5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Resolving The 'Axial' Age:
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| 5.5 Resolving The 'Axial' Age: A Differential Phase | ||||
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Our riddle is solved at once, then, by slightly extending the range of examination, to see that while there may be a local explanation for decline, there must be a global explanation for the rise. Our model won’t tell us why Rome declined, only that its (relative) genesis is in the great seminal era of cyclical upturn. We are at the point of seeing the one great clue to the emergence, as evolution, of civilization itself, in this strange phenomenon of synchronous acceleration. All across Eurasia, from Rome, to Greece, to the Near East, to India, and China, we see a sudden burst of cultural acceleration, with a center of gravity around -600, the time of the Exile in the case of Israel. The most beautiful case is that of the Judaic stream as it cross the boundary intersection of our mysterious sequence. A secular view will have an easier time here, and the issue is too entangled with theology. Therefore the Greek example is a better place to start. We are back at our starting point, the mysterious drumbeat sounding across Eurasia in the period from ca. -900, and over by -400. Beginning in the nineteenth century this perception of synchronous emergence in classical antiquity began to crystallize. These are ‘eonic observations’, and the redactors of the Judaic tradition were the first to observe the compression of their history and immediately cast this into the classic form that we have received from them. A similar sense appears in the history of Buddhism. The Judaic tradition is exceptional here, for the Greeks tended not to realize the phenomenon of their almost more remarkable and isomorphic history of this period. Let us note in passing, lest we get confused over ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, that we see the birth of monotheism, but also the Greek proto-secular Enlightenment (matched with the last spectacular flowering of Greek polytheism). The birth of monotheism and science are synchronous, therefore. Our data is a superset of such eonic observations passing so quickly into a great myth. The distinction of sacred history has no meaning. Clearly we are seeing a spectrum of outcomes that blend into each other. The number of cultural processes that undergo rapid transformation in this period is remarkable, and it is not until modern times that we see anything comparable. One problem is that the scale of the process is tremendous, the study of five time slices in parallel. The logistics defeats observation, like a blind man reading a Braille text of a movie script. We don’t quite see the spectacular effect. Normal historiography specializes in the part, but this requires a greater whole. Thus specialized study tends to lose perspective on the echoing parallels reverberating across Eurasia as this drumbeat clocks multiple innovations appearing in the ongoing momentum of the target areas. The Old Testament unwittingly suggests the time frame for this interval, from after around -900 to the proximate period around –600, if we distinguish carefully a kind seminal period from its first spectacular fruits in the rough two centuries after -600. The concept of the ‘Axial Age’ is losing its usefulness. Thus, in the clearest case we see the world of the Greeks emerge from its so-called Dark Age, suddenly begin a quiet transformation in the Archaic, then flower in spectacular fashion after -600, significantly the period of Solon. The change in character of the phenomenon shows how it is quite suddenly on the wane after around -400, and within a few centuries men are looking backwards to this era as an historical enigma. The remarkable thing is that we see this synchronous phenomenon in a fashion that transcends the possibilities of cross diffusion, which is nonetheless considerable. The Israelites had heard of the Iliad, there is an influence, but we cannot explain the one from the other. We might thus include the emergence of Rome as an additional independently emergent center, yet we see it more clearly as a variant of the Greek city state expansion characteristic of the Greek Archaic, that is, in part a case of diffusion. But with Greece, Israel, India and China we have no basis to claim that one triggers the other. We get the suggestion of something occurring ‘on schedule’. All we can really do is to try and observe this phenomenon by setting out rough periodization boundaries. Later, on the analog of the modern we can partition our Axial phase as transition and divide, which is easy to spot. We will examine this ‘differential boundary’ below as being about -900 to -600. This puts a ‘divide’ near -600, after which we find a brief flowering followed by a rapid fall-off. It is almost eerie. Within a generation or two the character of the Greek era changes gears and a great flowering is over (this falloff and the divide are not the same). We had thought that coincidental, but it falls like ripe fruit into our periodization scheme. The factor of eonic determination is waning, and the high-octane fuel starts to be exhausted. The ‘punctuation’ is over and the eonic emergents head out under their own steam, if they survive at all. Greek democracy and tragedy don’t survive. Archaic to Classical Greece The period from the Greek Dark Age to Alexander contains the great clue to world history, better almost than the record of the Old Testament. The gestation period is less glamorous than the later so-called Greek Miracle, but its action is crucial. Histories of Israel One of the strangest legacies of human history is the phenomenon of ‘Israel’ associated with our mysterious drumbeat, or the so-called ‘Axial’ age. No historical myth, theory of evolution, or universal history has ever produced a coherent account of this history. But the eonic effect clarifies its status at once, and in a very simple and elegant way, if we see that the key issue is the core period of the Prophets around which additional history is adjoined as epic prelude. Note the resemblance of this case to the Greek, one with an Iliad, appearing early, the other with its ‘epic’ interleaved with the whole transition. India, again, shows the analogy, although the Mahabharata, and its later Bhagavad Gita, require a slightly different treatment. China: a relative beginning One of the most remarkable confirmations of the eonic effect is the mid-stream echo of the Axial period in China. The rise to organized states in Chinese civilization begins very early, and yet we see the synchronous effect right in the correct time frame, as an overlay on the prior development. China and Europe are both at the fringes of the ‘eonic sequence’. China, with greater unity in isolation as a ‘civilization’, echoes the eonic sequence right on schedule, as an effect independent of the civilization. The Chinese case is inexplicable in isolation. It also shows a much higher degree of continuity as the Axial emergentism appears inside this flow to reshape an elusive relative transformation. India: Upanishads to Buddhism The case of India resembles that of our ‘Israel’ in producing a world religion from the temporal sequence, as if sifting from a tradition that is already clearly formulated (relative transform) and existing prior to the transition. We see that some dynamic is operating independently of the politics of cultures and empires in the reactions of religion to state integration. With the forest philosophers who renounce history, India creates a protected zone, a parallel world to the eonic mainline. We must devise invariant accounts applicable to states and religions to handle these cases. That will be easily done, for Israel gives the clue. Buddhism, like the redacted Old Testament tradition, arrives somewhat later. An earlier period of creative activity is clearly antecedent to its appearance. As noted, the first Greek transition gives us our clue to an ‘idea for a universal history’ and an insight into the riddle of the ‘evolution of freedom’: ‘democracy shows eonic determination’ but its outcome must survive as ‘free action’. Note that ‘free action’ was not ‘free’ enough in the first induction to survive the coming world of empire. The induction recurs in the next transition of the eonic sequence. And any idea of a teleological plan of history must confront the difficult facts here of multiple independent and contradictory emergent phenomena that will both collide and blend. The obvious benefit of the parallelism seen is the enrichment of the whole. Our thesis is about directionality, therefore, and our system splits into five directions. Notes: Recurring eonic emergents We have discovered the phenomenon of ‘double eonic emergents’. The rise of science and democracy in the Greek case are examples. Democracy—the discrete freedom sequence: We note that as we travel backwards to our Axial period, we see nothing in the way of democracy until we arrive back at the Axial interval. Note that the Roman Republic fails to survive. And then there it is, right after the divide in the period after Solon, halting steps towards democracy in Athens. That is, we see one determinate stream of continuous history, and in that a second discontinuous determinate sequence with an embedded freedom effect. Of great interest should be the point of transition from the discontinuous freedom effect to the continuous outcome of that, and we see that, formally speaking, ‘true freedom’ has to be as ‘free action’, not eonic determination. And right on schedule the Solons and Tom Paine’s appear precisely at our divides. There is a great deal more to all of this than the issue of democracy, we see a host of eonic emergents, but this example is a key. In this Axial interval, we are in the midst of something we had not expected, and of something that we can’t quite explain, and we can’t explain away. This broad field of parallel and simultaneous emergence in concert must constitute one of the strangest phenomena of world history, and its study, if we can really perceive what is going on, gives us a glimpse of ‘(cultural) evolution in action’, however we are to define the term ‘evolution’. We find here that Nature gives us a clue, and shows its hand. Evolution is meta-locational, if not global, in scope, and can synchronously interrupt runway sequences. Parallel interactive emergence We thus have two questions, one around a sequence of turning points, which tends to one branch of observations, and an issue of parallelism, another. Solving one problem, we confront another, and find they are probably related. We must consider issues of cross diffusion. Pythagoras seems influenced by India. Did he travel there? But this factor cannot be sufficient to explain the parallel emergence of whole cultural entities flowering simultaneously. We have a unique concept of discontinuity, temporal and geographical. What is going on? What we see is strange, but we can intuit what is going on. Imagine trying to globalize from a single source, the results would only be some sort of empire. Our system neatly branches outward in parallel to garland multiple cultural streams, even as it generates a higher-level sequence. But we can’t quite figure out the dynamics until we move backwards again. We must be wary of the scale, and make sure we know what we are seeing. The implications are of a non-local process acting on a large scale in parallel. Any other approach requires finding a unique trigger area for the advance. And the only candidate is Assyria. And (late) Assyria, while it is arguably a transition area, is entirely regressive, and simply cannot be pressed into the explanation of simultaneity observed. We call this parallel interactive emergence. We see the independent emergence factor even in the cases where interactive influence can be demonstrated. Greece shows clear influence from the Phoenicians, for example, and the triggering interaction is continual. Yet only in period do we see the distinct emergence of the Milesian advance into philosophy, science, the classic Ionian vision. The issue of cross diffusion is clear from an example in India and China. The world of Buddhism took a millennium to ripen in China. But the parallel seed phenomenon was already there all along in proto-Taoism. This example shows the considerable difficulty of separating two layers of historical evolution. We must distinguish eonic emergents, and the greater field of diffusion. There is great deal of cross diffusion, but the differential phase happens too fast for the explanation to be cross diffusion. Although it is virtually impossible to see how non-locality can be avoided in the simultaneity of the effect, it is important to proceed with caution, for we have no physical model that corresponds to this clearly natural phenomenon. |
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