Aristotle writes in the Politics that man is by nature not just a social animal — one that finds mates, forms families and households, and comes together in larger communities for the sake of living well — but a political one. Other animals have voice [phonē], which vocalises pleasure and pain: think of a cat’s contented purring or a dog’s yelp when it’s stepped on. But only human beings have logos, a word whose primary meanings include “reason” and “speech”. Speech, Aristotle explains:

“serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort], and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a political community.”

Politics unfolds in debate and deliberation. It concerns the shared determination of what is advantageous and harmful, good and bad, and the acquisition, avoidance and just distribution of these things. And because deliberation and persuasion — unlike force and compulsion — actualise our highest human potentialities of reason and truth-seeking, they are integral to the good life.

A quick glance at what is today called politics shows just how far we have fallen from this Aristotelian standard. The middle ground of public life has mostly become a space not to reflect and discuss, but to emote; not to listen to others, but to heckle them. Debate on contested issues has given way to blame, shame and hectoring. Speakers are shouted down and chased from the podium. Tribal conflict has erased the lines dividing speech from violence, and arguments are often settled by intimidation rather than persuasion. People have learned to protect themselves by concealing or lying about their opinions.

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There is historical precedent for these developments in the fascist and communist movements of the 20th century, and it is not encouraging. In her memoir, Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who was killed by the Soviet state, writes with powerful clarity about the collapse of thought, reason and speech in the USSR:

“Nothing can be predicted with certainty: people could even forget how to read altogether and books moulder away to dust. We might even stop talking to each other and communicate only by emitting call signs or blood curdling war cries. Sometimes I think this is what we are coming to. We did, after all, learn to speak in a lying code language designed to conceal our real thoughts. Our descendants pay for such things by losing the power of articulate speech altogether, caterwauling instead like fans at a football game.”

Mandelstam’s description of the degeneration of speech into animal voice — mobs howling their pain or pleasure like packs of wolves — draws directly from her own experience. She and Osip saw a woman torn to pieces by just such a mob during the civil war that started with the Bolshevik Revolution in the autumn of 1917.

There are many reasons for the disappearance of political logos. Social media, which has created sealed ideological echo chambers, is clearly to blame, as is the expansion of state surveillance and increasing control of economic and political activities. But so is human nature, sorely pressed by contemporary realities. “All human beings desire by nature to know,” Aristotle writes in the opening line of his Metaphysics. This seems right, with the qualification that some seek truth more than others — and that most people want other things, like avoiding ostracism and maintaining family comity, at least as much as they desire knowledge.

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Technology, at any rate, merely amplifies a disease to which all democratic republics are prone. From the time of Socrates to the present day, democracies have been plagued by the tyranny of public opinion — a tyranny that “leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul”, as Alexis de Tocqueville observes in Democracy in America:

“The master no longer says: ‘Think like me or you die.’ He does say: ‘You are free not to think as I do; you can keep your life and property and all, but from this day you are a stranger among us… When you approach your fellows, they will shun you as an impure being, and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you too, lets they in turn be shunned. Go in peace. I have given you your life, but it is a life worse than death.’”

Conformity of taste and opinion might not seem to be a big problem when the public is divided into hostile camps, as it is today. But the price of membership in these camps is the abandonment of individual judgment. The public space is no longer hospitable to spirited yet peaceful politics. It has become a field of conflict where herds of peevish cattle rush to lock horns.

The withering of individual capacities of thought has another consequence as well. It makes speech stupid and contributes to the essential unseriousness of public life. Søren Kierkegaard included the following apocalyptic parable in his 1843 book Either/Or:

“In a theatre, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed —amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”

Plato, too, compared the public space to a theatre. He described Athenian democracy as a “wretched theatrocracy” in which sovereignty is in the hands of spectators hoping to be entertained. But Kierkegaard gives the analogy a new twist. The management of public affairs is today in the hands of clowns who put on a show for scribblers and pundits. These “wits and wags”, who clap and laugh but don’t listen, have no interest in what transpires away from the spotlight — or, as Americans say, “outside the beltway” that rings Washington, D.C. Yet it is there, in the homes, towns, and cities of the hinterland, that the pillars of civilisation stand or fall.

All of the factors mentioned so far — social media, the censorious tyranny of public opinion, the frivolity of politicians and the chattering classes — debase politics by inhibiting the growth and ripening of individual minds. And they all contribute to the emasculation of public life.

Of Shakespeare, Goethe remarked, “it is said that he portrayed the Romans very well; I do not think so, they are all inveterate Englishmen, but, of course, they are men, men from top to bottom, and assuredly the Roman toga fits them”. Who could wear this stately attire today, outside of a comedy? It fits Blutarsky in Animal House, the insane, almost mute John Belushi character who leads a chant of “Toga! Toga! Toga!” and later becomes a United States senator. But nowadays there aren’t even any Blutarskys to be found on campus. Even our frat boys have been fitted with skirts.

Blame it on the puritans who govern us. We are ruled by scolding homeroom teachers, pedantic moralists with little political prudence who are determined to make us good boys and girls. And to our shame, we cower before them like frightened children.

Tocqueville saw this coming. He struggled to find a name for “the oppression that threatens democracy”. What he describes is a despotism that neuters spiritedness. This despotism “would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood”. Instead, the state “gladly works for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it”. It provides, facilitates, manages, and directs virtually all elements of public life. Why, Tocqueville wonders, “should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living”?

Tocqueville understood that all that would be left to erstwhile citizens under this despotism is entertainment. When the inner growth of our higher faculties is stunted and our political muscles have atrophied from disuse, what else are we fit for besides the lonely solipsism of personal amusement? Contemplating the extinction of the political animal, I fear Kierkegaard was right. The world will end not with a bang or a whimper, but a clueless guffaw.

This is a genre of writing that I, a historian by training and an around-the-clock worker by disposition, consume like Lay’s potato chips. I’ve waded through these swift waters accompanied by everyone from former Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion — keenly aware that no moment of immersion is the same as any other and none of them will ever recur. The one thing that history doesn’t do, for good or ill, is repeat itself. What I have sought is something I will never have: more time. Not better nor more meaningful time, as Odell is proposing to find, but merely more, in terms of sheer quantity. Because while I don’t want to live forever, I do hope to live long enough to do everything I’ve committed to do, such as help my daughter enter adulthood and support my parents and spouse in their old age.

Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.

Bubbling below the surface of How to Do Nothing is a sense of climate emergency, or climate apocalypticism. Odell is constantly out and about in nature, and conversant with all the worrywart liberal commentary about the heat death of the planet — which, like Jesus’s return in the Gospel of Mark, is always already imminent. This concern deeply informs Saving Time, giving it some of its urgency; it otherwise does the usual yeoman’s work of citing people such as British labour historian E.P. Thompson on the development of time and work-discipline, Frederick Winslow Taylor on industrial efficiency, and German philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure — all names you will encounter frequently if you have found the time to bathe in the waters of the time genre.

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Odell, to her credit, seizes upon the opportunity to situate the climate emergency in a discussion of the ways ancient Greeks delineated time: Chronos — time as a sort of forward, linear progression — and Kairos — a “crisis” or rupture in time. We all live in linear time, yet experience reminders — floods and famines — of the perpetual crisis in which we have found ourselves. Odell, in prose that betrays the vast condescension of our present, seems to think of this as a 21st-century phenomenon.

It most certainly is not; Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted “Theses on the Concept of History” reckons with a similar dichotomy of time: the “history of organic life on earth” as opposed to “Messianic time, [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”. For Benjamin, the powder keg that was Germany’s war on Europe — which, as an expatriate Jew facing repatriation in 1940, drove him to suicide — was the crisis, his “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” in front of him as he is propelled into the future. Humans from the emergence of civilisation, have always perceived themselves as living on borrowed time — because, of course, we are; we have always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “mortal men doomed to die”.

It is the approach to mortality that separates Odell’s work from, say, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — a title that references the average human lifespan. Odell, an atheist, is concerned with climate damage to the entire ecosystem; Burkeman, who is at least culturally Jewish, is concerned with trying to lead a balanced, moderate life in the amount of time allotted to him. It is the latter view that has always appealed to me — the Earth might be ending, but to those of us raised with anything resembling a coherent religious worldview and now struggling to raise a family, everything is already ending. As Father John Misty sings in “Holy Shit”, “Carbon footprint, incest streams…planet cancer, sweet revenge…but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

It is interesting, yet unsurprising, to see discussions of personal mortality get so little attention in a work like Saving Time. As my father lay on his deathbed — he died in his own bed, at home — he remarked to me that he had always thought it easier to die alongside millions of others in a meteor strike or global conflict than quietly and at home as an old and feeble man. This, he admitted, was a narcissistic strain of thought he inherited from his own father, who despised the civilian life that followed his time as a Second World War submariner, because it offered no promise of a collective death that would serve as a coda to some grand heroic saga. Today, as Odell acknowledges, we are bombarded with daily alerts of one crisis or another. So it requires an act of will to remember that one’s own death is not an event so significant that it must coincide with the end of life as we know it. It will only coincide with the end of life as you know it.

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It seems odd, then, that Odell cites Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper — not his description of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, but the fact that preparation for death is behind everything written therein. This is because, for the devout Pieper, as for Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, life is a preparation for eternity. “As a teacher usually says to the youthful student, who is even now finding the time of schooling too long, ‘Now, just don’t you get impatient, you have a long life before you,’” Kierkegaard writes in The Gospel of Sufferings, “so eternity speaks with more reason to the sufferer: ‘Just wait, do not become impatient, there is plenty of time, there is eternity.’”

I am, per my earlier admission, a workaholic. The clocks that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution rule my every waking minute; right now, as I type this, it is 2:04am in Pittsburgh. I have a Zoom meeting at 9:30am and another at 11am. This is not a complaint; it is the life I have made for myself. I have read Pieper and Thompson and all the rest. I understand how time, per the historian Fernand Braudel, passes both slowly for the unbending structures of society and quickly for individuals like me. But most important, in a way that none of these books on time emphasises, I know I am going to die. My father and mother never ceased with these reminders, which echoed those of Epictetus: “What harm is it, when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?”

When my mother and I would read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth — my favourite book in the early years of my homeschooling — we would linger lovingly over the passages about time. (There are many: one of the main characters is Tock, a “watchdog” with a clock embedded in his torso.) She would point out the inanity of the main character Milo’s early thoughts about wanting time to pass — “wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” — given that each moment we are bestowed by nature or heaven is a gift, the “present” (another cliché, of course). The great takeaway of the book, which brilliantly skewers the ways we waste time, was that we have as much time as we’re going to get: “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.”

For those of us who have already watched our parents and a good many of our close relatives die — particularly for people, like me, who do not share Pieper and Kierkegaard’s belief in eternity — this is cold consolation, but consolation nevertheless: we’re given the time we need to have the time of our lives, and no more. Our lives, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it, are defined by “finitude”, even as “a world is worlding around us”. We exist in a state of “being-towards-death”: a fascinating state, if only to us personally or to our families and friends, that will endure until it doesn’t. There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.