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There is a divergence of opinion among members of this Society on whether rising early each day is a morally superior act. The majority opinion holds that a schedule for sleeping, working, and living should be considered provisional and personal, chosen or found by personal experimentation as that which maximizes productivity and happiness. In other words, under the covering name of “night owl”, many I know — and respect! — claim that to work into the night, arise late when not called to an early appointment, and thus to divorce their lives from the diurnal cycle, is a morally neutral choice founded on the necessities of personal rhythm and physiological constitution. And while I do not propose to denounce this position with anything like forcefulness, the purpose of this brief reflection is to argue that it is in fact superior to subject one’s schedule to stricture and sacrifice through a generally regular, preferably early, sleep and waking time, even while making allowance for personal variation in wakefulness.
If I am to begin, I must delay in advancing the explanations for why an early and regular waking time is desirable, which anyway are felt by even those most devoted to lying late abed, immediately to answer the dominant objection: what if I am not tired at 9 or 10pm, but am in fact most awake and productive at that hour? Phrased in general, the content of this objection is this. All people, let us agree, have different personal circadian rhythms, such that their hours of most pronounced wakefulness and sleepiness are different. Some are chipper and alert upon arising, while others are torpid until late afternoon. I in no way wish to deny this, but I believe this objection is less final than those who make it think. To see this plainly, we need only consider the phenomenon of jet lag. That is, our bodies have clocks: when that clock is mismatched to the astronomical clock of the sun, we are confused and have difficulty sleeping and waking at the hours measured locally, at least until our body has readjusted. That this readjustment occurs, and it does, is the key to unraveling this objection. Even the most inveterate night owl can change the absolute time of his night owling if the driving stimulus — the sun and its course through the sky — are changed. Thus it is untrue that a person on a late schedule is unable to adjust his schedule: the preference for late hours is measured relative to a local waking time and, presumably, to some degree to the local sunrise and sunset times.
If it were not for the existence of artificial light, computer monitors, and curtains, I believe this phenomenon of late schedules would be very rare indeed. A brief tour of the physiology of sleep will help explain. Light –particularly bright light, like sunlight or a computer screen — causes our brains to release chemicals that causes wakefulness; we build up some of these chemicals throughout the day, which eventually trigger sleepiness. Exposure to light of any kind causes this phenomenon. Insufficient light can cause difficulty waking up and, thereafter, in sleeping, whereas excess light, especially into the night, can disrupt our ability to feel tired. Individuals vary on how sensitive they are to light inhibiting sleepiness, and it is my contention that many who consider themselves night owls are, in fact, night owls because of their sensitivity to light, particularly to the very bright and very white light of a computer monitor. For myself I know this largely to be true: if I do not limit my exposure to bright lights and computer screens for at least an hour before the time I wish to fall asleep, sleep is very difficult for me. There is sufficient internet literature on this point to convince me that this is no Ambrosian peculiarity.
If all of this is true, then what the “night owl” phenomenon mostly is is a circadian rhythm that is most active at the end of the wakeful day. But as we have established, the clock hours of the wakeful day are adjustable. Hence, if one is free to set one’s schedule — ie, leaving out the cases of shift workers and students writing to deadlines — there is simply no reason why even the late-alert person’s period of alertness cannot be moved freely, within some limits, through the day as measured by the clock.
Why move your schedule at all?
Why, though, is moving to an earlier schedule desirable at all? If a man be happy with his schedule as it is, why should he change it? To this I have two answers. The first is social. The world at large has decreed a particular schedule, shared by most and convenient to most. Many benefits accrue to one who lives on this widely adopted schedule: meeting people is easier, planning simpler. The late risers I have known habitually complain about scheduled appointments driving them out of bed before they have gotten sufficient rest. If I am right, this need not be so.
The second answer regards the spiritual life, and it is here that I finally make contact with this blog’s usual subject matter. This argument has two components, which are interrelated. The first is the givenness of the day: the sun shines during the socially normative schedule, and it is the sun that God gave us as our great light, materially speaking. To be driven from God’s day — and here we find where this post’s title came from — the day the Lord has made is something to avoid if possible; to be able to rejoice and be glad in the day, the given day, is a thing devoutly to be wished. The final reason has to do with self-discipline, denial, and sacrifice. The ease of awaking whenever, sleeping whenever, and damning the impinging perkiness of the morning person is on the face at odds with the life of that habitual death to self that is called for by Christ. As I have attempted above to show, this need not rob anyone of their most productive hours, even the late-alert person. By moving one’s schedule to an earlier time, it is possible to relocate those hours of alertness — not to morning, but to evening instead of midnight or later. This is not to say that such a change is simple or easy. It does in fact require much discipline from those who don’t nod off easily the moment that dinner is done. It is, however, and purely practically speaking, well known that a regular schedule is conducive to easier, better, and more restful sleep.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I think we can look to many religious orders for a cue on this subject. The monks of the Abbey of the Genesee, for example, rise at 2:30AM and retire at 7PM
I like the idea of early to bed, early rise; however, I can’t quite make it work.
Ah, Ambrosii. I love it! You know full well that you could hardly have chosen a better topic for picking a fight!
First of all, let me say that I have a good friend who actually researched the subject of circadian rhythms at some length, to the point of consulting doctors who are experts on sleep. The prevailing opinion among them seemed to be that circadian rhythms do have some attachment to particular hours of the clock, such that a person forced to adjust their preferred waking hours will always be less comfortable/productive than one who keeps them. I won’t express a definite opinion myself, but I do have to observe that, jetlag notwithstanding, my own sleep habits gravitate with remarkable regularity towards the same range of hours no matter where on the planet I live, and this has happened even in periods of my life in which I had no evening access to computers.
Of course, you might say that this is all the more reason to rise early, in that it involves more self-sacrifice. But if that’s the goal, why wouldn’t it make just as much sense to force early risers to switch to a late-to-bed, late-to-rise schedule? As a penance, it could go either way.
Of course, this gets us into your claims about the normative superiority of the daytime hours. Your main points here seem to be that 1) daylight is good, and to be cherished, and 2) daytime hours are more convenient for doing things, being the “socially preferred” waking times.
In response to (1), I would ask: didn’t God make the night too? And isn’t there something to be said for people who cherish the beauties of those nighttime hours? I agree that it would be sad never to have experienced the joy of a bright morning in springtime… but I also feel sad for those who don’t know the serene peace of nightly breezes in midsummer, or of the moonlight tickling autumn leaves. Sunlight and moonlight, and day and night, all have their charms, and all were made by God. The beasts are mainly confined to one or the other, but as men, it seems to me we have the gift of being permitted to enjoy both in their measure.
In response to (2), I would say that you are only partly right. The earlier hours of the day are what are sometimes called “business hours.” They are the socially accepted times for making appointments, scheduling meetings, and so forth. For interactions of a more personal nature, evening hours are prime. Social engagements almost never start before 10am, but it isn’t at all uncommon for them to extend past midnight. And personal phone calls are much more easily made in the evenings — it really can be difficult to stay in touch with people who retire so early that there’s hardly ever a convenient time to call them. (As an added bonus, most cell phone plans give you unlimited minutes after 9pm, so most of my personal calls take place after that hour.)
I think this is more than just arbitrary social custom. If daylight has some propensity to inspire people to industry, nighttime hours seem to open them up more to serious personal conversations and convivial times with friends. In college I definitely had some friends of the “I turn into a pumpkin at midnight” variety, and I always felt sorry for the memorable conversations and happy hours of friendly joviality that those people missed. My happiest social memories, pretty much from adolescence onwards, are very disproportionately clustered in the hours after 10pm. Also, as someone known to be regularly up late, I have multiple times been called on by friends in some sort of emotional distress who needed a sympathetic ear. In college they would sometimes come knocking in the later hours… and of course, they chose me in part because they knew I’d be up, and not irritated at them for keeping me past my bedtime. I still occasionally get phone calls from siblings or good friends in the late night hours, for the same reason. Now, I don’t doubt that people in need of assistance in the morning hours would consider me far less “available.” But I don’t think people are often wanting such conversation in the early morning. Rides to the airport, perhaps.
Anyway, my conclusion is that one’s use of daytime hours is quite appropriately adjusted according to practical need. One should be prepared to rise early insofar as there is a need for it, but there isn’t any intrinsic benefit per se to always being awake then. By contrast, having some flexibility with nighttime hours is a valuable thing, and people who are effectively unwilling or unable to be awake at those later times can potentially miss a lot.
Now, to the subject of spiritual discipline and dying to self. As I’ve said, insofar as it is penance one is seeking, there’s no reason to make morning schedules normative. Any alteration of one’s favored routine could contribute to the “death to self” of which you speak. Rising early when one is not so inclined might, certainly, be one example. But as another example, a friend of mine had her first child within the last year, and she found the necessary relinquishment of her very fixed and regular “early to bed, early to rise” schedule one of the hardest crosses to bear upon becoming a mother. Penances can take all sorts of forms.
With respect to discipline, however, I think your point is not entirely without merit. Strong proponents of rigid, early-morning-oriented schedules do tend (we’re speaking just of general tendencies here) to be the same people who place a high value on regularity and order in their lives in general. They are generally the sort who favor planners, to-do lists, keeping their work spaces neat, and, in short, imposing order on the various elements of their lives. There can certainly be benefits to this kind of self-discipline. It makes it easier, for example, to be regular with one’s prayers and spiritual readings. It can increase productivity (though this depends to some degree on what is being produced.) It discourages sloth, at least in the old-fashioned Protestant sense (though Josef Pieper argues that there is another sense in which this sort of Puritan work ethic can become a cover for a deeper sort of spiritual sloth.) Slovenliness can breed other vices, and haphazard sleeping habits can be one form of slovenliness.
But the dedicated early riser is subject to his own spiritual temptations. One that is particularly beguiling to that sort of person, I think, is adopting a modernist, rule-oriented conception of virtue and the good life. The classic example here is Benjamin Franklin, whose recipe for the virtuous life was to make a list of sensible-seeming rules, and to abide consistently by those rules. This is very foreign to the Catholic conception of virtue. The upright life involves responding appropriately to the circumstances that arise in one’s own life; rough rules-of-thumb may sometimes be helpful for getting us started, but consistency is not the core of the good life, and virtue cannot be adequately expressed in fixed rules. Certainly rising early is not per se a vice, but people who make a routine of it do often seem to feel that this is itself a virtuous practice, rather than, at best, a disciplinary preliminary that might sometimes aid in the development of other virtues. That mentality seems to be tending towards a modernist conception of the good life, wherein consistency, regularity, and maintenance of personal autonomy are core values.
On a related note, I sometimes find that determined early risers are the sort of people for whom a sense of control is very psychologically necessary. They need to feel that they are in charge of their own life, that their time is carefully managed, and that their habits are respected. Once again, this has certain benefits, but it can also be a defect. At the end of the day, we are not in control of our own lives, and all time is God’s time, not ours. To a certain extent a life of regularity can be spiritually healthy; taken to a greater extreme it can sometimes be a legitimate and non-vicious preference; taken too far it can be a crutch and even an expression of spiritual pride. Flexibility is sometimes required if we are to be useful and ready servants of God.
Grumbling about the cheerfulness of morning people is indeed unfortunate. However, I find that that kind of irritability is usually pretty mild compared to the indignance of morning people when they are occasionally expected to stay up past their bedtimes. As I indicated above, I’ve sometimes seen the reaction go beyond normal crankiness to a kind of quasi-moral outrage that their laudatory morning-oriented habits should not be respected by all. So you see, every group is prone to its particular foibles.
As in most such matters, I think the answer lies in some combination of personal preference and common sense. I’ve been a habitual early riser when circumstances demanded it, and I expect I will be again. And even when I don’t customarily wake early, I’m willing to do so without complaint when there’s a particularly good reason (e.g. a Latin Mass.) Every once in awhile I’ll wake early on a lovely, bright morning, and find myself in the mood for a walk. But to be honest, apart from a couple of red-eye flights, I have to cast my mind back some months to remember a time when my presence has been requested anywhere before 9:30am. Apart from Mass, I haven’t had reason to be anywhere before 11am since at least sometime last year. So it’s really no inconvenience to anyone at present if I habitually rise between 9 and 10 am, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to live.
Clara,
I’m glad you replied in the way I’d hoped and expected!
Your reply is lengthy, and I can’t answer it all right away. For my first whack, let me just make a few stipulations and clarifications.
What I didn’t say
1) I never said a late night could never be enjoyed. I confined myself explicitly to proposing a general rule, and what should constitute such a rule. Exceptions do not invalidate such a rule.
2) In like manner, I expect that there would be individuals, very rare ones, for whom my plan simply could never work. I posit, however, that that is indeed a rare thing, and that for most the incandescent bulb has simply become the false sun under which they construct their alternate days.
3) Neither did I say that foibles and failures were in any way confined to the late-to-bed crowd. Such a claim would be risible and ridiculous on its face.
4) Nor did I at any point claim particular virtue for those for whom an early schedule comes easily and naturally. Since I am blessed personally with the ability both to be alert late and early (though not so blessed when it comes to sleeping soundly with regularity in between …), I can without much fear of wishing only to justify myself happily concede that there are failures and weaknesses on both sides of that divide.
Discipline and why it’s relevant
Your claim for discipline being a two-way street, whereby the late-to-bed and early-to-rise are mirror images of one another, each of whom would be equally well mortified by being compelled to adopt the others’ schedule has some element of truth. However, this is only partially relevant to my point, which is that the departure for bed at a regular hour is necessarily an act that requires more discipline than the habitually haphazard selection of a late hour for sleeping. The reason is simple: it always requires planning and discipline to cease activities at a particular time. That some people find a regular schedule easier to maintain than others is not a case for moral equivalence. Some people have small appetites by nature and are inapt to gain weight through overeating. Yet it the existence of such people in no way invalidates a claim that to restrict overeating is a moral good. The merit of doing a good thing is less for those for whom the doing is easier, but this does not impact the goodness of the thing itself. Only the most extreme cases of early sleepers are simply unable to continue work, or play, or study, or what have you past hour X, if X is a relatively early bedtime (say, between 8 and 11pm). Habitually allowing oneself simply to “work til I’m done”, on the other hand, discourages the necessity of planning, and reinforces what I consider to be the false sense among many that they “can’t get thing done early, but need to stay up late to finish.”
This connect to what I consider one of your fallacies, which I might call the “romanticism of the Night”. This, too, is a common argument for night appreciation: it’s at time when true natures are revealed, when your intimate conversations proceed, when good times are had. And of course, there is an element of truth here, which connects to my earlier point that I would in no wise insist that a long talk into the night is, upon occasion, any sort of a bad thing; nor would a late party of occasion be undesirable. However, the night is not the time when natures are revealed: it is a dark time, and a time when we are not at our best. Night is largely a time of fears, self-deception, and confusion. I would claim that we believe our nighttime experiences are more often profound in large part (though of course not exclusively) because we are confused about them, because we do not experience them with the alertness and clean perception of a daylight-flooded mind. Our hazed minds build a memory of warmth around the night.
On a final point, you largely appeal to personal experience as a justification, a tactic which I have purposefully avoided and, while I agree it is relevant, I hope you will not feel personally attacked by these thoughts, as my strong aim was not to personalize this into a reprimand! It’s not surprising that a person long used, and inclined by nature, to much late night time is going to have a lot of memories about good times in the wee hours. These in themselves do not constitute an argument that those hours were in themselves a necessary prerequisite for the events which occurred during them. I also would concede that early years, such as collegiate times, are anomalous with respect to schedule morality: even if my argument succeeds in proving that a regular early bedtime is generally to be preferred, that again does not entail that there couldn’t be numerous particular circumstances where this preference could not be outweighed by other considerations, or made less relevant by those circumstances.
Not all my points were intended as direct refutations of yours. Some were equivalence claims: “The day is beautiful, and made by God.” “So is the night.” (Of course you claim that enjoying the beauty of the night is somehow difficult or exceptional, which I don’t believe at all.) You implied that a regular late-night schedule could lend itself to the development of certain foibles; I offered some to which the morning schedule lends itself. All of this is intended to equal the score, if you will, weakening your claim that a generally regular “but preferably early” sleep schedule is superior.
I didn’t say as much about regularity, but you could probably predict, on the basis of the above, what I would say. Regularity is healthy to an extent; wild variations in sleep hours tend to decrease productivity and increase spiritual torpor. Of course, being *capable* of functioning on a somewhat irregular schedule is a valuable gift, since most of us have to at one time or another (possibly in college, when we have young children, or if we ever work a job that requires responding to emergencies) and it’s clearly better to make the best of it in such a scenario. If you can, though, I agree that it’s better to generally stay with a fairly regular sequence of sleeping and waking times. I don’t think this need be too set in stone, and the person who demands too much seems to me in danger of the kind of modernist rule-worship I mentioned above. Exceptions will always arise for any sleep schedule, and even apart from that, I don’t see the inherent virtue in, say, a precise waking time every morning. I find that as long as I fall asleep within approximately the same 2-hour time frame, I pretty reliably wake within about 30 minutes of a normal waking time, and I find that much more peaceful and restful than waking to an alarm (which I’ve always hated with a passion, and I believe a lot of sleep experts have also suggested that a heavy use of alarms makes healthy sleep more difficult.)
Now, as to the virtues of the late-night hours with respect to social functions. I guess we might need to determine what hours you regard as “late.” For much of one’s adult life, a willingness to stay up until midnight or one would be pretty adequate to participate fully in most social functions. You say that college is an exceptional time, which may be true to some extent, but actually for me that time extended basically from high school through, well, about the period when people’s ability to stay out late was curbed by their having young children. Obviously children a kink in people’s evening social availability for awhile (though you can still talk on the phone in the evening) but my observations have led me to think that many adults drift back to fairly late social engagements (if perhaps not quite undergraduate hours) once their kids are grown. I brought up college because that’s when I have particular memories of people who refused to stay up late, and how little fun they were. But now too, it is pretty lame when you’re having/attending a dinner party, and just as everyone starts to get comfortable and chatty, somebody announces that 9:30 is their normal bedtime and they have to go. If they have kids to tuck in that’s another story, but I thought one of the benefits of adulthood is that you *didn’t* have to go to bed by 9:30.
As for your contention that all my pleasant late-night memories are an illusion of my muddled late-night state… what can one say? Except… no. I didn’t say that people necessarily revealed their “true selves” after dark. There’s nothing “untrue” about people’s daytime selves. But neither do we fall under a spell of dark confusion such that we’re unable to evaluate the quality of our conversations or social interactions. Forgive me, but that sort of claim just seems like the figment of an anti-evening prejudice. And after more than a decade of a regular post-midnight bedtime, I think I can characterize those hours without wild flights of romantic fancy.
What people do become later in the evening is 1) more relaxed, 2) less inhibited, and 3) chattier. The effects of this are certainly not all good. More relaxed, less inhibited people are more likely to make rash decisions, to say things they ought not to say, and to have emotional breakdowns. But they’re also better disposed to convivial times of a positive nature, towards wholesome heart-to-hearts that probably would never happen in the afternoon, and, sometimes, towards talking through painful subjects that would need to be confronted sooner or later. And while the night isn’t inherently a time of romantic blissfulness, I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the great majority of people’s romantic memories seem to cluster near the end of the day — 8am marriage proposals are not, I’ll warrant, a common occurrence.
Refusing to stay up late thus bears a lot of parallels to being a teetotaler… and perhaps also avoiding spending any time around others who are drinking. It can be prudent, and you spare yourself some risk and annoyance, but frankly, you do also miss out.
Obviously I don’t mean that people can’t be sober-minded at night — I personally do a lot of serious work in the late hours — but we’re speaking of tendencies here, and particularly when you get people together in groups, this is the tendency of the later hours. It would be possible, certainly, to keep a regular morning schedule but to make some exceptions for special social occasions or personal conversations, just as it’s possible for me to keep a later schedule but to get up early occasionally for a Mass or other event. Either model seems perfectly sensible to me. But a lot of your original argument seemed to predicated on the basic claim, “early hours are useful and late hours are not.” And I just don’t think that’s true. Each time of day has its special character and purpose.
Clara,
I don’t disagree with much of what you say, since what you argue against are absolute versions of more tentative claims I made. I have no interest at all in advocating a teetotler’s attitude to midnight. Flexibility is always a useful quality, though it is not one that everyone is fortunate enough to have. And I’m certainly not saying that Clara’s happy night memories are all a dark hazy fancy.
I guess I still maintain that early hours are by and large more useful to more people than late hours are, and that, and with certain exceptions duly noted, most people ought at least to try working within earlier hours. I don’t forsee or desire a world where everyone adheres to an identical schedule; such would be silly. But I do think that situations exist — and you would probably be a leading candidate as an exception to those situations, let me stipulate — where people have fallen into a late hours schedule out of laziness and lack of thought who would be made happier, better, and more productive people by changing their hours. But this is not meant as a universal prescription.
One can’t help thinking that while there’s a lot of clever casuistry here by Clara, in the end it’s a simple matter: God made nature to have certain rythyms, human sleep patterns are physiologically responses to those rythyms, and productivity at the societal level is linked to natural light. Ergo, God basically intends humans to be up once the sun is up. Roughly 7 a.m. Inability to do so is generally because of staying up too late, which, as Ambrosius points out in one of his best points, is often caused by an inordinate attachment to our own will/projects (either the project we are working on at bed time, or projects earlier in the day that we wouldn’t let go of but insisted on over-perfecting), or by mental laziness (neglecting to plan our time or to be realistic about how long it takes to do a decent job at something).
And the arguments from authority (scripture, the lives of the saints) are ALL on the side he is arguing.
I double-dare Clara to find one scripture passage that says, “Blessed is he who lieth in bed seeing the sun through closed lids”…
Natural light? Or just light? Ambrosius himself has argued above that light of all kinds induces a more alert state in most people. Well, in our time we have a lot more ways of manipulating light.
In a period in which a) a large percentage of people were engaged as some sort of outdoor laborers, and b) there was no source of artificial light available (barring fire, but obviously there are obstacles to using that too heavily as a light source), it was pragmatically necessary for most societies to be very daytime-oriented. I don’t know very many passages of Scripture about rising early, but such as I can think of seem to be basically injunctions against laziness — and in a certain period, sleeping late did generally mean that you weren’t doing much work. But that’s not necessarily so today. There are lots of things that were necessary in less industrialized ages that aren’t necessary for us now, and not all of these changes are necessarily bad. For example, our bodies were made to withstand a lot more walking/general physical exertion than most people today ever get, but that doesn’t bring most of us to regard vehicles as evil or commercial farming as a curse.
As another example, I’ve heard people argue before that children ought not be taught to read, because training their eyes to focus on detail to the degree necessary for reading will prevent them from developing the ability (for which, these people claim, human eyes were designed) to take in a wide field of vision, and register even very minute movements anywhere within this wide area. The basic idea, I think, is that human beings are natural hunters, and in our time we’ve failed to develop the relevant gifts. That doesn’t seem implausible to me… but, in our time, we don’t need to be hunters. Reading is a much more important skill. So that argument has always seemed a little silly to me.
It’s true that the issue is a bit tricky, because I do certainly think that human beings have natures, and a natural (as well as supernatural) telos, so to a certain extent empirical observations about the way we are do tell us something about how we ought to live. However, these arguments have to be wrought with care, as my examples are intended to show. In addition to our natural capabilities, we also have reason; we are supposed to subdue the earth and make use of its goods to better fulfill our telos. That’s why it isn’t impious for us to breed crops and animals to better suit our needs, or to develop complex medical technologies to cure our various diseases and physical deformities, or to construct machines so that we don’t have to grind all our own corn and weave all our own fabric.
Sometimes, these artificial solutions do draw us further away from our telos. We see this a lot in life issues, i.e. concerning birth control, cloning, IVF etc etc. In other cases, the artificial solutions are not per se objectionable, though careful thought and planning is needed to be sure some important good is not lost through the change. (For example, if we’re not going to do as much manual labor anymore, we should still integrate some form of physical exercise into our routines.)
What about the case of rising early? Well, personally, I don’t see why it is necessary for the fulfillment of the human telos. I can understand that sloth is a vice, but as I’ve argued, there isn’t any necessary correlation between industry and rising early. So I guess you’d need to give me an argument why this has some intrinsic importance. You made vague references to the weight of authority. Which authorities address this? What arguments do they give?
Basta! Catholicism is about both/and, not either/or. Look to the ancient Catholic realms of the Mediterranean and Latin America. They get up early *and* stay up late (like the girl in that song by Cake). They just take a siesta in the one time of day that no one here seems to find any interest in — the afternoon. Clearly, the afternoon sun makes us sleepy, especially after a full lunch. Don’t we all want to go take a nap? Right. So have your late nights, have your sunrises, just be willing to sacrifice the hours of 1:00-3:00/4:00/5:00 in the afternoon, like traditional Catholic cultures do.
Anonymous,
While I appreciate any aid on my side, bullying assertions don’t much help the cause, I’m afraid! And while also the competitive part of my nature would like to claim all the plain reason and good sense being self evidently on my own side, the dismissal of Clara’s argumentation without any substantial attempt at refutation will, I fear, not result in success.
Clara,
As far as I can tell, a part of what you’re trying to capture with your counterargument is a suggestion of the fabric of existence, which is more than a bare set of plain rules holding us in place like anchors, fixed and inflexible. Within the vicissitudes of life and varieties of natures and habits, you seem to say, the assertion of a simple correspondence between what you might call the puritanically extended agricultural day-laborer’s schedule and God’s Will is without warrant.
I’ve said a good deal already to suggest that I think your direction of argument goes down the wrong path, so here let me take up one of your earliest counter-thrusts, reflection upon which will reveal what I think a flaw in your vein of argumentation.
You said very early on that you hated the alarm clock “with a passion,” which I take to be a very strange and perhaps telling admission. Do you imagine this to set you apart from others, or that this is exculpatory evidence for why a more lax schedule could be adopted under the scenario in which you conceded that a more rigid one was theoretically preferable? Because I think it safe to say that most people dislike the alarm clock, rigid and insistent as it is. Whether this is its virtue, or an evil, is what really is under question here.
Is the alarm clock an agent of good or evil?
I set that apart for the skimming reader, because I think answering that question will be revelatory. I would say that submission to an alarm clock is a highly necessary daily mortification that teaches us in practice that our lives are not our own and that our bodies — our brother ass, in the Franciscan formulation — must be pummeled into submission by means which are hateful to the pride but necessary to the good of the soul. On this formulation the vice at issue is pride, and the refusal to submit the spirit to the God given day a willful act of defiance.
By contrast, I imagine you would argue that the alarm clock is simply at best a necessary evil: a tool used when a particular time for arising is necessary, but in itself rightly hated because of its disruption of the natural schedule to which an individual is drawn. As far as I can tell, over against my and Anonymous’ claim that the wakeful day is a given thing, you must claim that each individual reaches his telos, to use your word, by maximizing his personal efficiency and happiness through location of the optimal, or at least personally preferred, set of hours within the day during which he chooses to do his work. Thus on your view, I take it, it would in fact be a foolish act for one who often worked well into the night purposefully to alter his schedule to avoid this, supposing him by this alteration to deprive himself (and the world at large) with the fruits of his more useful, naturally chosen work hours.
However, I would hold — and as I tried to show in brief in my original posting — that these goods can be compounded: that judicious use of natural and artificial light can align our productive, our naturally most efficient, hours with the unquestionably God given hours of sunlight. The goods of nighttime that you extol are not hereby banished forever from experience, but reserved, like many lesser and subordinate goods, for occasion rather than being made a part of habit.
I would certainly hesitate to say that “efficiency maximization” is necessary for fulfillment of our telos… though of course activity is, and a certain level of efficiency is necessary if we’re to get around to a healthy variety of activities. But mainly I would repeat once again that all hours are unquestionably God-given. Perhaps I could re-orient my schedule to fit more closely with the hours of natural light, but I don’t wish to. I would miss the beautiful, mellow late-evening hours that I’ve come to love so much.
My main point to Anon, however, was that the argument, “X is what human beings would naturally do in a world without artificial innovations” is by no means adequate to show that X is a necessary part of fulfilling our telos.
But now, concerning your remarks about the “necessity” of alarm clocks — nonsense! It is absolutely necessary that you should be slave to a machine? Such sentiments are hardly fitting for rational man! And while you referenced St. Francis, I can guarantee that he never used one. Indeed, it’s long seemed to me that one of the more dehumanizing elements of modern life is our insistence on chopping our day into well-defined bits, which are regulated by bells and buzzers and daily planners. It’s no wonder modern people have such frayed nerves, and find so little time for wholesome leisure and peaceful reflection, when machines rule the world in this way. I have no doubt that alarm clocks contribute to the dehumanization and feelings of alienation that are so characteristic of modern life.
You say that everyone hates alarms as much as I do. It certainly seems that this ought to be so, but empirical observation oddly suggests otherwise. For example: I have so often heard people talk about how difficult it is to avoid the temptation of the “snooze” button on their alarm clocks. Though I have been unfortunate enough to use alarms in some periods of my life, I have never once used a snooze button, and I can’t for the life of my see why anyone should want to. Waking to an alarm feels to me about on par with waking to someone screaming obscenities in my ear — alarms are one of the world’s most hostile and unpleasant noises, and the sound seems perfectly calculated to disturb any peace my sleep might have brought me, and to start my day on a note of feeling frazzled, disoriented and angsty. So what could be more horrible than to start the day with a whole series of episodes of peaceful drowsiness followed by a nasty, jarring awakening? It seems sheer masochism to me, and yet people voluntarily do it.
I think the error in your reasoning might be in assuming that the shunning of alarm clocks is equivalent to keeping a completely haphazard, lackadaisical, do-whatever-you-feel sort of schedule. That is not the case. It is possible to train yourself in a different discipline, namely, that of learning to wake at a desired time without the crutch of an alarm. In earlier ages, I believe some people (soldiers and sailors, for example) honed this skill to extreme accuracy, such that they could literally tell themselves, “wake in four hours” and drift right off. I can’t do that, but I do find that I can easily wake within a customary time frame so long as I go to sleep at a somewhat regular hour. At present, very close regularity isn’t necessary for me, so I content myself with waking within about a half-hour time span on normal mornings. Every once in awhile, if I’ve been ill or particularly exhausted for some reason, I’ll give myself mental “permission” to drastically oversleep, but I’ve never done this involuntarily on, say, a day when I was teaching. When I was in the Peace Corps, I had my sleep timed to considerably greater accuracy than what I have now. I taught morning classes five days a week and never once used an alarm; in two years I only overslept once, and that was under the influence of a new cold medicine that my doctor had just prescribed me. I just don’t believe that it’s necessary to enslave yourself to those horrible machines in order to be productive.
I suppose, realizing the nastiness of waking to alarms, one could do it as a penance. But it makes equal sense to me to say, “X food gives me terrible indigestion… so I eat it all the time,” or “I have high arches, so I always buy shoes with little to no arch support, in reparation for my sins.” There’s no shortage of ways to gratuitously punish yourself, if that’s all you’re after.
Bonifaci, I’m wholeheartedly in support of the early-morning-plus-siesta idea… who doesn’t get powerfully sleepy in the afternoons anyway?… but how can we get it to take hold in the culture at large? It’s kind of a hard thing to do just by yourself.
The machine aspect of the alarm clock point was entirely irrelevant. The point was submitting to a moment in time not chosen by you, nor by your comfort, but externally; bells in the monastery, a knock at the door, or whatever means of waking are secondary and unimportant to the point.
“not chosen by you” in the sense of not habitually being selected at random, but according to a regular plan.
Clara,
Well, it’s obvious to me that the 9-5 schedule is never going to be changed to benefit night owls. It seems to me the question here is whether people who already have the freedom to determine their own sleep cycles (like me, as I am on fellowship) should let themselves be night owls or not. I am perfectly free to choose between any number of options. But society at large will never, ever change itself for me alone. Have we been talking about changing society?
An alarm clock is simply a mechanical rooster. Mankind has been rising to the rooster since chickens were domesticated. I’m not sure it’s so much better to be slave to a very stupid bird than to be slave to a machine. Mankind has submitted to irrational “alarm clocks” for a very long time without much protest.
Although I haven’t followed the ins and outs of this magnum opus length discussion, I’ll blithely interject a thought here. All normative considerations aside, I think it’s certainly true that the saints have followed (or exceeded) the general outline of Ambrosius’ counsel. If the saints were ever up late, they were also rising early and, somehow, managing on three or four hours of sleep. (Sorry, this has probably already been said.)
And all this talk of alarm clocks put me in mind of my old Holy Alarm Clocks post.
I’m terribly sorry to make this tangential remark, but I’ve often wondered whether a rooster is actually capable of waking a sleepy man. Maybe if the bird is in the same room! And my experience with birds in the outdoors is that it’s not like in the cartoons where the sun peeks over the horizon – cue the rooster. But maybe someone who knows roosters knows that they’re quite effective in this regard?
Really our waking times are more or less necessarily “chosen by us”, unless we live in a monastery or are otherwise subject to obedience to some direct superior. It is we, after all, who set our alarm clocks. Of course, we choose them in keeping with various other considerations. But my point is that there is nothing inherently good about maximizing the “jarring” nature of this awakening.
I’m not so sure about the whole “alarm clocks are mechanical roosters” idea. Waking to a rooster is nowhere near so programmed/exact as waking to an alarm. I think the idea is more that people who need to wake around dawn (which, historically, has been a common need) train themselves to respond to morning sounds; in some parts of the world, roosters crowing have been among the more noticeable of these. That still does not approach the dehumanizing, alienating character of a screeching mechanical alarm.
The whole “saints wake early” idea is worth setting on the table, but as I said above, needs fleshing out of we’re to do much with it. Which saints? Where do they talk about it? What reasons do they give? It’s hard to judge the applicability of that without more details.
And modern people train themselves to respond to alarms. Roosters shriek, too. I’m sure that many of the people who today want to smash alarm clocks once wanted to strangle the rooster. I have been awakened by songbirds an hour before dawn, and boy did I want a beebee gun.
What is wrong with exactness? Clearly, I haven’t been following this conversation.
I’m not actually sure why Ambrosius wanted to get into it insofar as he just wanted to support regular waking times. I thought I made it clear that I support that too, within reasonable limits. It is literally alarm clocks that I hate with a passion.
The difference between alarms and roosters may seem subtle, but I think waking to morning sounds like roosters can be seen as “responsive to environment” in a way. Waking to an alarm, by contrast, isn’t something you train yourself to do. If anything, you have to train yourself NOT to do it (say, if your spouse or roommate uses one.) It’s actually designed NOT to require any training or self-regulation of sleep patterns. It’ll jerk you out of sleep pretty much regardless! That’s supposed to give us more control over our schedules, and in a way it does, but (I think) at the cost of tranquility of mind and genuinely peaceful rest.
Ambrosius,
I’m not sure why you characterized what I said as bullying. Was it the ‘double dare’ challenge (merely a little attempt to be jocular)? Certainly there were no threats or menace in what I wrote, and bullying means that.
When you breezily say I dismissed Clara’s positions without any susbtance, well, that seems to be merely your own dismissal of the point I was making, which may seem simplistic to you but is actually important to keep in view during any casuistic debate: basic or foundational truths which deserve to receive greater emphasis than some other true propositions that are also relevant to the issue (but less so than these foundational ones), can tend to become de-emphasized as the casuistry proceeds to greater levels of detail. The end result can be multiple valid (and even sound) mini-arguments, but still, a position that is not ultimately sound overall. The best way to avoid this methodologically is to revert periodically to the propositions that deserve the greater emphasis.
Clara: I enjoyed your response to my challenge.
Anonymous,
I found your manner annoying and thought bullying an apt description. As the author of this post and tender of this forum, I get to be the one who breezily dismisses; you as the nameless intruder just get to submit to breezy dismissal, not toss out reverse judgments.
Thanks for your little excursus on how foundational truths relate to subordinate ones. I’m so happy you explained the basics of argumentation to us!