values conflict

I'm dragging an exchange out of the comments section for the rest of my readers to ponder. It's about a question of values. Where do you stand when it comes to the nature of history and the cosmos? Do you see everything as an endlessly repeating cycle? As a linear march to a glorious (or hellish) Omega Point? Or as a spiral, which shares both linear and circular traits, i.e., repeating, but never exactly?

Commenter (slightly edited):

This is nothing to do with the contents of this video or any other video that you post and which I rarely, if ever, watch but just something I am curious about. 

Don't you ever get tired of all the 'It's over', 'He's done', 'He's finished' titles, particularly since I'm struggling to remember an actual occasion when someone was over, done, or finished?

My response:

Yeah, it's all clickbait. But these videos usually contain a nugget or two of substance. So it's a value judgment: are the nuggets worth it? If I say no, I could be siding with the "cyclical history" folks who dismiss everything as "same shit, different day." These folks aren't far different from the moral-relativism or moral-equivalence crowd: the politicians are all dirty bastards, and nothing's ever gonna change. There is no progress. A pox on both their houses! It doesn't really matter who's in power because it doesn't affect my life. It's the 새옹지마 shrug of the old farmer who loses a horse, but who understands life to be a constant push-pull that always averages out to an equilibrium. Nobody in politics is ever really "destroyed" or "owned" or "made to regret" anything.

Which is fine, and truth be told, I often feel that way myself. It's a legitimate way to view the world. But the other cosmic point of view is that everything looks like a cycle until your family gets killed in a war, or your country collapses due to poor economic management or cultural rot. Things suddenly don't feel so cyclical then, and history reveals itself not to be a cycle so much as a spiral.

A spiral has traits in common with a cycle/circle. You do repeatedly end up at the same points on the face of a clock. But a spiral never repeats exactly, and therein lies the rub. So I think it's in the spirit of "spiralism" that I never seem to tire of the clickbait. There is a such thing as progress; there are differences in history and politics; it's not all just equivalence and relativism.

And I think the commenters who come to rebut my posts must feel similarly because, if they really saw my efforts as vain, saw the world as vain and everything as relative or repetitive, they wouldn't bother to comment. What would be the point? So why, I wonder, do they care enough to comment? Just to punctuate their own boredom?

Further thoughts:

It's ironic, how we often tend to mix the two cosmic viewpoints in our head—linear and circular. We can see this as a basic difference between Eastern (circular) and Western (linear) viewpoints, but even within the East and the West, we can see this conflict happening. The cyclical camp also subdivides into two sub-categories: those who are at a cynical remove (everything repeats; nothing ever really changes), and those who uncynically see eternal/unchanging aspects of reality (eternals are real, and that's a good thing). It's not obvious that the division between these two sub-categories is clear.

To take a Western example of the internal strife, though: Carl Sagan was a big-time liberal-leftist who embodied this interior conflict. On the one hand, he was a historical optimist, also called a progressivist, i.e., someone who believes in human civilizational and cultural progress. In his final book, The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan warns of the potential for "bamboozlement" that religion brings. Sagan includes, at the beginning of each chapter, many quotes from centuries-old sources that express some sort of eternal wisdom. Appreciating eternal wisdom implies a belief that there are things that never change, a stance that's more in line with a cyclical (and possibly cynical) view in which things repeat and/or stay in equipoise but otherwise never fundamentally evolve: stasis. But warning modern society against the dangers of falling back into religion, superstition, and other forms of "primitivity" bespeaks another belief: that there is such a thing as progress, and that progress is a precious thing that can be lost in retrogression or decay. This falls more in line with the linear-history view. Modern progressivism might not believe in Omega Points (Teilhard de Chardin), but there's definitely the thought that we are, potentially, lurching awkwardly and collectively toward Something Better. Sagan definitely harbored both tendencies within himself, but he was too optimistic to be considered a cynic, so maybe he wasn't the best example for my purposes. (How about Qoheleth?)

So what does that make a blog visitor who is both a progressivist and a circularist/cynic? Is that attitude even consistent? Does it hold up under scrutiny?

Trivia: the notion of spiral time is something that came up when I was in grad school as a way to describe what was really going on in Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist notions of history and the movement of reality. Normally, people dichotomize visions of history or the cosmos as either linear or cyclical, with Eastern thought being lumped into the latter camp. But history and science both show that, while reality might often seem to repeat, it never repeats exactly. George Lucas famously quoted the metaphysical notion, vaguely attributed to Mark Twain, that History never repeats, but it rhymes. Spiral time gets at that same idea.

So should I, or should I not, care about whether such-and-such politician got owned, was destroyed, was made to eat his/her words, etc.? It seems so petty and ephemeral—somehow beneath me. Or should I remain aloof, silent, and uncaring because everything is just an eternal return? All this has happened before and will happen again—so why worry? Such a tension underlies the series "Battlestar Galactica," with the Cylons coldly believing in eternal return while the human colonists desperately seek Something Better.

I used to be part of the politically cynical crowd that saw both sides (left/right, Dem/Rep, liberal/conservative) as essentially the same—equally dirty, each repetitively, endlessly accusing the other of the same thing. I now see that attitude as possibly legitimate but intellectually lazy, sparing the thinker the effort of actually caring about or thinking through the various political tangles of the day. Adopting a smirking, cynical pose is easy. Of course, to adopt such a pose consistently, one must not merely profess not to care: one must genuinely not care. And if you genuinely don't care, you have no reason to leave comments on my blog.

What's closer to the truth is that one side or the other (however many sides there might actually be) is usually more in the right while the other is more in the wrong at any given moment in history. Viewed over great spans of time, this rightness and wrongness might switch sides in a pendular way. I've hinted at this several times on the blog when it comes to left/right, liberal/conservative: it was the right that was crazy during the Dubya era, what with all of the neocon theocrats in charge and leading the US into an unjustifiable war in Iraq. Nowadays, though, it's the left that's gone off its rocker—refusing to define what men and women are, screaming about the earth's destruction in under a decade, morally policing every tweeted utterance, still preaching the supposed virtues of socialism, resolutely ignoring the damage done by the entry of unassimilated populations into a radically different culture, etc. My point is: if you adopt the cosmically cynical pose of "it doesn't matter who's in charge because nothing ever changes," you miss what's going on right in front of your nose; you've made yourself unable to see obvious distinctions. Maybe, if the cynic zooms back far enough, he's right to see how the oscillations of history ultimately balance out. But in zooming back so far, the cynic fails to realize he's currently part of a culture—right now—that could self-destruct if nothing is done about it, if the forces trying to destroy that culture remain unfought. Cynicism = blind passivity = moral cowardice.

So—why clean your room if it's only going to get messy again? Why go on vacation if you're only going to find yourself back at work? Why do anything interesting if you—like the rest of us—are simply going to die? Why care about what's happening now, politically—why engage in the vanity of the madding crowd, why follow the superficial clickbait if in the end it all averages out into the same white noise? Find your own answer.

ADDENDUM: hilarious, possibly related social commentary here about how things have specific natures, and how we can't just be PC idiots who dissolve everything into a vague sameness (ironically, the exact opposite of appreciating diversity). But I have to ask... is the man gay, or did he somehow miss the fact that he'd married a male lion?