I was watching the “Jungles” episode of BBC’s Planet Earth II last night. The trees make their own weather; you can see the mist coming up from them, forming clouds, and then the clouds eventually rain, and you have “rainforest.” It’s a cycle. It’s self-sustaining. It struck me that we humans—in my society, anyway—are still taking baby steps toward truly understanding the reality in which we live as cyclical rather than linear. We have been double-handicapped in that regard, even vis-à-vis other complex civilizations, such as China’s. The first handicap is Christian eschatology, and the second is capitalism. We inherit a linear view of human history. It progresses toward an end-goal, in the first instance. In the second, there is no end—there is only limitless growth, requiring insatiable consumption of the not-limitless resources of the Earth. Those enraptured by this concept who do accept that Earth’s resources are limited are not dispirited by that; they dream of exploiting the resources of other worlds once ours are exhausted—or perhaps even before, anticipating that eventuality.
Bringing that literally back home, I can think of my own quarter-acre property. We didn’t always manage our property as a cyclical natural system. Most of us are constantly removing energy and nutrients from the system—grass clippings, leaves, fallen branches—and then replacing them with energy and nutrients that we buy from outside—fertilizers and mulch. We don’t grow grass, so we don’t use fertilizers, but we do have our yard crew rake up the front, and we hardwood-mulch it every other year. This is entirely aesthetic.
In the back, where most of the trees are, we don’t let them rake. We used to let them put sticks and branches out for the City to take, but now we have them put on a pile in the way-back where I periodically use an electric chipper to mulch them and then put them in a compost bin, to be spread in the beds in the spring. Now, I find it hard to believe I haven’t always managed things based on the concept of an energy/nutrient cycle/recycle. It seems so obvious now.
To a large extent, “sustainability” means “recycling”—and not just trash. Everything.
It's just as important, though, to remember that these cycles, even these “self-sustaining” systems—are not closed systems. They are connected to what’s outside them. They receive input from outside, and their output affects what’s outside them. The Amazon rainforest is made possible by the dust from the Sahara blowing over the Atlantic. The oxygen produced by our forests is what we breathe, even in the desert or from a scuba tank.
I’ve written a lot here about the fallacy of linear thinking in the history of technology—and in human history writ large. When it comes to the “natural world”—a telling concept, removing ourselves from what we cannot, in truth, be removed from—we are now far more accustomed to thinking in cyclical terms, though we still have a long way to go. In human history, though, how do we think about cyclical reality? I don’t have a pre-prepared answer for this, so what follows is thinking-while-typing.
Traditionally, the Chinese have tended to think about history cyclically—particularly when it comes to their overarching political history, in which the “dynastic cycle” figures prominently. I don’t know enough about Chinese history to comment much further on that. The major Asian religions—Hinduism and Buddhism—emphasize cyclical processes. “The West” has, traditionally, prided itself on what it considered a more “optimistic” view of human history, embracing the idea of inevitable progress toward an end-goal of perfection—whether that perfection is achieved by us, or imposed by God. The savage insanity of the 20th century pretty much did away with this “Whig” view of history, among thinking people. There’s nothing wrong with letting go of naïve optimism that encourages complacency and self-satisfaction, which in turn blind us to real problems and harden us to the suffering of others. On the other hand, we don’t want a concept of human history that encourages despair and passivity. We also know, if we know history, that history does not, in fact, repeat itself; it “rhymes,” as some put it, but each moment in history is unique. So, what can we do with cyclical thinking in history?
The first thing that occurs to me is connected to the “law of unintended consequences,” which, as I’ve hinted at here, is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the history of technology. All of the major ecological problems facing us today (all of which we are perfectly capable of solving) are a result of either not foreseeing, or ignoring, the consequences of our choices and behavior. Cycles are cause-and-effect processes; when we think of the cycle Ian Hodder writes about—new technology, unintended consequence, development of new technology to address that unintended consequence, unintended consequence of that, etc.—we can start to see some value in expanding our cyclical thinking from the “natural world” to our own—which, of course, also serves to remind us that there is no actual separation between the two.
Perhaps another benefit of applying cyclical thinking is that it highlights the importance of context—of thinking, not about your subject or object as something discrete, but as something inextricably connected to what’s around it. If you don’t understand the subject’s/object’s context, you don’t understand the subject/object. For example, the Crabtree boat and ship models, which I’ve written about here before. It’s impossible to think clearly about the cycles going on in the jungle without realizing that everything is connected to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. That’s true of literally everything, us of course included. Any perception of isolation is an illusion, made possible by the limitations of our senses.
Speaking of the limitations of our senses: it also occurred to me last night that a major contribution of modern science to our understanding of reality is that it has done so much to remove those limitations. When we don’t know what something is, then we don’t have the perspective we need to understand reality outside our own subjective experience of it. We are only partially self-aware, because we are only partially aware, period. Which makes us unlikely even to ask the questions that would advance our understanding. For example, when no one knew what light was, why would it occur to anyone to wonder whether there were areas of the wavelength spectrum that we can’t see? No one knew there was a wavelength spectrum. And if that question never occurs to us, why would we wonder whether certain animal behaviors might be explicable only by the knowledge that they can see these wavelengths of light? How can we really understand how we work until we understand how our brains work—and how they are so intimately connected to every aspect of our physiology? Our culture held to a mind/body duality for millennia; we now know that it’s a false dichotomy; that it’s in our way.
Perhaps no insight of modern science is more at the core of understanding reality than that matter and energy cannot be destroyed—only transformed into each other, or into different forms. And only now are we learning how “space” isn’t really “space”—it isn’t empty, it isn’t nothing. There’s no such thing in this universe as nothing. Everything is something.
And that concept is the key to understanding that everything is connected—because nothing is truly isolated.
So perhaps to fully appreciate the centrality of cycles, we need to go beyond the simple arrows-in-a-circle logo on the recycling can. From that logo, we might infer that something is changed and then changed back into what it was originally, in a closed-loop. But there are no closed loops. When something is recycled, it comes back as something new. History does not repeat itself, but it certainly works in variations on a theme.
But what about the arrow of time? It moves in one direction—forward, as we would put it. The arrow of time is a fact. Everything changes, and nothing goes back to exactly the way it was before. Isn’t that more of a line than circle? More linear than cyclical? It would certainly seem so. It would seem to us that all the cyclical processes in the universe, including in our own lives, take place along the arrow of time—along a line, moving forward. Is the universe ultimately cyclical? Does the arrow of time have an end? We may figure that out, or it may remain beyond us. In the history of us, and our activities on this planet, though, neither the circle nor the line will serve as the overarching visual representation of reality. Reality is too complex for that. I think the line image serves us best as a reminder that nothing stays exactly the same; every moment is unique. The circle reminds us to think more in terms of cause-and-effect, and to look for general patterns—like Hodder’s pattern of technology—>consequence—>new technology in response to consequence.
And to anyone thinking “this is more about ecology and cosmology than history of technology,” I would say once again that one cannot understand something without trying to understand what that something is a part of—the context of that something.