Top Highlights

• Most of us who live in the modern world routinely make sense of social change by seeing it as more or less unidirectional and progressive over time. We find it difficult to think about history any other way. This is remarkable, because progress as a paradigm for understanding history is
• in fact a very recent innovation. Before this innovation, during nearly all of the millennia that humanity has (to our knowledge) thought about time at all, a very different paradigm was dominant: the cycle.
• Its passage is destined to annihilate everything familiar about our present—from such trivial pleasures as a morning cup of coffee to the grandest constructions of art, religion, or politics.
• Over the millennia, people have meditated on this anxiety over time and change, and they have addressed it by developing three ways of understanding time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear.
• The weakness of chaotic time, of course, is that it doesn’t address our anxiety about time’s destructive blindness. We all understand that much of what happens to us is unpredictable. What we want to know is: In what ways can we reasonably expect the world to change over time? Society could hardly function without some consensus about its common fu...