Essay ranked 3rd in GZA Global Essay Competition, 2022
Nothing new happens under the sun. It is an English saying as old as time itself. A phrase that means that what happened in the past, is bound to happen again, that the present is a mere reiteration of time that has passed, that our lives already have pre-determined endings.
As there is no smoke without a fire, there has to be some truth in the phrase, or it wouldn’t have stuck around for centuries. I believe that it has some standing, that the present holds a key to the past. The Earth goes through various uniform cycles of seasons every year, which is why weather can be easily predicted. Science has come so far that we can now predict future glaciations and sea level rises by studying patterns of the past. From our previous knowledge we can also determine when the human race will inevitably come to an end.
On a more personal scale, human nature is also very predictable. It is a fact that human behavior is shaped by the experiences and choices that were made in earlier stages of one’s life and that our future actions and the way we react in situations is a sheer reflection of the past. Wars in the past were fought for the same exact reason that they are fought for today. Countries and democracies are run on the same principles that have been around for decades. One can even argue that in the 21st century there are no new ideas or innovations anymore because all that Mother Earth had to offer has already been discovered and used.
In some sense, it is fair to that the present and future can be derived from the past and that our universe has run out of unfamiliar sequences of events; that whatever happens to us next has already transpired in the past. It can be a little sad to think about the world this way, imagine how boring and dull our lives would be if we had to do the same activities every single day for the rest of our lives and call it a life well lived. How melancholic would it be to not have the slightest bit of hope that tomorrow will not have something new and exciting to offer. Fortunately for us, there is a counter argument to the premise that nothing ‘new’ transpires anymore.
If nothing new happened under the sun, life on earth today wouldn’t exist as we know it. It is true that the universe runs on familiar patterns but once in a while something extraordinary takes place that changes the course of the future forever. A good example would be how Edward Jenner in 1796 noticed that people who were exposed to cowpox were immune to the much deadlier, smallpox and invented the first vaccine for it. Another example is that millions of years ago, the only existing life forms on Earth lived in the oceans and then one day an amphibian took to the land and the rest is history!
How could we conclude that nothing ‘new’ happens under the sun when every single day over 400 thousand babies are born, each having a different, unique fingerprint. It is hard to see new things around us because change takes time. Every day the earth changes bit by bit until decades or generations later, something absurdly new has evolved. If someone were to tell humans of the stone age that mankind would grow to develop sophisticated machines like televisions and mobile phones, they probably wouldn’t believe it. The Earth’s percussion has even caused what humans call the north star to have changed over time. During 3000BC, the ‘north star’ for ancient civilizations was the Thuban and now years later, it is the Polaris!
Change is all around us in every little thing that we do, it just takes time. According to chaos theory, if a butterfly flaps its wings at the right place and time, it could cause a hurricane halfway across the world. Though predictable, that is how erratic nature can also be. If all humans exhibited the same kind of behavior for generations, women still wouldn’t have the right to vote, medical practices wouldn’t have evolved to be as refined as they are today and so much of what we know today would not have been discovered. Change and newness is woven into the very fabric of the universe from which us humans, the Sun, Moon, Earth, and all other heavenly bodies are made.
So, in conclusion I think it is easier to believe that whatever happened in the past, is bound to happen again, that the present is a mere reiteration of time that has passed, that our lives already have pre-determined endings because the past is familiar and familiar is a comforting concept. Thankfully, it is not true because every second of every hour of every day, the universe is in constant motion. The only constant under the sun is change and the hope of something new to make a better tomorrow.
