Back from the Future
On a recent podcast I made some comments about progress and progressivism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjtv5wD-fM&t=168s) These concerned my doubts and hesitations concerning whether ‘progress’ was really so good a framing for understanding things like social justice or equity. After all, cultures that do not frame time in the linear western fashion are as capable of striving for justice as we are. That there are different concepts of time is something I learned a long while ago when, as a teenager, I read what might have been the first serious book from which I learned something. This was Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade. From this book I learned about the figuration of time as cyclical. Rather than a linear progression from point A to point B time was, in many non-western cultures, figured as returning or reverting on itself in a repeating pattern. This contrasts with at least two other figurations, absolute return (as to a golden age) and eschatology or the projection