5. SYMPHONY OF EMERGENCE
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| 5.2 The Modern Turn: Looking Backward | ||||
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What is our starting point? The Big Bang? Hominids parting
ways from chimpanzees? The Great Explosion? The Neolithic? Our
model is designed to allow us to start anywhere, without an absolute beginning.
We suspect our eonic series starts with the Neolithic, but we begin to see the
eonic effect only with the era of Track of the eonic observer As we begin an eonic outline, we need to produce the biography of the eonic observer, his global coordinates relative to the eonic effect, here ‘modernity’, probably in a secular perspective, his ideology, and place relative to the great eonic emergents inside of which he observes the past. He has an important task: updating the data of prior eonic observers, viz. the redactors of the Old Testament. An upgrade here is swiftly accomplished with the eonic model. Looking backward It is important to remember that we are outside the last transition of our sequence, looking backward. The action of our system shuts down and is replaced by our spontaneous free action, looking forward. This system shutdown point is clearly present in the early nineteenth century. Our model is fussy on this ‘quibble’ but protects us from teleological confusions. We suspect that directionality, seen looking backwards, is evidence of a teleological system. But this is a discrete-continuous system, We only get glimpses of the system changing direction, often several in tandem, not of teleology. The postmodern turn Instinctively, ‘postmodern’ theorists sense the end of the modern transition, thinking it somehow ‘post’ in relation to the modern. But for us this periodization is wrong. The ‘modern’ simply indicates anything after the early modern, until the next appearance, if any, of the eonic sequence. The ‘postmodern’ critiques of the modern realization are another matter. There is nothing enjoined in our fully dialectical discourse against challenges to modernist dogmas. But experience will show the fragility of simplistic substitutes. With what will you replace the discrete freedom sequence? Decline into chaos would be your fate. Thus the postmodern turn is perhaps illusory as postmodernism will end absorbed into modernist holism. Did not Kant invent postmodern anti-foundationalism? The idea of a Table of Contents is apt. As example consider a well-known world history. Cheshire Cat Cycles and a Table of Contents. Consider William MacNeill’s TOC in his world history The Rise of the West: Part I: The Era of Middle Eastern Dominance to 500 B.C. Part II: Eurasian Cultural Balance, 500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. Part III: The Era of Western Dominance, 1500 A.D. to the present. Note how the TOC automatically reflects the eonic effect.
Note that our present is just outside the last transition. The question of the
West, however, is problematical, until we see that the overall pattern is not
about the West, but the frontier effect in the Western Eurasian sector. Since
this ‘civilization’, the West, began in the agora of 1. Transition 1,… era of the Mesopotamian/Egyptian oikoumenes 2. Transition 2,… era of the Axial interval, and oikoumenes 3. Transition 3, the present… ???? onset of first global oikoumene. 4. A new mideonic era…end of eonic sequence? We detect what we have called the ‘eonic evolution’ of civilization. In fact our first transition is probably nothing of the kind, and we can compute backwards in 2400 year steps to posit some possible earlier transitions, but for now all we have is our core eonic effect. We could recalibrate our sequence with a different beginning. In the Appendix we will use this completely generalized terminology of ‘eonic transitions’ exclusively, expressing our frequency hypothesis: ‘ET1,…’ : ????? ‘ET2,…’ : ??-8100 to -7800 ‘ET3,…’ : ?-5700 to -5400 ‘ET4,….’ : -3300 to -3000 ‘ET5,….’ : -900 to -600 ‘ET6,….’ : 1500 to 1800 The purpose of this terminology is to produce global
coordinates, ‘ET5, This is not cyclical myth-mongering, but an arduous discipline, and we can’t just look for vague correlations. We need rich data that can show relative transforms with the right periodization. That’s hard, even for ‘ET4’, but easy with the Axial period, and modernity. And these two form a kind of ‘core eonic effect’ that makes sudden sense if we assume some kind of frequency phenomenon at work. We are essentially attempting to understand our modernity, and the meaning of secularism disentangling itself from its Axial predecessor. Modernity is under attack, and yet we can see that it has clear evolutionary status. We should plead the hope that our efforts not vanish in the flood as did the Greek Axial. If need be we will put everything in a time-capsule before we disappear in the next jihad. The myth Of Western Civilization The idea of the ‘rise of the West’ won’t pass muster in our formulation. We have one global field of civilizations and an eonic sequence, with time-slices usually satisfying a frontier effect. The sudden rise of modernity is one such frontier effect, in a brief transition that rapidly swings outwards toward globalization . Two Universal Histories Having created one universal history, we suddenly confront another, the stream and sequence contrast. Historical narratives suffer the bane of selectivity. Ours is so selective it flies in reverse. Three small time slices are all we need. Having produced one universal history, we promptly create a vacuum and generate a second, as if one is trying to reach another. So our discussion, and the eonic effect, is really about the whole, with a strategy to reach that whole. Since this invokes some form of globalization, we note that it is not the same as the economic variety. So the ‘modern’ time-slice, ‘ET6’, in a Western Eurasian sector triggers a new era of globalization. Note the way the modern transition expresses a theme of universality, followed now by a postmodern reaction, which is misleading, but an essential challenge to Eurocentrism. Like clockwork the system disengages itself from Euro-centered culture toward a matrix of global culture that also honors the immense diversity of cultural streams. And as we pass beyond the modern transition our resolution of Kant’s Challenge shows us a coherent history five thousand years in length, in the dawn of a New Age just barely underway. We see that much of the drama of secularization generated by modernity is really about this New Age effect, and this, if the Axial era is any guide, threatens a prodigious recasting of the elements of religion, a process well underway as we examine the wake of the mighty Protestant Reformation at the beginning of the modern transformation. The emergence of the Enlightenment sets the tone for this dangerous passage, and we should do well to learn the lesson of this revolution of time, since history will not rest. But this risks casting all our observation in terms of modern conceptions, as we see antiquity through the modern lens. To do justice to our subject we must be prepared to enter a series of different worlds, and to understand the logic of different moments in our eonic sequence. ‘ET6++’: Looking backward Just as we are about to begin our tour of the eonic sequence, we can remind ourselves again that we are in the late (post-transitional) modern period looking backward, inside the cone of diffusion of the last transition, seeing everything through the filter of the changes of this last transition, whose effects create a dialectic against what was occurring before, e.g. a secular perspective on religion. Our double plus can stand for the two centuries just past the transition, with their spectacular flourish, followed by sudden chaotification, noticed, if not abetted, by postmodern critique. We should be wary of a loss of nerve and not be overwhelmed by the inexorable resurgence of traditionalism that flows around the modern transition as if nothing had happened. ‘ET6+’: The divide point The spectacular moment of the divide predicted by our model is clearly, if misleadingly, correlated with the French and Industrial Revolutions, and the host of other eonic emergents rushing into existence as a nineteenth century take-off ignites the modern period as such, distinguished from the localized early modern with its frontier effect clustered in Northern Europe. ‘ET6’: The modern transition The sixteenth century is the primordial early modern onset of the transition, and the parallel Reformation and Copernican paradigm shift prophecy the coming era. The aftermath of the Thirty Years War and the English Revolution leads to the birth of the Enlightenment, and the seeds of virtually all that will come are sown. We are ready to begin a stepping stone passage through our eonic sequence in a minimal outline, beginning with the Neolithic.
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