the labor that we are doing in that time. If you can lean, you can clean.
John Leavitt argues out that Whorf’s critics—both universalists and essentialists—misunderstand him. The Boasian stance is not that we are forced to think certain ways by our languages. Nor is there only one way that is right and understandable, per the universalists; or many ways with their own natures, that cannot be conveyed between different languages and cultures, per the essentialists. To the students of Boas, anything can be said in any language if you’re willing to use enough words. We are not locked into our habits of thought by grammar or culture. We have only tendencies. But we also have the ability to pause, refuse to slide down the easy path, and to reexamine things in any other light we choose.
Our days are allotted and numbered, and our stack dwindles until it runs out entirely. Imagine if instead, the morning was another visit from an old friend, with new stories to tell. Both ways of thinking of a day are valid. Does our relationship to time, work, quality and quantity, and life, change if we take a different perspective?