All of this happened before, but does it have to happen again?

Bear with me. This does have to do with what's going on in the United States right now.

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I ran across an article this week on Aeon.co called, "The Shape of Time". The tag line is: "In the 19th century, the linear idea of time became dominant, forever changing how those in the West experience the world". The author, Emily Thomas, is a philosophy professor at Durham University in the UK. She says that in the ancient word, philosophers like Plato regarded time as cyclical, just like the periodical positions of celestial bodies, and that concept persisted for centuries: "As ancient Greek philosophy spread through Europe, these ideas of time spread too. For instance, Greek and Roman Stoics connected time with their doctrine of 'Eternal Recurrence': the universe undergoes infinite cycles, ending and restarting in fire." To be sure, the concept of linear time also existed. But sometime in the 1800s, partly thanks to Darwin's theory of evolution, the idea that time was linear took over Western thought, so that now, timelines are pretty much all we see.

Prof. Thomas says, "By the late 19th century, representing time as a line was not just widespread – it was natural. Like today, it would have been hard to imagine how else we could represent time. And this affected how people understood the world." I would add that it still does today. We are fixated on the idea of past-present-future, that history always progresses -- that civilization always progresses.

But any honest look at history shows us that is not so. I've been following historian Heather Cox Richardson for several years now on Facebook. She writes daily posts about current events and ties them back to events in US history that, if they're not exactly equal, they rhyme. Her basic thesis, I believe, is that much of what's wrong with America dates back to our unresolved issues regarding slavery. I'd trace them even farther back, to the Western idea that "civilization" means only white, Christian culture, and anything else is barbarous and either: a) in need of taming; or b) ours for the taking.

Underlying Prof. Thomas's article is the very Western assumption that linear thought is good and right: forever changing how those in the West experience the world implies that we can never go back. Forward is the only way to go. 

But the idea of time being cyclical persists in some, uh, circles -- including Pagan thought. I've talked here before about the Pagan Wheel of the Year and posited that time is actually more of a spiral. We get to the same place in the year, year after year, but this year is a little different than it was last year. To be fair, this year is a lot different than it was last year, when Trump was just beginning to dismantle the federal government, and jackbooted thugs weren't murdering white Americans in the putative search for "violent, criminal illegal aliens" to deport.

And the hell of it is that we have been here before. Slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Indian wars, concentration camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Communist witchhunts in the 1950s -- and that's just the American experience. It's all the same shit, different day.

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One quote kept banging at my brain while getting ready to write this post, but I couldn't remember the exact wording. It was something like, "All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." The bell it was ringing in my head was from the 2004 reboot of the sci-fi TV show Battlestar Galactica, so I asked Mama Google to find it. Turns out that exact quote is from the 1953 Disney movie, Peter Pan. But Battlestar Galactica did use it in its final episode:

For us, too, the question remains: Does all of this have to happen again? Baltar, the pessimist, thinks it will, on and on, forever. Time for him is linear. But Number Six, who's a Cylon, is more hopeful. "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough," she says, "and eventually something surprising might occur."

Can we get out of this current mess the same way we have in the past? I have no answers. But I'm rooting for the solution to be something surprising.

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These moments of spiraling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. So say we all.