OPINION
History is littered with the corpses left behind by utopian revolutionaries. As Jordan Peterson points out, it’s pointless to condemn the grim toll of, say, the Maoists or the Stalinists, if we don’t forensically examine the ideologies that motivated their crimes and catastrophes.
For instance, the Maoists insisted on foisting not just collectivisation but so-called “Marxist biology” on Chinese farmers, during the Great Leap Forward. The absolute refusal to eschew ideological purity in the face of practical calamity ultimately led to around 45 million deaths. A few decades later, the ideology of ridding China of the “Four Olds” unleashed the mass slaughter and destruction of the Cultural Revolution.
The French Revolution, too, led to the mass slaughter of the Terror.
Luckily, one of the other lunacies of the Revolution wasn’t so deadly. It mainly just pissed people off.
After the French revolutionaries beheaded their king, they had another bright idea: “Let’s make the day 10 hours long”. This is NOT a joke. Left-wing ‘experts’ actually changed the length of minutes, hours, and weeks in the name of science.
Left-leaning “experts” causing mayhem with really dumb ideas, because, “THE SCIENCE”? Aren’t we glad that doesn’t happen any more!
This is the story of that disaster:
The French revolutionaries adopted a new calendar for three reasons: To eliminate religious consciousness from the French society, to make time more “rational” [and] to announce the birth of an egalitarian era.
In their zeal they forgot an important factor: human nature.
This is a story of political arrogance.
And deranged over-estimation of “science”.
After all, the revolutionaries had rationalised weights and measures with great success. Let’s be honest: the metric system makes far more sense than the older, ad hoc, measurements of the Imperial system. But, here’s the thing: even the metric system is still ultimately based on nature. The metre, for instance, is one ten-millionth of the length of an Earth quadrant, the length of the meridian arc on the Earth’s surface from the equator to the North Pole. From there, it scales rationally: 1,000 metres = one kilometre. A thousandth of a metre is a millimetre, and so on. The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at 4°C.
But when it came to time, the revolutionaries simply lost the plot. Trying to break up time into neat blocks of 10s and 100s simply doesn’t bear any relation to the Earth, its rotation or its orbit around the Sun.
A radical attempt to redefine time itself. In France, from 1793 to 1805, one week had 10 days […] One hour = 100 minutes. One min = 100 seconds.
This simply doesn’t make sense.
But it got even worse when the revolutionaries married their zeal for decimation to their hatred of religion.
The 7th day, traditionally a holiday – “holy day” – became a typical week day. An attempt at secularization […] Sociologist [Eviatar Zerubavel] notes that the 10-day week was meant to disrupt the “traditional, sacred seven-day cycle”. [Its] purpose was to disorient people and make them lose track of “Sunday”. That is, the day for going to Church and having a weekly sitdown with the divine.
But, hey, there were experts. Listen to The Science, peasants!
The French Revolutionary Calendar was designed by the top experts of the day. The chief designer: CG Romme (Physics professor). Mathematicians & astronomers chipped in. Tradition/old habits didn’t matter. The designers answered “solely to the principles of Reason and Science”.
In reality, they were simply deranged ideological zealots, just like the Red Guards (only slightly less given to cannibalism).
[According to Zerubavel] “The Revolutionary Calendar was introduced in an age which advocated the total obliteration of the old order in the name of progress & modernity: the beginning of the new Republican Era marked the total discontinuity between past & present”. The Revolutionaries changed the first day of the year from January 1 to 22nd September – the day of the “foundation of the French Republic”.
Society was to spin not around religion but politics.
Days which had a unique flavor due to their religious significance like “the saints’ days, Sunday and the Church’s religious holidays” were abolished. Each day became mathematically and symbolically alike. Differences were to be erased – whether among people or on the calendar.
As the ‘ideologically pure’ follies of ‘experts’ are apt to do, the “scientific” new calendar wrought havoc — and mightily pissed people off.
Imagine you’re a French man in 1793… The revolutionaries have not just beheaded the King and slaughtered their own, but have also made the week 10 days long. The day is now 10 hours, not 24. Your old clocks – and your old instincts – need to be thrown out […]
The people HATED the new Calendar. It made them work for 9 days straight instead of 6.
Plus it was confusing.
Special clocks were made to translate the Revolutionary calendar into the Gregorian calendar and back.
It was just as useful as you would imagine.
But it wasn’t the last time ‘rational’ revolutionaries messed with the calendar.
Stalin imposed a new calendar too. The week was cut to 5 days to eliminate the holiday of Sunday. Days were assigned colors, and workers were given colors. When it was your colored day, you took a day off. Families and friends had different colors and so they never hung out.
Twitter/Josh Dolani
Which, given the Communists’ determination to destroy family and traditional communal life while atomising the individual and making them solely dependent on and loyal to the Party, might well have been the point.
The take-home lesson? Whenever anyone wants to completely throw out an old and reliable system, in order to make it ‘rational’ and ‘better’, be very, very, sceptical.
New Zealanders ought to have learned that one from MMP.