"You Advocate A ___ Based Approach To Calendar Reform ... "

"Your Idea Will Not Work. Here's Why."

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Greetings, gentles all, on this fine Sunday – or at least it is fine, for now, in New York. On a somewhat lighter note than my last, schoolmarmish, finger-wagging post on the perils of Big Ideas (spendy consultants, just kidding, love you mean it) I recently rediscovered a post on the subject of calendar reform, which for some reason I found much more tractable and much more comprehensible than the first time I read it way back in the early 2000s.

A little background may be in order (to the sound of unseen readers thinking, “oohhh, here we go again.”) The calendar we all use today is the so-called Gregorian calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII. I always remember that he was the thirteenth pope by dint of an unwieldy mnemonic, which is barely a mnemonic at all as it consists very simply of remembering that there are twelve months in the year and then adding one. The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in use across most of the world today, and when you consider how difficult it is to get groups of humans of any size you can imagine to agree on anything, it is remarkable that while the Gregorian calendar is not the only one in use, it is by any measure the most successful civil calendar in the world. You may be so ticked off at the country over the river that you’re ready to cross the burbling brook separating Us and Them and rain down fire destruction and mayhem on their heads, but one thing is for sure, you’re both going to agree that hostilities commenced on the 28th of July (or whenever; that’s the date World War I got underway and I picked it more or less arbitrarily).

Pope Gregory XVIII

This speaks to the fact that if there is one thing people don’t like, it’s calendar reform.

Despite the fact that the Gregorian calendar is indisputably useful and reasonably stable over a human lifespan, as long as you don’t mind an intercalary day once every for years, it got off to a little bit of a rocky start. It replaced the earlier Julian calendar, which was first proposed by Julius Caesar as a reform of the even earlier, lunisolar Roman calendar, and the Julian calendar was similar to the Gregorian in that it was based on a year assumed to be exactly 365.25 days long, with an intercalary day inserted once every four years to compensate for the extra quarter day tagged on at the end. This however was not an exact correction and by the Middle Ages it had become increasingly clear that the dates of the Equinoxes on the calendar were drifting out of synchronization with the observed astronomical equinoxes.

This is a problem for several reasons. First of all, the uncorrected error meant that the calendar in general was gradually drifting out of synchronization with the seasons. Secondly, it meant that key dates were drifting out of synchronization with the seasons. Thirdly, it meant that the calculation of the date of Easter, which was based on the timing of the Spring Equinox, had errors of increasing magnitude introduced into it (the calculation of the date of Easter has been called the only real problem in arithmetic in the middle ages and the problem is knotty enough that to this day, no watch exists which can calculate the date of Easter correctly.).

By the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced, the error had increased to about ten days. Urgent action was required! – and the Pope and papal authorities swung into action. The Gregorian calendar came into effect: The Julian calendar day Thursday, 4 October 1582 was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, Friday, 15 October 1582. The general adoption of the calendar took some time, especially in non-Catholic countries; the Brits for instance at first refused to consider it, and then, finally, passed the New Calendar Act of 1750 which went into effect in 1752 and which created an update to the Julian calendar that avoided any mention of any Papist claptrap, but which amounted to the same thing (Ben Franklin wrote, “It is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on Sept. 2, and not have to get up until Sept. 14.”)

Since then the Gregorian calendar has managed to find almost universal adoption for a number of reasons but one of the most basic is that it simply seems to work without much fuss from one year to the next. The fact that it was essentially an improved version of what was already the legacy calendar for European civilization didn’t hurt either.

This has however not kept people from trying to either improve on it further or get rid of it altogether. The perennial calendar, for instance, is a hypothetical calendar on which the dates and days always line up the same way from one year to the next and this would mean that you could use the same calendar year after year – Halloween for instance, if you arranged the calendar that way, would always be on a Saturday night, which I think we can all agree is where we should put it. However these systems have not been adopted, once again largely because the present system offers no particularly urgent reason to change again.

The French took a shot at calendar reform on the occasion of the French revolution and attempted to introduce a decimal timekeeping system, which was instituted for the same basic reason as the metric system: a single consistent decimal system for reckoning weights, measures and times seems eminently more practical and also wipes away the ecclesiastical foundation of the Gregorian calendar, which was viewed by the Republicans as a noxious vestige of the ancien régime. It was an unmitigated disaster, however, as it offered no real advantages over the Gregorian calendar. The Republican calendar had 12 months, each of thirty days divided into three ten day weeks, and if necessary a leap week was inserted. For all that this was supposed to be the last word in modernity, it in fact almost exactly duplicated the calendar used by the ancient Egyptians and after twelve years of irritating watch and clockmakers, as well as the general public, the Republican calendar was shut down by a decree signed by Napoleon in September of 1805.

The basic problem with calendar reform is that despite the apparent rationale or rationales for changes to the existing program, it is virtually guaranteed that no perfect calendar system can ever be developed – by perfect, I mean one in which a year has a whole number of months, weeks, and days, with no need for intercalary anything, and moreover in which the observed seasons do not drift out of synchronization with the calendar.

There is a wonderful website called Things Of Interest which first went up as a Geocities site in 2001 and which has been around ever since. My first acquaintance with it was via the wonderful detailed article the site’s owner shared on How To Destroy The Earth, the opening of which I will quote at length just to get you in the mood.

“This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.”

As you can see this is a person who likes to think things through systematically, and since they are fascinated by among other things, time travel and time, there is a wonderful article for anyone interested in the subject on why calendar reform, howsoever you may try to finagle it, is a lost cause.

The article, whose title I have quoted as the title of this particular story, begins in this wise:

“You advocate a

( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic

approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: …”

… and the list is long. You might think that such an article would focus on the inherently irrational ratios produced by trying to make things like astronomical days, weeks, months, years, the SI second, and the chaotic variations in the Earth’s orbit fit together. But There’s More! The element of human stubborness and love for fixed patterns of behavior does not get let off the hook either, in the list of “philosophical objections:”

( ) nobody is about to renumber every event in history
( ) good luck trying to move the Fourth of July
( ) nobody cares what year you were born
( ) time cannot be stopped, nor can clocks be abolished entirely
( ) the history of calendar reform is insanely complicated and no amount of further calendar reform can make it simpler

Anyway, I found the whole thing, at long last, incredibly hilarious and I highly recommend, “You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform” to anyone interested in a highly engrossing, funny, and periodically deeply sarcastic take on the subject. You wouldn’t think calendar reform would be a good subject for satire, much less a source of some good ol’ LOLs, but here we are.