“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world. The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote: When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself… read article

With civil society under attack from a dehumanizing far-right government, it bears remembering: In crisis there is also opportunity.