AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE: ANNA KALIUZHNA
Editor-in-Chief of the journal Culture and Religion
At the end of the 19th century, the French ethnographer Émile Durkheim noticed a strange feature of human societies. People living in different cultures do not simply count time differently — they literally feel it differently. For a peasant in medieval Europe, the year was built around the church calendar, the change of holidays, harvests, and fasts. For a sailor in the Age of Discovery, time was defined by wind and weather. For a monk, it was measured by prayer. For a soldier, by the beat of a drum and the speed of a command. Even then, it became clear that the time within which a person lives is never only a physical value.
It is interesting that modern people, surrounded by clocks, calendars, and digital timers, have almost stopped noticing this dependence. It seems to us that time exists in the same way for everyone. A second is equal to a second. A minute is equal to a minute. However, if we look carefully at different cultural environments, we discover an amazing thing: people do not live inside astronomical time, but inside a cultural rhythm.
This thought is felt especially strongly in the old monasteries of Europe. In the archives of Benedictine communities, schedules from the 13th and 14th centuries have been preserved, where human life is divided not according to everyday tasks, but according to states of consciousness. Rising before dawn. Prayer. Reading. Silence. Contemplation. Work. Evening liturgy. Sleep. And if a modern person sees such a system as a restriction of freedom, a medieval monk, on the contrary, saw it as liberation from chaos.
One Scottish researcher who worked in the monastery archives on the island of Iona wrote a short phrase in his diary that describes this problem with surprising accuracy: “A person begins to break down when he stops hearing his own rhythm of time.” At first glance, this sounds almost mystical. But the more carefully we study the history of cultures, the clearer it becomes: almost all stable civilizations created special mechanisms for synchronizing human time.
Modern science usually sees time as a physical value — the movement of planets, the decay of particles, the sequence of processes. However, culture has always worked with another side of time: its psychological density. One hour in battle and one hour in a library are experienced by a person in completely different ways. In anxiety, time speeds up. In contemplation, it stretches out. In fear, it breaks into fragments. In ritual, it becomes stable. And this is where the main question appears: who controls this inner time of the human being?
THE WARRIOR AND COMPRESSED TIME
Any warrior culture of the past was, above all, a system for controlling reaction time. It is a mistake to think that armies were created only for the sake of force. In reality, military structures formed a special type of perception of the world, in which a person had to act faster than fear and more precisely than emotions.
The samurai schools of Japan show this mechanism especially clearly. In old treatises on fencing, one idea is repeated again and again: a true fighter wins not by technique, but by the ability to perceive the moment correctly. The samurai was taught not to speed up mechanically, but to enter a state where inner noise disappears. This is why breathing rituals, pauses before a duel, the slow drawing of the sword, and even the order of walking were so important. All of this was a system for resetting time inside consciousness.
European knightly orders used similar principles. Modern people often imagine a medieval knight as a rough warrior in iron armor. However, chronicles show a very different picture. A young man was trained for years in the discipline of gestures, silence, endurance, and control of reaction. He was taught to live inside a certain rhythm. A knight had to keep inner stillness even in a situation of mortal danger.
It is interesting that such practices existed not only among the aristocracy. Almost every warrior culture — from Scandinavian war bands to Sicilian brotherhoods — created its own methods for synchronizing reaction. Drums, marching steps, collective singing, rhythmic movements of weapons — all of this formed one shared field of time for the group. A person stopped acting as a separate organism and became part of a common rhythm.
Today, neuropsychology partly confirms these mechanisms. Studies show that synchronized movement changes people’s perception of danger, reduces anxiety, and strengthens the sense of belonging to a group. In other words, ancient cultures intuitively understood what modern science has only begun to formulate in recent decades: time inside a person can be organized.
THE MONK AND SLOW TIME
If warrior cultures worked with the extreme compression of time, monastic traditions, on the contrary, created the art of slowing down. A medieval monk saw speed as a form of spiritual danger. Haste was considered a sign of inner chaos.
In monasteries, there were special practices of slow reading. A monk could spend hours rereading a few lines of Holy Scripture, without trying to receive information quickly. The goal was not to collect knowledge, but to change the state of attention. Modern people, used to an endless flow of notifications and the fast consumption of information, have almost lost the ability for this kind of concentration.
The structure of monastic space is especially interesting. Old abbeys were built in such a way that a person could physically feel a change in time. Narrow corridors, dim light, the slow rhythm of bells, inner courtyards, long passages — all of this slowed down perception. Here, architecture worked as a mechanism of psychological resetting.
A Gothic monastery could quite well be called a “machine of inner silence.” This phrase seems exaggerated only until a person finds himself inside old monastery complexes in Europe. Even a modern person, entering such a place, almost automatically begins to speak more quietly and move more slowly. The space literally rewrites behavior.
But something else is even more striking. Modern civilization, which has declared speed to be a symbol of progress, is gradually beginning to lose the ability to hold attention. A person becomes not the master of time, but the object of continuous acceleration. Perhaps this is why interest in monastic practices, meditation, and rituals of slowing down is growing again all over the world today.
MODERN MAN AND DESTROYED TIME
It is interesting that no civilization of the past lived inside such speed as modern man does. A medieval peasant could live his whole life almost without changing the inner rhythm of existence. A monk lived for decades inside the same cycle of prayers. A craftsman worked in a space of repeated time, where gestures, skills, and daily order were preserved for generations. Even a merchant of the Renaissance, who constantly faced risk and uncertainty, still existed inside a relatively stable cultural environment. Modern man has become the first figure in history whose inner time has begun to be continuously broken into fragments.
This is especially clear in the urban environment. The morning of a modern person begins not with a ritual, but with an informational blow. The phone screen, even before full awakening, starts dozens of streams of attention at once: messages, news, images, notifications, work tasks, advertising, social signals. Consciousness enters the day already in a state of accelerated switching. It is interesting that most people see this as a natural part of civilization, although from an anthropological point of view, such a mode of attention would have been impossible for almost any culture of the past.
Old societies understood very well that a person cannot exist for long without a stable rhythm. This is why almost every civilization created systems for synchronizing time. The ringing of bells in Europe. The call to prayer in Islamic cities. The tea ceremony in Japan. Military formations. University ceremonies. Holiday calendars. All of this was not folklore and not a decorative tradition. These were mechanisms for stabilizing collective consciousness.
The modern digital environment acts in the opposite way. It continuously destroys long attention. The algorithms of social networks are arranged so that a person never stays in one state for too long. One image replaces another. One emotion pushes out another. One news item destroys the previous news item before consciousness has time to understand it. As a result, a person gradually loses the ability to experience deep inner time. He lives not in the flow of life, but in the flow of reactions.
The most dangerous thing turned out to be not even acceleration itself, but the disappearance of the pause. Old cultures always included periods of silence, repetition, and inner stopping in human life. The modern system leaves almost no such spaces. A person begins to fear empty time. A few minutes of waiting are already experienced as discomfort. Silence becomes psychologically unbearable. And it is exactly here that modern civilization faces a paradox: the faster the information environment moves, the weaker a person’s ability for deep thinking becomes.
Studies of attention in recent decades show an amazing thing: the human psyche is poorly adapted to constant switching between tasks. Consciousness begins to grow tired not from the amount of work, but from the continuous fragmentation of time. As a result, a state appears that many psychologists call “scattered presence.” A person is physically present in reality, but his attention is constantly torn between several streams at once.
It is interesting that ancient monastic practices unexpectedly begin to look not like a relic of the past, but like an attempt to solve a problem that the 21st century has faced on a new scale. Slow reading, a repeated rhythm of actions, discipline of attention, limitation of informational noise — all of this was created as a technology for preserving a person’s inner wholeness.
The modern world rarely speaks about this directly, but the struggle for attention is gradually becoming the main cultural conflict of the era. States of the past fought for territories. Empires fought for trade routes. The 21st century is increasingly fighting for the inner time of the human being. Because whoever controls attention, in the end, begins to control memory, behavior, desires, and the very sense of reality.
WHOEVER CONTROLS TIME CONTROLS CULTURE
The most amazing thing in the history of humanity is probably not that different cultures measured time differently. Something else is much more important: every civilization created its own way for a person to experience time. The warrior learned to compress the moment. The monk learned to slow down inner noise. The merchant learned to feel the rhythm of waiting and exchange. The teacher learned to preserve the long time of memory. Modern man is increasingly finding himself inside an artificially accelerated world, where attention is continuously broken into fragments, and the inner rhythm of life gradually begins to submit to the algorithms of the information environment.
It is here that it becomes clear that time has never been only a physical category. For human beings, it has always remained a cultural construction. Moreover, it is one of the main forms of the cultural code of civilization. Because a cultural code is defined not only by language, symbols, or traditions. It is defined by how a society teaches a person to experience the duration of life, waiting, work, memory, fear, silence, and the future.
Every stable culture creates its own system of temporal organization of consciousness. Some civilizations form a person of long patience. Others form a person of instant reaction. Some are built around ritual repetition. Others are built around continuous movement and risk. And this is why the destruction of a cultural code almost always begins with the destruction of the rhythm of time. When a society loses common cycles of memory, common rituals of attention, and a common structure of duration, culture gradually stops holding its inner wholeness.
It is interesting that old civilizations understood this much better than the modern world. They knew that a person cannot exist in the chaos of acceleration forever. This is why the temple, the university, the army, the craft school, or the monastery were always not only institutions of knowledge or power, but also mechanisms for synchronizing human time. Through ritual, architecture, discipline, repetition, and symbol, culture literally tuned the inner rhythm of the human being.
Today, this mechanism has not disappeared. It has only changed its form. The digital environment, social networks, information platforms, and algorithms of attention are creating a new cultural code, in which speed gradually begins to replace depth, and continuous reaction replaces inner reflection. And therefore, the main question of the 21st century may not be about the number of technologies or the speed of information development at all. The question is different: will the human being be able to preserve his own inner time inside a civilization that is more and more actively trying to control the very rhythm of his consciousness?