Genesis of Early Modern

We are ready to resume our march backwards, first toward the early modern. As we have already noted, one of the strangest mysteries of world history is the sudden take-off in the West that occurs in the period after 1500. Suddenly we start to see the reason why, and can see that none of the usual theories for this are going to succeed. We will cut the Gordian knot with a different approach. The red herring of the Renaissance tends to confuse the issue. A Renaissance can make do with esthetic genius, a Reformation and Copernican Revolution show the evidence for a large-scale world historical transformation getting underway. But simply try the argument by discontinuity, making no foundational claims. What is referred to are the individual acts of creative innovation in multiple independent fields in parallel, which we can see are clustered in a pattern stretched across millennia. None of this disallows or excludes restricted continuity arguments also tracing development from the medieval period. Our model produces a new complexity and richness. It has two streams of development, successive and large-scale intermittent, by hypothesis.

Our solution will be to proceed on the assumption there is some ‘discontinuous action’, but that we don’t know what it is. Therefore we will proceed less rigorously on an experimental basis, and introduce ‘discontinuity’ as ‘differential periodization’, as a rough interval showing strong clustering of innovation. Its starting point is relatively arbitrary. Some have a problem with Luther and secularism, and indeed our interval seems to divide in two, with a genuine secular culture starting in the seventeenth century. But it won’t work to amputate the Reformation, and our system stages the full transition clearly evident from the sixteenth century. Since causal explanation falters confronted with parallel independent eonic emergents, we retreat to our question again, does world history show signs of general sequence? The answer is that we see overwhelming evidence of intermittent sequence, if we allow jumps between regions, and the rise of the modern foots the bill at once. To see the point consider the isomorphic category of ‘acceleration’ which proceeds as a function of time independently of the content under transformation. But we can’t allow ourselves any such direct metaphor from physics.

Thus, we are restricted to an empirical but semi-constructivist gesture that deconstructs flat history, but this can certainly increase our understanding, without being a complete explanation. The reason this is justified is that nothing succeeds like success as trial and error pattern matching. This simple model throws out a small hook and catches a big fish. The pattern matches to a remarkable degree. That at least will stop the hemorrhaging of attempted causal theories, the ‘science of history’. The reason this will succeed lies in the way we do this systematically across world history.

Differential periodization Questions of periodization are debated ad infinitum, and names assigned to eras after a certain date. There is a better way. Our trick is to use a double periodization to isolate a relative transformation or differential transition as our ‘unit of analysis’. It is not the ‘rise of the west’ that is the issue, but the differential transition from about 1500 to 1800, these dates being conveniently fuzzy. And this is our model applied to history. No mystery mongering over ‘discontinuity’, although it tokens something real. We create an analytical discontinuity, and if it clarifies the data, it is a valid procedure. It is like increasing contrast in a photograph. A gray image suddenly stands out, and we see the directional dynamic in the pattern lurking in the background. The value lies in doing this consistently in the large, to detect something deeper.

Whatever our method, the emergence of modernity is a striking world historical interval. But now we have two things, modernity and a transition to modernity with a divide. And this works. The rise of the modern, with a strong economic component has a built-in unity and reaches a climax and half-way point in the period of the Thirty Years War, with the implications of the English Revolution showing the first signs of the new world to come, with a template reissued in the American and French Revolutions. A secularist will fidget here, let’s move the interval up here to remove Luther. Others will try to clock the transition from feudalism, and stretch backwards. But these issues miss the point. And we tend to obsess over the crisis of modern revolution, but the real transition to modernism was almost complete before the era of the French and American Revolutions. We are dealing with two dates enclosing a transition, and this might well hint at some deeper mechanics, for it suggests a sliding scale, like some frequency analysis. First we looked at the period 1800. Now we are emphasizing the year (roughly) 1500. The two together enclose a massive redirection of world history. The point is a little more obvious with the Axial Age examples. There we can’t avoid the issue. Here we notice the massive resemblance: modernity to the Axial transitions, especially the Greek case.

The question of how a new era could start in the year 1500 confuses the issue. The question is really how the interval, 1500 to 1800, could start a new era on a scale of five to ten thousand years. And relative to a larger scale a rough three-century block makes sense. Our differentials are rough measures that become meaningful in relation to increased scale. The point is that we are not looking at a succession of periods definable by ‘type’ but a transitional phase between intervals that are nameless, the reason attempts to define the ‘modern’ are so often mismatched in the debate over the ‘ism’ to go with it. With this approach the obvious ideological contrast of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, for example, simply disappears. Their unity is seen at a deeper level.

The period of most seminal change, to a close look, is comprehensive, and rapidly reaches a peak in the Enlightenment and one that has tuned a new instrument of civilization, climaxing in the emergence of a new society by the time of the early nineteenth century. These three centuries, too often analyzed in separate parts and pieces, form a clear unity, and yet defy the manifold attempts at historical analysis. It could hardly be teleological if it inconsistently produces a spectrum of contradictions. A considerable debate attends the history of science and the confusion of discussion without the concept of ‘relative beginnings’. Once again, we have the case of the missing centuries. The great clue is the non-random appearance of democracy.

Thus, with some caution, we find after 1500 an explosive discontinuity, as a ‘revolutionary’ process seems to ignite, and morph into an entirely new form of culture, a process achieved, yet incomplete, by the middle of the nineteenth century. But we cannot replicate this ‘revolution of the ages’ as eonic determination, with a revolution as free action. As we will see from the simpler cases of antiquity, part of the problem is that the civilization will leave behind is already complex, and not altogether some primitive substrate from which the ‘modern’ evolves.

An eonic world system? An immense literature surrounds the idea of a capitalist world system beginning in the sixteenth century. This in turn was challenged by the evidence of earlier ‘world systems’. The problem is the confusion of econosequence and the sequence we are seeing in terms of three mysterious turning points. We can resolve these issues by seeing the ‘modern world system’ as a transition in a larger eonic sequence, or eonic world system, which will become clear as we move backwards.[i]

Theorizing here is fixated by the economic perspective, yet ends in the equivocation over the meaning and first birth of capitalism, when this shows a healthy existence as early as Sumer, yet at one and the same time an explosive unfoldment with the birth of the Industrial Era. This effect, of intensification, or relative amplification, of a process already latent, is seen repeatedly, and suggests the nature of the transformation can be confused with its content.

Our definition of modernity is quite different from the typical version and we note that Columbus, the discovery of the Americas and the resulting colonial/imperialist data are not eonic emergents. These are not genuine novelties, fit into econosequence, and are part of the ‘business as usual’ our system is attempting to transcend.

We are short of space but this is an appropriate point to invite/insert data on ‘postcolonial’ and/or ‘core/periphery’ distortions. Even as our transition gets underway, the phenomenon of empire is coming into existence in many of our core areas. However, we must note that our definitions of eonic sequence and economy enforce a distinction. We cannot say that the slave trade is built into this directionality in stark contrast to the discrete freedom sequence.

A great divide To throw light on the decline of the Roman Empire we can repeat our concepts of ‘divide’, ‘postmodern periodization’, and the Spenglerian idea of decline. One of the confusions of the idea of the modern is between the transition to the modern, and the outcome as a new era, beginning in the nineteenth century. We suddenly realize that this visible fact falls into place in our thinking, since the logic of discontinuity, in the sense of jump-starting something, will itself terminate at a rough divide even as the ignition process gives way to what it brings across a threshold. Witness the transition to capitalist economy, versus the real onset of such a new style civilization in the wake of its climax, the explosion of the Industrial Revolution.

Is there a postmodern age? The sense of the ‘end’ of the modern is suddenly seen in terms of our divide as entirely apt, but very misleading. As we observe this double division of the modern we are struck by how our experience corresponds to the transitional nature of the rise of modern. This, however, must distinguish very carefully the fruits of periodization form the ‘isms’ of some rejection of the modern. The whole point is that history sets a new direction. Changing again could prove counterproductive but is the nature of this type of system.

Decline of the West? We have to reckon with the current theories of the Spenglerian type pronouncing the decline of the West. The problem is that Spengler was confused by the rise of the modern, and thought that to be a decline! We do however see that our post-transitional era is not the same as the ‘rise’ and that it might well seem to be declining in some fashion. Greater perspective and the example of antiquity requires examination. There we will see that our position is not far from its early creative period, and that by analogy a decline is both unnecessary and far in the future. The question is confused by using a wrong unit of analysis: the civilization. Why and where do all these transformations occur? Why do we seem to see a ‘rise of the West’?

[i] Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I (New York: Academic Press, 1974), Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

This system is thus not an economic system as such and does not include, necessarily, the discovery of the New World. We note this point because modernity is often taken in association with the discovery of the Americas, for example. But in our approach we will be able to distinguish core and periphery, and the resulting colonialist and imperialist confusions better by distinguishing two levels. Jim Blaut, in 1492 (Trenton, NJ: Africa Free Press, 1992), very cogently exposes the confusions of the so-called ‘European Miracle’ but his argument shows the contradictions (with great insight) that arise by confusing the expanding field of European discovery (and economic exploitation, the periphery), which is a natural process going on throughout history, and influenced by the advances of technosequence, with the flagship emergentism of a new social system, with its elements of liberalism, and which will be the core source of abolition. This is a bit oversimplified, but the basic point is seen frequently, and especially as we will see in the case of Archaic Greece where the same expansion of the city state system is going on even as the core area is producing a transition of its own. This relationship of cores and ‘sidewinders’ (Greece, its city-state field, and especially the later Rome, England and North American) is a frequent outcome and efficient feature of our eonic world system that we tend to pass over in our preoccupation with nationalism.