The idea that history (in the humanities-typical sense, not in the "just collection of "claims" about homo sapiens shenanigans" sense) has any meaningful structure (whether forward-backward or spiral or whathaveyou) is extremely suspect.
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history is the way we tell stories about our past. the facts themselves have no inherent structure, the stories do.
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I think there's a weeeeeee bit of mote-baileyesque thing happening here. Most claims about presence of historical structure (whether forward-back or something more elaborate) are not claims about structure in fictions people make up about the past (in fact, I don't think there
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is a discipline directly dedicated to peculiarities of biases and trends in "free form theorising" human minds fall into when dealing with extremely information-impoverished circumstances, of which "the past" is a fair representative, even tho everything from history to
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psychology to psychiatry deal with this shit from time to time) Most claims about "historical structure" inevitably come back to claims about facts, and more importantly, about what future events will be like. The difference between "history is a forward-backward game" and
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"history develops in a spiral" (not actually a dichotomy, of course - many other options are plausible!) is, inevitably, in implications for future possible developments, not just a trite argument about what dead people were up to before they died.
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I think historians have really got burned on this whole (rather important, notably) "trying to discern predictive trends from low quality data about past" thing ever since Marxists stained the world with their bullshit, but still kind of want to engage with it because, well
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it would be incredibly useful if true, and without it, the activity of historical inquiry is a bit... hollow.
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A consequence of our separation from nature?
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possibly. it extends the metaphorical problem elegantly in any case. human environment full of straight lines and right angles, our politics and ideas have the same "shape".
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The concept of linear time was very fruitful (it used to be cultures were organized around seasons and cycles, even computing the grand procession) but harmful in areas characterized by loops and feedback effects. I think it helpful to use both or either metaphor based on task.
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Re the procession see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession …
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Pretty sure you just described the matrix. A linear story (or metaphors) repeated often enough to be "reality".
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