We have a political culture based on linear metaphors. forward vs. backward. future vs. past. change vs. preservation. these are all hindrances. almost nothing in reality is linear. the world proceeds in loops and spirals and recursions.
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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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I agree with a lot of what you're saying w.r.t utility of predictive frameworks. I was commenting a bit more narrowly about political narrative structures though. "We have a political culture based on linear metaphors".
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Haha, fair. Tho, if neither "linear" nor "spiral" nor any other currently available accounts have any particularly strong predictive power, then there's no particular reason to believe a political system based on these alternate... views... would be any better, except maybe by
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well, some of the facts have an inherent structure. Gravity, for instance, has been a major player in history with fairly predictable outcomes.
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