3.2.1 A Middle Age

Table of Contents for
 
World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
3rd. Edition
The Book
By  John Landon

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 3. A FREQUENCY HYPOTHESIS  
     3.1 AN EONIC SEQUENCE, AND A FREQUENCY DEDUCTION  
        3.1.1 A Short History Of The World  
     3.2 MODERN TO POSTMODERN  
        3.2.1 Genesis Of The (Early) Modern  
        3.2.2 A Middle Age  
        3.2.3 Decline And Fall: The Idea Of Progress  
     3.3 THE AXIAL AGE  
        3.3.1 Synchronous Parallelism: A Minimum Principle?   
        3.3.2 The Frontier Effect  
        3.3.3 Again, A Middle Age: Detecting Sumer…  
     3.4 THE BIRTH OF CIVILIZATION  
        3.4.1 Invisible Transitions? The Neolithic  
     3.5 THE EONIC EFFECT: PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM  
ENDNOTES  
     3.6 TRANSITION AND DIVIDE: A NEW MODEL OF THE MODERN  
        3.6.1 Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence  
     3.7 SPENGLER, TOYNBEE, AND CYCLICAL THEORIES  
        3.7.1 Cycle, Counter-cycle: Floating Fourth Turning points

 The perception of the rise of the modern is the mirror image of our intuitive perception of the Middle Ages. This medieval period is a phenomenon that we take for granted, and which stands in ironic relation to our ideas of progress (which remarkably go into postmodern decline promptly after the modern transition). Sometimes it is the ‘Dark Ages’, though not everywhere so dark.

Note that as we move backwards the concept of the unilinear ‘evolution of a civilization’ loses its meaning. We enter a far larger sphere, the one Eurasian ‘civilization’ of which the European modernist offshoot is but a branch. The concoction, ‘Western Civilization’, blinds us to this unity. We speak of the Dark Ages, but it was quite a seminal period of gestation, as the influences of the Roman oikoumene began to ferment. The student was beginning to graduate. As we move backwards, our earlier hotspot steps are in different places, and yet development occurs nonetheless. And we also see the absence of a Dark Age in other areas, as the ‘medieval’ seems better-named the ‘mideonic’. Islam, and Sung China, are evidence of the many ‘mideonic’ peaks in our emerging large-scale ‘eonic world system’. What we mistakenly see as one ‘Western’ civilization is an illusion created by the fact that Archaic Greece and the rise of the modern (which we see as intermittent phases in our eonic sequence) both share common linguistic and cultural elements, but braided with Judaic, concealed Indic, and finally Islamic influences. The spread of the great religions is creating a foundation for a global culture, even as its effects crystallize as new sluggish civilizations. The attempt to make one ‘European civilization’ out of the successive transitions in Greece and Europe has hopelessly confused the issue. So ‘Western Civilization’ is a sophisticated paste up of basically tribal thinking.

We are immersed in the cascade of modern things, yet clock this from an arbitrary starting point, the end of a middle period. This is a good example of the way we already sense an ‘eonic effect’, in isolation, without realizing its significance. This chronicling begins in the sixteenth century. We should be confronted with the question, What is this ‘medieval’ period in the middle of? Our sense of a discontinuity, now with a suggestion that it is not a date but an interval of several centuries after about 1500, draws us backwards to grapple with clear reality of the long period of stasis that almost dwarfs the period of modernism that is now a world in itself, a new age of history well underway. We have forbidden ourselves the term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ but we can take the phrase apart and notice that our ‘Western Tradition’ is really two punctuations (at least) connected by a long static equilibrium. In fact, the term is misleading, since our sluggish middle is by no means in equilibrium, save relative to the unique periods of truly foundational advance. Technology proceeds apace, economic networks are growing apace. Prior sources of advance are diffusing. Cultures that long ago entered the Neolithic and then remained on that plateau are starting to reckon with the later achievements of the Sumerians onwards.