So there’s this novel. I haven’t read it myself, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to identify it – but it was written by an Oregon-born author, published in 2020, became a best-seller, and won awards. Many people love it, including at least one of my friends, and others really don’t care for it, including many members of my husband’s book club, a generally fine group of people. It’s about embracing diversity, and since it’s a fantasy novel, I bet that theme gets pretty interesting.

My husband and I had a long discussion about the book this week. I was hoping he could help me see why some people might love it while others, who do value its themes, didn’t enjoy it at all.

For him, it came down to the story’s logic. The main character is great because he has all of these desirable qualities, but then he’s plunged into a situation where he has to develop these same desirable qualities, as if he didn’t already have them. Another character does likewise – starts great but then has to go through a process to become great. That’s inconsistent!

I agree, but I kept thinking about it. Now I’m wondering – and this is sheer speculation, because as I said, I haven’t read this book – if maybe the conflict is between cyclical and linear time. The people who share my husband’s complaint might prefer a linear way of experiencing the world, where cause leads to effect and these effects accumulate and grow. That’s normal and common sense, right?

In a more cyclical way of experiencing the world, however, things may be eternally true and yet need to be developed and experienced again and again. Let me give two examples that I hope will expand your sympathy toward cyclical thinking, if you’re skeptical.

When we celebrate our annual holidays, each year we touch base with old truths (the emotional heart of the holiday) in new contexts (where we are in life right now). We carry our memories of our earlier holidays with us, but we also get to do things fresh and new each time we celebrate – the new experiences and the memories resonate together. We go through cycles of experiencing “eternal truths” in new ways.

In the writings of Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religions, all ancient religions worked this way, with eternal truths that new generations of people would be born into and experience. Only Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, are more linear, where societies are building toward a future.

A second way that cyclical thinking comes in handy is when we understand that societies that haven’t experienced a particular bad outcome are less likely to heed its warning signs. With new generations, we find ourselves re-experiencing some of the same old patterns and not necessarily noticing or caring. It is an eternal truth that totalitarianism is bad, whether that’s Stalinist communism or Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism, but people who aren’t attuned to its signals may be vulnerable to its lies.

So where many of us hope that we have collectively learned to Run! Run! Run! from a man using language like “vermin” to describe people living among us, others see a tough leader standing up to problems on our behalf. It could be tempting to trust someone like that.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading key works in a variety of fields beyond my own and finding more examples to add to my book manuscript on the ways we use language to shape public opinion. If you’d like to read more about the topic right now, though, I’d suggest the paper that Gerard Saucier and I wrote a few years ago. “Vermin” and words like it have been used to soften people up toward the idea of committing genocide.

As the philosopher George Santayana told us more than a hundred years ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You can’t get more cyclical than that.

For fans of this book, then, maybe the eternal truths it celebrates are not diminished by the reminder that they may need to be relearned. For the real-world usefulness of this idea, though, let us hope that whatever lessons we collectively need to review aren’t put to too great a test this November.