Inexorably, Humanity Marches to Perfect Orderliness
Military parades, particularly in communist regimes like North Korea, can be an amazing display of orderliness and precision. The soldiers, as seen in a march-past, move their limbs with such split-second synchronization that the whole thing defies belief. Tearing oneself away from the spell cast by such ‘military precision’, one observes about oneself what, in comparison, appears to be complete disorder and chaos. But this cursory and superficial comparison could be deceiving. What appears on the surface to be disorderly and chaotic belies significant amount of order. In fact, the whole advancement of the human civilization is an inexorable march to orderliness.
I am sure this might be hard to believe. But cast your minds back to say 300 years ago when telling the time of day was a hit-and-miss affair. When the sundials used to tell time where fixed to one location, and their ability to indicate the time of day was contingent upon whether it was day or night and on weather conditions. Even if ‘moon-dials’ had existed, they would have also been subject to weather conditions! So not only where devices not portable, but even if one were able to build a portable one that could be set up on the side of the path – presuming one could consistently establish one’s compass bearings – one would not have always been able to tell time as indicated above. It therefore goes without saying that in this era, ‘keeping to time’ would have been near impossible.
Fast forward to the 21st century and I bet you have already glanced at your watch a couple of times since you started reading this short article. You are sitting at a café waiting for your friend to join you for a cup of coffee. He is already running 10 minutes late and you are wondering what happened. Did he perhaps not get the time right? Could he have forgotten, or was there miscommunication of the rendezvous? You decide to give him another couple of minutes before ‘checking up on him’. Presently, you are heard saying, “Hey Vusi, aren’t we supposed to be meeting for coffee this morning?”, appearing to be talking to yourself as you speak into your cordless Bluetooth mobile telephone headset. Vusi assures you that he has not forgotten, but is running late due to the late arrival of his flight from Johannesburg. He estimates that he will be with you within 5 minutes.
Well, what do you know? We have just gone from having difficulty to tell time and keeping it, to expecting life and activities around us to happen within very narrow margins of time. Indeed, it is amazing that we have moved from not being able to tell time consistently with the use of comparatively huge devices, to being enslaved and held to ‘time’ ransom! What is even worse is that devices like mobile telephones have become activity-synchronizing devices that we use to compel each other to fall in line with the time. So with the proliferation of these time-keeping and activity-synchronizing devices, all humanity is becoming like one giant army, inexorably synchronizing itself to marching like an army on parade! Not so much as in everybody doing the same thing, but in being compelled to be ordered and organised in the way that we go about each day’s activities.
