What Actually Happens | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

June 19, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- When you think about it, it’s really rather odd that so many people nowadays should be so hostile to the suggestion that history moves in circles.

Central to the rhetoric that celebrates industrial civilization’s supposed triumph over the ignorant and superstitious past is the notion that our beliefs about the world are founded on experience and tested against hard facts. Since the cyclic theory of history gave Oswald Spengler the basis for accurate predictions about the future -- predictions, mind you, that contradicted the conventional wisdom of his time and ours, and proved to be correct anyway -- wouldn’t it be more reasonable to consider the suggestion that his theory applies to our civilization too?

Reasonable or not, of course, that’s not what generally happens. Suggest that industrial civilization is following the same arc of rise and fall as all previous civilizations have done, and shows every sign of completing the rest of that trajectory in due time, and outside of a few circles of intellectual heretics on the fringes of contemporary culture, what you’ll get in the way of response is an angry insistence that it just ain’t so. The overfamiliar claim that this time it really is different, that modern industrial civilization will either keep soaring ever higher on the way to some glorious destiny or plunge overnight into some unparalleled catastrophe, is wedged so tightly into the collective imagination of our age that not even repeated failure seems to be able to break it loose.

That last comment is anything but hyperbole; the repeated failures have happened, and are happening, without having the least effect on the claims just mentioned. Glance back over the last half century or so, to start with, and notice just how many prophecies of progress and apocalypse have ended up in history’s wastebasket. From cities in orbit and regular flights to the Moon, through fusion power and household robots who can cook your dinner and do your laundry for you, to the conquest of poverty, disease, and death itself, how many supposedly inevitable advances have been proclaimed as imminent by scientists and the media, only to end up in history’s wastebasket when it turned out that they couldn’t be done after all? Of all the dozens of great leaps forward that were being announced so confidently in my youth, only a few -- notably the computer revolution -- actually happened, and even there the gap between what was predicted and what we got remains vast.

It’s indicative that the humor magazine The Onion, which makes its money by saying the things nobody else in American life is willing to say, ran an edgy piece a few months back announcing that Americans had begun to grasp that the shiny new era of progress and innovation promised so many times was never actually going to happen. No doubt sometime soon they’ll run a similar story about the claims of imminent cataclysm that fill the same role on the other side of the spectrum of industrial society’s folk beliefs about the future. Year after weary year, the same grandiose visions of destiny and disaster get dusted off for one more showing,; they resemble nothing so much as a rerun of a television show that originally aired when your grandparents were on their first date, and yet audiences across the industrial world sit there and do their best to forget that they’ve watched the same show so often they could close their eyes and plug their ears and still recall every tawdry detail.

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