Septidi de Floréal de l'Année CCXIII

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Oh those crazy Germans! Toasting the French Revolution every year, as Hegel was said to do, is not enough these days; the revolutionary calendar must be revived. From Design Observer:

Now, two hundred years later, the decimal day reappears in the manifesto of German conceptual design group REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND. There it is, point six in their ten point plan to redesign Germany from scratch: "Introduce decimal system in all areas. 1 day have 100 hours. 1 hour have 100 minutes. 1 year have 1000 days."

The REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND project is a joke (no, seriously) and a clever one at that, but as one of the commenters points out, the Swiss have taken digital time seriously for a while now.

I think it's all good and fun, and I have no problem with it. But, just in case, I'm dusting off my James Scott.

For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural Progress. The academicians of the revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make France "revenue-rich, militarily potent, and easily administered."

Local time zones, after all, are the invention of railway companies and should thus not enjoy any special deference by the traditionalist. Which goes double for me, since I'm not a traditionalist. But we should keep in mind, whether we cling to local custom or abandon ourselves to cosmopolitanism, that all struggles over standarization have concrete effects on the ground. Trade is sped or hindered, culture preserved or hybridized, farms and small towns isolated or depleted. It's no wonder that Steven Thoburn, the so-called "Metric Martyr", was a Sunderland greengrocer, not a futures-trader in London.

(Thanks to the Virtual Stoa for the Revolutionary date.)