mgpcpastor's blog

Another reason to hold Robert Farrar Capon with some affection is his dislike for daylight savings.
Well, not so much a dislike for the concept, but for the inequity that it imposes against early-risers at the hands of the more indolent.
To illustrate his point that is their laziness deserves no indulgence he poses a scenario that accepts their imposition of daylight saving but instead credits that which is saved to the account of the larks, not the owls.
As with most things Capon there is a theological point being developed, but theology can never be divorced from the realities of life.

My personal disenchantment with [daylight saving time], however, derives from the second of my charges, namely, that in practice it results in inequities. For one thing the daylight it purports to save is all in the evening. For another the dates at which it undertakes to begin and end this one-sided rescue operation … serve only to skew things even worse. And for the last, rather than making the summer more bearable, it in fact obtrudes the sun’s heat on the very part of the day that needs it least…
Does that mean I must accept the present system quietly? It does not. Instead it immediately raises the question of why the savings are not deposited at the beginning of the day rather than at the end. Why not to the lark’s account rather than to the owls’?
I am aware that owls do in fact run the world and that they show little interest in whose ox is gored as long as it insn’t theirs. But I am also aware that their principal argument for “saving” daylight in the evening is the fact that if we didn’t do it the sun in solstice would rise at the, to them, monstrous hour of 4:31am. Accordingly, since the best defence against such people is to be as offensive as they are, I propose a new system. Set the clocks back instead of forward in the spring and frighten them with an even bigger hobgoblin: sunrise at 3:31.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Youngest Day, Mockingbird, 2019, pg 70-71.