5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Relative Transforms
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| 5.8.3 Relative Transforms and Eonic Emergents | ||||
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Why do we see these turning points at all? Over and over we find some escalating innovation showing its deep roots in the early modern, especially the mid-seventeenth century, taking off around the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions. In fact, the effect is almost always continuous with the sixteenth, save that the first dawn of this New Age is still bursting at the seams of the old, witness Luther, who is a revolutionary, though we don’t take him that way now. In fact, he was also the first ‘liberal’, if you like, and the Reformation, arguably, bears fruit in the seventeenth century with the creators of liberalism such as Locke, Spinoza. A conservatizing effect repeatedly distorts our vision. The Levellers appear, disappear, and the classic ‘Whigs’ are soon relative conservatives. Yet the world they token sources in the Protestant innovations of the sixteenth century, moving toward an earthquake in the English Civil War, which generates the ideological corpus of the American Revolution, e.g. the seminal Hobbes and Locke. The most obvious case is the Scientific Revolution. Then the Enlightenment, which obviously emerges in the seventeenth century. Before Adam Smith we find William Petty. The examples are innumerable. The basic evidence for our model is the ‘eonic emergent’ inside our turning points. We have already seen this before in our idea of the eonic evolution of religion. The Old Testament is an eonic emergent of the Axial transition. We see the eonic effect as a series of clustered ‘eonic effects’, or ‘eonic emergents’, relative transformations of the incoming stream of continuous history. Our puzzle over Axial monotheism arises because it is an emergentist phenomenon. This relative effect is the result of creative transformation within the interval of rapid transition. We see these effects in religion, science, philosophy, economic organization and ideology, and in the phenomenon of revolution. The examples are very numerous and define the new era. Put an ‘eonic tracer’ on any phenomenon, and watch its transformation in this period. We see that our Industrial Revolution, inside the econosequence, is in fact an eonic emergent, showing spectacular timing inside the eonic effect. Our discrete freedom sequence is a statement about eonic emergents, e.g. democracy, using periodization. An eonic emergent is something broader than an innovation, a fuzzy cluster of correlated cultural artifacts. The modern list of eonic emergents is quite long indeed, the Reformation, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the emergence of liberalism, revolutionary freedoms, the Enlightenment, the cascade of sudden changes that generated the modern period. These are merely the most massive. Examine the traces of modern culture, and over and over you will find their roots in the early modern. Democracy, modern esthetics, physics, the industrial revolution, the root idea for the United Nations, the list is long. For example, because of the economic emphasis, the eonic aspect of modern philosophy is often missed completely. It is a relatively coherent whole, from Descartes and Spinoza, to Kant and beyond. |
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