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There is one more crucial property, the ‘acorn or frontier
effect’. Note that something global is occurring starting in a series of local
areas. But the sequence restarts in a new place each time, just at the frontier
of its predecessor. The world of Archaic Greece
is a frontier relative to the center of
gravity of civilization. The world of Canaan, spawning ‘Israel’, does not look like a frontier now, but
in the era of the mythical Abraham it certainly was, and we even have a
‘pioneer’ story about his leaving the city of Ur
in a prime diffusion source, the world of prior Sumer. A sort of double acorn
effect, in fact, results from the equal influence of the Egyptian civilization
nearby. Greece and Rome in the Axial period were definitely still frontier
areas, relative to the by then ancient world of
Egypt
and Mesopotamia. Each of our transitions
creates a hotspot, then expands to create a new civilization, better, oikoumene.
Cultural acorns sprout in this field, and then at the next cycle one of them
becomes a new transition. Note how our sequence is generating ‘evolution in the
large’ via local hotspots, ‘short term evolution in the small’. We must study
the diffusion fields of our turning points.
This property makes complete sense. If we restart too far
away, the sequence can’t continue. But if we are too close, the momentum of the
earlier stage will overwhelm advance or make novelty abortive. The strangest
thing about this ‘Israel’ or ‘Israel/Judah’ is the way it
can barely maintain its integrity as a state, yet manages to produce a second
great tradition and literature, and this in synchronous emergence with the
Greek. It succeeds by failure, remarkably, as the empires around it pass away.
We are suspicious of an isomorphic structure here. This play on the state is
characteristic of TP2, and we see all the stages of a state turning into a
religion. The synchronous intervals match across the board, one to the other,
from about –900 to the period just before the Exile, for a seminal period, with
the period of great advance well completed by –400. Note that the by the second
date the Old Testament is essentially a fait accompli. If we examine
India
and China
we see once again analogous intervals in which creative advance occurs. Note
that by about –400 a second world religion has come into existence in India.
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