Is Life a Circle or a Line?

Is humanity progressing or regressing?

Fylfot window at Bloxham by Thorskegga

How are we doing?

Would you say that we are advancing as a society? There are certainly an assortment of positive developments you could point to, such as modern medical care, communications, and a superabundance of dairy-free creamer options. My kids have trouble understanding how we did anything without Wayze, banking apps, and Amazon. At the same time, there has been a dramatic increase in things like heart disease, Diabetes, social and political friction, and an epidemic level of mental health issues—especially in children. Two steps forward often feels followed by two steps back. 

This is an ancient problem. 

What was is what will be.

What that has happened is what will happen. 

There is nothing new under the Sun.

—Ecclesiastes

Yes, the camera quality on our phones will improve year by year. Yet, we will clutch these wonder devices as we sit and imbibe the world’s highest quality coffees—watching any film that’s ever been made or listening to the collective musical output of anyone who has ever performed—and still suffer in existential and emotional confusion and loneliness.  Are we moving forward, back, or a little of both?

Deep Time

This week at Beyond Belief, we were able to explore this idea through two fascinating thinkers. Dr. Joshua Moritz wrote about the largely unheralded discoveries of the 17th Century geologist (and Bishop) Nicholas Steno, who was the first person to prove the idea of “Deep Time” in geology—the fact that earlier organisms are less complex the farther back we go in the geological record.

Obvious to us now, this was not at all what even very intelligent thinkers of the day expected. As Dr. Moritz explains: “Apart from a leap of faith, no one could conceive of a time before there were seasons, or mountains and rivers or before humans existed. Skeptics of such faith assumed the uncreated eternity of the cosmos and the Earth, along with the eternal perpetuity of human beings.” Amazingly, Steno showed us that, at least biologically speaking, we are not stuck in an infinite and unchanging loop but rather that life is progressing step by step. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this discovery and its implications for the way we view reality.

The Eternal Return

The second series of insights came to us from Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, who I was fortunate enough to interview. In addition to the remarkable revelations this interview (and his excellent book Superhumanites) generated on the surprising non-atheist viewpoints of several famous “atheists,” we discussed our very topic of the notion of the “Eternal Return.”

This is what Nietzsche had to say about it:

“I teach you redemption from eternal flux: the flux also flows back into itself again and again, and you always step into the same flux again and again as the same people.” 

Now, Dr. Kripal has another way of understanding what Nietzsche said that is much more in line with the idea of progress. Nonetheless, as seems to have happened often with Nietzsche (and other thinkers), their ideas were coopted for less savory purposes. In this case, the Nazis embraced the Eternal Return as an anti-progress and an anti-technology concept. They also took his progressive idea of the “Ubermensch” and turned it into an Aryian supremacy doctrine. As cosmologist Frank Tipler explained:

“The political consequences of Nietzsche’s Eternal return philosophy have been catastrophic. Perhaps the simplest way to show this is to point out that the Eternal Return is sufficiently ancient and important a concept in philosophy and religion to have its own symbol. The old Anglo-Saxon word for the symbol of the Eternal Return is Fylfot (FILL-fot). So dominant had the idea of progress—the antithesis of the Eternal Return—become in England that, when the English encountered the Eternal Return symbol again in the 20th century, they had, to their credit, forgotten their ancient word for it. Instead, they used the Sanskrit word for the symbol: Swastika.

Even the spirit evolves

There is a Kabbalistic idea of the world that is a hybrid of the notions of progress and eternal return. Unlike a closed circle, the shape would be more like a cylinder—spiraling around but ever upward—always returning to the same conceptual time and space but always on a higher level. This conception is never stagnant and allows no room for the cynicism and sad resignation of a world that will never change. There is always a goal, and always motion toward it. Every setback is a lesson and an opportunity—one step back and two steps forward.

In his book, Dr. Kripal also wrote about the co-founder of the Theory of Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace. As he notes: “at the very beginning of evolutionary theory, we can easily detect at least four evolutionary domains in a founding figure like Wallace: the inorganic, the biological, the social, and the spiritual. Wallace wrote about all four domains even if he is most known today only for the second.”

Yes, this would suggest that even that which is transcendental evolves—ever higher. So while there may be “nothing new under the sun,” there may very well be [something new] above it. 

Also on tap this week