Cycles

November 28, 2005

Is history linear (having a start and an end) or cyclical? I have no trouble answering that question, but I also believe that certain cycles impact our lives. I tend to think of such things as working and sleeping, winter and summer, jet-lag, etc., but blogger Michael Kruse goes even further.

Kruse Kronicle: History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it Rhymes

Meaning in life for the ancients was grounded in conforming to the appropriate rituals and behaviors that marked each time or season. There was a sense in which you lost yourself to the reaffirmation of the eternal cyclical order. This is not to say that some ancients and some cultures were without a sense of linear time (i.e., time progressing from a beginning to and end) but cyclical time defined life in most ancient cultures across the planet

Something unique happened about 4,000 years ago. Thomas Cahill in The Gift of the Jews shows that the Jews were the culture that introduced us to the idea of history as a linear progression toward some end. This view of time was carried forward by Christianity into Western Civilization. However, for the first 1,500 years of Christianity, linear time was only appreciated by a small minority of educated elite. About 500 years ago the world was changed forever when two powerful ideas converged.

These ideas were a growing obsession to quantify everything and the invention of the printing press. This was the beginning of the renaissance, usually thought of as beginning in the 14th and 15th centuries. For me, this obsession is well portrayed in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin sea novels. Dr. Maturin is a naturalist who spends much time measuring and classifying his finds.

In the linked article, blogger Kruse says that in the rush to quantify everything we may lose sight of the cyclical nature of human events.

I have to wonder if our relentless quest to ignore or conquer the cycles of our existence blinds us to forces that may be shaping our lives. The Bible, from which we derived our linear driven view, says:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (NRSV)

In a future post, Kruse promises to review the views of some historians on cycles in human affairs. But for now, I would simply point to the cycle of the seasons and suggest that they may have more effect on our lives than we admit.

Dave, getting in over his head on the subject of cycles.

Posted by Dave | Filed Under Deep stuff, General