In The Fourth Turning, Strauss and Howe list three different ways of perceiving time.
1. Chaotic Time—Life is governed by the interplay of chance and chaos rather than a cosmic order. Nature is inhabited by spirits or capricious pantheons. For those living in “chaotic time” life is lived in the present.
2. Cyclical Time—The turning of the seasons, the rotation of the stars through the sky, birth and death, are all part of a cosmic order. Religious festivals revolve around the natural cycles of planting and harvesting. Gods, men, civilizations, and even the cosmos itself are thought to pass through their own cycles.
3. Linear Time—Time is experienced as a journey with a beginning and a destination. For Dante, the journey is the upward ascent of the soul towards God in Paradise; for Augustine and Bunyan, the destination is the city of God. These Christian authors were drawing upon the redemptive history of the Old and New testaments.
The way that we experience time has a profound effect on how we think about history. This is perhaps best illustrated by the works of two great historians of the early 20th century, each of whom sought to address the question of what gives birth to a civilization and what causes it to fall.
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in his classic work The Decline of the West, argued that civilizations go through cycles of birth, life, and death, like all biological life. The path which a civilization takes can no more be altered than the cycle of life itself. Spengler’s arguments appeared prophetic to modern Europeans then in the throes of an economic depression and about to embark on another world war. However, the distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) fundamentally disagreed with Spengler’s view. There is nothing predestined about the path a civilization takes; nor does a civilization die a natural death as though it were a biological organism.1Toynbee 1946, 210 ff. A civilization dies when, having arrived at an impasse, it refuses the path of repentance and embraces Utopias instead.2Toynbee 1946, 431-432 The different ways in which each historian understood civilization is a reflection of how each perceives time.
The spirit of our own times seems somehow to have joined chaotic and linear time. Antipathy towards the past is joined to a new ethic—the negation of all value judgements. “One thing every professor can be sure of,” writes Alan Bloom, “is that every student believes that truth is relative… The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”3Bloom 1987, 26
Ironically, I think many of my history professors held this view of history. Their courses were very dull and boring as a result. One exception was a seminar taught by a visiting lecturer, a colonel who had fought in some famous battles. He taught us history as though our lives depended on grasping some obscure historical point. He could be harsh and a stickler for details; you’d better come to class prepared. By the second week of the course, enrollment had dwindled down to probably half the original number. But it was undoubtedly the most interesting history course I took during those years of undergraduate studies. He taught us how to ask good questions, how to research a topic in order to discover the truth of the matter, and how to write properly formatted papers. We had many spirited and lively debates in that course. Looking back, one can see how the relativism and nihilism , besides killing the soul, makes for very boring history.
Bloom, Allan.
The Closing of the American Mind : How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Toynbee, Arnold.
A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, edited by D. C. Somervell.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.