This probably doesn't need to be explained, but this illustration is an edited version of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.
Before the Julian calendar, a solar calendar, the various iterations of Roman calendars desdended from a lunar calendar. They had only 355 days, which means that they would fall out of sync with the solar year. To correct for this difference, the pontifex maximus intercalated days at the end of the year, a practice reminiscent of one that we still observe today, though in much smaller and more precise ways, like the leap year and the occasional leap second. This intercalay pseudo-month was known as "Mercedonius." It was generally around the length of a month, and inserted every 2-3 years to re-synchronize their lunar calendar with the solar year.
Today, our calendars are automatic. Their unquestioned authority comes from their rational, technical precision, so much so that the calendar and the year as such are conceptually indistinguishable, though the former is the symbolic representation of the latter. There just are 7 days in a week, just as there are 12 months and 365 days in a year, just as there are 40 hours in a work-week. It's as natural to work Monday to Friday as it is to have a solstice on the 21st day in December, because we've simply solved time.
Except that that there are these two deeply irrational days on our calendar, the beginning and the end of daylight savings time.1 Twice a year, we either "fall back" or "spring forward," and everybody hates it. It just doesn't make any sense. We all end up late to appointments, or lose out on an hour of sleep, or show up an hour early to a meeting with colleagues in London who also practice this barbaric and delusional "ritual," a very telling word commonly used to describe the time change in media, but on different days. Every year, around this time, there's a bunch of mainstream articles about how the time switch kills people, slicing the data in various ways, each adding to the mountain of evidence that the time change isn't just inconvenient, but something much worse: It's wrong, on a technical level. It is an incorrect implementation. It besmirches our otherwise gleaming time-keeping mechanism.
So if it's broken, why can't we fix it? Well, it's a lot easier to point out that something is the wrong solution than it is to find the right one, and it's very important that we do this correctly. In 2022, the US Senate passed The Sunshine Protection Act unanimously, which would put the US on permanent daylight savings time. This unleashed an avalanche of articles and op-eds wondering whether permanent daylight savings time was the technically correct implementation. This article tried to weigh the pros and cons of both sides, which I find to be a pretty good summary of the discourse that crops up every year around this time. The articles summarizes the technical findings of several experts, in fields like sleep research, public health, neurology, economics, and even law.
In their book The Dawn of Everything, Davids Graeber and Wengrow talk about the many holidays that subvert the usual order:
A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.
True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.
They argue that these festivals that change up society are important practice in imagining a different world. They help us avoid getting stuck by play-acting the removal and subversion of the world's power structures, even if just for a day. I think that this is exactly correct, and something with which everyone reading this is already familiar. Consider a common argument against permanent daylight savings: We need to change the clocks so that kids don't go to school in the dark in winter. We have full control over when school starts. We know that starting early is actually bad for kids, but we never get to move the start time of schools, or jobs, so it seems impossible. Since we do practice changing the clocks, it's the only solution that we can imagine. We're all so used to being told that we have to be certain places at certain times by people with power over us that moving the school starting time is unimaginable.
Switching the clocks twice a year is the most Protestant version of carnival, or even an anti-carnival. Twice a year, we have a non-holiday when everyone is miserable, sleeps poorly, and is chastised for not being punctual. Instead of inverting or subverting hierarchy and power, the only thing that we practice is our complete subservience to punctuality by sacrificing things like sleep, daylight, and even some number of people to please the arbitrary time-keeping system that rules our lives.
I argue that we are stuck. We can't find the right answer to daylight savings because there is no right answer. We are searching for a technical fix because technical expertise is the only language that we understand when attempting to organize our time. I even argue that our hatred of the time changes is partly justified, but also because its irrationality exposes the time-keeping regime for what it truly is: an arbitrary system of control that dominates our lives.
To fix this, I propose that we return2 to a modified version of the pre-Julian calendar. Every year, we'll elect a pontifex maximus, whose job it will be to determine the length of the intercalay period at the end of the year. I further propose that the intercalate be composed entirely of Sundays, and all non-essential work be banned. Then, after a few years of practice, once we've gotten used to the idea that the calendar serves us, not the other way around, let's return to the question of daylight savings. We can still ask doctors which they think is healthier, or economists which they think will be more productive, but in the end, we should do what we think will make us happier, not aimlessly search for what is "correct."
1. A minor technical note, but "daylight savings" is not the act of changing our clocks, but the change applied to the clocks such that the sun rises and sets an hour later than it otherwise would. When you say that you want to "end daylight savings," you are arguing to stay on the time system that we use for ~4 months of the year, in the winter months, whereas arguing for permanent daylight savings means to stay on the system that we use for ~8 months of the year, including through the winter.
2. Retvrn