3. A FREQUENCY
HYPOTHESIS
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3.2.1 Genesis Of The (Early) Modern
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| 3.2.1 Genesis Of The (Early) Modern | ||||
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The emergence of modernity is a striking world historical interval. But now we have two things, modernity and a transition to modernity with a divide. The rise of the modern, with a strong economic component has a built-in unity and reaches a climax and half-way point in the period of the Thirty Years War, with the implications of the English Revolution showing the first signs of the new world to come, with a template reissued in the American and French Revolution s. We are dealing with two dates enclosing a transition, and this might well hint at some deeper mechanics, for it suggests a sliding scale, like some frequency analysis. First we looked at the period 1800. Now we are emphasizing the year (roughly) 1500. The two together enclose a massive redirection of world history. The point is a little more obvious with the Axial Age examples. There we can’t avoid the issue. Here we notice the massive resemblance: modernity to the Axial transitions, especially the Greek case. Looking at the rise of the modern, using our differential periodization (two dates enclosing an interval of transition), we know what to look for. Three century transitions? We can see that the rise of the modern is a two-pronged transition of about three centuries, a divide at its end, and the onset of the New Age it creates. This clue of three centuries will help us unlock the earlier cases, which have very thin data, but, at least in the Axial interval, the same rough three centuries of transition. TP1 shows clear clustering around the three centuries leading up to –3000 (in a more complex model we might think in terms of an integration from minus infinity, tapering off rapidly before 1500, thus dispensing with the confusing idea of discontinuity). The question of how a new era could start in the year 1500 confuses the issue. The issue is not one of discontinuity, but of the clustering of innovations along an interval in a continuous history. The question is really how the interval, 1500 to 1800, could start a new era on a scale of five to ten thousand years. And relative to a larger scale a rough three-century block makes sense. Our differential intervals are rough measures that become meaningful in relation to increased scale. The point is that we are not looking at a succession of periods definable by ‘type’ but a transitional phase between intervals that are nameless, the reason attempts to define the ‘modern’ are so often mismatched in the debate over the ‘ism’ to go with it. With this approach the obvious ideological contrast of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, for example, simply disappears. Their unity is seen at a deeper level. The period of most seminal change, to a close look, is comprehensive, and rapidly reaches a peak in the Enlightenment and one that has tuned a new instrument of civilization, climaxing in the emergence of a new society by the time of the early nineteenth century. These three centuries, too often analyzed in separate parts and pieces, form a clear unity, and yet defy the manifold attempts at historical analysis. It could hardly be teleological if it inconsistently produces a spectrum of contradictions. A considerable debate attends the history of science and the confusion of discussion without the concept of ‘relative beginning s’. Thus, with some caution, we find after 1500 a field of clustered emergence, as a ‘revolutionary’ process seems to ignite, and morph into an entirely new form of culture, a process achieved, yet incomplete, by the middle of the nineteenth century. |
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