Retarding the Spark

What is “retarding the spark” you may ask? Mechanically, it is asking the engine spark plug to fire after the piston has reached full compression, not before. Retarding the spark was something you did manually to get a Ford Model A started. Also, backing off on spark advance under conditions of severe load was standard practice - e.g., climbing a steep hill with a heavy load. Today’s modern combustion engine runs most efficiently when the spark is advanced or preemptive (ignites before the engine piston has reached full compression) resulting in greater power, better fuel economy, and less pollution.
My hypothesis in this essay is this: if we backed off a bit in how we operate our cultural and human engines and “fired our plugs” in a way that took into account the steep ascents we often encounter, we would not have to run so hot all the time to be efficient and fire our human cylinders in a surge-like fashion.* In firearms terms, the advance (preemptive) ignition sequence is FIRE-AIM-READY. If we retard the spark, we have the more deliberate READY-AIM-FIRE. I am not suggesting that we go back to the Model A as a means of transportation. I am merely suggesting that as human beings we have something to learn from the model A as a saner approach to life when things get heavy. Today, we tend to surge when we ought to be more mindful of timing. We have been conditioned to believe that nearly everything in life has to be done as a preemptive strike.
The day after Thanksgiving is now called Black Friday, the most glaring evidence yet that we have elevated consumerism to a god-like status. Its ritualistic aspect and participation numbers easily eclipse those of Good Friday, a Christian sacred holiday associated with Easter, a time of reflection for Christians. The whole thrust of Black Friday is to get consumers out buying Christmas presents at bargain prices so that they get into the mind set of shopping for holiday gifts until December 25th. That kick-off of the holiday shopping season produces a full month of activity characterized by greater than normal buying frenzy. Black Friday is so named because merchants hope they will end the year “in the black” or, profitably. The stores open well before dawn to ensure consumers that they are participating in something special, almost sacred, like a sunrise Easter service, but more active, like, say, the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Black Friday is turbocharged by the faith in the laws of supply and demand. If everyone wants a particular item, it must be good. That’s the operating value in a culture that ostensibly values values.
In Colorado we finally have a law outlawing texting while driving. What precipitated the law was a form of multi-tasking that produced carnage on the highway. While we like to see ourselves as a nation of multi-taskers, we have finally met a situation where multi-tasking needs to be strategically thwarted. The researched truth about multi-tasking is that nothing ever gets done as well as if it had been done as a single-focused task, but don’t tell that to Americans who believe first and never mind the facts that conflict with those beliefs. We Americans as a culture are in a hurry to get somewhere, go to the next level, climb the ladder, eat, exercise, achieve, acquire, all because we operate with the illusion that standard of living is synonymous with quality of life. If we have more, we somehow are more. ”He who dies with the most toys wins” served as the mantra of the ME generation. The ME generation has now blossomed into the ME culture.
Our politicians need to get something done because they must have some achievements under their belt or they will be turned out in the next election. Obama has not been in office for a single year and yet for months he has been criticized by the right and left for not accomplishing anything substantial yet. His trips abroad, the economy, the wars, health care, all have signaled no tangible results so far. The public wants results the way it collects purchases on Black Friday. It wants them, and it wants them now. We have become a data-driven society that is more interested in what we have to show for ourselves rather than how we live.
American culture needs to retard the spark. It needs to slow down and take another look at what quality of life really means. It is not solely based on GDP or interest rates or granite counter tops. Quality of Life is not even a derivative of Standard of Living. It is the measure of happiness and meaning a people has from its day-to-day existence on this earth, and it assumes not only personal budgets are in balance but that actual lives are. Research has demonstrated that Americans don’t become any happier when they rise above middle class status. A large portion of America has surged in spending without the actual income to pay for the surge. A focus on quality of life would suggest the only debt people should live with indefinitely is their debt of gratitude for that quality life.
What I am suggesting is heretical to ACM or American Cultural Momentum. Our collective ethos has been bigger and more is better, sooner is better than later except when it comes to paying for it, and surges are good for everything except computers and other small appliances. We can surge in Afghanistan, surge on the gridiron, surge at the fast-food drive thru, and surge in the polls. We can put on a surge and win at NASCAR, and we can surge out of the pack and win a golf tournament. Some of us can even surge our way into a White House state dinner if we have the appearance of surge power. Or we can surge out our driveway and into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree, if things get too hot on the home front. Surging has become our mode of accomplishment, just as surfing (the internet) has become our preeminent pastime.
I urge us as a nation to slow down a bit and retard the spark. We could do without the surges and sloughs of Wall Street and their derivatives; we can avoid being trampled like runners in Pamplona by staying home on Black Fridays and shopping with greater deliberation rather than speed; we can be more than less by doing more with less. We have been on a power surge as a country since the 1960’s, and we are tired and worn out by the extraordinary energy our ACM has demanded and extracted from us.
Will the surge in Afghanistan be the surge that breaks our cultural back? I do not know. I look back on Vietnam and in the midst of its throes how wrong our leaders were about the long-term outcome and how close we came to our own cultural meltdown. It seems the lessons of history are never learned until the long view back is available, and even then our theories are subject to continual revision. The surge might work or it might not. As a concept it is more acceptable to the American psyche than simply going to war because our whole culture thinks in terms of surges and splurges. Right now it seems we are about to splurge on a surge that may turn into our scourge.
Perhaps it is time for our culture to take at least a small dose of Thoreauvian philosophy and begin to live a little bit more deliberately by retarding our cultural spark, and living consciously, less impulsively, and a little cooler in the process. It’s all right to drive a highly tuned machine: It’s not all right to become one. The end does not warrant the means. As Socrates so wisely offered thousands of years ago: “Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.”