On the History of Ideas

Around five years ago, I started writing a book about the nature and history of Renewal Ideas, the first of what I hope is a series titled It's About Time. The subtitle of that volume, published in February of this year (2024), is Renewal Origins, Mutations and Eros’ Arrow. I believe that Renewal Ideas–Rebirth, Renaissance, a Golden Age, Reform, Revolution, and Millenarianism–belong to a single family and seek their common, invariant structure or shape in the same way that a physicist attempts to model the “laws of nature.” I found their parent in the concept of the cycle, a series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order, which has notional origins in the early human experience of the day, month, year, and lifetime and is itself a member of the category called renewal ideas when it is used to present an idea of cosmological or historical change. 

I sought an invariant principle behind renewal concepts because of their persistence over millennia and their power of persuasion regardless of great changes in culture. Those using these concepts have applied widely differing values or models of what is good or desired. The proud boys prayed for reform and renewal before storming the capitol in 2020, mirroring St. Augustine’s attitude when writing De Civitate Dei or watching the Vandals approach from the walls of his bishopric. The Nazi program of renewal of the Germanic Volk may be compared with the 60’s mantra of the Greening of America. The functional structure is the same when Trump “makes America great again” or Biden “builds back better” even though their respective values differ. The many prophecies of an imminent end of the current age of the world and a savior who will destroy evil and save the good begin with Jesus’ words “Not a stone shall be left here . . .” and attract eager followers whenever they are uttered. The latest Pew Research says that thirty percent in the United States hold such views. 

Advocacy or an explanation of change over time is described through such renewal ideas. The earlier volume describes the original mutations within Judeo-Christian culture that produced much of the variety from reform and rebirth to apocalypse and tests the theory that there is an underlying invariant structure of renewal that has persuasive power when used in communication. For example, even though millenarian concepts are common in early Christianity, they are expressed infrequently during the early Middle Ages. Then they are common by 1200 and continue to be a key part of our rhetoric until today. Jung himself suggests that they are archetypical. They justified the destruction of heresy, the crusades, the voyages of discovery, the protestants, the English Revolution, the French Revolution, Naziism, Fascism, Communism, Jihadism, Trumpism, and an apparently endless variety of cults that claim special knowledge of the future. Jumping to the conclusion: there is something inherent in the nature of mankind that allows for this appeal of millenarian ideas so that when one is suggested, it commands attention and possible assent. The same may be said of other renewal ideas–reform, rebirth, golden age, revolution–that are structurally congruent with the millenarian. They are powerful. 

By studying the history of ideas and isolating the structures that continue or reoccur, including, notionally, as much as possible from pre-literate times through the study of myth, one may glimpse a piece of permanence, that which philosophers call Being. We must distinguish the structural from the aspirational. Concepts such are Equality, Truth, Beauty, Rights, Justice, Humility, Heroic may, to be sure, be desirable, but they have no permanent being in themselves. We may aspire to them, but they will never be reached, and well-intentioned people seeking to advocate a definition or example shall disagree in major ways. They are value variables that culture may insert into the x’s and y’s of renewal functions.  Human equality has not been experienced and is not in itself permanent, but it is asserted as a value in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man–it is aspirational. However, the idea of reforming something such as a person, an institution, or society from a lesser to a more perfect state incrementally and intentionally is a specific type of renewal structure that reoccurs with many possible aspirational models such as equality, the truth, efficiency, imago Dei, a golden age, the life of hunter-gatherers, democracy, the 50’s, etc..…. The structure that reoccurs provides our peek into Being, which will never be known in its completeness–the Totality of Human Experience.

These structural frameworks, which may not be escaped in the same way that we may not escape our peculiarly human experience of space and time, must be contrasted with the clutter of aspirational values.