5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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A Gaian Matris:
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| 5.2.2 A Gaian Matrix: The Myth of the Continents | ||||
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All of our turning points connect adjacent regions. And they do not honor any particular culture. We must distinguish two levels, what Big History is doing, and what individuals are doing. It needs to show structure in the whole, and yet not interfere with the present, by injecting teleology into this. In fact, we have already laid the groundwork. But we also need a model on the scale of many millennia, with a context that is global in the sense that all civilizations are members in the domain of theory. The so-called ‘rise of the West’ dominates our skewed perception of world history. Notice that five centuries since 1500 is actually a short interval relative the period since the Neolithic. We need some careful accounting to keep the different scales in perspective. In fact, the ‘West’ is not a relevant division. The myth of the continents World history tends to be divided into geographical regions as ‘civilizations’ or ‘East’ and ‘West’, or the ‘rise of the West’, ‘western civilization’. Up to a point nothing is wrong with such terms, until we find that nothing is right with them. We can instead take our field as the surface of a globe divided into sectors, where ‘eonic evolution’ steps between zones of relative transformation inside the civilizations. Strange as that sounds, the Greek example in the Axial interval has no other explanation, and this gives us the clue to the modern case. Civilization is emerging via an ‘eonic sequence’ from many civilizations, as related to our ideas of two universal histories. The stream of culture intersects with the global sequence. We tend to speak of ‘western civilization’ because this sequence intersects with a ‘European’ subset after 1500. But this has little to do with the ‘west’. Beyond tribal obsession, there is no such thing as ‘western civilization’. It is a function of global evolution. It is misleading to divide the field into continents. There is one global mainline.[i] Our transition shows a comprehensive character that no individual, so far, can match. Thus the rise of the modern stands in the direct line of a greater process of world historical evolution. This raises issues of Eurocentric focus. Eurocentrism is easily addressed by this approach, in principle, and our eonic model will help to put the issue in perspective. We think in terms of the ‘rise of the West’, or of Western Civilization. But this, as noted, misses the point of what we are about to discover, the global interconnection of all three of our great turning points. The issue will be recast in terms of a new ‘fundamental unit of analysis’. This will be a relationship of transition areas and their oikoumenes. In the modern case the swing toward a global system although both present from the beginning commences in the nineteenth century. Our subject is one global civilization, and the transition areas that advance the whole through the part, in each in a frontier boundary. Here we see the take-off after 1500 in areas at the fringe of the old Roman World. The issue of Europe, then, is a theoretical red herring. Needless to say the members of this ‘civilization’ don’t see it this way.
[i] Martin Lewis et al (ed.), The Myth of Continents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). |
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