What's Your Beef? The Spiral of Time

Steve Kirchhoff  |   Saturday Feb. 1st, 2025

If history truly does repeat itself, as it seems to, this fact argues for time’s being nonlinear. Instead, time is probably circular, like a spiral or a wheel, and you and I, and our lifetimes, are like spokes on a wheel of time so large that its curved surface cannot be detected. Time appears as a line stretching out before us into the future; but this is illusion, for it is actually bending around to re-visit points already traveled-over innumerable times.

For the past dozen years or so, I have been an occasional instructor of classical political thought at MSU, focusing on the Greeks of classical antiquity—a people who knew something about art, architecture, poetry, politics, war, and geometry, including the circularity of time. The class begins in the Dark Ages, a long period of inexplicable cultural, economic, and political decline occurring between the fall of Troy at the hands of Achilles and Agamemnon (around 1186 BCE) and the beginning of the glory days of Athens in the sixth century BCE.

The Greek Dark Ages occupied a long time: more than twice the age of our American Republic.
The Dark Age’s poets include Homer and Hesiod, and it is the latter more than the former who speaks directly about things of his time that are also things of ours. When Hesiod laid down his laments, the glory of Achilles and the marvelous journey of Odysseus were stories belonging to an ancient past—the Greek landscape of Hesiod’s time no longer witnessed the heroic feasts of a brave warrior caste, and no longer gave rise to imposing citadels or watched over the movements of Greek traders returning home laden with goods from Phoenicia, Persia, and Egypt.

It would be several centuries after Hesiod’s death before the Athenians Made Greece Great Again. What were the forces that broke apart the epoch of glorious Greek Bronze Age heroes, causing depopulation, the emptying of cities, decline of trade, disappearance of literacy, reduction in agricultural production and degeneration of statecraft into tribalism? Was it invaders from the North, depredations by the mysterious Sea Peoples of the East, or natural disasters: earthquakes and plagues and drought? Or, was it the Enemy Within?

Sometime around 700 BCE, looking around the landscape of Boeotia (“cow land”) in eastern Greece, where Hesiod kept his farm, the poet was utterly dismayed by the absence of basic virtues and the hardness of daily life, which are intertwined here:
 
Not a day goes by
A man doesn’t have some kind of trouble.
Night too, just wearing him down. I mean
The gods send us terrible pain and vexation.
Still, there’ll be some good mixed in with the evil,
And then Zeus will destroy this generation too.
Soon as they start being born grey around the temples.
Then fathers won’t get along with their kids anymore,
Nor guests with hosts, nor partner with partner,
And brothers won’t be friends, the way they used to be.
Nobody’ll honor their parents when they get old
But they’ll curse them and give them a hard time,
Godless rascals, and never think about paying them back
For all the trouble it was to raise them.
They’ll start taking justice into their own hands,
Sacking each other’s cities, no respect at all
For the man who keeps his oaths, the good man,
The just man. No, they’ll keep all their praise
For the wrongdoer, the man who is violence incarnate,
And shame and justice will lie in their hands.

 In these lines, we listen in on a crescendo of nearly three-thousand-year-old complaints, encompassing familial collapse and political violence—and every bit of Hesiod’s utterance resonates with contemporary times. When things inside and outside the home are broken beyond recognition, when economic predation replaces regard for the dignity of others, what one wants is to recover the basics: respect, truthful speech, warmth, a commitment to virtue.

Hesiod never lived to see better days. Yet in generations following him, population across the Greek mainland increased, cities regained importance, and trade and arts returned. These improvements, however, were unequally enjoyed by sectors of society. Corrupt aristocratic families, particularly in Athens but in many other cities as well, held sway. They increased their fortunes by preying on the lowest classes of society.

Not until the 7th century BCE, under the successive rule of two “strong leaders,” Solon of Athens and Peisistratus, did Athens manage to bring an end to plundering by the elite with the adoption of laws protecting poorer classes from oppression by the wealthiest. 
And yet it is here, dear reader, where the would-be parable of time’s circularity ends, for circularity merely implies that all human struggles and triumphs, all acts of justice and injustice, have already occurred and are bound to recur, and that the whole human comedy or tragedy, seen from time’s serene indifference, is happening as if all at once. 

From the point of view of eternity, history’s repetitions exist simultaneously and indiscriminately, not as a particular evil flashing out, and not as the deliverance from this evil in a particular time and place, which is how individual human beings see things unfolding. 
While it is true that moral lessons from archaic Greek times have been repeated, in our time they appear upside down, as in a prism. The morality of a point in time is symmetrical to, but not identical with, the morality of other times. Instead of the strong leader come to the rescue the sinking ship of state, as in post-Hesiodic times, we now experience the political reverse. In America, today’s strong leaders are predators and profiteers, the ones whom Hesiod fingers as having both “shame and justice” in their hands. 

Our most potent political figures—in state and federal government and belonging to both parties—are uninterested in rescuing working people from the grips of profiteers. Because in our time, leaders are the very profiteers that government is supposed to curtail. And we, the people, are witness to these events. So, my question to you is: Who are you? What time do you live in, and what do you intend to do about it?  

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