Postman: Mumford: Moses' clock

Postman quoting Lewis Mumford:

"The clock is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes"

Postman continues:

In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of dissociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences...

In the process we have learned irreverence towards the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.  Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.  And, thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment;  that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.  Perhaps Moses should have included another commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time. p11&12