Some Thoughts on History and the Nature of Time
Once upon a time, a girl I was dating said she “didn’t believe in time.” She rejected the binary notion of time as a linear vs. circular thing. Of course, I didn’t buy what she was saying at all. Just because something doesn’t conform to labels or definitions doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, right?
Years later, I heard a young student say the same thing, and I gently explained to them that time is a scientific fact, measured in terms of entropy and energy loss. They took that at face value, as students often do when their seniors lecture them.
Shortly thereafter, I asked some friends on a trip the same question, in the context of discussing philosophy and life’s meaning. A fellow traveler (clearly a postmodernist grad student) said that we couldn’t know because it’s all a matter of perception. I was annoyed at this response, since it basically shut down the question behind of wall of relativism. But she certainly had a point!
The subject certainly came up in university, where I studied history and the liberal arts (I know, hardly a surprise). In a course I took, "The History of Ideas,” the textbook explained that the act of recording history taught humanity that time is a linear phenomenon. In this respect, our perception of history graduated from thinking it's circular to linear.
Somewhere along the line, all this stuff crystallized for me, and I devised a theory. Time truly is a matter of perception, but it’s a cultural one as much as a scientific one that has developed over the course of several millennia. And like many things, people today are reaching back to previous ages because our rapidly changing world is creating a shift in our perceptions.
Ancient Traditions
Examining any ancient human culture or those that have maintained traditions for thousands of years, you will see a common thread. Time is perceived as circular due to the patterns in nature: the changing of the seasons, the passing of the Sun through the zodiac, migration patterns, growing and harvesting seasons, sunrise and sunset, andlife and death.
This understanding is based partly on the study of ancient cultures that gave rise to “Western Civilization,” — i.e., the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Ancient Hebrews, etc. Whereas the earliest known records seemed to portray the history of the land in a sort of cyclical fashion, later records began establishing a timeline between past and present, and the notion that history had a beginning and an end emerged.
This conclusion also comes from historians and cultural anthropologists who believe that people’s perception of time — much like religion and their perception of the Universe — was subject to progression. When it came to religion, I learned, people progressed from believing in spirits inhabiting all things to worshiping many deities, then one deity, and perhaps to believing in a higher intelligence or order. Drawn out, it would look something like this:
Animism — Polytheism — Monotheism — Monism (?)
Something similar applied to the perception of time. Whereas ancient people (or “pre-literate,” as they are often called in old academic circles) believed life worked in accordance with natural cycles, more advanced civilizations understood that humans are subject to progress and growth.
Check Your Bias
If you’re anything like me, I suspect that many of you would be struck by the severe cultural bias of these assumptions. Not only did academics think until very recently that the ancient Aztecs, Maya, and Inca were “pre-literate” cultures, but they also seemed to think performed ritual cannibalism and didn’t understand the wheel!
These were all myths based on ignorance and blatant racism have been thoroughly debunked, but only in recent decades.
These academics were also oblivious to how their backgrounds colored their perception. Eurocentrism is the deep-seated idea that Europe is the superior culture, and its colonization of the non-Western world was somehow a good thing, or at least inevitable. This thinking is a massive failure on two counts:
- Virtually every invention that led to Europe’s ascendancy in the modern era came from Asia and the “New World.” This includes gunpowder, steel, paper, compasses, navigation devices, vital crops (tomatoes, beans, corn, rice, chillies, chocolate, and vanilla), and precious commodities (gold, silver, and pelts), which came to Europe either by trade or by conquest and theft.
- It is classic ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism. In addition to committing genocide, slavery, oppression, and exploitation on all continents, Europeans also put a torch to the traditions and cultures of their victims.
By studying the pre-Columbian and pre-contact history of the non-Western world (with an open mind), you realize that what we think we know about them is steeped in centuries-old prejudices. In reality, what we don’t know about them and still haven’t figured out is staggering! This ignorance leads to the impression that these places and people either don’t matter or have no culture or achievements to speak of.
Putting that aside, there’s also the built-in intellectual and anthropocentric bias. The average Eurocentric believes that all things great and worthy came to them through the Greeks, Romans, and the cultures of the Levant. That, of course, includes perceptions that time is linear, attributed to the ancient Hebrews (though it is more rightly attributed to Indo-Iranians and Zoroastrianism), and that humans are the driving force behind everything — a very classical assumption.
In truth, these beliefs were imposed on Europeans through conquest by the Romans and the Church. As part of the prevailing cultural snobbery of the Greco-Roman tradition, they were presented as “rational” and as “truth” to those who were conquered. At the same time, their ancestral beliefs were branded as “superstitious” and “pagan.”
Sound familiar? The descendents of those who suffered from the yoke of genocide, slavery, and imperialism in ancient times became the perpetrators of it in modern times.
Origins
The first recorded indications I know of come from the Zoroastrian faith (as I noted earlier). This religion emerged in the mid-6th century BCE, when the Persian/Iranian empire had arisen and had become a dominant political force in Central Asia and Asia Minor. Not only is it the first known example of monotheism (Judaism still maintained that there were other gods), but it is also the first instance where time is presented as linear.
This was characterized by the ongoing struggle between Ahura Mazda, the supreme being of the Universe, and Angra Mainyu, a destructive spirit and adversary of all things good. This struggle would end with Ahura Mazda’s eventual triumph over evil and the “Great Renewal,” a day of judgment on which Ahura Mazda resurrects all the good souls and restores the world to a state of perfection.
The highly relevant period known as the Babylonian Captivity also occurred during the 6th century BCE. After conquering the Levant and destroying the First Temple of Jerusalem, the Neo-Babylonian Empire exiled many Jewish people from Judea to live in other parts of their empire. However, the Babylonians were themselves conquered by the Persians in 539 BCE, which led to many of the exiles returning to Judea.
It was also during this time that the books of the Torah and the Talmud, the primary sources of Jewish religious law (halakha) and Jewish theology, were compiled. In these texts, God is portrayed as a universal and transcendent being. They also contain the first mentions of the “Day of the Lord” in the Hebrew faith. In particular, the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel tell how God will resurrect the dead and bring judgment upon all the nations of Earth and His own people.
This tradition, adopted by Judaism from Zoroastrianism after the Babylonian Captivity, was passed on to Christianity and Islam. In all Abrahamic faiths, the concept of history as a dialectical struggle between good and evil that ends with the final Day of Judgement is universal. Through conquest, conversion, and transmission, this cosmological view became widespread.
A Humble Theory
After learning all of this, I began to see a pattern. The truth, in my humble interpretation, was that the issue wasn’t so abstract or simple. Basically, my theory is that the act of record-keeping itself fostered the notion that time is linear because that is how we began organizing it on paper and (just as importantly) in our minds.
With more and more materials to draw on about the past, scholars began thinking there was a progression at work. By the time the period known as Classical Antiquity came around, the focus of scholarship shifted from viewing time as an ongoing drama involving the gods (or a God) to one dictated by human actions. Everything we did as nations, cultures, and a species was part of our progression towards something indefinable.
Oh, there is a progression, all right. But it’s one we’ve created for ourselves! The path we perceive from the past to some nebulous future is one we forged ourselves. Like any swath cut through the wilderness, it does not survive on its own, so we take great care to preserve it. Hence why the destruction of great libraries throughout history— the Library of Alexandria (48 BCE), the Grand Library of Baghdad (1258 CE), the Nalanda Mahavihara (1200 CE) — was seen as an immeasurable loss.
The same can be said about theories regarding developmental-evolution, aka evo — devo. In previous ages, this interpretation of history was known as “The March of Progress,” or “Onward and Upward.” In more modern times, it goes by the name of the “Singularity” or the “Accelerando.” Here too, the idea is that technological progression is a natural feature in human history, and it is subject to “accelerated returns.”
The anthropological record certainly bears this out. Since modern humans (homo sapiens) emerged, the technology we’ve relied on has evolved. Evolutionary changes, like the opposable thumb and greater manual dexterity, led to more fine tool work — flint tools, needles, hooks, and barbs. In any era, the tools we’ve relied on were used to fashion better tools, and so on.
But again, this is part of the human condition. Our physical evolution has affected the technology we’ve developed, and the technology we’ve developed has influenced our evolution. This includes language and writing systems, which have (according to my theory) affected how we perceive time.
I would be remiss if I didn’t add that this idea of mine is probably not at all original. Chances are, more than one person thought of it a long time ago and already put it to paper (or in digital form). Perhaps I picked it up somewhere along the line and didn’t realize it, who knows? That being said, I really felt like I was on to something when it occurred to me. I hope it has inspired some thought in other people who read it.
