Read a fun recent article today by comparative historian Prasenjit Duara called "Oceans as the Paradigm of History." It argues that
Most historical storytelling narrates in linear terms within the logic and ever contested boundaries of nation states, but that's not how human history actually works - or how it participates in the broader history of life. Letting the ocean serve as the paradigm of history (how time flows, how change happens) opens many possibilities - and, of course, isn't just a metaphor. The Gulf Stream and the Monsoon, for instance, have shaped human history in all sorts of ways. Duara argues also that it is in water - especially in the oceans - that humanity has experienced the cycles of time, and how to live within them.
Duara has reflected on these questions and processes for many years, but here is agitated by the way human beings are increasingly affecting the oceans, deliberately and unwittingly, in territorial claims and mining and pollution, etc. To counter this, and vindicate the ocean as a better model for understanding the "human relationshup with the natural world," he invites us to consider how the ocean is different from terrestrial imaginings. Unlike land or even rivers, oceanic currents don't just flow but cycle. Temperature and salinity but also the topography of shore and ocean bed affect them, as do wind and weather - and of course all of these are interdependent relationships.
But ocean currents occur simultaneously also at multiple dramatically different but interacting levels. Currents include surface eddies (see above), but also deep currents (see below) which complete their slow circuit roughly every thousand years (wow!). Imagine understanding the way events unfold in these terms! (He gives some interesting examples from the circulation of ideas.) But there's more: we're talking a three-dimensional space, not the flattening illusion of terrestrial two dimensions, and everything interpenetrates. There are no boundaries as (apparently) on land, but a vast shared reality. We might be able to learn from cetaceans, who track multiple spaces all the time; sound travels four times as fast in water as in air.
Ancient cultures can't have known all of this but they knew enough to understand cycles, and that you have to learn to accommodate them. This is something Duara thinks moderns and our historians have forgotten, committed as we are to unsustainable linear ideas of growth. But in the Vedas, in Buddhist ideas of "dependent arising" and of course in Daoism there's something like an oceanic understanding of things which we could sorely use to break the hold of the ways of living which produced the Anthropocene. The more reason to protect the oceans from despoliation, not only as a reality - we can't live without them, and their "revenge" at our unsustainable ways is already devastating - but as an idea, too, a paradigm for the way of the world.
