Our schema has thus produced a very remarkable result, and we have another way of looking at modernity, as a ‘switched on’ interval. Using a sort of differential periodization , take the interval using the differential of two dates from 1500 to 1800 as the system interrupt in the eonic sequence, which switches off some time around 1800. That’s a strange thing to do to the data, at first sight. Let it seem strange. We simply chop everything off before 1500 and look at the compression of the differential period. There are undoubtedly factors of continuity, but it is the discontinuity that is of interest, for the nonce. The Euro-stream intersects with the eonic sequence, and we see all of a sudden why the rise of the modern has such a compelling resemblance to the Greek transition, almost like a restaging of the Ionian Enlightenment.

 That leaves the question, On what date did the switch on occur, and was it before or after Luther had breakfast one morning in 1512? That’s a problem with this kind of model, we don’t know. But to a first approximation it doesn’t matter. It is like acceleration. There is an interval of rapid change, but the content inside that change follows its own logic. That Newtonian ‘metaphor’ of acceleration  doesn’t quite apply, but the basic analog is cogent. Beyond that, we can see that there is a definite logic to the interval indicated. We can see that the period from Luther/Copernicus to the Enlightenment shows a coherent unity in its logic, but it is fairly well fragmented also. The ‘net transition’ is a major turning point, whatever inconsistencies it ends up with. The eonic sequence throws money at the problem in its interval, leaving the result to micro-action.

Students of medievalism or the Renaissance will be outraged, but in fact once we see that the issue is one of relative changes of direction, these other periods will stop getting stuffed into ‘pre-modern’ lead up boxes, where they don’t fit. Medieval Christendom was one of the great periods of world civilization, and it makes little sense to say that modernity evolved from that (apart from common parlance usage). TP3 is a >change in direction, not a continuous ‘evolution’ from antecedents, so says this new model. Looking at the eonic sequence we can see that its ‘next step’ echoes antiquity, not the period just before 1500. Such statements undoubtedly oversimplify, and this can be amended, complexified still further, to reintroduce, not continuity, but successiveness from the medieval period. But the streamlined version highlights the fact that TP3 seems to echo TP2 as much as anything else. And please note that we unconsciously take it this way, because we speak of the ‘middle ages’. Middle of what?

It sounds like science fiction at first, but we can take it experimentally, and then consider the clear exemplars in antiquity. As with the Greek case, we see that discontinuity is not speculative, it is essential to correct reasoning, and thoroughly empirical. So many pieces fall into place that we know we are on to something. This is the only way to handle a teleological system in which we are immersed. The sudden appearance of jagged edges to broken sequences is our fate as embedded observers.

Looking at the Axial Age, and the stream and sequence  pattern, especially that of the Greek example, we see that the chronic confusions of historical theories trying to explain the sudden take-off of the ‘West’ are really confronted with exactly the same phenomenon that we see in antiquity, which seems suddenly to stand out as the next phase in our eonic sequence. The telling clue is the signature rebirth of democracy, a low probability event in the general stream of history. Another is the (second) birth of Science. Look carefully, the rise of the modern shows a remarkable resemblance to the Ionian Enlightenment, thence the Greek transition (with important differences).

Thus, the stream of cultures, in a European zone, crosses the boundary of a greater sequence, and we have a new transition, which must be intermittent, and show a ‘divide’. The transition occurs with great precision in an acorn field, computable from the fields of diffusion in TP2. This transition is about three centuries. Trying to explain the rise of the West from something in the medieval period never succeeds, and now we know the reason why. This model  explains the confusion very well. It also shows why the outcome in the nineteenth century suddenly changes gears toward globalization , and as the system moves toward integration, the ‘West’ is indicted as a source of colonial imperialism, even as the associated emergent freedoms struggle to survive. This is a better way to mediate those conflicts, in any case. Our model separates directionality and (possible) teleology, and this is reflected in the immediate teleological collision that arose in the wake, not of modernism, but of the modern transition.

The rise of modernity is one of the most contentious of theoretical subjects, theory after theory, with attempts to explain its sudden rise invariably getting into a snafu over discontinuity, the Renaissance, and secularist ideology. But the high-level perception of its placement in the direct mainline of the eonic sequence solves most, if not all, of all of the problems, at the price of clipping the data at both ends with discontinuities. One reason for confusion is the tendency toward an economic interpretation. The problem is that while capitalism  seems to emerge in this period it doesn’t characterize modernity in and of itself. Forget capitalism, for just one moment.

The difficulty is one of univalent explanation. We can’t derive the Reformation  from economic explanation. It could just as well be a religious phenomenon! Isn’t that obvious? Scientism has left us cockeyed. The problem is clear: we see, this time inside our transition, the phenomenon of parallel interactive emergence. There is no getting around it. We see a Reformation , a Scientific Revolution, a philosophical descant from Descartes to Kant and Hume, the emergence both of an economic society and a new economic science, the rebirth of democracy and liberalism, trends toward freedom and equality along with their revolutions. And that doesn’t even address the question of literature and art, which show massive relative clusters between 1500 and 1800. The trick to the analysis here is to introduce discontinuity and the idea of a transition, on an experimental basis.

Axial Greece and modernity One thing we can focus on is that there is an astonishing resemblance of the modern transition to the Greek. We almost have an identical set of emergents. We see the ‘birth of science’ twice. We see the birth of democracy twice. We see a philosophical spree echoing the Greek Ionian Enlightenment, another ‘enlightenment’ in fact. Most of the key emergents in the Greek case barely survived the mideonic period. We see a strange recursion of the ancient case. And this tends to create confusion because it seems like something to do with ‘Western Civilization’. That is misleading. What we see is a frontier effect in the wake of the Roman Empire. And there is a difference in the modern case, in so far as the Indic, Israelite, and Greco-Roman diffusion fields sourcing in the Axial are blended in the final result.

It is misleading to speak of some ‘Western Civilization ’ in dynamical terms. We are stuck in that rut, even as our eonic mainline deftly exploits its assets in recursive fashion, on a global scale, in the pivot interval, TP3. Please note that science and the Reformation come into play in the sixteenth century, and that the beginning of modernity was, if anything, a religious phenomenon, one rapidly dissolving into a broad secular pluralism, if you prefer. Our secular age, however, has no easy definition. Darwin’s theory somehow got drafted into the definition, but if that fails, what is the definition? A close look at TP3 shows a definite effort to respond to that problem, and we see the climax to the Protestant Reformation in the Enlightenment’s alter ego’s, e.g. the rise of the philosophy of history, in figures such as Kant and others. They try to take the idea of Reason in history and produce a secular version of the religious thematics absent in the great Newtonian revolution. Note that science is an eonic emergent, and can’t necessarily be taken as the source, cause, or future of the system. It may be able to exit eonic evolution to produce a ‘history as scientific culture’, but so far it is just another stream process getting reamped at TP3.

Science is about physics. We have no grounds, as such, for thinking it can explain its own self-evolution in world history, let alone replace the self-consciousness and its psychology, which stands at the core of change. To do that it must produce a science of metaphysics, and the philosopher/scientist Kant attempted to lay the groundwork for that. Science can’t resolve Q1, 2, 3. But we see that our eonic mainline already seems to have the key to that. In fact, we note that TP3 shows an explosion in the emergence of ideas of freedom, and that the ideologies  of TP3 are built from that. So the question returns, can Science answer the ‘what causes freedom?’ question? If not, its emergent stream, trying to overtake the whole of the output of modernism will sooner or later derail. We can see that our system sets its own direction. It is therefore, if not a teleological system, at least one not in the Newtonian mold. Thus scientific models will tend to produce peculiar Oedipus effects in their emergentist collision with the outcome of TP3. Indeed, right on schedule, we see the battle over evolution arising as the mechanizations of ethics (the freedom idea) start to produce their culture noise factor.

We tend to underestimate the Protestant Reformation, speaking here from a secular viewpoint, to be sure. The sociologist Weber didn’t make that mistake, and saw its crucial place as a culture form morphing religious culture as an economic vehicle. The point is that religion can disgorge practical ideologies of action from its mythical muddle, while science can only produce theories, causation claims. This religious phenomenon was triggered by the translation of the Bible into the various koines of Europe, a decisive revolutionary gesture of ‘open information’, one rapidly outstripping its own starting assumptions, moving toward democratic equalization in the Enlightenment. We forget the ‘freedom’ factor in the Reformation, too focused on the freedom revolutions that start popping up one after another. Just as with the Greeks a religious matrix starts to rationalize and generate an Enlightenment Reason ideology. Luther applied Reason to the almost psychotic hodgepodge of Christian theology that he found. But the term ‘secularism’ is not easily defined, and what we are talking about is a major turning point, which is a broad cluster of eonic emergents  related to a frontier effect. It is an issue of global stasis, not of some ‘secular’ ism. This creates, not a Western civilization, but a modern temporal phase, a New Age of modernity, that is global with a local pivot.

Note that it is not the cultural evolution of ‘Europe’ that produces modernity. No, it is the divisive partition of Europe, at a frontier, that produces the modern phase transition, Europe cut in two in an unmistakable case of the frontier effect, and the defensive barrier for innovation. The sheer ferocity of that partition (due to the ‘filling up’ of world space, and the closure of frontiers) and the resistance to it should sink any illusions Europe was going through spontaneous cultural evolution due to superior anything. Not Christianity but the eonic relative transform of the same is what lays the groundwork. And it is not Protestantism but the partition itself, and the resulting flow of information from innovations created behind this partition that produces the modern phase. These innovations are not Protestant or religious and flow as well across the partition. However, it remains true that Protestant countries rapidly outstrip the rest in terms of their modernist transformation. Again it is not Europe, but the core zones behind the partition, in the frontier area, along with their diffusion fields and sidewinders, such as the new American continent, that produce the changes. It is a question of the partition and the flow of information, with much of the result in the sidewinders, that is important, not the future evolution of Europe. In any case, please note the fine grain of modernity, with the depth of its spectrum, and its many ‘Enlightenments’ behind the basic partition, Scottish, German, French (half and half, as to the partition).

The modern divide We have a way to put our idea to a simple test: if the phenomenon is not a continuous history (it is that too) but a transition, then its endpoint will show its hand. With that idea we discover the modern ‘divide’. We can see it clearly just at the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions. Our transition climaxes and comes to an end, a new (mideonic) period underway. Many systems have such a property. A slingshot just at release point, a rocket at liftoff at the end of countdown, and so on.

Our model is a fairly crude one, but its way of using two dates to enclose an interval, or transition, suddenly uncovers a phenomenon we didn’t suspect. Why is the last generation of the eighteenth century one of the most densely packed regions of innovation in world history? All of sudden we know why, and can see the effect is like a sudden release point when a new era comes into existence after its transitional passage. It is also going to be the rough point where ‘eonic determination’ fades out and the system is under its own steam, ‘free action’. This divide must be left rough, say 1750 to 1850, but we can see that the generation of the French Revolution  shows a good approximation to the main moment. The term ‘eonic evolution’ has been defined to refer to the ‘turning’ of the turning points in our sequence. Once that turning is complete, the ‘evolution’ is over, eonic determination switches off, and free action fills the vacuum. This ‘turning’ we call a transition.

We can see that our terms are somewhat fuzzy, but it is not hard to find the actual evidence for this in ‘modern times’, and the obvious choice of beginning point is the Reformation and sixteenth century. And once we consider it this way we can see at once a good candidate for the divide is the period of the Enlightenment, or just after, as the phenomenon of ‘modernity’ matures and takes off as a new period in history. We are not going to be dogmatic about this, for the issue is fuzzy blocks of turning points whose effect in the large is obvious from a high level. But it is useful to zoom in for greater detail, and once we do that the ‘discrete’ series connection of modernity to the stream of continuous history suddenly becomes obvious, to our amazement. We suddenly realize why we are preoccupied with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, with a rationale out of the blue to see that is not random.

The switch-off point is roughly visible in antiquity, though not so clearly in the case of the birth of civilization, and this resolves a confusion of Jaspers’ Axial Age. We will continue to use the term, but it is not an age at all, but a transition between age periods. If we look at the history of the Old Testament composition we can see that its redactors came into existence about the time of the Exile, and thereafter. It is the clear point where the seminal innovations seem to complete and people start looking backward. Just before the Exile, for example, the Old Testament starts to take shape. By this logic the riddle of Greek civilization solves itself. We are about the time of Solon.

We see that our ‘modernity’, the rise of the modern, is really two things, the transition and the period that starts after that transition. We are ready to dig deeper, in the next chapter. But, if we recall our ‘frequency deduction’, we note that our model faithfully reflects the paradox of ‘freedom evolving’ in producing a ‘something causes freedom contradiction’, and our data directly mirrors this unexpectedly significant piece of jargon.

Eonic macroevolution of freedom? What on earth is that? Our analysis spawns a strange piece of jargon, the term ‘eonic macroevolution of freedom, or democracy’. What on earth does this mean? The ‘causality of freedom’ (??), seemingly a contradiction in terms. But the clue to everything, as we will see, and an indication of the inherent power of our model, that it raises a subtle question, about freedom and causality. This is a piece of ad hoc jargon issued by our model, and seems to be too odd for use, until we see that it does have meaning, as a shaggy dog version of the famous antinomy of Kant we will proceed to examine in the next chapter. Please note that our formulation distinguishes between the ‘eonic determination of democracy’ and ‘democracy as free action’. Is that a helpful distinction or just a strange permutation of terminology? In fact, we will suggest that this is a clue to the nature of what we call the divide at the end of a transition. But to summarize, either free men produced democracy or else some induction occurred there. Since the later seems to be the case, we suspect some determination of freedom, an apparent contradiction. Does history reflect this? Sure enough we find the moment when induction passes into free action twice in our model, once near Solon, second near the modern divide. We can see such a distinction is essential since the emergence and realization of democracy might differ, a difference clearly visible in the American system. We will explore this in the next section.

Although these concepts are somewhat abstract we should table them to protect a secular philosophy of history from a theistic one, where the action of divinity turns into a form of domination as authoritarian ideology. The meaning of the term ‘freedom induction’ might remain unclear, but its gist is not control but the staging of emergent freedom. That is something very different from the manipulation of transcendent metaphysics to stifle human autonomy.

A universal history built around the idea of freedom  is quite different from a theistic one, for the sense of transcendental domination, the puppet history of the historical subject, becomes his ‘evolution of freedom’, however formal that depiction. Freedom induction is very different indeed from theistic programming. We can get more specific in the next section.