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on secularism Nikki Keddie, Martin E. Marty, James Carroll, Henry Munson, & religion Azzam Tamimi, M. Hakan Yavuz, T. N. Madan, Akeel Bilgrami, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Vali Nasr, John L. Esposito, Jose Casanova, Heba Raouf Ezzat, Spring 2003 Jean Bethke Elshtain, William Galston, Christopher Hitchens, and others Spring 2003: on

on Alan Lightman, Gerald Holton, Susan Haack, David Pingree, on time D. Graham Burnett Mapping time 5 Peter Pesic, Peter Wolynes, and Robert Schimke David S. Landes & the wealth of nations 20 Michael Rosbash A biological 27 on learning Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Jerome Bruner, Susan Carey, Thomas Gold The physics of & 37 Elizabeth Spelke, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Povinelli, Clark Peter L. Galison & Glymour, and Michael Tomasello D. Graham Burnett Einstein, Poincaré & modernity 41 Jennifer M. Groh & on happiness Martin E. P. Seligman, Richard A. Easterlin, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael S. Gazzaniga How the brain keeps time 56 Anna Wierzbicka, Bernard Reginster, Robert H. Frank, Julia E. Danielle S. Allen How the Greeks kept time 62 Annas, Darrin M. McMahon, and Ed Diener Anthony Grafton Dating 74 J. Hillis Miller Time in literature 86 on progress Joseph Stiglitz, John Gray, Charles Larmore, Randall Kennedy, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jagdish Bhagwati, Richard A. Shweder, and Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson Is time running out? others & Marco Verweij The case of global warming 98 Richard Fenn Time’s up: the apocalyptic imagination 108 on human nature Steven Pinker, Bernard Williams, Lorraine Daston, Jerome Kagan, Vernon Smith, Joyce Appleby, Patrick Bateson, Thomas Sowell, poetry Susan Howe from Bed Hangings ii 113 Jonathan Haidt, Richard Wrangham, Donald Brown, and others ½ction Rick Moody Fish Story 118 plus poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido, Les Murray &c.; ½ction by Lee K. Abbott, Joanna Scott &c.; and notes by Nathan Glazer, Robert notes Bernard McGinn on mysticism & art 131 C. Post, Michael Traynor, Jennifer Hochschild, Perez Zagorin, Yi-Fu Tuan on human geography 134 Gerald Early, Daniel Schorr &c.

U.S. $13/Canada $16 www.amacad.org D. Graham Burnett

Mapping time: chronometry on top of theworld

i\t dawn on the 9th of June, 1873, the had more than comfort on his mind: the ocean sturdy Victorian naturalist C. Wy belly of Bermuda, he believed, secreted a rare - a an ville Thomson swung his elegantly device kind of earth clock, bearded person down from the deck of for planetary time. the British research vessel Challenger, For it happened that more than fifty berthed in the Bermuda dockyards, and earlier, the commanding officer of made his way aboard a diminutive steam the North American and West Indian a on sev pinnace for trip the island. After station, Sir David Milne, had spent churning around toMount Langton to eral days inWalsingham indulging his sever pick up the governor, the shore party of petrological curiosity by carefully a an collectors and dignitaries (with 'native ing eleven-foot stalagmite from its as a on cave fisherman' in tow guide and photog moorings the floor, and arrang rapher along in the service of posterity) ing for it to be returned to the British - made for Harrington Sound, rowed Isles yet another strange fruit plucked en ashore, and hiked up to the Walsingham from the colonial periphery to be an Caves for afternoon of learned spe joyed in metropolitan institutions of lunking in the deep and winding lime philosophical cultivation. This calcare stone caverns. The cool reaches of this ous obelisk had thus found its way to a geological attraction would provide wel new, cool, dark cave across the Atlantic come - respite from the midday tropical the Museum of the University of Edin sun, to be sure, but Wyville Thomson burgh, where Thomson (the Regius Pro fessor of Natural History) would later ponder its bulk and consider the manner D. Graham Burnett is an assistant prof essor of and pace of its formation. Between 1819 ur history in theProgram inHistory of Science at and 1873 such ponderings had grown Princeton University. He writes on geography and gent, since the of the earth had burst natural with an on the connec into one of the most contested history, emphasis questions tions between science and imperialism. He is the in science. Genesis, evolution, Darwin, even in author of aMasters of All They Surveyed" thermodynamics lay the balance. (2000) and "ATrial By Jury" (2001), and a co So it is perhaps less strange to learn that - editor of uTheHistory of Cartography" (19S7 ). in 1863, four years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the Wals Caves saw the visit of another ? 2003 by D. Graham Burnett ingham

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham a con pith-helmeted colonial administrator, permanent record of the Sir Alexander Milne, dition of the of the 0^rnett who, acceding nep stump stalagmite, we time otistically to his father's post in the West and twice tried to photograph it," but a Indies, made pilgrimage to his stump the conditions foiled the photographer, as well, the better to follow in his foot and spoiled his exposures. steps, and to report on the passage of Thomson, however, would not be de time. There, on his elbows and knees, nied : "It then occurred to us that it pocket in hand, Milne junior might be possible to take another slice timed the soft splats falling from the from the column, showing the amount cave on a as an ceiling of the and landing five of reparation during half , separate points where the stalagmite had accessory and complement to the Edin once been. One drip fell at the rate of burgh specimen." Hammers and chisels five drops a , he reported, another again went to work inWalsingham, with between three and four, the rest slower the aim of producing yet another crate new still. He identified two knoblets that for the Edinburgh Museum ;another come over had into being the interven crate, containing yet another piece in the a ing forty-four years, along with little jigsaw puzzle of time.1 - mineral slick to one side a total of five cubic inches of matter. Itwas Alexander com JLhere is something strangely Milne's brother back in David, Scotland, pelling, I think, about this crate. Grant who did the and decided that at none math, ed, itwould solve of the pressing this rate their father's three-and-a-half chronoscientific questions of the day. It ton like six prize represented something would not help sort out if Lord Kelvin's hundred thousand years of subterranean much reduced timescale for the forma accumulation. tion of the earth (grounded in his phy To this same came was site, then, Wyville sics of cooling bodies) right, and it Thomson and his the de party following would not settle heated disputes among and also drew their in cade, they geologists and paleontologists about the the lantern "The two were cave light: drops dating of remains. In fact, it is not still Thomson "but even falling," reported, clear (to me, anyway) that this more one apparently somewhat slowly, crate ever made its way to the museum not three in a the quite minute, in Edinburgh ; itmay have, but itmay other twice." The three other con on drips also have wound up forgotten the tinued to feed their little slick deposit, docks in Bermuda, or in the office of the the "could not determine though party superintendent of the shipyard, Captain that the bulk of the new accumulation Aplin, who arranged for the stonecutting was was perceptibly greater than when it tools and the men to wield them. measured Sir Alexander Milne." If by But this slice of lost stalagmite merits this was ever to be of a geochronometer 's thought nevertheless. For what Thomson needed was a real use, here was specimen chosen for what it some more definite record of the current might tell about the of the plan form and of the Out magnitude lumps. et's history, the sequential ages of geo came the was photographer's equipment, logical time ;chosen because it the and the blue-white brilliance of burning made the i can magnesium Walsingham The story of the Walsingham stalagmite Caves, than a Bermuda be found in C. Thomson, the briefly, brighter ' Wyville Voyage of : noon. But Thomson "We 'Challenger, Volume I: The Atlantic (London despaired: - were very anxious to carry away with us Macmillan and Co., 1877), 322 328.

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions frozen stuff of a chthonic strains to every social form ? Mapping trample time a a dripping in smooth quartz bowl of And what to make, then, of physicist middle earth. And yet, this small artifact like Thomas Gold, who reminds us that of the relentless passage of timeline time without the particular configurations of was something quite different too, since, astrophysics, it is not clear that time to a a keystone-like, it served close set of would exist at all? Or of biologist like looping arches that spanned and Michael Rosbash, who points out that if : our time falling into place, it promised to several of deep biochemical path were close the gaps between geological time ways slightly different, it is not and human time, between 1819 and 1873, clear we would miss it? between Milne p?re and Milne fils, be Do these pieces fit? The reader must tween now turn and then, Edinburgh and them in the mind to find reflecting Bermuda, here and there, metropolis facets, to hold them together, to measure and colony. The scientific investigation the remainder. of linear time cut a divot in the floor of the but the redoubled me a an Walsingham cave, -L/et add piece myself. In inter scar in the stone powerfully symbolizes view published in the early 1990s, the how the of human workings memory French philosopher Michel Serres of continuously tangle that timeline time fered a for the - striking parable timescape into a skein a knotty producing folds, of modernity, story about the collec curious our juxtapositions, singularities. tive conception of time that shapes The crate contained another in sense we are. piece of who Gesturing at the the of time. But did the jigsaw puzzle history of cartography, Serres recalled fit? I the piece imagine stalagmite-in the quirky world maps of the medieval exile reunited with this now rootless period. These geometrical disks strike sliver of its trunk. The do not as fragments the modern viewer wholly fantastical, of course. There is a a cal fit, remainder, since they gathered up the known world careous accretion that holds them care a apart. and arranged itwith around pow Is there a lesson in this? We set : Perhaps. erful centering point Jerusalem. We at and to out, great effort, again again, laugh, Serres pointed out, at this and the of time but time put pieces together; every other ancient cosmography that it forever holds those itself, seems, tried to place humanity in the heart, pieces apart. middle, and origin of everything. And on yet, he went to argue mischievously, a are we a JLhis issue of D dalus draws together not the victims of comparably shipload of pieces in the puzzle of time. narcissistic delusion? IfMercator and From Heraclitus to Einstein, from Faulk Copernicus dramatized that human in ner to fifteenth-century Namibia, from stitutions are not at the center of space, to cognitive science the apocalypse, the deep cognitive structures of moder on these ten essays invite reflection what nity have offered us a consolation of time is and what it has meant and still considerable power :now, at this mo means. Does the of time lie in lan we are we origin ment, continuously reassured, as guage, J.Hillis Miller suggests in stand at the summit of time. "Time in literature" ? Or could we say, The idea of progress makes us this - a with Danielle Allen, that time condi guarantee. As Serres put it, "we conceive - tion of possibility for human justice is of time as an irreversible line, whether or born of the need to put both halter and interrupted continuous, of acquisi yoke on anger, the furious beast that tions and inventions." And therefore,

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham more a continuously abreast of the past, "it fol cal way. This story ismuch than lows that we are for the in the of ec ontrnett always right, forgotten episode history reason we a time simple, banal, and na?ve that centric learning, since it is, in the end, are living in the present moment." From watershed moment in the creation of our as a vantage point at the center of this history itself, both history practice, we can as a temporal mappamundi survey his and history product of this practice. we are tory, secure in the knowledge that As Renaissance chronologers like Scal was not only right, but "righter than iger organized antiquity along the axis of ever we are were au possible before."2 Moreover, time, they putting the presiding guaranteed always to occupy this envi thorities of the classical tradition in the was a able seat, since each moment simply lifts past. It not simple business, but us over come was higher all that has before. here, surely, the hill of time abuild one men to even By these lights, if dreams Serres's ing, and scrambling the top, a our as strange dream for moment, domi they heaped the dirt under their feet. - our was a nant theories of knowledge ac If it these early practitioners of we we are as counts of how know right in 'science of time' who served archi our sense politics and in science; that tects, builders, and earliest summiteers our are - was truths the best truths suddenly of the hill of time, it the robed seem on a to be dependent very particu claque of professional historians who lar (even peculiar) cartography of time. became its surveyors, custodians, and we Who made time into the hill are al dedicated gardeners. And in this club the come ways atop? Will those who after historians of science and technology us - secure our a someday look back at in have long held special place where the sense our of being forever astride yester problem of progress is concerned. For - as we are was an at days and laugh, just tempted theirs enterprise, least in its a to to chuckle at mappamundi with the Old inception, exactly dedicated showing a an en Temple at its navel? It is puzzling just how high the hill had grown, thought. terprise that could dramatize temporal a Who made time into the hill we are progress, stage by stage, in pageant of a new errors on always atop? This is deep and difficult truths overcoming old the question, and reasonable thinkers have way to the present. These historians on lain the idea of progress different might have walked down the hill, but so to doorsteps. Anthony Grafton's essay in they did in order show the colorful to this volume, "Dating history," takes up and treacherous path back up the us even this very issue, and reminds that Olympian heights of modernity. were re as those old TO maps being If the field of the history of science has placed by the cartographies of Mercator changed in the last , many of its a and Johann Schott, similarly revolu most satisfying narratives still hail from - tionary project technical this of the mountaineers. One of the - was rearranging the temporal frame very best stories they brought up the an was work of the universe in equally radi slopes the story of timekeeping it self. This was a story of progress if there 2 The interview was in as - published English ever was one perhaps the ultimate tale Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations of how humanity had literally 'climbed on Science, Culture and Time, trans, Roxanne by the hill of time.' And a : compelling story Lapidus (Ann Arbor The University of Michi on it remains Once: a human gan Press, 1995). For the section modern upon time, - of see reasoned the of time conceptions time, pages 48 51. beings passage by

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the loose of the years, the bles like a leaf"). Suffice it to say that the Mapping organic cycles time arms no , the moons, and the days. Time swinging of the foliot beat natu- sun :a was the passage of the in the sky ral pulse. a sweep each day, seesaw procession But the basic structure of the mechani each . The invention of timekeeping cal clockwork had been defined, and - towns devices , water clocks, medieval vied for glory in the - sort graduated tapers made it possible for erection of public clocks, the better early civilized people to begin to control of which showed the paths of the planets and standardize the units of time, and in on their dials and sounded the on so set doing to coordinate their lives. But giant bells. The very gaudiest those the great step came sometime around bells ringing with the hammer strike of - the turn to the fourteenth century say, well oiled jack-work automatons, which - between 1270 and 1330 when someone creaked into action in elaborate mechan (we can't say who !) somewhere (in Eu ical masques. Many of these clocks sur we rope, we think, but can't say where !) vive, jacks intact, but few retain their a me were hit upon the ticking heart of true original escapements, since those an : chanical clock. This heart, called 'es upgraded long ago in the seventeenth a capement/ consists of clever arrange century, thanks to the work of Galileo a ment of swinging paddles set beside (and Christian Huygens), the verge and a crown. same toothed wheel shaped like The foliot met its demise ;and those a wheel would like to spin free, driven by paddles that kicked the slowly turning cannot a falling weight, but the weight fall into regular beat found a free (and the wheel cannot simply spin) their way onto the shaft of pendulum, a new because those deftly balanced paddles whose swings gave rhythm to the a a kick the wheel's teeth, stopping it for mechanical . Within few - error moment, before letting it go but just years, the of the best mechanical a : for moment, only to stop it again went from something like a block, unblock, and block again; block, twenty day, to something clos er unblock, block. Instead of the weight to twenty . a was dropping to the floor in whir, it lowers The effect profound, since these : new were re itself by tiny steps tick, tock, tick, tock; devices precise enough to and the wheel turns, slow as the plod veal in detail curious irregularities in the ding of the seconds. natural cycles of earthly and celestial Not that those seconds were all exactly time. Take the 'day,' for instance. One alike, at least not at first. The earliest might think that the period of time from noon noon an mechanical clocks swung those precious to marks unchanging a more more paddles with certain erratic charm, unit; light in the summer, were sum since the paddles affixed to the axis dark in the winter, but always in the a a same of T-shaped bar called verge andfoliot. period. An astronomer will tell you The name itself suggests that the device different. By the seventeenth century could not be made to behave with per this and other quirks of the natural order con fect regularity: etymologies offered for could be measured and plotted with the Toliot' have suggested that it siderable accuracy. hails from the root word for lunatic' or 'madwoman' (as in, "the thing swings l\ remarkable thing had happened. A back and forth like a nut"), or perhaps device that had started out as amechani from the word for leaf "it trem (as in, cal model of day and night, and hence of

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham the between the earth and new areas of (and Burnett relationship geometry physics) by sun a ^ ^for^ is what ^ hands of watching those same springs, swings, are - a i/me clock really model of the dynam and cogs.3 Head and hand met in the ics of earth and sun), had gradually out backrooms of the clockmaker's shop, at new stripped its original: had to the bench and the forge. be equipped with correction tables, al Meanwhile, outdoor types made their user own use new lowing the to convert shadow time of these powerful devices. to clock time, this newly abstract and Carefully cased and padded, such 'regu no unworldly ticking. It is exaggeration lators' made their way around the world to say that human beings suddenly with the naturalist voyagers of Enlight sun - a found themselves correcting the enment learning, revealing strange sure more as even small correction to be (never things they went. For instance, a one run than few minutes), but with large the best clocks seemed to at slightly on on implications. For ticking there the different speeds in different places a wall was product of human ingenuity the planet. These worrying observations a re that had, in sense, surpassed the heav would lead natural philosophers to as on ens. It is if the shadows the wall of vise their understanding of the shape of cave Plato's reached back to nudge the the earth, and the forces that gave it source of light and truth back into place ; form. as if Pha?thon took up the reins and Nor was that all. As David Landes drove the chariot better than Apollo. The points out in his essay in this collection, a relationship between the celestial realm "Clocks and the wealth of nations," new - and mechanical art, between heaven and type of highly resilient (and breath never same. - earth, would be the takingly accurate) timekeeper the true A clock that could be used in these 'chronometer,' developed in the late was a an es - ways scientific instrument, eighteenth century would up the ante even as sential tool of the cosmos-encompassing of mechanical magic it provided a astronomical researches of the seven handy solution to the oldest problem teenth and eighteenth . Indoor in navigation and cartography: the lon types tinkered with the mathematics gitude.4 These newly compact instru that described such fine devices and ments could ride out a six- voyage : on seas their workings if in the mid-sixteenth slopping the high while main century clock craftsmen had worked out taining time to within a or two a an the curve representing the force of day: accuracies of 99.999 percent and so unwinding spring, they did not with better. They were, in their day, the most or ever graph paper numbers, but rather with otherworldly devices made by the as man. a files and wooden blocks, they shaped hand of Otherworldly in very real a sense : was own the cone-shaped cog (called fus?e) that each its little autono uneven compensated for the driving 3 See, for example, Michael Mahoney, "Huy power of the earliest clocks. That spring gens and the Pendulum :From Device to Math was less than the reification cog nothing ematical Relation," in E. Grosholz and H. Bre of a The sophisticated dynamical analysis. ger, eds., Growth of Mathematical Knowledge as :Kluwer Academic But by the seventeenth century, the (Dordrecht Publishers, historian of mathematics Michael Ma 2000), 17-39. has mathe honey shown, clockmaking a a 4 For brief description of how clock makes maticians were that anal to measure see in actually doing it possible , page 45 on ysis paper, and discovering whole this issue.

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions - - mous a universe to itself. This nometer, Ki back on board the Mapping world, ship lme on in a fact was not lost the English mechan stopped ticking forever, mystical manifestation of mechanical ical genius John Harrison, who first sympathy. into Such a of machines and pushed chronometrical precision braiding men, this ethereal realm. For decades he meaning and mensuration, should not a us. even as labored to produce clockwork that surprise For timekeeping pre curve to would be impervious to the vicissitudes cision climbed the of progress : an the of the swirling world of dirt and change asymptotic plateau beyond soil, his devices would continuously compen sun, and stars, the devices that per formed remained sate for every perturbation in the condi these feats potent - as Peter tions of this fallen, messy planet worldly objects. After all, Gali son us in there is swings in temperature, in pressure, in reminds this volume, a orientation. Regarding his creation, after eternally propinquity between things count and the was a enumerating its fine balances and and thoughts, clock peren : a less defenses, he was moved to declare nial philosophical machine, machine "In short, it is a little world of itself, in to think, as much as itwas amachine to use. medieval dependent of the difference of gravity, Those verge and foliot heat, or cold of this our Globe."5 clocks did more than tell the time of ves a or A world of itself. It is tempting idea. pers in the village merely toll the out An idea consistent with that powerful working hours into the fields ; they a new to narrative in the historiography of time provided way think about what science : the story of how time left the nature was and how itworked. If that earth' in the march to modernity. Once elaborate tower clock could coordinate upon a time, sun and , heat and the swinging motions of the planets and on us cold were not obstacles to time-telling, stars its baroque dials, what made were rea sure a was not they exactly the way that people that similar clockwork be soned what the time was. The medieval hind the swinging of the originals, out peasant watched for hoarfrost and night there, moving against the black sky? as herons ;but Captain Cook, aboard the Newton wondered much. And what a Resolution, peered into gimbaled box, about that mechanical jack, hammering which, inured to heat and cold, place the bell? If itwalked like a duck and a a and position, simply told the time, a talked like duck, what made it not a world unto itself. duck? Or what made duck something a But of course, in another sense, such other than particularly intricate jack on devices could never leave the world; work? Viscount Bolingbroke may have - the contrary, they stayed right here doubted wryly, with patrician comfort - among us, and transformed it. Their aus that his villagers would ever confuse were tere and independent workings in the parish clock with the town bull, but to cat scribed with human significance at every Descartes, listening his squeak like : a was not so sure. tick. Not least aboard the Resolution it wagon wheel, became immortal legend that when Such musings touched the heavens. on Cook fell dead in the Hawaiian surf Was God, in the end, perhaps the finest February 14,1779, his faithful chro watchmaker of all? A clockwork nature a called for clockwork natural theology, 5 Quoted on page 217 of William J. H. An in a notion still in drewes, "Even Newton Could be Wrong," vigorous (and contested) nineteenth when the cele Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude (Cam the century, Mass. :Collection of Historical Scien bridge, brated Anglican divine William Paley tific Instruments, Harvard University, 1996).

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham on a opened his treatise God and Man fallen-on-hard-times branch of large with a clockwork encounter He: asked and o^rnett distinguished Virginia family, a as a to cast mea time his readers to imagine sojourner upon Maury decided boy his a heath who, walking through the empti ger bread upon the waters, joining the on a ness, stubs his toe pocket watch. nascent U.S. Navy in 1825, at the age of an From this encounter, Paley assures us, nineteen. Largely autodidact, Maury our sure one rose to solitary walker could be of be the first superintendent of the :a man - a - is re thing thinking being has U.S. Naval Observatory, and often on now as ocean been this way. And yet, Paley went to membered the 'founder of on a suggest, we stub our toes rocks, twigs, ography.' As midshipman and naviga seas and turtles in any field. Can we not, tor plying the in naval and merchant in nine looking at these, be absolutely certain vessels the first decades of the contact that some fine intelligence passed this teenth century, Maury had much new way before us ? Otherwise, who made with the technologies of timekeep as these 'works' ?Moreover, does the turtle ing at sea. Later, in the midcentury, he a new not surpass the watch (in complexity put his hand to the defense of kind sea and craftsmanship) by precisely that of science, he reached for the chro measure that the Divine Artificer sur nometer as a way to make sense of the oceans. passes man? And his visionary "Physical In these ways and many more, the Geography of the Sea" needed chronom - as clock the concrete referent in the dom eters both practical and conceptual a sea inant metaphor of 'clockwork uni tools. Practically, Maury's science - a on an verse' served as potent conceptual depended extended network of tool for thinking about the workings of global informants, continuously making even as was a nature, it also powerful and reporting observations about the of wind and water practical tool for investigating those physical conditions same none was oceans. As workings. And of this throughout the world's the static. As the actual clocks changed century unfolded, chronometrical navi new a through time (gaining parts and gation would make such system viable, to cor new capabilities) the elaborations and since it enabled observers reliably on implications of the clockwork metaphor relate their data with specific sites the :new wastes of the sea. Plotted to changed in step bits of clocks, like trackless the compensator or the precision their chronometer-derived coordinates, new enhancing remontoir, offered dimen these data would make the earliest large sions for thinking about the (clockwork) scale oc?anographie models possible. universe, in much the same way that in Standard of oceanography sel - as to the debt our own day Jennifer Groh and Mi dom fail acknowledge field's to chael Gazzaniga show in their essay the chronometer. - new as here developments in computing But Maury needed the chronometer we more an instrument. A true sea sci have implications for how think than our ence a sea had an inner about (computer-like?) brains. demanded that - order that could be revealed a sea of and a rational sea, JLo see this dynamic at work, take, for patterns workings, not a sea of unformed chaos and instance, the nineteenth-century earth opaque sea science of the American naval astron looming. A real science therefore omer Mat called for less than a and hydrographie innovator nothing conceptual reinvention of the sea thew Fontaine Maury. Hailing from the itself, traditionally

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions a brew of moodiness, JDut there may be a deeper point here as Mapping brooding mystery, time and fearsome unpredictability. Against well. The chronometrical sea was, above these notions invoked a sea. Maury repeatedly all and crucially, rational Human a "clockwork whose inner work ocean," efforts to conceive the workings of the were as and reliable as those - ings regular sky the original 'rational' phenomena of a blue chronometer. Waves and - great presented by nature yielded the earliest as cycles of salinity were, he put it, clocks, and in time refined clocks made "balance-wheels" in the as sea - mechanism, it possible to reconceive the long was the cloud which as equatorial ring, invoked the consummately 'irra "like the balance-wheel of a well-con - as a tional' face of nature sky-like structed affords the :a chronometer, grand place formal system that would yield machine the most atmospherical exquis to metrical and mathematical analysis. A itely arranged self-compensation" ; the sea that behaved like a clock was a sea as a Antarctic served "regulator" in the amenable to science. A chronometrical thermodynamics of oceanic currents ; sea was a rational sea, a sea of ratios, a the clockwork a and, expanding analogy, sea ready to come under mathesis univer he that the Gulf Stream "acts like sea argued salis. Here Maury's chronometrical a heat on pendulum, slowly propelled by science intimates the degree to which one on the side, and repelled by cold the the chronometer had come, in the Victo other." "In this he "it to view," continued, rian age, embody nothing less than becomes a for the chronograph sea, rationality itself. keeping time for its inhabitants, and Was the chronometer a Victorian 'the seasons marking the for the great ory machine' ? A way to think about whales and there it has been for all time ; thinking and being in the nineteenth to and once a vibrating fro, every year, century? The argument can be made. In great self-regulating, self-compensating January of 1841 another hard-luck young the man liquid pendulum." Pushing beyond of good breeding took passage to went so far as to a waters, Maury suggest the Pacific to try life at sea. By the time that the sea was itself less than nothing the youthful Herman Melville signed on the main driver in the whole a geophysical for sperm-whale cruise aboard the clockwork of and air. For those on sea, land, Acushnet, Maury had given up life the who took up this new study, Maury decks for life at the desk, but the two "the with its men more common promised, sea, physical had in than youthful as geography, becomes the main-spring wanderlust: Melville's cousin Thomas of a watch its and its ; waters, currents, had been Maury's shipmate aboard the and its and its with on a salts, inhabitants, U.S.S. Vincennes in 1827 -1830, voy their as across adaptations, balance-wheels, age the Pacific that stopped in the and and in the ter a on cogs, pinions, jewels Marquesas and included junket restrial mechanism." Maury's rich lan wild and seductive Nukuhiva Island, his meticulous elaboration of the guage, where Herman would later jump ship. in the nine as metaphor, suggests how, Maury's older brother, John, it hap teenth new clocks facilitated century, pened, had lived for almost two years as new as well as new on thinking doing.6 a beachcomber Nukuhiva all the way back in 1812. On his visit there in 1829, 6 Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geog ed. and a com raphy of the Sea, John Leighly (Cambridge, 347, 70 ; for lengthy discussion of : Mass. Harvard University Press, 1963 [1861]). pensators in the "clock-work of the ocean" see In order, I refer to pages 212, 224, 423, 260, 403, also page 240.

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham was for evidence chant and navy vessels on urne t young Maury searching embarking Q?^ broths's stay. Thomas could not global voyages would set their chro time know then that his cousin Herman nometers by the daily fall of the 'time would give the island literary immortali ball' atop the Greenwich Observatory, over ty in the novel Typee less than twenty which presided the lower reach of - years later. the Thames docklands Plinlimmon Like Maury, then, Melville spent his reimagines the divine soul (not merely as a youth in the chronometrical world of the body) clockwork device. Thus too to global navigation, and, strikingly, he regulated keep 'God's time,' virtuous new can would place this clockwork system spirits make their way through the to a at the heart of his later writing. Book world and remain 'true' distant and as XIV of his sprawling, cloying, and finally divine standard. They may require, or con maddening Pierre, The Ambiguities any chronometer would, periodic adjust - tains a half dozen of the most remark ments, and playing out the allegory in on - able pages ever written timekeeping, technical detail Plinlimmon suggests a so in the form of fragmentary pamphlet they ought to be 'rated' their particu cor that falls into the hands of the novel's lar behaviors can be continuously eponymous hero. "Chronometricals and rected. But still, such souls can, with who "was a Horologicals," authored by the shadowy attention, emulate Christ, sage "Plotinus Plinlimmon," offers a chronometer; and the most exquisitely sermon on exact worldly time, space, and the adjusted and one, and the least - soul a sermon that uses the chronome affected by all terrestrial jarrings, of any ever come to ter as an instrument for nothing less that have us." than the transvaluation of all values. At Moreover, like Christ, all 'chronomet the heart of this strange embedded nar rical' souls will find themselves in the a same : rative lies cumbrous allegory. As Plin worldly bind limmon it : puts Now in an artificial world like ours, the

It seems to me, in my visions, that there soul of man is further removed from its is a certain most rare order of human God and Heavenly Truth, than the souls, which if carefully carried in the chronometer carried to China, is from body will almost always and everywhere Greenwich. And, as that chronometer, if Heaven's own with some at will it to be give truth, all accurate, pronounce variance. For 12 o'clock when the China small grains of peculiarly high-noon, source local watches it is 12 coming from God, the sole of say, perhaps, so chronometri that heavenly truth, and the great o'clock midnight; the Greenwich hill and tower from which cal soul, if in this world true to its great the universal meridians are far out into Greenwich in the other, will always, in as infinity reckoned ; such souls seem its so-called institutions of right and mere London sea-chronometers (Greek, time wrong, be contradicting the local namers) which as the London ship standards and watch-maker's brains of floats past Greenwich down the this earth. Thames, are accurately adjusted by To work from one's chronometer is Greenwich time, and if needfully kept, - thus to be out of sync usually ridicu will still that same time, even give so - to lously with the 'horologicals,' be though carried to the Azores. out of sync with local norms and ways of on Describing the actual process by which life. Only the fine line of the prime was - mer on world shipping regulated meridian, that "great Greenwich hill

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and tower" of the celestial seat, will fectly arbitrary. Plinlimmon would seem Mapping time chronometrical time to a be the 'right time.' be offering kind of antinomian ho- Elsewhere, living by Greenwich time rology at worst, at best an unctuous will make a chronometrical soul "guilty pragmatism of local mores. - of all manner of absurdities : to a going And yet, there is suggestive promise bed at when his that noon, say, neighbors the conceit, if rightly understood, would be down to dinner." sitting offers something more, perhaps some At is stake, finally, nothing less than thing less bleak. As Plinlimmon hints, the very existence of absolute principles "And yet it follows not from this, that in moral life. Melville the beachcomber is one God's truth thing and man's truth - - that amphibious sailor who had by another; but as above hinted, and as this time made his inland on will be already way further elucidated in subsequent notorious and con - Nukuhiva, who, lectures by their very contradictions the won are fronting terrifying 'Typee,' they made to correspond." dered how to reset to a his ethical ticker "By their very contradictions are - they local time lets Plinlimmon to 'savage' made correspond." What can this out the dark of the lecture : play meaning gnomic conundrum possibly mean? Since the text in is a In short, this Chronometrical and Horo question fragment, the reader of Pierre shuffles in vain for an seems logical conceit, in sum, to teach account of this reconciliation :- of opposi this That in things terrestrial (horo this transcendental deduction. aman tions, logical) must not be governed by Still, the vehicle of the may car ideas celestial (chronometrical)_A allegory us ry to a solution :for to anyone familiar virtuous then, seems the expediency, with the actual of or operations mid-nine highest desirable attainable earthly it is a excellence for the mass of men, and is teenth-century navigation, simple matter of to geometry make horological the only earthly excellence that their and chronometrical contradictions 'cor Creator intended for them. When they respond.' That is to say, the difference go to heaven, itwill be quite another between Greenwich time and local time thing. There, they can turn the freely is a of way orienting oneself in space, of left cheek, because there the right cheek where one and one never knowing is, how is will be smitten. There they can heading. Does Melville want us to think freely give all to the poor, for there there of moral in a no principles this way? As will be poor to give to. A due appreci means to find our way home ? Is this, ation of this matter will do good to a the function of the chrono man. ultimately, metrical soul?7 Here are the clocks and not of a From maps the natural theology of Paley's physical relativity (that will come later wanderer and his watch, to the mean with Einstein and an Poincar?), but of derings of Melville's chronometrical radical ethical relativism. on equally spirit, adrift the high seas, the tech - If not more extreme since something nologies of timekeeping ticked away in it cannot have been lost on an educated the heart of Victorian metaphysics and salt like Melville that nation set its even as every theology, they ticked in earnest chronometers to its own prime meridi 7 In the edition of an : the French to Paris, the to Northwestern-Newberry Spanish and Pierre, "Chronometricals Horologicals" San Fernando, the Americans toWash - runs from pages 210 215. See Herman Melville, Even the absolutes of those chro or The ed. ington. Pierre, Ambiguities, Harrison Hayford, were Hershel nological souls, by these lights, per Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Ev

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham in the church towers of Victorian Bri fulfilled its admiralty duty, charting the tain. And as if in echo of South American coasts for the onirnett syncopated improve even time Plinlimmon's tale, those steeple ment of British shipping, while showing clocks did not tick together. As the rail the Union Jack from Bahia to Valparaiso ways extended London time throughout and beyond. The Beagle and its countless a were England in the 1850s, real chronometri sister ships chronometrical souls, : cal schism split the isle high church and they kept Greenwich time (and noncon bells still rang local hours ; the paraded Greenwich mores) in the horo formist places of worship switched to logical Chinas and Nukuhivas of the Greenwich time. Chronometricals and expanding European empires. Horologicals indeed. But the geopolitics of timekeeping meant more than this. For even as those brass Frodsham and Arnold chronome vy ne reading of "Chronometricals and sees as a ters colonial Horologicals" the tale parable helped bully explorers keep track of where were on sea and on of nineteenth-century theosophical they land made their and used chronometry. And this cannot be wrong. (as they maps these same devices And yet, it is not clear that this reading is them), ticking helped one at such men track of where were enough. For could begin again, keep they in the of civilization : came the beginning, and survey the world history they - from the hill of and could from the top of time from atop Mel atop time, show this to the feathered and ville's "great Greenwich hill and tower." benighted From here we can watch the sails open people of the horological realms by a for the east, for China, Java, Africa, and opening gimbaled mahogany box. are Such scenes were the stock-in-trade of India, places that out there beyond Victorian The French the sea, yes, but even more importantly, exploration. are our :not our swashbuckler Paul du places that not in time in gorilla-hunting Chaillu would write of how awed Afri time chronometrically speaking, to be sure, as Melville reminds us ;but not in cans contemplated his timekeeper in wonder and amazement and decided our time in a deeper way too, since in the was that itmust be his If colonial imagination the 'out there' "guardian spirit." a sense his onlookers asserted some almost always 'back then.' In this actually like of not London marked the in a thing this, they were, course, - a far off. And such tales were After cultural cartography too global chro legion. was a his watch and other instrumen nocultural geography. If there showing tal accoutrements to the native metaphysics of the chronometer in the people we not he the British Lovett Cam age of empire, might be obliged met, explorer was a eron their to acknowledge that there geopoli quoted (ventriloquized?) tics as well? ejaculations of Anglophilia: "Oh these white men ! make all these wonder This observation extends beyond the They ful and know how to use them ! straightforward fact that the clocks of things men who know so much the nineteenth century were tools for the Surely ought never to creation of the maps of empire, though die!"8 were : so all And if they emphatically that Darwin's Indeed, they hoped. they no did not die under the ship the Beagle carried fewer than tropical sun, they as twenty-two chronometers aboard it 8 Both stories are told in Michael Adas, Ma : chines as the Measure Men (Ithaca, N. Y. :Cor anston and Chicago Northwestern University of nell Press, 1989), 159. Press and The Newberry Library, 1971). University

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions a on up and went back to the future, R after lecture Mapping packed ecently, presenting time were sure Iwas whence they increasingly they science and colonialism, ap a had come. They left the past behind, in proached by distinguished senior gen - me Africa, the Amazon, and elsewhere tleman who wanted to explain why never a revo primeval places, filled with primeval the Chinese had scientific - as peoples at different stages in the evolu lution. This question often known tion of civilization. the Needham Problem, after the great scenes en These of chronometrical Cambridge sinologist and Marxist histo no new - counter were by means to the rian of science, Joseph Needham has nineteenth century. Mechanical time long been the sixty-four-thousand-dollar keepers had served European voyagers question for the historian of science. If on as a way to put themselves the map in recent years developments in the his were culturally, long before such devices toriography of the European 'scientific on adequate to put them the map geo revolution' have somewhat put the ques was sort are no so sure we detically. Nowhere this of time tion aside (we longer more keeping important than in the know exactly what that revolution was, so early-seventeenth-century encounters itmakes it tough to ask why the Chi nese a between the China of the Ming dynasty didn't have one), it remains hard on and the Jesuit missionaries who set out problem which much distinguished for Peking to convert the middle king work has been done. I began to offer my a sense one dom. As Father Ricci liked to tell the questioner of how might go was a story, it the promise of receiving about answering his question, but he cut se me gift of 'self-ringing bells' that finally off briskly. As it happened, he al duced the reclusive emperor and gave ready knew the answer, and wanted to a me : ex the brethren way around the meddling tell "The Chinese emperor," he re eunuchs of the imperial palace. The plained, "had this huge, locked closet sults entered the providential hagiogra where he kept all the clocks of the king see phy of the order: the emperor, instantly dom, and he wouldn't let anyone else new or besotted with this fine toy, obliged them study them. He hoarded them his mathematicians to sit at because he was afraid of what the supercilious "people to the feet of these clever foreigners and would do if they got any science. learn the regulation and maintenance of Now this isn't right. By the early eigh this remarkable device. Soon thereafter, teenth century there was a proper trade a he insisted upon having clock with him in European timepieces through Canton, a a a at all times, and within year section and by the 1820s whole international was of the Forbidden City being remod European subindustry had arisen, link a eled to accommodate large tower ing London and Geneva, wholly for the a to a clock. By 1730, French missionary purpose of supplying distinctive kind court the would report that "The Imper of watch to the burgeoning China ial Palace is stuffed with clocks.. .watch trade.10 But my interlocutor was not to es, carillons, repeaters, organs, spheres and astronomical clocks of all kind and - and encounters with China. there are more than four keeping European an see description For introduction Chun-chieh Huang and thousand from the best masters of pieces Erik Z?rcher, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Paris and London."9 Culture (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).

9 Quoted in Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 10 This industry is discussed by David Landes, 1300-1700 York: Collins, 86. (New 1967), Revolution in Time Mass. :Harvard There is a rich and detailed literature on time (Cambridge,

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D. Graham : movement be budged authoritarian tyranny and subtle back through the ages as far as he was con of this was the task of that onirnett technophobia had, humanity, to time cerned, consigned China the dustbin paradigmatic figure of Enlightenment of history. For him, they got stuck in the learning: the philosophical traveler. Middle Ages. For Fabian, then, modernity was born over This view, which glosses both the when the timeline time of Grafton's a history of timekeeping in China and chronologers was spatialized into a vast, ex complex story of cross-cultural globe-encompassing geochronocultural has a a change, nevertheless long scholarly tableau, concentric secular cosmology one can pedigree, that be traced right that gathered the peoples of the world some a new back to of those very eighteenth into mappamundi with the great century Jesuits who attended at court in cities of Europe cast as the new Jeru Beijing. Put aside its merits. Most strik salem, the origin and apex of civiliza ing is the way this view places the chro tion, the only part of the planet that was was a nopolitics of modernity in high relief. actually modern. Here powerful For what does itmean to say that other new way to make sense of the flood of our people, manifestly contemporaries, discontinuous, fragmentary, and desta are as our best understood living in bilizing evidence about human origins was past? and human habits that pouring into In an influential essay published in the learned societies of those cities. 1983, Time and the Other, the Dutch an Here, for Fabian, was the birth of the thropologist Johannes Fabian undertook human sciences, particularly anthropol a tem new sweeping critique of precisely this ogy, which grounded itself in this poral cartography, which he called 'allo cosmology of modernity, grounded itself chrony.' If Serres's parable probed how in the original sin of hegemonic ambi moderns came to think of themselves as tions, the "denial of coevalness."11 some moun a perennially atop abstract That map of time enabled travelers us see tain of time, Fabian would ask to to orient themselves and plot others - that this mountain was quite literally throughout the age of empire this, I as mapped onto the globe in the age of think, cannot be denied. Whether, overseas European adventuring. Lon Fabian suggests, allochrony remains a - don, Paris, Berlin these metropolitan "vast entrenched political cosmology" centers were atop that hill, which is to such that contemporary geopolitics has were as say that they in the present, but the its ideological foundation in, he a farther one went from downtown, the would have it, "flawed chronopolitics" - farther back in time one could venture. this remains a contentious thesis, but an one. some un From the 'serfs' of neighboring Ireland not absurd Talk with all the way to the 'natural men' and dergraduates about the non-Western a (even better) 'natural women' of Tahiti. world and use to time how Out in space meant back in time. Read long it takes before they invoke allo was a as a sense ing movement in space the job of chrony way to make of others. or more navigator geographer, but reading this Or, perhaps tellingly, listen to the news. evening

268. University Press, 1983), See also Catherine il Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New Eastern and Pagani, Magnificence European Inge York: Columbia University Press, 1983). He Clocks Late China Arbor: to nuity: of Imperial (Ann takes the eighteenth century mark the instal of run University Michigan Press, 2001). lation of this idea ;but the roots deep.

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This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.228 on Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:15:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions an on Fabian considered his analysis in wound up to do battle foreign shores. scan one tervention in what he called "the And might build large closets for dal of domination and exploitation." He such troublesome devices. was believed that he revealing the ideol of time that had and in ogy undergirded, JL^eep the Walsingham cave, in Ber the attitudes and as finally authorized, muda, watch in hand, the native guide that led and their practices Europeans looked on, C. Wyville Thomson and his Creole descendents to the claim, by party tried to get to the bottom of time. of the twentieth terri were to opening century, Pickaxes poised, they ready dig, torial over some sovereignty 85 percent if necessary, to get there. All the while, of the terrestrial globe. though, they knew exactly where they But does his observation add : were anything stood in history they men of sci to the of time's science? That history ence, from Victorian England; they had story of progressive precision, of fine set their chronometers at Greenwich, clockwork? That that takes us story that towering hill. Getting to the bottom from the water rough-and-ready judicial of time would only tell them what they clock in Athens to atomic clocks so fan already knew: they stood at the leading that can reveal were tastically precise they edge of knowledge, they astride the in the of the changes speed spinning past. earth when the winds and when we are blow, Who made time the hill always the rises in the trees? on spring sap atop ? And who sold plots the ter For a while Need Perhaps. long (as raced slopes to the people of the Carib ham's Problem suggests), scholars in the bean, to the Pacific Islanders, to the of science and have history technology whole 'family of man' ? At what cost? been interested in the problem of Euro I have sketched two stories in this es have : pean exceptionalism. They asked, say one, the story of how, with clocks for the Chinese did not instance, why and rocks, human beings tried to get to take the astro - immediately up larger the bottom of time to grasp, hold, and nomical and was cosmological significance show what it really ; the other, the of clockwork. What precision impedi story of how, with maps and memory, of their culture or char mentary aspect human beings managed to get to the top acter could be held for the - responsible of time to mound up the hill of the past way that they held these devices in the and summit it. Do these two stories fit? realm of baubles and But comes playthings? Between them something else. we would do well to reconsider An a perhaps accretion, flow, the sand that slips this and others like it in of question light through the skylight of the hourglass, : Fabian's chronopolitics if clocks went and makes that little hill, from its base to into the at least in to show world, part, its ever-sliding tip. Between the bottom that were in the non-Europeans they of time and the top comes the remain were past, then these tickers not simply der. Time itself. Which we have not useful tools, scientific instruments, or Which does not fit. - caught. symbols of the clockwork universe What would it be like to let this sand were also instruments. into our they agonistic fall hands, and neither to dig Little boxes that measured not merely nor to climb ? I do not know. men were time, but ;and which always

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