5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Three Turning Points?
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| 5.2 Three Turning Points? | ||||
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The context of world history as a whole backdrops the modern turning point. Turning point with respect to what? And, what is the force that can turn anything? We can turn in circles, or, perhaps what we intend from the term, ratchet beyond return to a new stage, or plateau, of becoming that leaves ambiguous the continuous field of initiative, the individual’s sense of his own options. And we are driven to equivocate these ‘turning points’ as acts of political will, technological liberation, or the tides of economy to end with a myth, philosophy, or science of instantaneous historical forces whose leverage remains mysterious, amidst much hue and cry as the conservative protests than the ‘old order’ is being undone, that the signs of progress are those of decline. We are going to turn this idea into one of an ‘eonic transition’ in a larger system. The riddle of the modern is easy to resolve, if we zoom out, and we need to move backwards toward antiquity to find the relations of eras among themselves. Then, we will see that world history falls naturally into three massive clusters, seen in three turning points, equally spaced, and echoing each other, with a very ingenious placement of successive eras. This is an empirical fact, to which we will try to bring some elements of theory. It is our conjecture that these are connected. A close look here shows the simplest of hidden dynamics. What about the middles? That will be the fascinating part. We will create an exercise about ‘fourth turning’ to challenge this claim, or least to try. That in itself corresponds to ‘free action’, attempting to buck the trend, against the transition areas showing ‘eonic determination’. ??? TP1 the ‘birth of civilization ’, TP2 the rise of the classical civilizations, the Axial period, TP3 the onset of the modern world, ??? We tend to dislike lists that don’t connect with primordial beginnings, but this one simply starts arbitrarily, with the appearance of writing. It is not hard to show that these three turning points alone are fundamental to world history, but the point should not, and could not, be dogmatic. Even if you were a defender of TP3, ideologically, you would have a hard time specifying, or replicating, the vast scale of this historical change in direction. The period 1500 to 1800 shows a massive relative transformation, and we see the context of the rise of the modern. The circumstantial evidence in general shows us a ‘driven character’ to the sources of much of what we call civilization. We call this ‘eonic determination’. The factor of ‘eonic determination’, or jump-starting, does its work, then seems to switch off, and the results pass into ‘free action’, in our phrase, and the outcome is not certain. It is insulting, but free action, so far, has a poor record. Take slavery. The modern system almost didn’t make it here. Abolition waits and waits, as slavery gets worse, then suddenly abolition appears precisely in the generation of the modern Enlightenment. Chance? Note: A three-century interval Note how the scale changes as we describe TP3. We see already a transition, with a divide, and we are inside this new period, two centuries downfield, inside its action, sequentially dependent on its effects. Can we spot this more exact structure in antiquity also? All of our turning points are unique, and we can’t expect to transfer the structure of modernism to the ancient case, and yet that’s just what we can do, up to a point, keeping in mind the dangers of overly exact correspondences. Not too hard to find at all, if we look for a rough divide in the Axial period, around the time of Solon or the Exile. That would be the point at which things stop turning and begin a new era. It is easy to spot this rough division if we look at. That would suggest that the three centuries before –600 should demonstrate a seminal gestation period. And that’s exactly what we see, although the term ‘gestation’ is just right, almost like seeds before sprouting. The gestation of the early Greek Archaic, for instance, in the period before even Homer in the eighth century is less visible to us now. And the case of India is less focused. But once we take it this way the Old Testament falls into our lap like a charm, as an unwitting account of such a transition, with things tacked on at the beginning and end. In general, however, our idea of fuzzy turning points is enough. This closer analysis of three-century divides is an extra for our analysis, and can be taken as a rough butterfly net, or statistical probability region. The degree of concordance for such a disorganized and fuzzy system is too great to be chance. |
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