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!

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.

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.

What is wrong with exactness? Clearly, I haven’t been following this conversation.

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 all this talk of alarm clocks put me in mind of my old Holy Alarm Clocks post.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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”…

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.

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.

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.