5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
|
From Turning Points
|
||
|
|
||
| 5.5.1 From Turning Points to Eonic Transitions | ||||
|
We are given a completely unexpected glimpse into the ‘how’ of evolution, with respect to multiple independent streams of culture. We thought these would evolve at random, as cultures, competing or producing innovations that spread to other cultures. But we can see that nature has a different way. It can generate a high level sequence from these individual streams by interacting with parallel streams in synchronous short-term action. The effect ‘selects’ cultural elements from the cultural stream, and they flow in modified form into the oikoumene arising in the wake of the sequence transition. Stream and sequence We have the great clue to how evolution can operate on the surface of a planet confronted with multiple ‘streams’ of culture. The greater eonic sequence returns intermittently in parallel phasing on multiple streams of culture. This Axial period gives us the one incontestable image of something we would never have thought of without hard evidence. The Greek Archaic, the core period of the Old Testament, the sudden spiritual flowering in India with an analogous period in China, all fall into place as ‘stream and sequence’ intersections. We will also call this the t-stream and e-sequence process (first edition terminology). Let us take one example, that of Greece and the Greek Miracle, so-called, and examine its relation to our ideas of a model. It is this classical period that gives us the full perspective of what we will call eonic transition, the relative effect as input and output, redirection, and amplification, with a clear record of what went before, and what happened after. Why does Greece suddenly take off out of the blue almost on schedule? And not almost. By and large, what we see is an interval about three hundred years in length, with the rise of the modern as the clue to its length, rising into an explosive period of cultural change, and then expanding outward and flattening out. The data suddenly becomes clear. Then modernism is seen as a transition to a new global era, as the sequence intersects with the European t-stream. Right on schedule, the modern shows signs of globalization, as the transitional source opens outward to reach its larger field. The example of the Hellenistic shows the process clearly. Before proceeding to define an entity called ‘eonic transition’, we must be careful. A descriptive glove called a ‘transition’ is not a causal explanation, and yet it is in a more general sense. First, this threatens to say that history is not homogenous. There is obviously no difference between men in the Enlightenment and ourselves. Look at the Archaic Greece. History is homogenous. But this era stands out, why? The factor of acceleration changes the character of driving, but not necessarily the flow of events in the lives of the passengers. But they might ‘get there sooner’. Second, we associate ‘cause’ with ‘cluster of correlation’, but in phenomena on this scale, cause is not properly defined. So we use the idea of a transition. Notes: Eonic grid terminology We can refer here to a special terminology in the Appendix. As we zoom in on our turning point s, we find a series of periods with a clear interior structure, a geographical focus, a length of about three hundred years reaching a ‘divide’. We can call the period -900 to -600 a generalized transition stretching across Eurasia a transition, and/or call the individual zones, transitions. As we stand back we see, or think we see ‘causality’, as we zoom in we find clusters of disconnected ‘free action’ under a rubric of ‘eonic determination’ (creative action associated with a cycle, seen to be ‘system return’). Clearly two ‘levels’ of effect are intersecting, like a tangent to a circle. These ‘zones and periods’ are the crucial factor, at the beginning. No better instance can be found than the mysterious (and confusing) Old Testament core period we will label, ‘ET5, Israel’. Relative to -900 to -600, we can indirectly infer ‘fuzzy geo-focalization’ of our system return, or fast interrupt, in a Canaanite ‘somewhere by somewho’. This three hundred year interval is a bit artificial, please note, but works fine as long as we keep a sense of the real meaning. One of the traps of discrete periodic historical analysis is the temptation to label the stages with significant names, in a named sequence. The term ‘Axial’ has this problem. Grid Terminology: To avoid named ‘stage-of-history’ labels or the mis-periodized naming of ages, since our transitions are abstract transformations, we can create a somewhat abstract terminology of zone and period as neutral terminology, with a default label, to suggest the scale of cultural evolution occurring, ‘ET5, Greece,…’, i.e. the time slice of Greece in the period -900 to -600, ‘ET5, India…’, ‘ET5, Israel/Canaan,…’,etc,… to emphasize the phenomenon as a time slice with its ‘global coordinates’, for what we are dealing with is the temporal stream of cultural evolutes passing a ring of cyclical phases. The effect is a sort of diffusing ‘V-cone’ spreading outward from the Neolithic, sourcing in the Fertile Crescent. These dates over-reify statistical regions, perhaps, but are roughly useful. The issue is not whether this fits exactly but the extraordinary degree of correlation visible in the data available. This can’t be due to chance. Three-century transitions? Here we can try to clarify the issue of ‘transitions’ as three centuries in length in this classical case, by analogy to the modern example. The question is part guesswork. Our basic guideline was that any system operating on two levels will produce periods of apparently discontinuous action, this shorter than the intervals between them. We might hazard therefore a guess at the length of these periods of impetus. A close look at the rise of the modern suggests a period roughly three centuries in length. The Old Testament provides the clue, along with the issue of democracy, and the period of the Exile shows a transitional phase close to completion. This has nothing to do with the contingent factor of the Exile, as such, although it is a remarkable gesture toward universalism that the Israelites are without a country at the climax of the transition. This puts us in the period of Solon in Greece. The problem is that the earlier section before about -800 is a bit fuzzy still. We don’t have the modern fine grain. But the rough division makes sense. The flowering comes after the Greek Archaic period, which is almost invisible, but the point where the ‘pivot of action’ lies. A good example is Greek tragedy. The exteriorizing art form we see must have been latent in some form. Indeed it was, consider the Iliad. We see the ferment occurring in the centuries after -900, as a new culture gestates. The reason Greece looks a bit late is not hard to find. The earlier effects can be seen closer to the core area in Mesopotamia, but there change seems aborted, for reasons the Greek Marathon make obvious. In general, despite the lack of more spectacular effects, the Greek Archaic is the giveaway as the last part of a Greek transition of this kind, the centuries of its immediately prior ‘Dark Ages’ suddenly being of great interest for showing the earliest gestation at work. Here the struggle against kingship is starting, and the polis is crystallizing. Don’t equate this with the icing on the cake, Greek, Athenian, democracy. Primitive ‘republican experiments’ with a ‘higher degree of freedom’ than what the Middle Eastern empires would allow, is all we see, but that is enough. It is like Luther and Voltaire. They don’t look connected, but they are. Luther is still part of the old, the new just breaking through to a new beginning. This tells us something at once about the primordial early period of Greek history just leading up to the so-called Archaic period, which will be cut in half by our artificial, yet highly significant, divide at around -600. Around this date Solon appears. Start with larger intervals, and close in on the phenomenon. Suddenly we see the resemblance of the five hundred year interval of the rough Axial Age, -900 to -400, to the period 1500 to our current time frame. On the analogy to our three hundred year transition and divide in the modern case, what do we find? We spot the rough analog at once, with the divide around -600. It is almost spooky. The case of the Judaic zone, ‘Israel’, is a giveaway, and the period just before the Exile is a clear ‘divide’, the period thereafter showing the crystallization, looking backward, as a tradition. Note that everyone starts looking backward from this point onward, to an age of Revelation from which they are emerging. Our rough era of three centuries seems thus to go from about -900 to -600. The Judaic example seems to clock it best, from the time just after the supposed Solomonic period, to the Exile. Please note that this does not include the period before that. Moses and Abraham are part of the lore of these remarkable Canaanites. But they are not part of the period of transition. The text, please note, clearly tends toward mythology, with marginal degrees of fact, before our core interval. But the interval period is more historically definite. Their tales are handed down and then are cast in current form toward the end of the transition, and are pumped into the general stream by the transition, after the divide. We must arrive at the exact facts. Almost nothing in the Old Testament is usable, strictly speaking. We retreat to large-scale block analysis. The facts would be much more interesting than the final redaction. Note the completely analogous effect in Archaic Greece. Homer is part of the transition, while Achilles, Agamemnon, if real people, are part of the ‘temporal stream’ lore entering the period of transformation. Exact figures are really approximations, here. But it is suddenly strange indeed to see Solon appear at the calculated divide almost like an apparition of the forces of equalization moving to climax the transition. Such deeper concordances we suspect to be non-random, but they are more than we need to demonstrate the bare eonic effect. Transition and oikoumene The correlate of the transition is the field or V-cone of diffusion, or oikoumene that it creates. In the Greek case the system proceeds to the Hellenistic in short order. Our model throws an intense light on the evolution of religion and we can see the elegant way in which a core transition generates a diffusion field, in many cases, a religion. It is fascinating to see the Israelitic and Buddhistic streams remorph in transitional areas and then become large-scale integrators of cultural interaction. We should note that there is no real distinction of sacred and secular and that the Chinese case does the same as the others but produces Taoism and Confucianism in parallel. Philosophy blends into religion and the core is the action of self-consciousness. Our transitions are short acting, and we see that the idea of a divide arises spontaneously from the fact that these transitions are intermittent and short acting. Our system proceeds from there by a process of diffusion to expand its effect into the greater oikoumene in which it is embedded. This Axial period is especially spectacular here, for it produces, the Hellenistic, the Roman World, several religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and (late post-Axial) Jainism, to say nothing of the clear ecumenical civilization inside the Chinese civilization, as it moves to integrate on a very large scale. These transitions create a kind of sequential dependency in those that follow, because they are inside the tradition created, and cannot replicate the higher effect of the transition itself. Thus we have a complementary pair, transition and oikoumene, the latter showing its sequential dependency by diffusion on the phases of transition. |
||||