Fun read on the tyranny of “enlightenment”
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Calendars, time keeping, and counting systems have all changed multiple times over the course of human history. The only reason you can make fun of this attempt is because it failed. If this is even true.
We can make fun of it because it failed, yes, but it’s not like that failure happened in a vacuum. There’s not someone flipping a coin on whether a given timekeeping system catches on and this one just got unlucky. It failed because it was a retarded and unnecessary change that did nothing but cause confusion at best and a deliberate attack on societal cohesion pushed through in a much-hated attempt to engineer a top-down changing of values at worst.
That’s why it deserves scorn, not just some arbitrary “well, this one didn’t happen to catch on but plenty of others have” silliness.
I mean there kind of is. It's just the coin flip happened thousands of years ago. That's why there's a random mix of base 10 and base 12. Ever notice that there's two roman vanity months in the middle of the year and now the Sept- Oct- Nov- and Dec- months have prefixes for 7,8,9,10 but are the 9th,10th,11th, and 12th months? Everything is a clusterfuck of random traditions and royal decrees. What's one more?
But they're not random, that's the point. Each one had goals and motivations behind it, each one had consequences, and some of them were better than others. If you want to say "the coin flip happened thousands of years ago," how far back do you want to take that? Is it a "coin flip" that we happen to be on a planet with 12 lunar cycles in a typical year, which gave us natural preferences towards 12 unit cycles for keeping time? Is it a coin flip that we have ten fingers and ten toes and that's why we use base ten for our numbers? Sure, maybe (although it's worth noting that the religious perspective, which this system was deliberately made in opposition to is that that isn't random), but at that level we can say that about literally everything in every aspect of human society. That doesn't mean its not worth looking at some of the more immediate causes.
Yep, close enough at least.
Nope. The number of hours in a day has no natural basis. I guess you could argue 12 is a "timey" number due to the lunar cycles, but then why 2x12? Why not 4x12 or 365? And then why 60 minutes and seconds? The Sumerians invented that shit purely for mathematical convenience. And if they can do it, why can't someone else?
Some cultures count by moving the thumb between the sections of each finger, which is base 12. You only think base 10 is good for counting and 2x12 is good for dividing the day because you were raised that way through some quirk of history far beyond your control. You could easily find yourself living in a world of base 10 timekeeping and base 12 counting had history gone differently (and not really that significantly). Colloquially, I would call this a coin flip.
Everyone has noticed that. December was the 10th month, hence the 'decem'. January and February were the 11th and 12th months, followed by the new year which was in March until the Gregorian reform.
It is not random that there are 12 months. It's 12 because in an average year, there are 12 lunar cycles, which unfortunately do not add up to 365.25 days.
I like that you're willing to take a controversial stand.
But you are wrong. The changes that you mention in history were organic. They replaced a system that was less good by one that was better. Nobody mourns the loss of the interkalaris.
This one was imposed top-down not for pragmatic reasons, but based on ideology. Which is why it sucks so much. Caesar didn't hire an ideologue. Neither did Pope Benedict. In Persia, it was Khayyam. It was the foremost men of the age who designed calendars. People stuck to them because they were good, unlike the work of the Jacobins.