Linear History versus Cycles

Techno-topia

The idea of linear history embedded in the Christian religion dominates thinking today. History has a beginning and is a story that unfolds in a logical way to its happy end. The story's unfolding is driven by fundamental forces, e.g. the master/slave dialectic, the quest for justice, divine providence, manifest destiny--you name it. The future is necessarily morally better than the past, and at some point (apocalypse) there will be a decisive break with the necessity of cycles--we'll live in a perpetual harvest time.

Some people see technology as the key to a break with the cycles. Various authors have recast the golden age myth in technological terms.

In earlier times, people understood time as cyclical. There was no linear unfolding of history and no end of history, just up and down, birth and death, round and round. Gods died, Empires came and went just as cities came and went, and men and woman came and went. The earth, the sky, the sun, the stars, these were eternal things. A sort of ghostly afterlife existence was possible either through fame or through lineage, but the generations of man were like the leaves of deciduous trees, each emerged from the mother earth and returned to her.

Time and Death these are divine forces. Death is transformation, a release of the bow string, where we are released from the cycles and returned to primal possibility.