A Great Divide

We are getting a sense that we are actually outside the last episode of the eonic effect, outside the transition, and see that a rough interval of three centuries is the key, relative to world history, or our new idea of ‘transitions’.

In general, any such intermittent process will generate a ‘divide’, that is, the rough point at which the intermittent effect wanes and the outcome stabilizes. 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.

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.[i]

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.[ii]

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.

We have a first bare glimpse of the dynamics of our subject. It does not make full sense until we examine a larger scale. From this point we can move backwards, in search of its placement in a series.

The point is worth dwelling on. We have implied that we are just on the fringe of a significant evolutionary transition, the recognition of the obvious as being the bearer of a new and unsuspecting meaning, our modernity is a period of eonic transition. It is remarkable that we are therefore so near, by hypothesis, to a phenomenon whose significance is on the order of the birth of civilization and the founding of the great religions.

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.

Notes: Philosophy of history at the divide The eonic effect leaves a clear signature in the history of philosophy and we should notice, first, the whole course of modern philosophy in the modern transition, especially since Descartes, and then its spectacular climax at the period of the divide. This philosophy also spawns the German philosophy of history just this point.

Kant, Hegel as eonic observers…and Marx Kant, and then Hegel, are both completely aware of, baffled by, and curious about what they are beginning to detect as the eonic effect. Kant, we can see, is puzzling over the French Revolution as evidence of the dawn of a new age, and Hegel is aware of the change, and trying to figure out the sudden upsurge in the ‘evolution of freedom’. Both are building their historical thought systems around incomplete observations of the eonic effect. Similar considerations revolve around the figure of Marx, who is the first to conceive of a whole change of civilization, in a discrete series, what he calls the ‘bourgeois’ phase of history, confusing this perhaps with the economic transition to capitalism in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Marx, a generation later, has still greater perspective, and is really the first to try and study the ‘modern transition’ in our sense: he is even struggling with a ‘discrete sequence’ of stages, which he can’t quite resolve. Our transition is far greater than the emergence of a new form of capitalism (We could just as well say the idea of socialism emerges in parallel, but loses out), but Marx as an eonic observer is apt. We should note that the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns, well before the divide, is essentially doing the same thing, noticing the dawn of a new era in history. We are all eonic observers now, witness the way we use the term ‘modern’.

[i] The idea of a divide is a variation from a notion of P. Drucker. It is interesting to consider, and challenge, the analysis of Peter Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society, when he says: “Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. We cross... a divide.” There are any number of uses of a notion of a divide. Drucker’s is useful for being almost the opposite of the usage here. It would serve no purpose to question the somewhat arbitrary but valid examples that he gives of important cultural or technical changes without making the transformation explicit, such as the emergence of the new city in the thirteenth century, or the invention by Gutenberg of the printing press, but we should note, the transformations he points to seem as much the strictly sequential outcomes of the historical ‘working-out’ of previous conditions, technological and economic: these are occurring continuously, the first layer of cultural evolution and temporal continuity. It is the drama of accumulating technical innovation and human invention, the creativity that proceeds independently of and yet is greatly accelerated by a greater process of transition that the revolutionary divide represents.

But the last generation of the eighteenth century was the moment of the real future shock. And the historians themselves have always found it extremely difficult to explain the complexity of the event without pronouncements invariably shown to be false or misleading if they seek small scale sociological causative factors. The phenomenon is like a change of phase or a state transition. Thus Drucker’s statement applies beautifully to the era of the French Revolution: “Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself, its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world.” Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993), p. 3.

[ii] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 17.