The cult of continuity

History would be a very boring read indeed if nothing changed. Imagine reading about the Roman Empire if it had survived intact and more or less untouched from Augustus onward. All that might be said is that the Pax Romana has been good for business and that any one day in the life of the empire has pretty much looked like any other for the past 2,000 years.

But, of course, that is not how human history has unfolded. It is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life. The argument goes that humans are so very clever that they have brilliantly overcome every resource and ecological constraint on their way to becoming the dominant species. And, now with our powerful new technologies we are poised to dominate the globe forever while adding to it the conquest of outer space. Perhaps every empire including the empire of modern man thinks along similar lines.


But a cursory study of history should lead us to conclude no such thing. Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. Human societies do not always triumph. They tend to rise and fall as if they had a natural life cycle.

This may seem all too obvious once you think about it. And yet, at present our modern society seems captive to a cult of continuity even as it touts the great change wrought by technology and predicts great changes ahead from that technology. It never occurs to those caught up in the cult of continuity that great change almost always means great peril! There is barely any mention of the possible vulnerabilities or even fatal side effects resulting from such technology. The Luddites are laughed at today as is Thomas Malthus who predicted starvation for the masses since food supplies were not supposed to keep up with population growth. These men saw peril where their compatriots only saw progress.

But history is all about discontinuity. Who would even bother to write the dull history of the untouched Roman Empire imagined above? In fact, reality has spawned myriad volumes of history over the past 20 centuries reflecting in part the great volume of discontinuity experienced by human societies.

Energy Bulletin