The Histories and Theories Generational Cycles Michael Kiyoshi Salvatore Does history repeat? Ask a historian and they may humor the suggestion of a literal recurrence, perhaps conceding that some events may metaphorically rhyme. Humanity’s ability to shape its fate is limited, after all; despite our many advances in embodied and material technologies, the incomprehensible scale of our endeavors and their potential for catastrophe, we possess the same fundamental needs and behavioral inclinations as we had millennia ago, constraining our responses to present, novel events. Inherited, rational knowledge of the past is rarely a substitute for the intuitive wisdom of first-hand experience, often dooming us to chronically relearn hard lessons. 1 To suggest these patterns have sustained, predictable regularity is a far more exceptional claim, however, demanding exceptional evidence. Among laypeople, some cyclical models like Spengler’s theory of civilizational decline or the Schlesingers’ political oscillations between conservatism and liberalism may intrigue, but history is most commonly understood in terms of two visions that Richard Tarnas articulates in Cosmos and Psyche: history tracks “a predominantly problematic, even tragic narrative of humanity’s gradual but radical fall and separation from an original state of oneness with nature and an encompassing spiritual dimension of being” 2 or else history describes “the evolution of human consciousness as an epic narrative of human progress, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance, suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever- increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being.” 3 The former has affinity with everyday impulses toward conserving tradition against further descent, the latter with reforming and revolutionizing impulses for further transcendence, best embodied by the ideals of the Enlightenment. The former intimates a downward line of time, the latter upward. 1 Two supplemental truisms: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” - Mark Twain (apocryphal) “Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana 2 Richard Tarnas. Cosmos and Psyche (New York: Plume, 2007), 13. 3 Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, 12. 1