"Time is more valuable than money" quipped the motivational speaker Jim Rohn; for, "you can get more money, but you can't get more time." 

A salesman by trade, Rohn knew that time is not money, but transcends any and all valuations as such.  Such a take against conventional wisdom--- namely, that "time is money"--- is something easily overlooked: if economists convey anything through their talk of "opportunity costs" (i.e. the exclusivity of competing end uses) then time is the very denomination of value. 

How would I clearly represent this observation more clearly? 

The pricing of a thing (or, its "cost") reflects its "next best" use value (or, "trade off") [and here, "reflects" simply means "equals"], whereas the use value of a thing reflects its expedience (i.e., your need then and there), whereas the expedience of anything reflects  its timing. 

Thus, the price or cost of anything reflects its situation in time.  [Note: this is why the word "opportunity" as in phrase opportunity cost is defined by Merrian-Webster as either "a favorable juncture of circumstances" or "a good chance for advancement or progress".].

This is what it means to say that time is the denomination of value.

But time is not just a series of moments that beg our consideration as pebbles on a scale.

Speaking as a scientist rather than a businessman, renown physicist Albert Einstein (somewhat apocryphally) stated that compound interest was an unrivaled force of magnitude beyond anything else in the Observable Universe--including that of nuclear fusion! --- even dubbing compound interest the "eight wonder of the world." Now, as any greenhorn in finance will tell you, this force of compounding interest is also known as the "time value of money" but let's not risk yet another tangent...

Einstein, the physicist, both understood and appreciated that time as a mathematical entity scales beyond anything we can touch or see.  Indeed, time is the ultimate scale-- another way of speaking of "scalars."

Even so, time isn't just a mathematical entity, but something real (in this sense, Einstein wasn't a mathematician but a physicist concerned with measurable but also real things outside of our heads).  Its magnitude itself is transcendent and indirectly present in any material transformation-- something manifest in the moment (explaining the potential for accumulative change in, say, a nuclear chain reaction or a growing trust fund) and yet always unrealized in what it leads to.  For, taken in its most peculiar sense, time by its very nature is not just the exclusivity of moments, as Rohn explained above, but time is also boundless. 

Such an insight into the Infinite is nothing new.  Aristotle of Stagira went a step further than the physicist Einstein and lamented with equal awe and dread on the divine quality of Time, observing how "Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time." 

For Aristotle, time under its terrifying aspect of oblivion was itself a sort of deity - a power both intrinsic to and yet entirely above this world.

Even so, Aristotle's natural piety about the Sublime is lost on most people today.  This is likely because modern folk inhabit a relatively safe, stable, and predictable environments.  Our routines are so regularized that one cannot help but overhear the words "streamlining" and "efficiencies" in workplace conversation.  Among moderns then, time is thus said to be the scarcest and most consequential of resources in our technological era--- something to be squeezed out in the mantra of "more"--- but I would say that it is also the most misunderstood of realities:

For, to speak of time as a "resource" first implies that we can master it. 

But, as the physicist, the philosopher, or any dead man and former beauty queen will tell you, time is not something one can "master."  It makes more sense to say that it masters you and that you can cope only by finding ways as a clever slave to outwit its wrath just as Odysseus outwitted the far more powerful Cyclops.

As a philosophical blog, "Holy Wit" focuses on the subject of Time from admittedly more Earthly and grounded perspective--- all squarely focused on the Common Good: indeed, what could matter more to a society as a whole than the good use of our time as a topic of universal interest?  Given its social consequences, is it always safe to assume that this decision is something for the individual alone to determine?  Indeed, is that even true (or, just another ideological illusion)? If consent as a social architectural principle is an illusion, and obligations preexist that are both true and given, is there something more involved as it relates to the satisfaction of deeper obligations of each and all? 

It is the opinion of the author that, from a bird's eye view, all of our political frustrations pale in comparison to this question.  And, the purpose of this blog is to reframe such a question in a historically more precise form: what is the right conduct of this "public service" or liturgy?

From the get-go, how we use our time consciously and consistently is the least common denominator of society.  Everyone ends up doing this or that (and the options expand or contract in relation to the development of a society), but everyone is called to do something.  At the very least, you are called by your animality to find shelter, to eat and to rest.  For many sad souls, this tendency to consume is both their basic and only imperative.

So, it seems almost inevitable that everyone must either confront this matter then or have this matter confront them. 

What time entails and demands of us both personally and as a society is, I would argue, the beginning of the ethical question of the "good life".  For, what is a human life, but a particular span of time set to a particular purpose?  In any biography, which captures such a life, what is a life to any reader but a personality in confrontation with a series of decisions--- and the awareness that this series will be cut short? What do such stories of those decisions give rise to? What are they pointing to? And to whom do they point?  We tell ourselves that such questions are worth asking and yet our discordant lives do not reflect their ultimate consequences at the political level of society.  We live in a society unique in history that defers such questions to the realm of private conscience alone.

It is not that what moderns call "human development" is not worth examining or shaping public policy: our economists focus on "life spans" and "death rates" and many variables, but as important as those metrics are, what is absent is a concept of the human person in all of its developmental progression: from conception to birth, from childhood through adolescence, from young adulthood to maturity, and from retirement up to death itself.  There are in short qualitative features of human life that are invariable in so far as these properties follow from the essence of human nature itself.  To live in a polity, particular the liberal polity of today, is to deny that such a nature exists is to deny these basic realities of the human person in favor of an abstract conception of an individual (that is, a mere data point).

That is where the map of political metaphysics takes us which unites the Common Good to the Human Person.  Such a cartography is important to scale a society of human proportions correctly in an age that will be increasingly dominated by "thinking machines" which is to say algorithms that (because they cannot properly think) do not recognize the meaning of the parts vs. the whole beyond what the "data points" or individuals entail.  But the post-nominalist commodification of man is another conversation for another day...

As a religious blog, meanwhile, where questions eventually find answers (rather than just better questions), "Holy Wit" showcases something far more specific focus: how the secularization of time, or the emptying of our calendars to be filled by our private interests of a human lifetime required in some sense the abandonment of religious observance as a matter of public concern.   This is a story that is not quite well-understood, even among "people of faith", because that "liberalization" of our calendars in the creation of empty space was not a historical given, but something created and subsequently forgotten among modern people. 

There is a question of historical form (versus the mere contents of historical events) of the secular imagination that remains a major blind spot for modern men and women.  This blind spot will continue to keep us away from any decisive action to turn away from the modern condition and thus this malady of the intellect and will first needs to be understood and acknowledged especially as we begin to inhabit an increasingly inhuman world in the most literal sense. 

Above all, what this blog hopes to do is to challenge the hegemony of liberal conception of history itself through a microhistorical focus on the conceptual and cultural practice of liturgy.

 

With this purpose in mind, it is the main thesis of this blog defended both through Ancient political philosophical canon and the Christian theological tradition that (1) the historical concept of "liturgy" must be explained in this postliberal moment (more on that pre-Christian political term later) and (2) that the moral restoration of Christian society alienated from its own traditions in particular must be heralded by a politically recognized restoration of liturgical time [in the ancient Christian sense of that term].   This is the prerequisite for creating a spiritual harbor and stable locus in the ecclesia against the backdrop of a world-- i.e. Mundus-- that will only further consume itself in the social entropy of its own perverse logic.

Let me rephrase the issue in clearer terms of what is at stake: To negotiate a liberal privatized form of religion such as to "make room" or "make sense" of religion among modern minds is itself a contradiction of terms and a Saul-like "falling on one's own sword" in light of what the liturgy is (i.e. "public service") and it is that contradiction that will imperil the Church just as the lack of a civic liturgy, civic (poetic) theology, civic ethos will continue to imperil the State.   

The purpose of this blog is to cultivate the Church's historical distance from the trappings of the present through its own inheritance so as to prepare it for the dawn of the postliberal era.

More to come!  Be well!