How did our society become so linear?
Building on the concept of the circular economy to drive deeper cultural transformation
The following is an abridged version of a longer piece, written by Gareth, which you can read here for a more in-depth discussion of these topics.
We’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of circular economy this month with the launch of our short documentary on the topic. Our team has had some great conversations about what it means, how it could become a reality, and whether the concept goes far enough.
The idea behind a circular economy is that supply chains are currently too linear–we take in inputs, create products, and generate waste. Circularity looks at the entire life cycle of manufacturing and finds ways to prevent that waste through reusing, repurposing, or regenerating those materials into other things. It takes responsibility for what it produces through the entire life cycle of a product, not just up until the point of sale. It’s a circle, not a line.
Although the idea has real promise, there have also been many criticisms made against it–some warranted, others less so. Some argue that it is a technocratic variant of “green capitalism” which does not fundamentally challenge the root causes of overconsumption. Others that it co-opts the regenerative principles of Indigenous economies, or that it is simply unfeasible technologically.
However, one of the deeper criticisms is that focusing on the idea of a circular economy doesn’t go far enough. How could such an economy actually flourish in what is, fundamentally, a very linear society? How could we change one aspect of our society while leaving the rest in a very opposing orientation?
Today we wanted to focus on that idea: how our economy–and society–came to be so linear in the first place. Transforming this dominant culture requires applying circularity principles to much more than just our economy, in a way which challenges some deeply entrenched beliefs–including something as basic as our sense of the direction of time itself.
Time’s arrow or time’s circle?
Most of us intuitively feel that time is linear. It makes immediate sense–we’re born, we grow up, and we die. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. A past, a present, and a future. But was it always this way? Or is this just the way those of us born in western contexts have inherited, unable to see beyond it? And if it wasn’t always this way, where did this idea come from?
For most of human history, cultures saw time as cyclical rather than linear. For the vast majority of our existence, human beings existed in small-scale nomadic cultures, moving around with the changing of the seasons and animal migrations. Even with the beginning of settled agriculture, social life was organized around harvests and seasonal celebrations. Large-scale cultures like the Maya or Babylonians had cyclical religious calendars organized around cosmic cycles of apocalypse of rebirth, often accompanied by other massive social changes, such as the cyclical cancellation of all debts in ancient Babylon. In these stories, the universe will come back around over and over–there is no discrete beginning and end.
These ways of thinking are so counter to our own reality that it is difficult to imagine them. Our current society is designed to deny the cyclical nature of human life–treating human beings as machines rather than living beings–while also disconnecting our economy from nature’s cycles, attempting infinite growth on a finite planet, extracting resources and disrupting ecosystems at a rate which is causing the sixth mass extinction. Although our lives are still undeniably cyclical–the passage of day and night, of changing seasons, even of fiscal cycles–much of our world is constructed to deny the cyclicality of our existence.
So where did things go wrong?
Prior to the ascent of Christianity, there was actually much debate about the nature of time. There were heated debates amongst Greek philosophers, for example, about whether time existed or was just a construct that we used to measure things in the world. There was no universal acceptance of one view of time–no agreed-upon “beginning” and “end.”
This concept arrived largely through the Bible and the spread of Christianity. Genesis and Judgement Day became the bookends for the beginning and end of time. Time was not some kind of endless cyclical entity guided by processes of nature; it was a grand narrative, a plan laid out by God, a story for all of our lives to follow with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It was a way to make sense of the chaos of the world. Tragedies and suffering were not the result of randomness or chaos; they were the work of an all-knowing God with a plan unbeknownst to us.
To accept life is to accept death?
This shift also radically changed our relationship with death. In nature, death is inextricably linked to life. Nature is the embodiment of circularity–a process made so efficient over billions of years of evolution that it has eliminated any kind of self-destructive waste. The natural decay of organisms provides food, nutrients, and soil for other organisms to grow and flourish. This allows ecosystems as a whole to thrive and become more complex over time, even while individual organisms perish. It’s a constant give-and-take, with each part working to sustain the whole.
To separate ourselves from this system, human beings first had to invent a culture which saw life as separate from death–which saw death as a separate realm, entirely disconnected from the natural world. This was achieved through the Christian concept of heaven.
Christians were not the first to invent the idea of an afterlife by any means. The notion that the human soul lives on after death, rather than dissipating with the body, is close to a cultural universal. What Christianity invented, however, was the idea that death was superior to life, and something to be venerated. This led to the pernicious idea that the material world of living things–fleeting, ephemeral, full of decay–was itself evil and profane, something to be transcended.
In the Christian faith, human beings are seen as banished from an eternal paradise–the garden of Eden–which we can rejoin only after we die. Our entire lives, therefore, are lived in preparation for this one great moment: reuniting with our creator, who absolves us of sin and allows us to finally live forever, to become perfect and immortal beings.
We can only live forever, in fact, after we have shed our mortal bodies and escaped Earth altogether, ceasing to be animals and instead becoming angels or gods. In other words, we only really live once we have died–once we have transcended the cycles of life and death which define natural existence. The material world of life, in this dualistic formulation, becomes something evil, associated with Satan–the world of sin and temptation which must disappear in order for God to triumph.
This notion was also the beginning of the idea of linear time, the idea that history had an ultimate endpoint, a final moment of revelation. Individual human lives culminated in death and the rise to heaven, while history itself pointed towards the end of time, the Second Coming, the apocalypse, and the death of the living world.
How linear thinking shapes the world
It’s easy to feel that these notions do not implicate us if we are not Christian or religious. But they are baked into countless aspects of our societies. As society became less religious, the role that the idea of heaven played in our culture did not disappear but rather changed forms, becoming analogous to a belief in endless progress and growth, ultimately culminating in utopia (i.e. the idea of a perfect society).
The notion that history was an upward march towards ever greater perfection and accumulation of power did not disappear but was simply secularized–what historian Karl Lowith called “the secularization of divine transcendence.” What changed was the site of this perfection–rather than being achieved in the afterlife, it could be achieved here on Earth. Paradise still existed, and it could be gained within our lifetimes.
This idea was instrumental in the rise of capitalism. As sociologist Max Weber famously wrote, Protestant sects such as the Calvinists believed that the accumulation of wealth on Earth was a sign of divine favour, creating a “Protestant work ethic” which played a major role in stimulating the development of European industry. The Reformation, coinciding with the invention of the printing press, helped spur the rise of individualism and the development of commerce simultaneously as it undermined the power of the Church.
Theologian Martin Palmer explains how “a huge amount of social philosophy, socialism, and Marxism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries belongs to the notion that history is inexorably moving towards a better world. This utopia/apocalypse tension is one that, to this day, shapes the social policy of socialist parties around the world.”
This concept of linear time continues to be the foundation of modern culture. We see history as linear and progressive, which also translates into a belief in unlimited economic growth and the creation of endless material abundance. This standard interpretation of history, also called the “Whig interpretation of history” (after the British political party associated with it), is the belief that history is oriented towards the gradual triumph of liberal capitalism all over the world. With roots in Immanuel Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” it has been repeated throughout time, finding a most recent expression in Francis Fukuyama’s much-derided essay on “The End of History.” It’s the idea that “modern is better,” that we are headed down an inevitable path of progress, and anything that stands in the way of that is to be treated as a threat.
This linear understanding of time was violently exported to the rest of the world in the form of European colonization, which was accompanied by a messianic belief in progress which justified subjugating other cultures in order to “uplift” them along the linear continuum of history, bringing them “into the present.” Such was the justification for “liberal imperialism,” as articulated by scholars like John Stuart Mill.
This belief was unquestioned by both supporters of capitalism and its critics, encompassing both Marxists, who believe that history will culminate in the victory of a perfect classless utopia, and also the modernization theorists following Walter Rostow, who see human cultures as progressing through a series of stages towards the ultimate end goal of industrial capitalism. Its fingerprints remain everywhere. It follows us as we separate our time into discrete blocks, optimizing our productivity and measuring each block carefully. It follows us as we declare that “time is money,” something to be quantified and assigned a price.
It also prevents us from accepting our status as a part of nature, not its dominator; as inherently cyclical beings, rather than machines from which to extract productivity; and from living in the present, rather than constantly oscillating between analyzing the past and agonizing about the future.
None of this is to say that we need to reject “progress” in the way we currently define it. The advances we’ve made in medicine, technology, and countless other sectors should be celebrated and maintained. The argument is a forward-looking one. This linear way of thinking produced many things that most of us would not want to give up; the problem is that the methods by which we produced them are no longer fit for purpose on such a finite planet. One thing to keep in mind is that we can still achieve progress–new cures for diseases, better agricultural techniques–without the massive, profit-driven, linear economy that causes so much destruction. Movements like Appropriate Technology and the fact that a great proportion of innovation still happens in universities and other government-funded research settings both exemplify this idea.
The bottom line is this: in order to have a chance of living in stability and longevity on the planet, we must embrace cyclicality in all spheres of life–not just in our economy.
Could we build a circular society?
It’s clear that the linear view of time is causing significant–even existential–problems for both the planet and our social systems. The endless pursuit of some utopia through constant progress is preventing us from exploring other ways of being with the Earth that may actually have a chance at sustaining life.
Simply restructuring our economy to produce less waste will not bring us all the way there. It is surely a step in the right direction, but creating a society which respects the cyclicality of life requires more than a technological restructuring of industrial systems. It also entails a social and cultural revolution. It requires rethinking many of the underlying assumptions about our world, mental models which invisibly shape our social reality. It also requires looking for new ways of being and knowing, particularly non-Western ones.
At the deepest level–the level of personal transformation–building a more circular society requires rethinking something as basic as our attitude towards death. As Ernest Becker writes in his famous book The Denial of Death, Judeo-Christian culture is premised on an intense fear of mortality, one which gives rise to a desire for immortality that is the basis of religious movements. Contemporary movements like transhumanism, accelerationism, and the life extension movement are just a few examples of this trend.
In reality, death is a necessary part of life, being that which connects living beings back to the Earth. Our fear of death is the root of our separation from the Earth. To be truly sustainable, we must learn to accept finitude–both the planetary limits of the Earth system, and also our own limited time as finite beings. To do so requires overcoming the false idea that we are separate from nature, and remembering that we are animals, not Gods. Only by doing so will it become possible for us to reclaim meaning in our lives and create a truly life-sustaining world.
This essay by Joe Zadeh for Noēma titled “The Tyranny of Time,” which discusses the concept that our modern sense of time, heavily influenced by industrial and technological advancements, and how it imposes a rigid structure on our lives that can be both oppressive and alienating.
This essay by Matt Farr for Aeon titled “The ABC of time,” which explores the philosophical perspective of time, specifically the C theory, which challenges the conventional view of time having a fixed direction from past to future.
This interview with Jenny Odell for Emergence Magazine “points beyond the domination of clock time toward ways of being that are more in tune with the rhythms and patterns of the Earth.”
The book "The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire" by Giordano Nanni, which examines how British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures during the 19th century as part of colonization.
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