Header image: KF in Dall-E
- We all belong to the same cult of speed.
- And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.
- the human cost of turbo-capitalism
- As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella Slowness, “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.”
- In a recent ICM poll, half of British adults said their hectic schedules had caused them to lose touch with friends [KF: Honoré mentions family]
- If we carry on at this rate, the cult of speed can only get worse. When everyone takes the fast option, the advantage of going fast vanishes, forcing us to go faster still. Eventually, what we are left with is an arms race based on speed, and we all know where arms races end up: in the grim stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction [KF: cf. iEx]
- Our impatience is so implacable that, as actress-author Carrie Fisher quipped, even “instant gratification takes too long.”
- Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.
- It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything.
- The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. As we shall see, performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results.
- Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed.
- By taking aim at the false god of speed, it strikes at the heart of what it is to be human in the era of the silicon chip.
- In the United States, the Petrini doctrine has inspired a leading educator to launch a movement for “Slow Schooling.”
Chapter one: do everything faster
- St. Augustine mused, “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.”
- The clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible—meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts.
- In 1880, Nietzsche detected a growing culture “ . . . of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once.”
- Kundera thinks that speed helps us block out the horror and barrenness of the modern world: “Our period is obsessed with the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered, that it is tired of itself, sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.”
- KF: This desire to forget is facilitated by the permanence of digital memory.
- not only do we enjoy going fast, we get used to it, we become “velocitized.” “The curse of velocitization”
- In a 24/7 world, however, all time is the same: we pay bills on Saturday, shop on Sunday, take the laptop to bed, work through the night, tuck into all-day breakfasts. We mock the seasons by eating imported strawberries in the middle of winter and hot cross buns, once an Easter treat, all year round. With cellphones, Blackberrys, pagers and the Internet, everyone and everything is now permanently available.
Chapter two – Slow Is Beautiful
- The Decelerators use a German word—eigenzeit—to sum up their creed. Eigen means “own” and zeit means “time.” In other words, every living being, event, process or object has its own inherent time or pace, its own tempo giusto.
If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together (origin)
- Tucked away in an Austrian national park, his three-hundred-bed Slow Hotel will be different. Guests will travel to a nearby village by steam train, and then on to the hotel by foot or in a horse-drawn carriage. KF: On train travel
KF: Honoré traces historical concerns over time about the increase in the pace of our lives (ancient world on); LOL “bicycle face.”
- it was nevertheless clear by the end of the nineteenth century that speed really did take a toll. Thousands were dying every year in accidents involving the new vessels of velocity—bicycles, cars, buses, trams, trains, steamships.
- Every religion teaches the need to slow down in order to connect with the self, with others and with a higher force.
- In many quarters, “slow” remains a dirty word. Just look at how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: “not understanding readily, dull, uninteresting, not learning easily, tedious, slack, sluggish.” KF: “Forget”
- Jeremy Rifkin, the American economist, thinks it could be the defining issue of the twenty-first century. “A battle is brewing over the politics of time,” he wrote in his 1987 book Time Wars. “Its outcome could determine the future course of politics around the world in the coming century.”
Chapter three: Food: turning the tables on speed
- hijacked by haste
- In 2003, researchers at Essex University calculated that British taxpayers spend up to £ 2.3 billion every year repairing the damage that industrial farming does to the environment and human health.
- KF: What of damage done to mental health by the centrifugal forces of hyperspeed?
- After half a century of relentless growth, McDonald’s recorded its first losses in 2002 and immediately began closing overseas branches.
- Fifteen years ago, for instance, two large companies, Miller and Busch, dominated the US beer market. Today, fifteen hundred craft breweries make beer following Slow Food principles.
- Nothing, however, illustrates the spread of the Slow Food gospel better than the renaissance of the traditional farmers’ market.
Chapter Four: Cities: blending old and new
- A Slow City asks the question: Does this improve our quality of life? If the answer is yes, then the city embraces it. And that includes the very latest technology
- “…we want to strike a balance between the modern and the traditional that promotes good living.”
- In the real world, speeding is the most common form of civil disobedience (BC, 2021 data)
- Studies around the world show a direct correlation between cars and community: the less traffic that flows through an area, and the more slowly it flows, the more social contact among the residents.
- The only way to win the war on speeding is to go deeper, to recast our whole relationship with speed itself. We need to want to drive more slowly
- In 2003, London began charging drivers £5 per day to enter the city centre during weekdays.
- KF: congestion charge
- A prime example is Portland ☹ , Oregon. Barred by law from expanding outwards in the 1970s, local leaders set about regenerating the downtown with pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods linked by light-rail lines.
- Pledge to slow down: https://polktpo.com/pledge-to-slow-down
Chapter five: mind/body
This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men. —Captain J. A. Hadfield
- Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking
“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” – Einstein
Chapter six: medicine: doctors and patience
- Of course, speed is often crucial in medicine. We’ve all watched ER. If you don’t remove a diseased appendix, or staunch a bullet wound, or administer an insulin injection in time, the patient will die. But in medicine, as in so many other walks of life, faster is not always better. As many doctors and patients are realizing, it often pays to be Slow.
Chapter 8: Work
- If we can be sure about anything in the twenty-first century, it is that reports of the death of work have been greatly exaggerated.
- Franch 35-hr work week
- the French experience points up the dangers of taking a unilateral stand against the culture of long working hours in a globalized economy
- Today, the Dutch work fewer hours than almost any industrial nation.
- In 2001, Nestlé Rowntree became the first of many UK firms to introduce email-free Fridays.
- KF: Encouraging face-to-face communication; understanding that something is lost in [fast / disembodied] comms
Chapter 9: Leisure
In a world obsessed with work, leisure is a serious matter. The United Nations declared it a basic human right in 1948.
- “The right to rest and leisure is the economic, social and cultural right to adequate time away from work and other societal responsibilities.”
- KF: the right to let your guard down; protected from society by your right to privacy; but now your ass is hanging out 24/7
- Craft: In its uniqueness, its quirks and imperfections, a handmade item such as a knitted shawl carries the imprint of its creator. We sense the time and care that went into the making—and feel a deeper attachment to it as a result.
- “When something is handmade, it means that someone has invested time in it, and that imbues it with real value.”
- Gardening / knitting = slow
- In the words of Paul Virilio, a French philosopher, “Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing-down that destroys the mass’s dynamic efficiency.”
As the American writer Saul Bellow once noted, “Art is something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes . . . the eye of the storm . . . an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
- KF: Am I not a work of art?
- Tempo Giusto concert….CONEXT This begs a question: If indeed we do play some classical music faster than our ancestors did, is that really such a bad thing?
- If 100 beats per minute set pulses racing in the 1700s, it is more likely to induce a yawn in the era of Moby
- Kliemt sets great store by matching musical tempo to the rhythms of the human body.
- And he takes heart from the progress made by other Slow campaigns. “Forty years ago, people laughed at organic farming, but now it looks like it will become the national standard in Germany,”
KF: To naysayers of The Human Pace
- Cage: As Slow As Possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible The next note will be played on February 5, 2024
Chapter 10: Children
- The letter, which now goes out to Harvard freshmen every year, is entitled: Slow Down: His point is simply that a little selective slowness can help students to live and work better.
- Kids as young as five now suffer from upset stomachs, headaches, insomnia, depression and eating disorders brought on by stress.
- In education, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, rang in the changes by attacking the tradition of teaching the young as though they were grown-ups. In Emile, his landmark treatise on schooling children in accordance with nature, he wrote: “Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.”
- Maurice Holt, professor emeritus of education at the University of Colorado
- In interwar Germany, Rudolf Steiner pioneered a brand of education that is the polar opposite of accelerated learning.
Rescuing the next generation from the cult of speed means reinventing our whole philosophy of childhood, much as the Romantics did two centuries ago.
KF: perhaps the same reimagining is necessary to protect our most vulnerable citizens as they form their identities. They need to be able to do so in a way that these identities can be de-/reconstruced as necessary, while they experiment with new ways of being in the world and seek to live in an authentic way without being subject to commodification and surveillance..
Conclusion
- We are so time-poor and time-sick that we neglect our friends, families and partners.
- What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between.
- Alice Waters, founder of the celebrated Chez Panisse
- Larry Dossey, the American doctor who coined the term “time-sickness,” helps patients beat the condition by teaching them to step out of time, using biofeedback, meditation or prayer to engineer “time exits.”