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The pieces of our puzzle fall into place quite easily once we
have rightly posed our question of the rise of the modern in terms of its mirror
image, a middle, if not a decline and fall. This Roman decline is perhaps
confusing because it is not the entire interval of this middle, and only its
last stage, and then only in the relationship of the Roman to the modern worlds.
The idea of Western Civilization throws us out of whack, and Islam appears to
carry the slack of the Dark Ages. Our model is global. So we see a ‘middle’ age,
‘medieval or dark’ or not. We are looking for the beginning of this ‘middle’,
and we find it at once in the period of the rise of our Roman World, and the
next era of discontinuity, so visible in the onset of the Classical World. The
overall pattern is utterly simple. We see the rise of the modern, after a
decline and fall, and the rise before this decline brings us to the age of the
Roman
Republic, and this to the
world ca. —600, where a host of changes is rapidly transforming the world it
finds. Even as we insert a place marker, to zoom in for close observation, we
should wonder, why stop there, just under two and a half millennia separate two
punctuations. We shall be curious in advance of the period, now finally an
object of archaeological enquiry, taken by an equal interval to about –3000, our
destination.
The issue confronts us stubbornly, why do we use the term
‘Middle Age’? We begin to see that, while a case can be made as to the emergence
of a more advanced culture from a less advanced medieval culture, the reality is
actually more complex. Two things are possible now, two evolutions, general
development from medieval to modern times, and the decisive change of
evolutionary direction that we see in the second type of ‘eonic evolution’. The
problem with old accounts disappears here, for the medieval world is not so
primitive as the first type of evolutionary account implies. What we can say is
that the rise of the modern world dramatically changes the direction of world
history. And it is also true that this has some of the qualities of resumed
advance. It would seem that progress had dried up at the fall of the Roman Empire, and come to a halt. The difficulties in the
idea of progress are essential to explore, for its current form doesn’t quite
match the evidence, if we had wished to extend it to an evolutionary context.
Promptly its critics are in ascendant. But a facile critique of the idea of
progress too often forgets its ultimate implication: the renunciation of the
hard won victories of modern revolutions in pulling out of a kind of global
slump. Part of the problem is the arbitrary misuse of the idea in an
evolutionary context, where biologists understandably challenge its surrogate
status as a ‘law of evolution’. But the idea of progress, in our context, is a
beast in its proper forest, the contentious pulling out of ‘medieval doldrums’
to forge a new world, and advance human knowledge beyond what it had been
before. We see the birth of the idea of progress in
the celebrated battle of the Ancients and Moderns, a splendid symptom of the new
era coming about.[i]
The idea of
progress is attacked on evolutionary and religious grounds, but we will both
embrace the idea and generalize it to a less ideological version, as eonic
progression.
We are ready to move backwards again toward antiquity in
search of the right perspective on the rise of the modern world. We have asked
‘middle of what?’ There can be only one answer, and we can move on, to examine
the onset of our middle period. As we explore the world of the Classical Greeks
we know that we are in the presence of another or our seminal eras, further,
that as we zoom in on the phenomenon, it shows a strong resemblance with the
rise of the modern world.
[i]
Robert Nisbet, in History of the
Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), has an interesting
conservative depiction of the rise of the idea of progress as the Great
Renewal beginning in the sixteenth century, distinguished from the
Renaissance period.
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