5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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The Fundament Unit
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| 5.9.3 The Fundamental Unit of Historical Analysis | ||||
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We are ready for the idea of the fundamental unit of historical analysis as transition and oikoumene. Note how Spengler speaks of a Magian civilization, but we can see he is mixing the Judaic, Persian period of transition and the oikoumene arising in that era. The Greek transition passing into the Hellenistic is thus one such unit. Not the civilization but the individual with his idea of civilization is the key point. There is nothing wrong with the idea of a civilization, but it is not a dynamical or evolutionary unit. Our unit of historical analysis is the transition and the field of diffusion it creates. The idea of civilization tends to suffer ambiguity over geographical positioning. If an Athenian Greek of Homer’s period climbs in a boat and travels to found a new city-state, he takes his ‘civilization’ with him. Are these two civilizations? It is a relationship of sourcing area, transitions, and diffusion. It is a question of the flow of information. Look at the relationship of England and North America, in terms of transitions and sidewinder diffusion fields. Then again the similar case of the Greeks and the later Roman diffusion field. The term ‘civilization’ is poorly defined and serves badly as a basis of analysis, except to designate the content of social activity, for its instances, although structured loosely, are always ad-hoc, that is, the result of temporal choices and incidents, and its extent, duration, and character entirely fuzzy. What is the start of a civilization, its finish, its duration, does it have a beginning middle and an ending with interior structure, be it systematic, organismic, or dramatic? It is the phases that fret duration, resolve beginnings and endings, what arises across or in between what we may or may not care to call ‘civilization’, as constructive incidents freely chosen, yet empirically found to echo these phases. It is useful to bring a term ‘civilization’ into this context. But the scale of time involved shows they are as corporations to ‘economy’. These phases do nothing, but like a conductor in an orchestra they organize sequence and ‘stepping’. These phases wedge new middles into the problem of beginning and ending, take over or render superfluous the dramatic metaphor, and fret the statistics of the temporal history like a sluice gate. Any barbarian with a sword can found a kingdom. Is this civilization? Our phases show their hand if we consider this barbarian with a sword before, during, and after a period of transition, and the sequence of transitions as a whole. Then again, a crowd with a constitution, set of laws, a prophet, or a religion, can create a peopledom. Is this democracy? We can watch this crowd before, during, and after a transition, or a sequence of transitions, until, in our own time, having looked back we attempt to discriminate our own free action from historical causality and thereby create a free future or expect a new transition. We can move to define the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ in terms of an idea of ‘eonic evolution’ as the relationship of phases to their generated fields, rather than the more qualitative ‘civilization’. The appearance of these phases suggests an empirical frequency hypothesis, in a system of unknown source and continuation. This analysis makes a distinction between economic, technological, and eonic ‘sequences’, the former two continuous, the latter discontinuous. These phases can be referred to as ‘ET4, 5, 6’ with a suggestion, unclear, but strongly suggested, of earlier such phases. One of the difficulties with the idea of civilization, on top of our previous objections, as a fundamental theoretical unit in the fashion of Toynbee, is that it is appropriate to the earlier phases of history, the birth of civilization, and its failure to match the nature of the structures that begin to arise thereafter. The Buddhists, for example, attempt to exit or renounce civilization, and yet create one of a series of civilizations. The common denominator is the phase of eonic determination. The distinction, almost the mismatch of free action, and eonic determination is clear in this case. The Hebraic prophets are the critics of civilization, as observers of the Assyrians. And these ideas are inherently the socio-politics of our own time, for there is no law of civilization, while there certainly is the entailment to create a new concept, or new definition of civilization, to meet the growing global oikoumene. The fundamental unit of civilization then is not the next civilization, but the outstanding eonic productions of the latest phase of eonic sequence, which amounts to our reckoning with the diffusion generated from the rise of modernity in its grossly imbalanced western manifestation. In any case, our fundamental unit of civilization must apply equally to past and present, account for its own observer and his statement of the unit, and account for his interfering free action as no exception to the generalization. The problem is easily solved if we look at the process of oikoumene and diffusion in relation to a transition. The unit of definition applies as well to the ancient Egyptians as to the men, including ourselves, passing out of the ‘modern’ transition. And our ‘interference’ in the ‘law’ fulfills it, if we take to the task of modernization as free action in the wake of the modern transition, viz. the emergence of industrial civilization. Our substitute fundamental should be, cycles of phase as eonic determination and mideonic sequential dependency as free action in a field of diffusion, and generating an oikoumene. The progeny then are eonic emergents and eonic productions. The products of this process can be states, universal empires, civilizations, civilization, Buddhist sanghas, Judaic networks, economic structures, etc,… The classical period of phase produced the Israelite and Upanishadic eonic determination and sequential dependency in the generation of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and Buddhism /Hinduism. This is quite disparate, which is appropriate, for we are not bound by our own creations on the grounds that they must follow historical laws. However we can create generative sources that engulf us. But this is a different issue. Similar statements could be made about political and economic structures, indeed religious and political structures blend together. In our modern case, the issue is not yet clear! We speak of Western civilization. For example, the phase of local European modernization 1500 to 1800 shows accelerated evolution and initiates a global cone of modernizing diffusion in a new generative oikoumene. This definition dispenses with many difficulties and red herrings. This approach includes the villagers of Borneo as they encounter and interact with the cone of diffusion in the frontier from ‘Eonic transition period, Europe, 1500 to 1800’, ‘ET6, Europe’. Their exact disposition in the new oikoumene is not as yet clear, but the issue of their culture and values in relation to the generative nexus does not subtract from their status as members, not of ‘western civilization’, but of the sequential phase structure. Thus as observers of the past, we are in a position to upgrade our ideas of civilization, which will indeed show sequential dependency on the period 1500 to 1800 as eonic determination! This approach relieves us of the analysis of civilization that we are forced to apply to ourselves as a sociological law. We can apply the same definition to the classical phase of emergent ‘civilizations’. The phase of Israelite and Buddhist transitional emergence fit this approach especially well, for they bypassed the issue of state formation, and generated templates for the generation of mideonic sequence with a constructive series of results in ambiguous relation between state and religion. Nationalism and the Unit of Analysis Eonic determination stands beyond the state constructs of men, and there is a simplicity behind confusion, and a redundancy of categories in our thinking, civilization, states and The State, nation states, tribal zones, cultural units, the polis, the empire, the religion, the Buddhist Sangha, ‘Israel’ without or without quotation marks, plus others, viz. the ‘kingdom of god’, utopia virtually achieved or in progress (revolution). Socialism, communism, anarchism, and economies, e.g. market economies, join this list in some fashion. These categories are permutations and combinations and are man’s creations and are a separate relevant study, but secondary. The beauty of the Israelite transform freeze framing a moment in the transition from State to Religion is one of the most telling sectors of the eonic data. The collision of libertarian and collectivist categories in the wake of our third transition is another case of ‘evidence in plain sight’ of what our system seems to be always up to.[i] Into this mix arrives the question of nationalism. The nation state is another confusing category tending to distract from broader perceptions, even as it becomes a major piece of the modern puzzle. The author adopts a critical here, and a look at emergent nationalism in the wake of the French Revolution shows our system crystallizing in some not very wholesome ways, but the fact remains that as a secondary process nationalism shows an emergentist character. It qualifies as a relative transform (?), an at first obscure statement. Put an eonic tracer on the ‘nation state’. Egypt seems one of the primordial early versions, due to its geography. But the modern phenomenon is a definite ‘eonic emergent’, and shows strong divide correlation in the era of the modern transition. Note that modern Germany was the locus of a great deal of transitional action before it consolidated as a nation while England, for example, had a comparative integration before! We must conclude therefore, armed with a strange clue provided by our model, that the nation state is a secondary category, and that our eonic sequence moves independently of nation building. Our fundamental process is thus not working in any fundamental sense through nationalism. But nationalism is also a clear ‘relative transform’, and shows gestation in the medieval period, rapidly consolidating in the period after the modern divide. And so on. Our terminology might seem jargonistic and very odd, or abstract, but rightly used it will work perfectly in a wide range of situations you wouldn’t expect and can be used to explain many things. The idea of the nation state as a relative transform and eonic emergent might seem strange, but the facts speak for themselves, as with other cases. Something like nationalism has existed from the start, yet it becomes a distinctly modern re-creation almost precisely timed with our divide, in some confusion over the contradictory main trend toward globalization. The rise of the nation state shows a clear process of differentiation and integration at work in modern times, for there is also the unmistakable ‘eonic emergence’ of the core ideas of an ‘international system’, yet one challenged by the aggressive tactics of the far left. This double motion reflects the sense of tension in the idea of the nationalistic and produced catastrophe in the First World War. Even as the nation state crystallizes the system is moving beyond that. There are dozens of issues like this that we simply don’t have the space for. The eonic sequence simplifies all this not by solving these issues, but by abstracting large-scale dynamics to another level, leaving these other categories in the empirical realm. It is always the same process over and over, a core area or transitional zone surges ahead, and then an oikoumene is created around diffusing influences in a field of diffusion. This passage from local to global is unmistakable in the modern case, in the generation of a figure such as Marx who appears with precisely that issue in mind. It is ironic that this ‘ecumenical integrator’, the construct of the far left, was not this time a ‘religion’, but related itself to the new market economies as a ‘materialist’ worldview. But Marx tended to override the clear ‘eonic emergent’ we see in such thematics as the Kantian confederation of states. The left never quite did its homework and ignited one of the classic ‘jackknifes’ that haunt any discrete process embedded in a continuous one, witness the horrific rise of anti-Semitism as Christianity jackknifes away from the Judaizing stream flowing from the earlier transition. Whatever the case with all these issues of rival units of analysis, without exception, our fundamental unit embraces them all, and we see the core issue reanimated in the modern dialectic of libertarian and collectivist ideologies. These diffusion fields tend over and over to degenerate into empires. The most dramatic case is that of the Judaic transition, which spawns transcultural ‘religions’ complete with ‘law codes’, so to speak, and these produce active missionary expansions. This seems almost a response to the issue of empire, a vehicle for the individual as an adherent to a ‘religion’. The rise of the modern seems to abandon this, with a renewed emphasis on the state, and the progression of religion to a series of churches. Whatever the case, the ‘religion’ and the ‘state’, in relation to the individual, often thus seem redundant categories and a struggle arises to replace one with the other. Needless to say, we tend to forget that medieval Catholicism was an integrator of states, and, as such, as much a political formation as a religious one. Note how poorly defined the term ‘religion’ is, therefore. Its forms change almost into their opposites.
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