5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Modern To Postmodern
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| 5.1 Modern to Postmodern | ||||
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What defines the ‘modern’? Science? Secularism? An economic society? Technology? The Protestant Reformation? The rise of the West? We should stand back to see the relation of modernism to a greater historical whole. Then we can suggest that it occurs as a function of time in a general sequence. Indeed, also, of place. This is related to the reverse question, why, if this is the ‘natural evolution of Europe’, did it take so long to happen? Europe, relatively close to the origins of higher civilization, seems as much a case of sluggish development. We survey world history and notice a simple fact, now apparent since the discovery of the beginnings of civilization. The rise of the modern seems connected to a series of turning points of equal momentum, our mysterious drumbeat, the eonic effect. There is a jump-start process at work. We tend to become swamped in the detail of particular periods. Let’s see if we can’t move from the modern period to the Neolithic in one stroke, without losing our focus, a hundred yard dash, with place markers at each point, so that we can return to zoom in. Then we will see a remarkably simple unity to the whole process. We have already developed a simple model. We can start over with a simpler version, in the process putting it into action by constructing a periodization matrix for world history to see how easy it is to use in practice. Our preoccupation with modernism is really a sense of being in the wake of one of these great turning points of history, the rise of the modern world itself. But this feeling tends to grant the most recent novelty the banner of fundamental change. It is connected to our feeling of cultural, or technological acceleration or innovation, although it is open to question whether ‘culture’ in its fundamentals, has changed as much as we believe since the early nineteenth century, relative to the culture of the Middle Ages, speaking of the West. Our turning point, about three centuries long, from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution, seems to lay its foundations early on, in the period after the Thirty Years War. Take the example of liberalism. It emerges rapidly in the seventeenth century. Look at Locke and Spinoza. But it is already implicit in Luther. We don’t for a moment suspect a clockwork aspect to all of this. The solution to the riddle of modernity is to look at the larger scale, and the case of antiquity, the Axial period. Then we see that we have no choice but to adopt this approach, or something like it. Large-scale historical transformations simply start out of nowhere. And then we notice the resemblance to the modern case. In fact, the rise of the modern is almost like a repeat of the Greek Axial period. In one way, this approach makes no sense. To introduce the idea of discontinuity seems to invoke an artificial device. But it will help us drop the fruitless quest for a causal theory of modernism, and simply look at blocks arranged in a pattern over millennia, the reason for our original perplexity becomes obvious. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment the foundations are laid for a new era of world history. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the basic innovations are set. Then the three-cornered hat passed into the early versions of the business suit, as a threshold or divide was crossed in the generation after the French Revolution. We assume we are advancing from this period, but the reality is that it creates a plateau effect. In part this is the result of the rise of science, or so it seems. But a closer look shows a broader series of innovations. Many students of modern philosophy, a good bellwether, sense this, scratching their heads. Why is it impossible to match or escape from the early moderns in this field? It takes off in the seventeenth century, peaks with the Kant/Hume generation, and one can barely grasp what happened, let alone surpass it. An age of scientism makes matters comically worse by thinking it doesn’t even matter, that it has all been transcended. This sequential dependency should warn us to be wary of our turning points. They are not so easy to progress from. This period ignited many exponential processes, which can distract from this insight, but, in the midst of this geometric progression of technological and economic novelties, we see a different, quieter music, at work in the real fundamentals of early cultural modernism. Philosophy is but one example. Did you never wonder why modern music climaxes in the generation of Mozart, with a crescendo echoing into the nineteenth century, then suddenly on the wane? Chance? We have already seen the indications our ‘dynamic’ is entangled in esthetic questions. But this one is a bit strange! Historical sociology tends to assume the economic transformation in the generation from ca. 1750 onward, the English Industrial Revolution, is the prime mover of everything. It has certainly turned into a cultural bulldozer, as of…That is the point, as of the early nineteenth century. A closer look easily suggests a counterargument, and repeated caution, beware of assumptions about historical causes. Some of the seminal causes of the modern started as mere whispers. Newton hid his notes for twenty years. The cause of an earthquake, and its effects as new causes, are entirely different. The economic tornado is as much an effect, as a cause. Marx’s perspective has proven misleading in this regard. We could as well claim the emergence of the modern, or the trend toward freedom, spawned a new Capitalism from the old. And the old was already ‘capitalism’ in the networks of Phoenicians, Greeks, of antiquity. This New Capitalism was an ‘order of magnitude’ change in the nature of economy, continuous with the past, yet discontinuously something new altogether. It is significant that our sense of the modern is faithfully reflected, if antagonistically, in the spontaneous sense of the postmodern. Note the term ‘modern’ is ‘eonic’, i.e. a reference to periodization, time. Our basic declared viewpoint is, or might be, that of the Enlightenment. But, all at once, this is under attack, and in general our perspective is not the same as, or need not be, ‘endorsing’ some Enlightenment viewpoint or ‘Project’. The main issue is its association with our turning point, and the suggestion it is a response as much to antiquity, as a ‘philosophy of the present’, which may incorporate and then transcend that. And what of postmodern critiques of this? Can we really pick and choose ‘isms’ to pass judgment on the rest? Strictly speaking our view could end up incoherent as we endorse all the main outcomes of eight transitions, including the theocracy of the Pharaohs plus the Exodus revolutionary script in the next period, and we should be disembodied observers gazing on history, noting the views at each period, then the change of views associated with our turning points, before and after. Instead, we are in the wake of one of these, forced into a dilemma of objectivity: are we postmodern critics of the Enlightenment or Enlightenment critics of postmodern deviation from historical directionality? We don’t have to decide. But after a while, with the right scale, we can see the most obvious significance of the Enlightenment period all over again, in stark simplicity, as a new era challenges antiquity. We can at least follow the contours of the ‘eonic effect’, keeping a close eye on its behavior as it changes gears. Then we suspect that the momentum of modernity, which has no intrinsic connection with some Enlightenment philosophy, is bound up in something larger, and that the postmodern, if anything, is a part of that. And we can’t shake off the sense of ‘progress’ in the succession of periods. A tacit ‘should’ lurks in the analysis. Either we should modernize or not, but whatever the case, we seem to have little choice in the matter at this point. Our modernism is a far broader result than the Enlightenment, and constitutes an overall integration of elements from religion, to science, to culture. It is not a very complicated problem. History fights back. The great Ionian Enlightenment didn’t make it, and was buried for millennia. Perhaps some prefer a Spenglerian future. Sometimes the issue of the Holocaust is raised as a challenge to modernity, or the Enlightenment. While the question should haunt any perspective on history whatsoever, it is entirely odd to lay the blame for this at the doorstep of modernity. That postmodern Spenglerian future is there, close at hand, if you want that. We will soon see another example, the decline of antiquity in the wake of the Axial Age. Another turning point seems to have lost its impetus, and a second reverse turning, more like meandering, undid much of its effect. In fact the rise of the modern seems to pick up where a second turning point left off. What’s going on? Look at the Greek Axial period. Then at the Hellenistic. Then at the postmodern phenomenon. Nothing says our turning points will prove lasting. Once they are done the direction deviates, perhaps. Is this happening again? In any case, nothing in our argument absolutely requires defending modernism as some Enlightenment philosophy. That misses the point. Even if everyone agreed on the Enlightenment’s importance they would still have a hard time saying what philosophy that entailed. There were a slew of Enlightenments, French, British, Scottish, German. We can critique historical outcomes, but we can also see a major turning point in history as a given. It is a different question than that of historical progress. It is ‘eonic progression’, as we might call it. Possibly modernity shouldn’t have happened, although we should wonder at any agenda of those who say so. But it is factual to depict this sudden new development. Perhaps we should do something else now, instead, generate a fourth turning point. There seems nothing in the way of trying. We have given up causal determinism. Our present is ‘free action’, the factor of eonic determination a mere aroma associated with the past. Is the rise of the modern some law we are forced to obey? We could undo the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Science, the Enlightenment, the birth of democracy, the emergence of capitalist economy, the French Revolution, and substitute a new turning point for the one we call the ‘modern’. After all, we have invoked Popper on prediction. Our statement seems to imply we will, must, or should remain inside this modern period. The answer is simple, we won’t predict. But it would be hard to undo the situation. We are sequentially dependent on this change in world history. Our turning point includes the Industrial Revolution in its family. We are sequentially dependent on that new relative beginning, especially so in that case. That’s not determinism, for we have immense latitude, relative free action within context. To say that a certain semi-geographical cluster of events creates a major turning point in history, the Enlightenment at its peak, is not the same as saying that this is somehow entailed as an historically inevitable outcome, or that it is the same as some philosophic viewpoint. The point should be obvious from the shotgun spectrum produced. The number of variants is tremendous. Our system seems to operate wholesale, dealing in ‘potential’. And we notice the issue is not just some Enlightenment ‘ism’ but a geographical region with a dialectic of isms and a job done with or without a concluding philosophical capstone. Our perspective creates, or makes clear, a crisis of objectivity, as we move between civilizations. One minute we are looking over the shoulder of the Pharaohs at the sanctities of state formation, next moment we are crossing the Red Sea with the Israelites, or in the woods with the forest philosophers of India. The Enlightenment period sets the pitch for the rise of the modern even if it is subject to considerable postmodern critique and negation. The whole period from the Reformation up to the nineteenth century creates a net effect that forces the issue of global renewal. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter what ‘ism’ we assign to it, by 1800 it is a fait accompli. The unity of advance in all fields is stunning, but we tend to see it incorrectly due to the exclusion of large-scale history. We see this as the rise of the West in some consideration of what we call ‘Western Civilization’. But we are starting to see that the rise of the modern is connected to a greater whole and that we need a new ‘fundamental unit of analysis’ beyond the ‘civilization’, to use the phrase of Toynbee. The evolution of an autonomous civilization doesn’t quite work as a concept if the real issue is one of timing and the diffusion of information. ‘Modernity’ is a concept of periods, of timing, not of civilizations. Notes: A Divide We are beginning to notice a strange divide in the middle of our emerging modernity. A postmodern view forces the issue. But we see that the inherent nature of the process we are studying produces its own much earlier version of the postmodern divide. It is built in. In fact the postmodern first appears, so to speak, in the modern itself, e.g. in Rousseau, with his timeless detachment toward the modernity he sees around him. If you shoot a man out of a cannon, there’s the point before and after being in the cannon. Hopefully the man will land on his feet. We have provoked a puzzle inside out theme of turning points, by also invoking a sudden ‘turning against that’. Action and reaction. But more generally, our theme is one, not of linear progress, but of intermittency, and ‘stepping progressions’, turning points. A turning point is different from a ‘new period of history’. It turns, evidently. Then it stops ‘turning’ and a new period is set. Equilibrium follows punctuation. The problem is that the later period is not really in equilibrium, the reason, among others, we don’t use the tempting term ‘punctuated equilibrium’. It has resumed growth after blocked growth, which is more than economic growth. And we see this in the case of ‘modernity’. Can we detect this point where our turning point stops turning, and a new era starts just being what it is after that? With the right question, one riddle of modernity solves itself. We can actually detect the timing. The type of society coming into existence after the early modern period began in this sense to stabilize in the early nineteenth. Karl Marx is almost perfect evidence of this, for he gave a name to the result, tried to periodize it with an ‘eonic’ scheme and was determined to tear the whole thing up and do something else, just as the opera was getting underway. Not so easy to accomplish, as events made clear. The early nineteenth century shows all the characteristics of this ‘divide’. Spengler and Toynbee Into this context arrive the misleading postmodern theories of thinkers like Spengler and Toynbee with prophecies of the decline of the West. Assuming we know what we mean by the ‘West’ (we don’t, in fact), everything declines sooner or later. The answer to these two is simple. Our subject isn’t the West, but a local transformation in a global evolution. If the ‘West’ declines, the center of gravity of ‘modernity’ might shift to another area. That is clear from antiquity. The question, then, is not about the West, but the status of a new global period. A frequent sermonizing image of the fall of the Roman Empire is often brought to the spectacle of moderate social disorganization. This red herring rarely produces coherent discussion. In terms of our emerging periodization, the correct comparison would be to the era ca. –400, just after the spectacular age of the Axial surge, an era of great potential. A new era is barely under way. However, in our developing idea for a cyclical theory these cross comparisons can be misleading. The exemplars of the modern are not the same as the ‘period’ itself. The data for this is readily transferable and transcends location. The system is global. Witness Japan. It picks up the scheme in a few decades. If anything a ‘decline’ of the ‘West’ would allow modernism to advance more globally. Still, nothing in our account either predicts or forbids decline. Beware of the attempt at self-fulfilling prophecies here. The post-divide is ‘free action’, and interlopers can do what they wish, if you let them. We are discovering the properties of an ‘intermittent’ or in our phrase, ‘eonic’, system, and such a system does not determine its ‘middle’, that is the whole point of such a system. Our turning points, so strangely leaving the eras between them up in the air, are falling into place as ‘eonic’. As eonic determination (whatever caused the ‘rise of the modern’) fades into ‘free action’ the result is open-ended. We will discover cyclical progression, not cyclical recurrence. The ‘West’ is not our unit of analysis. The issue is a function of time, innovation, and its diffusion. The center of gravity of the system can change, but the basic phase of the ‘modern’ can continue. The issue is not decline but the question, how long can advance be maintained with the potential achieved? Will it simply be thrown away as the system degrades back into its apparently most probable state, empire, religious domination and mechanized consciousness? Thus we see a kind of postmodern effect. This is not decline, necessarily. Part of the confusion in Spengler and Toynbee is the idea of the civilization as a unit with its own inherent life span. That is the wrong approach. The crucial issue in our perspective is the rise of the modern itself, a kind of time-slice in the Western sector of Eurasia that flagships the emerging global culture into a new age period. The slow shift in the center of gravity, so obvious in antiquity (e.g. the movement from Greece to Rome) might indeed seem like decline. Indeed the inability of the local transition areas to produce instruments of globalization puts the victims of the ever-recurring imperialism (which tends to wreck everything) into wishing for the decline of the source area. We need a larger perspective starting with the birth of civilization or before to see the simple dynamics involved, always in permutations of one and the same process of transition and ecumenization. |
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