I've been using a lot of structural and technological metaphors to describe various historical processes, and for the most part this is fine. In a way, structures and technologies are simplifications of the infinite complexity of the cosmos to suit our own aims (living or dead is simplification in the greater scheme of things), and the application of these things as teachable concepts is no different.
History is very much an organic thing. You can talk about causes and effects, but what we actually tend to see is a fractal emergence of a whole multitude of events and phenomena that take on a certain pattern of what we could call similar "causes," and that these patterns gradually coalesce and intensify and give way to what we could call similar "effects," and so in turn we could discern a certain flow of phenomena in time and space, but that it is never simply the one thing that leads to the other, which is more or less an artifact of our own thought and our need to simplify things to manipulate them in service of our aims.
In my writing I attempt to honor this organic conception, but this has to be done by juxtaposing an array of artifice in mimicry of that organic reality. It's still just a slightly more sophisticated and artful form of simplification and conceptualization. That's what I'm doing, and again and again I like to remind myself of this.
For whatever reason, we are deadly serious about the misuse of power tools, yet with something like the mind - which has an arguably far greater power to consume more and more available energy and run away with its instantiations, which have real world effects - we encourage people at a very young age to go hog wild with the thing and simply put as much resources as one can into it and sally forth with it to god knows where.
