Listening to the podcast of Fareed Zakaria GPS (CNN) from last weekend, I heard economist Ken Rogoff explain that we could predict things about the economy because “We have centuries of examples.” It’s a meme that’s been popular in the past decade (probably forever): that whole “those who don’t learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them” thing; that whole grand belief system in the infallibility of history to repeat, wash, rinse, repeat.

History: that map that we must study in order to conquer.

Only. What if history is not a timeline we can follow?[1] What if history doesn’t repeat but only rhymes, as Mark Twain quipped? What if history is the ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail? A circle, spinning. A cycle? And how do we know the course of the cycle? We can only assume from 6000-ish years of people living sorta like us. We can only assume from an historical record that leaves more gaps and unknowns than quantifiable certainties. And what if we’ve been poor at reckoning the cycle?

Then, what if it is not a cycle? What if it’s a grid that stretches out into infinite space or infinite directions? Or what if each moment splits time and history into separate fragments and directions? What if it isn’t only one thing? Who are we to think we’ve got it figured out? Seems to me reality offers more evidence to the contrary than in support of us mastering the universe.

Let’s just go with the past decade: I have heard the world at large get all Miss Havisham-y about Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy. I have watched the events unfolding and frequently thought we were getting things wrong by assuming we had the pattern figured out: Iraq/Af/Pak/Iran/Al Qaeda were all variants of the Peloponnesian War, the Crusades, Vietnam, the first Gulf War. The economic recession of the early 2000s mimicked the recession of the early 80’s (go shopping and perk up, America!) and the Great Recession could be handled like the Great Depression Lite because it is/was the Great Depression Lite.

And for a decade, all I could picture was that Dickensian lady in her yellowed wedding gown looking at a moldy cake. The two thoughts were: What if we are wrong? And: No, this feels different, this looks different, this is looking to me (and I am admittedly amateur hour) like a Shift, a New Thing, a New World in the making—one of those restructurings that happen and change everything we know into Something Else. And we’re living in the transition from what was to what will be.

Thus, the worst possible thing we could do, if that last is the case, is to think America is “the greatest civilization the world has ever known. The strongest economy the world has or has had”[2] and to believe—and act upon—the assumption that the U.S. sprang from the earth to dominate it and thus cannot possibly fail. (We’re exceptional, after all, and we’ll keep shouting about our superpoweriness while we stand on the rubble of what used to be streets, bridges and public works as the impoverished and diseased remnants of the population look on if we’re not careful.) There’s surely a peril in the strongly held conviction that “as is” equals “as ever” just because we’ve studied our history and the case is closed. “[The] assumption is that history is over. You know, we are very sloppy here. We don’t have a fixed identity.”[3]

Francisco Goya, "Saturn (Kronos) Devouring His Son," 1820-23. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

So when I hear the expression of “history repeats itself” in the face of a world that itself faces man-made climate change, the unintended consequences of 6.94 billion people living on it,[4] a changing global economy, geography, and power structure (multi-polar, multi-polar, multi-polar!), I worry that if we, the U.S., doesn’t handle this smartly and listen more than we speak, metaphorically, then the events of History and Time—or our interpretation of them– will devour us alive.[5]

After all, as Simon Schama has pointed out, history “is definitely not in the thumb-sucking business.” It means “inquiry,” not “story,” and it, as he says, keeps us awake at night. It isn’t a predictive map or a “geneology of feeling wonderful about who we are now…[it is not] the furniture polish of antiques.”

But whether so many of the chatterati (and politicians) are right and everything now is clear and fits into an historical pattern or whether I am right and this could be something different, my position is: We just can’t know. We are uncertain and should proceed with caution. We should not be certain about our certainties, because it’s entirely possible that something can look like a duck, quack like a duck, walk like a duck and not be a duck. (Video of ducks, which is not the same thing as actually being ducks.)

Rene Magritte, "La Trahison des Images," 1929. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Or, as Magritte painted it in The Treachery of Images: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. “This is not a pipe.” It’s a representation of a pipe. (And right now, you’re not looking at a pipe or even a representation of a pipe. You’re looking at a pixilated representation of a representation of a pipe. Put a mirror up to it if you really want to play recursive mind games with yourself.)

And so it is with history and time and our place in both. Sometimes we don’t see what we are so sure we are seeing. Sometimes the smartest answer in the world is “I don’t know.” This is not a pipe.

[1] “My own suspicion is that history is not symmetrical. And that unfortunately things don’t necessarily go down…the same arc they came up on.” James Howard Kunstler
[2] Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)
[3] Patrick Geary
[4] U.S. Census Bureau estimate as of July 2011
[5] The link to the Goya painting and the same opinion expressed by Teofilo Ruiz in a lecture at Stanford: “The Terror of History,” November 4, 2010.