The Arc of Civilization
Where we are going might look familiar
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This quote most often attributed to Mark Twain has popped up a lot recently in response to much of what is going on today. It seems that much of what is happening presents patterns that are eerily familiar to anyone who has studied even a little bit of history. There is no doubt that things are changing very rapidly, and it is natural to try to make sense of the changes by trying to compare the events of today with events of the past.
The most obvious comparison that immediately comes to mind for many people almost doesn’t even need to be named to be understood. It is, in a way, strangely comedic that in today’s environment, the comparison to Hitler and the Nazis is very often the start of the conversation rather than the end of it. When Mike Godwin put forward his now famous “Godwin’s Law” in 1990, it was an expression of the devolution of a discussion to the point where there really was no point in going any further. The implication was that whatever was being compared could simply not hold a candle to those kinds of atrocities, and that invoking this comparison effectively kills any reasonable discussion of the subject.
It is quite telling, then, that even Mike Godwin has come to realize that sometimes the shoe fits. He has gone from writing an article in Wired magazine in 1994 called Meme, Counter-meme where he talked about how the comparison had gotten out of hand to a 2023 article in the Washington Post titled Yes, it’s OK to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you. (SIDEBAR: One wonders if that article could be published in the opinion pages of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post today.)
Whether or not we agree with Mike that the comparison may be apt, it brings up a larger question that has been discussed and debated since the beginning of civilization. The question is whether culture and the civilization it creates progresses towards some ultimate goal or simply circles upon itself treading again and again over the same old ground. If civilization is progressing towards some sense of improvement or perfection, then it must be heading towards some desired ideal. The same can also be said for a civilization that turns back towards its history to find its way to its desired ends. The real irony, is that the goal itself could actually be the same in both cases.
We could make many comparisons with the changes today to our past. We could talk about how the anti-intellectualism and distrust of the elites today seems similar to that of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China in the 1950s. We could obviously invoke Godwin’s Law and talk about the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s. We could even compare it to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the waves of political revenge. All that, and we haven’t even gone back much more than a century. The same process applied to century after century would undoubtedly produce an inexhaustible number of doctoral theses until the end of time.
The question has long been at the very center of philosophical thought in both the east and the west. Plato talked about a type of cycle where a just city starts out with good intentions but degenerates over time through various types of government until it crumbles to be replaced with something else. While he didn’t use the word cycle for this the way others would later, it definitely sowed the seed for future thinkers.
Modern western thought on this subject, at least over the past few centuries and particularly in the United States, has been dominated by the ideas of the enlightenment. For enlightenment thinkers, the goal was always ahead of civilization, and that goal was freedom. This linear story of history was perhaps told no better than by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He believed that history was rationally driven by a “Weltgeist” (world spirit) that was a shared common desire to progress towards higher levels of freedom and self-consciousness. There was a teleology that was natural and unstoppable.
The enlightenment perspective is grand and very persuasive, but it has also had its detractors. One of these about a century after Hegel was Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s view was that the history of a civilization is cyclical. It was similar to Plato’s in that he believed that civilizations go through what might be called their own life cycles. They are born, they grow, they mature, and they decline. He didn’t believe there was any driving force heading to some specific end reward.
Spengler was most famous for his work “The Decline of the West.” In it, he argued that the difference between the terms culture and civilization was that “Culture is the becoming, Civilization is the thing which a culture becomes.” In other words, civilization is a kind of ossification of culture preventing it from continuing to grow and ultimately leading to its own demise. Spengler’s ideas are popping up more today, however, because of an ominous prediction he made. Over a century ago, he predicted that Western civilization would enter a period of crises that would lead to 200 years of Caesarism - a form of populist authoritarian autocracy where executive power leads to the collapse of civilization. One need not wonder why that might possibly seem relevant to today.
The cyclical idea of the history civilization is also a key element in Eastern philosophies. The Hindu Yuga cycle divides history into periods of creation and destruction. Buddhism teaches of the samsara where repeated rebirths lead towards eventual enlightenment. Taoist philosophy takes it perhaps even a step further in its concept of the constant struggle between opposites as manifested in the yin and the yang which can not only represent the back and forth of civilization but even the conflict between the concepts of linear progression and cyclicism itself.
Which brings us back to the hopes, fears and anxieties of our present time. Perhaps the real truth lies in some sort of combination between historical progressivism and cyclicism. Perhaps it’s a sort of diagonal spiral that oscillates between freedom and control with each new upswing reaching a little higher and each new downswing not dipping quite so far down into the depths of despair. One could make a powerful argument that the historic arc when viewed from 30,000 feet has trended in that direction. But just as any good financial advisor might say, “Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.” Perhaps the future has always been up to us to decide.