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As noted, our eonic sequence is built around a series of
short-acting intervals or transitions, and any such intermittent process will
generate a ‘divide’, that is, the rough point at which the intermittent
effect wanes and the outcome stabilizes. It is one of the most spectacular
confirmations of our perspective that it uncovers this unsuspected aspect of the
rise of the modern. We shouldn’t be distracted by the secondary or exponential
changes ignited by the new period generated. It is the core emergents,
high-level cultural innovations, that are crucial, not their subsequent course.
The downfield is something else. We deduce this in the abstract, and turn to our
data to see if it reflects anything like this. It definitely does, and we can
spot the right point immediately.
Thus, the period of the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century foots the bill at once, and is one of the
most fantastic (relative) ‘start-up’ periods of world history (a start-up
inside a larger start-up, the transition), as the system crosses a ‘divide’.
This crossing point, a divide, comes near the end of the most recent of our
eonic transitions. As we move backwards we can deduce the rough points of the earlier
transitions and divides, although the divide for the first transition is not yet
within the range of observation.
In one way this divide is an illusion created by the
greater ‘divide’ of a transition. But the divide around 1800 is very real
(we can take 1750-1850 as a broader version). We see one of history’s great
evolutionary moments. By definition the system is moving from eonic
determination to free action. It is also the moment that the economist W.W.
Rostow, in economic terms, called a ‘take-off’. It is essential, however,
not to confuse this divide with a purely economic phenomenon, as in the
‘take-off’ of the English Industrial Revolution. The fantastic creativity of
the threshold period of the American, French and Industrial Revolutions, the climax of our great turning point, is mirrored in the spawn of
neologisms that appear at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Eric Hobsbawm, at the start of The Age of
Revolution,
a history of this period from the
French and Industrial Revolution to its close after 1848, begins his account of this
Dual Revolution with a list of some of these terms:
industry,
factory, middle class, working class, capitalism, socialism, aristocracy,
railway, liberal, conservative, nationality, scientist, engineer, proletariat,
(economic) crisis, journalism, ideology.[i]
The retail of current change tends to be smothered by the
wholesale of this great divide period, and these words almost tell the story of
the modern period of transformation by themselves, and demonstrate very
dramatically the way in which something more than transient fashion is coming
into existence. They are each miniature examples of what we have called eonic
emergents’, growth processes that suddenly come into being, or amplify, or transform
from something related, and whose character shows a clear relationship, and
therefore correlation, with the overall process of modernization in its broadest
sense. The sheer density of social change that ushered in a new world in the
period of the post-Enlightenment can be seen in the nature of our daily
preoccupations whose structure spring from this period.
In our own age, we are the children of this mysterious
‘divide’ of the generation of the French Revolution, with its cornucopia of accelerated changes. We aren’t being dogmatic, for
the effect is relatively fuzzy, and can call this divide the period from 1750 to
1850. But once we suspect an intermittent process, we zero in for this property,
and find it in this case (and marginally for our earlier turning points, as we
will see). The
divide is the climax of the rise of the modern and the scale and depth of the
change that occurred in the whole period, especially near this divide, dwarfs
all other candidates and is comparable only with the onset of civilization and
the onset of the ‘Classical’ World.
In the space of a generation, the Dual Revolution of the
English ‘great transformation’ of industrialism and the French political
conflagration, as a volcano of the ‘Left’ passing into Socialism and
Communism, initiate a global-scale ‘crossing of the divide’ that encompasses
the American Revolution, immense cultural changes in politics, class structure,
philosophy, religion, science, literature, indeed every
category of human behavior. After more than two thousand years, democracy,
driven by ‘class struggle’, emerges into universal acceptance after
universal condemnation. The final assault on slavery
rises with the paeans of Freedom
culminating in the American Civil War.
Awash even after two centuries in a global transformation
that dwarfs the memory of the wrathful minutes of revolutionary ardor in the
streets of Paris, we arrive in our moment still animated by its momentum with
enough distance to review its meaning from a greater perspective, and with an
earnest hope, that only some phantom of the ultra-right could challenge, that as
its children we will not undo its axioms. In a history of 5000 years we are
barely more than a century past one of history’s most terrible institutions,
human slavery. And we would be deceived by our briefer time and the immediacy of
a nearer moment if we complacently assumed that an action of Freedom guaranteed
our future from the reaction of a greater time.
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