Ingenious clockwork
Do you feel like you’re always rushing to keep up with what you should have finished last week? As if life is hurtling forward at a terrific pace? You’d not be alone. Everyone, it seems, is busy. In fact, this feeling is so widespread that there’s now a growing scientific literature on the health effects of “time scarcity.”
Digital media has made people “used to instant gratification,” Sara Robin says here in The Signal, and if there’s ever a slight moment of boredom, “you can reach for your phone.” You no longer have to live life in first or second gear. As Gloria Mark explores, people’s attention spans on screens have fallen from roughly two and a half minutes in 2004 to 75 seconds in 2012 and to about 48 seconds today.
This isn’t good for political life, Robin says. Today’s challenges require humanity “to come together to work out solutions to problems we’ve never faced before—climate change, building a society where robots do most of the work. All of that will require energy and cooperation. We’re underequipped.”
And the pace of politics itself keeps getting faster. U.S. President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon made a tactic of it, which he called “flooding the zone”: Pump out one provocation after another into the news cycle so that no one can recall last week’s scandal.
What’s all this doing to democracy?
William E. Scheuerman is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time. Scheuerman says life is clearly speeding up. People feel hurried, stressed, overwhelmed, as if they’re forever falling behind schedule. And they’re not wrong. Society, he says, has become ever more fast-paced: The news cycle, for example, is now a constantly changing series of short clips; in financial services, meanwhile, firms close trades by the millisecond.
But this acceleration challenges the “ingenious temporal clockwork” of liberal democracy. Political theorists have traditionally thought of the executive branch as the part of government that can respond swiftly to emerging situations. As society and politics have sped up, the executive has grown ever stronger, at the expense of the legislative branch, which ought to move slowly. And in turn, legislatures and courts have increasingly come to operate as though they themselves were part of the executive. The political forces this favors most, Scheuerman says, are populist strongmen who promise to handle problems faster than sluggish legislators—even when they can’t …
This feature is open-access, courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.
Gustav Jönsson: Has life really become more frantic than in the past?
William E. Scheuerman: Definitely. There’s a massive literature in sociology and social theory on “social temporality”—that’s to say, time as a social experience. I think the best definition of “social acceleration,” which is really what you’re describing, is offered by my friend and colleague Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist and social theorist, who says it has three prongs.
First, there’s technical acceleration: the acceleration of things like communication technologies, transportation technologies, and a lot of other technologies we’re familiar with from everyday life. We can clearly and objectively ascertain that these technologies have become ever faster.
The patterns of social change have also sped up. Basic social structures seem to be changing at a quicker pace than in the past. This is related to technical acceleration in some ways, but it’s also a distinct phenomenon, so we shouldn’t conflate them even if there’s a relationship between them.
And then last but not least, there’s been an acceleration of everyday life. A lot of sociological work suggests that many people indeed experience life as much more hectic today. We feel rushed. We feel hurried. And it’s not just that people perceive that things have been speeding up; objectively, there’s been an intensification of the number of activities people do during the course of the day.
Social acceleration has been around for a while. It didn’t begin last week. The process may, however, have become more intense in the last 50 years or so. And there are all sorts of complicated debates about who exactly is experiencing social acceleration and to what extent—there are going to be variations across social classes, nationalities, and so on. But on the whole, life is clearly more hectic now.
Jönsson: Why?
Scheuerman: I think there are two basic sources: modern capitalism, which is a sort of speed machine that encourages and incentivizes all sorts of acceleration, and the geopolitical competition of the modern state system. A lot of the technologies that relate to social acceleration can be traced to modern warfare. Not to start off on too horrific a note, but the fact that we can destroy the planet within a few minutes is a historically novel experience, which we’ve been living with for just over half a century. That’s one of the more dire manifestations of it.
Jönsson: That reminds me: I was recently reading a history book that described how in the early modern period it might take more than 10 years for an Armenian merchant to return home from a trade trip to the east.
Not to start off on too horrific a note, but the fact that we can destroy the planet within a few minutes is a historically novel experience.
Scheuerman: That’s a good example because the economy is one of the sources of this speeding up. An argument I try to make—though I’m not sure it’s right—is that the increasing pace in the economy has real implications for the rule of law. If you were engaging in a business transaction that could take five to six months, you wanted not just some sort of legal framework you could rely on, but one that was characterized by constancy and stability. You don’t want the rules changing over the course of six months. By contrast, if you’re sitting in the City of London today and you’re pressing buttons on your computer and making these high-speed financial transactions, you want to have legal protections for property, but I’m not sure that legal constancy is as important to you as it might have been to someone in the 15th or 16th century. And indeed, a lot of the legal regulation that we see within our high-speed economy is often flexible and open-ended in ways that don’t really mesh with this old-fashioned demand for stable and constant law.
What’s the rule of law? There are a lot of different answers to that question. But typically, when people define it, they will include the idea that you should have not just clear general norms, but norms that are relatively stable, relatively constant—they’re supposed to last for a reasonably long period of time. This is in every legal theory 101 textbook. And there are a lot of reasons why you want to have constant rules. But one of the things that we might be seeing in this high-speed society is that for at least some economic players—those operating in parts of the economy with instantaneous processes—the need for constant, stable law is in some ways diminished.
The way I came to this was not by thinking about it in terms of theories of the rule of law; rather, I was seeing that the legal infrastructure of economic globalization is strikingly loose. The laws are often open-ended. They allow for flexibility. And in a way, that makes sense. If the rules don’t change, they could get in the way. In a social and economic environment that’s constantly changing, the rules may look rigid and out of date very quickly.
Anything with business transactions that involve high-speed processes, like e-commerce, or really most parts of the internet, is going to be tough to regulate because the technologies themselves are changing at an incredibly rapid pace. You’ll have a couple hundred people hammer out some compromise, but that statute could be out of date within a very short period of time, and legislators are often very aware of it. In some ways, that’s an old problem. The world has always been complicated. You always had elected legislators struggling with this, but when you live in a world that’s constantly changing, with high-speed, rapid evolutions, it’s going to be very difficult for lawmakers to come up with some clear set of rules that’s relatively lasting.
Jönsson: What does that mean for legislatures?
Scheuerman: If you look at all of the canonical theorists who talk about the separation of powers, one thing they say about legislatures is that they should be deliberative. Deliberation takes time, because there are a lot of different voices and interests that have to be heard and recognized, and then there have to be negotiations. And these canonical theorists also say that legislation should be prospective. It should be oriented to the future. It should last for some time. But that’s increasingly difficult.
I like to think that liberal democracy, at least traditionally, has tried to rest on an ingenious temporal clockwork. You have legislators who deliberate. Legislators have to take their time; they shouldn’t be rushed. And if you read Montesquieu or Hamilton or whoever, they all say that the legislature should be slow-moving—it needs to be if it’s to plan for the future.
And then on the other side is the executive, which is supposed to be fast-moving. Theorists historically viewed the executive as a relatively small institution: John Locke was thinking about the single person of the king, and maybe some advisors; Alexander Hamilton and the American framers were thinking about the president together with some stable hands. And because the executive was small, it could move quickly, and it should move quickly because it was supposed to respond to new events. Montesquieu, for example, said that the executive acts in the moment. The law, of course, has to be enforced immediately.
If that’s how, in fact, institutions were set up to operate, with that temporal division of labor, then in the context of social acceleration, we’re going to have a problem, at least if we want the legislature to be the dominant player. There are caveats, but in traditional liberal democratic theory that was the plan: James Madison said the legislature—Congress—would be predominant; in fact, he was worried about Congress overreaching. But most likely, social acceleration favors the executive, because the executive is the institution that’s supposed to have the capacity to respond quickly. It’s supposed to have what Hamilton called “energy.” As the executive itself has become stronger, the other branches of government have increasingly come to look like the executive.
Jönsson: That makes me think of the so-called Gang of Eight, high-ranking members of the U.S. House and Senate who represent the rest of Congress in intelligence matters.
Scheuerman: Exactly. Another example that’s been in the news in the U.S. is the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket,” where it often doesn’t explain its rulings, so you don’t know which justices are coming down in which way; it just issues a ruling. Here’s a decision: Do this. And by operating in that way, it looks more and more like the executive. And it seems to me that one reason for this is that the Court is overwhelmed.
Jönsson: Much like the rest of us.
For many Americans, going to the computer, pressing a few buttons, and sending 50 bucks is all they feel they can do. It’s political action, but it’s the kind of high-speed thing you get done with quickly.
Scheuerman: The big picture is that the executive is going to be the winner in this context. But I want to be careful because there’s an obvious counterargument: There’s a library filled with books explaining why executive power has grown in the last century. And I would not discount any of those accounts. All I would do is add to them.
Jönsson: How is all this affecting political culture more broadly?
Scheuerman: I don’t know if you’ve come across Anton Jäger’s book on “hyperpolitics”?
Jönsson: I have. We actually spoke with him here a while ago.
Scheuerman: I would place much of what he’s describing under the rubric of social acceleration. You’re going to see impatience with the slow, hard work of democratic politics. In a society where speed and adaptability and getting things done quickly are at a premium, there’s going to be a shortage of the kind of things we as citizens need to participate meaningfully in democracy: patience, the ability to listen to other people, the ability to go to boring political meetings—and you know, a lot of political meetings are very boring, unbelievably boring. All of this requires patience, and I don’t think the high-speed society encourages that.
In the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections, one of my grad students from South Korea said, “This is a strange country,” and I said, “Yeah, it is, but why?” “Well,” he said, “in Korea we mobilize around the election. I don’t see a lot of that. What I see is people making donations on the internet.” This is, of course, one of the pathologies of U.S. campaign funding. At this point, though, for many Americans, going to the computer, pressing a few buttons, and sending 50 bucks is all they feel they can do. It’s political action, but it’s the kind of high-speed thing you get done with quickly. And there are good reasons for it. We’re busy, right?
Jönsson: Yes.
Scheuerman: Even going to a demonstration might—
Jönsson: —take a whole day. It may rain. You’re forgoing that martini in the bar.
Scheuerman: Exactly. And I believe this is a problem for democracy. But I don’t want to be simplistic. There are ways in which democracy has already adjusted to social acceleration. But I do think there may be limits to that. When you live in a society in which we’re socialized to think that temporal efficiency is the most important thing, where all of the dominant institutions encourage it, then the virtues that the democratic citizen as well as civil society organizations should exhibit are going to be in short supply.
Jönsson: What’s the upshot of that?
Scheuerman: Authoritarian populists, I think, are tapping into this, because they promise to get things done quickly. You don’t have to wait for the sluggish legislators, because the leader or president decides. It’s a kind of radicalization of that trend toward the growth of the executive and the sidelining of the legislature.
Authoritarian populism means you have an executive who views himself—and it typically is a guy—as capable of moving quickly and getting things done. But in fact, they often don’t. I think we should view the idea that the modern executive is always fast-moving as in part being a piece of ideology. It’s no longer George Washington and a couple of advisors; it’s thousands and thousands of people. And it’s clumsy. These leaders have not fulfilled their promises. Trump did not end Russia’s war in Ukraine within 24 hours. He didn’t end inflation on day one. These are complicated problems that require the modern state and a fully developed modern executive, which is oftentimes not the efficient machine that the old-fashioned view of the executive makes it out to be. And so, the view many people have of the executive is to some extent disconnected from reality. In that way, it’s actually dangerous, because we assume the executive can do stuff that it can’t.
Jönsson: It’s like some frenetic stasis. Things are happening all the time, but there’s no fundamental movement. One day there’s something about Russia’s war in Ukraine, the next day it’s about some golf course in D.C. or whatnot, and the focus just keeps moving from thing to thing.
Scheuerman: It sounds like you’re describing Donald Trump. I think he’s a perfect exemplar of a pathological manifestation of high-speed political leadership. He’s hyperactive, someone who’s constantly spinning his wheels. He fits the times. He can do a lot of damage, but in some ways he’s very ineffective.
This idea of “executive energy” is incomplete. It’s true that the executive is often the first mover in the political game. You see that with Trump. He can change the political terrain very quickly. But that’s not the same as saying that the executive can rapidly handle complicated problems or crises. That seems to me to be empirically much more dubious. The executive branch often doesn’t deal with emergencies or crises very well. And it’s not just because they’re incompetent; it’s because they’re institutionally lacking that long-term, considered deliberation.
Jönsson: It’s like a storm on the surface of the ocean: The waves are tremendous, but down below, the water is calm.
