Sans Fig Leaf
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"With the time"
15 March, 2007
When I was a kid my dad grumbled about Daylight Saving Time every year. He complained that it was for folks who worked Banker's Hours--it gave them more time to sip their martinis at their poolside cocktail parties. Real people who worked at real jobs didn't gain anything but inconvenience from moving the clock.
That term, Banker's Hours, was used by many of the adults around me as almost a cuss word. People who worked Banker's Hours, I was assured, had probably never worked an honest day in their lives, didn't understand the problems of ordinary people, made descisions that inconvenienced said ordinary people, and spent all their free time drinking martinis and gobbling down expensive hors d'oeuvres at these fabled poolside parties--when they weren't cheating on their wives or making dishonest deals to get even richer.
Even when Banker's Hours weren't mentioned specifically, there was a clear implication that certain times of day held more moral power than others. People who slept in "late" were clearly leading morally suspect lives. People who stayed up too late at night were doing the same. Exceptions were noted for specific people who worked the night shift, but it was clear from the tone of voice used while discussing these folks that there night shifts were a necessary evil. People working those shifts were expected to be awake early in the morning of any day that they could be, no matter what.
This notions didn't just spring up from nowhere. Most of these relatives grew up on farms or in farming communities. Tending the fields and tending the herds had to be done on a schedule that left little room for negotiation. The sun determined when necessary tasks had to be done, whether it was the daily cycle of sunrise-sunset or the annual turning of the seasons.
Since most of human history has revolved around agrarian societies, these notions about the proper time to be about your business has been around for a long, long time. I couldn't really blame my relatives for making sweeping generalizations and issuing dire pronouncements.
But I also couldn't help notice that they weren't consistent. People who stayed up late on weeknights watching TV (or hanging out at a bar, or dancing) were shameless wastrels, rushing down the road to hell. My great-grandmother who stayed up until midnight every weeknight watching her beloved Perry Mason reruns, on the other hand, was revered as very nearly a saint--her late night habit was merely something to chuckle about. And don't get me started about the nights of praise at the end of Revival Week at church! Staying up to all hours laughing and singing in a house of worship is completely different than staying up to all hours laughing and dancing somewhere else.
By junior high school, I was quite skeptical about this correlation between how early one got out of bed in the morning and one's morality. Once I got into my teens, and found my own sleep cycle doing strange things, I became even more convinced it was a load of hooey. Which just confirmed some relatives' prejudices about "kids these days," I'm sure.
When, in my early twenties--attending college, working multiple part time jobs (including one night job)--I got into the habit of sleeping in later than certain relatives approved, I was constantly being nagged about it. There were many dire warnings about coming to a bad end and so on. These predictions were sometimes justified by pseudo-scientific claims about "natural sleep cycles" and other times by quoting scriptures or folk proverbs. In either case the person nagging me was convinced that some bedtimes increased morality and ethical behavior, while others will inevitably led one into the most wicked and self-destructive of debaucheries.
Over the years various medical studies I've read have quite deflated the notion that some bedtimes were more natural others. Our sleep cycles are regulated by a complex interplay of hormones and neurochemicals, which are regulated in turn by environmental factors (including, but not limited to, sunlight). Each of us seems to be programmed to respond to those factors in different ways. In other words, biochemically, some people literally are morning people, and some aren't. Some are quite strongly nocturnal, most aren't. And which biological clock-type we are can change, somewhat, at different stages in our lives.
Maybe early to bed and early to wise really does make a person healthy, wealthy, and wise, but who defines early? The decision to assign the number "12" to a particular part of the day was, ultimately, an arbitrary one. Admittedly, it's clear that a person is healthier (and more alert) if they get an adequate amount of sleep on a regular schedule. But regular means at more or less the same time as you did on previous days, not at precisely the same time as everyone else.
For myself, I'm emotionally healthier if I'm on a schedule that allows me adequate amounts of quality time with my loved ones. I've managed to consistently remain employed at a place that wants me there in the daytime, keeping something closer to Banker's Hours than the "up before dawn" schedule my father used to keep. But we don't have a pool, we don't throw cocktail parties (so few of our friends drink!), and no one has ever offered me an oppurtunity to become fabulously wealthy by exploiting someone else.
Our time away from work isn't spent in wicked debaucheries. We find it difficult enough keeping the house in a state that we're not embarassed to have friends over to dinner, or to watch silly movies, or play games, or read to each other.
As far as morality or ethics are concerned, it doesn't matter what time one goes to sleep or gets up each day. What matters is what we do during that time we're awake--how we treat each other, how we handle our responsibilities, where we put our time and energy.
--Will Rogers
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