7. Conclusion
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The Great Transition:
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| 7.1 The Great Transition: A New Age Begins | ||||
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As if the last place left on the planet to stage a surprise attack against Eurasian inertia the Euro-partition generates a new frontier sector that takes off in a race against time and newly expanding slavery, in the brief launch window, closing if not closed, by the rough point of the divide, before the underdog becomes a new source of domination and empire. Democracy comes roaring back, much stronger this time, abolition is achieved, and it almost seems as if the Ionian Enlightenment is in a second coming against the theocratic worlds created by the winners of the Axial period. We can add the ‘rise of the modern’, now a time-slice phase, to our list of stream and sequence intersections, resetting the directionality of the world system as it moves toward globalization. We are already making a tradition of the views of the world it has given us, and in the wake of great revolutions, economic changes, and the elusive temporal correlation of many arts whose telltale ‘high octane’ performance tokens the foundational changes initiating a great New Age of history, whose enigma of evolution eluding all theories is seen in the spontaneity of the discrete freedom sequence. We have no external metalanguage to describe or analyze this system, so we have left the latter concept of the freedom sequence at a high level of abstraction to embrace the full spectrum of the idea of freedom, whose realizations and outcomes might be, and were, open to judgments of ideology and dialectic. Our system loses no time in its bifurcation around ideas of the right to revolution, economic freedom and ‘freedom from economic laws’ in the swift derailment of the emergent systems of the capitalist type climaxing at the divide. By our reckoning particular outcomes have no fundamental teleological status as secondary eonic emergents selecting strains of realization. The ‘evolution of freedom’ in our sense is a far broader dynamic, almost beyond our abilities of analysis, and embedded in the very structure of our novel type of historical model. The emergence of modern freedom is nonetheless a stupendous revolution of time and civilization and vigilance toward mideonic reaction is demanded of a world system that has shown little for its five thousand years but the domination of elites, political, and spiritual. We now can see how this transition forms a coherent unit in two rough halves as the Reformation and the Copernican Revolution leading past the Thirty Years War brings us to the new age of the Enlightenment, renewed democracy, and the Industrial Revolution. Although past the modern divide, we are still altogether in the grips of the modern transition, and culture still has the freshness of a new age in world history, despite the convulsions of the past two centuries. The resemblance to the Greek transition is striking, almost like a recursion. The immense potential lost in the post-Axial chaotification of the Hellenistic seems to get a second chance. Let us note that science, including the idea of evolution, and democracy both failed the ‘survival of the fittest’ test, and show our clear evidence of eonic mainline reinduction. So much for Darwinian thinking. Our univalent modern transition, compared to the Axial parallelism, is severely imbalanced in one sense, leading to Eurocentric illusions, but the overall logic is clear, and the swift turn toward cultural globalization occurs promptly in the wake of the divide, thwarted by the forces of rising imperialism. We can see now in a very intuitive fashion the unmistakable resolution of Kant’s Challenge, almost like clockwork, for a ‘regular movement’ in the play of freedom should be obvious. The birth of the State, the discrete freedom sequence, the socio-political core of the great religions seen in the light of our unit of analysis method, all these show very strong correlation with our eonic sequence, a spectacular confirmation of Kant’s suspicions. Each of our transitions shows a rapid advance of directed innovation and advance, to the point of echoing each other across time. And how remarkable that is. As we exit the modern transition and achieve the minimum dataset for our eonic pattern, all at once the beautiful vista comes into view, one that we could never have suspected. The phenomenon of Axial parallelism would be counterproductive in the modern transition, and the emergence of universalist themes is a striking feature of the Enlightenment contribution to globalization, real globalization. Alone among the great religions the Christian stream is in the eonic mainline and the swift remorphing of its Protestant trigger into the Enlightenment’s idea of ‘religions within the realm of reason’ shows the deft effectiveness of the transitional era. Our model renders no judgment as to either the true definition of religion, or its future in the world system. In one sense, as secularists would believe, religion is a redundant category, from the view of our fundamental unit of historical analysis. But it would be naïve in the extreme to pronounce on the future passing of religion, as the host of New Age movements, to say nothing of the leftist themes of class struggle, already show the trend toward mideonic reformulation of religious fundamentals. The issue is not religion, as such, but the inability of all parties to create spiritual vehicles that are not vehicles of exploitation, or domination. The dynamic of transition producing the Reformation, we can now see, has nothing to do with Christianity, and grants this no special status, and occurs because of the nature of the prior historical structure in place. The eonic sequence simply remorphs whatever is in its direct path. It is a strangely abstract enigma. A secular modernism is the achievement of a pluralistic society that can mediate these receipts from antiquity, too many of them derelicts destined to delay modern realizations in endless postmodern reactions. We cannot expect, or demand of science substitutes for religion, although its contribution to a new foundation for this has few challengers. Kant shows the gist, not science versus religion but the disposition in parallel of theoretical and practical reason, a rubric too abstract, yet the key in principle to a new humanism that can make science the foundation, yet embrace the totality of human historical evolution. Such a humanism need not degenerate in the obsessive theistic versus atheistic polarity, and might acknowledge the limits of human rationality, and man’s evolutionary propensity to a bifurcating metaphysical dialectic. It is thus significant that many sense what they call a ‘postmodernist’ age. Our interpretation shows the reason, and the paradox of progress surging, progress in paradox. This term is superfluous in our model and postmodernist periodization tends to create confusion, whatever our views on its philosophies, where a ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ is simply par for the course. As a critique of teleological ideologies postmodernist thinking is significant. But we might just as well critique a lack of any map of Big History, equally able to produce a ‘postmodern’ assessment of our historical dynamics. Our interpretation deftly bypasses the illusions of Eurocentrism and we see that the eonic sequence is moving on a far greater scale than that of individual civilizations, if only it can become disentangled from the local medium of its long-range action. Our system can generate change in the core, but cannot control its peripheries, the undoubted reason such an explosive left arose so quickly in the wake of our transition to challenge the instant distortions of globalization. Our modern transition is not the triumph of ‘Western Civilization’ but a pivot on the way toward globalization. And this globalization is not the same as economic development. That is true by definition in our account, but clearly economic action rapidly becomes the key player in this instance. If we compare the three centuries of the ancient Axial transitions, plus the two centuries immediately in their wake, then look at the modern instance, as five centuries from the onset of modernity, we see it is not surprising and no accident to find the current preoccupation with empire and pseudo-globalization of economic exploitation. It is almost too mechanically precise for comfort. Well past our divide period, the world system is now in the throes of its reversal toward the whole, and our model is ready with its balance of two universal histories in the struggle of reachability. Chauvinist or Eurocentric accounts of our modern transition (e.g. the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition, etc,…) will be swiftly disabused of their sense of centrality as the system slowly but surely changes its center of gravity. In fact, the first shift in that center of gravity occurred early on in the American sidewinder. The latter would do well to consider the gifts of time, not overestimate one’s brilliance, and not fall behind as the globalization process continues. We should not forget that, while our use of the term ‘evolution’ is at risk of an ethnocentrism reflecting the transition zones, its scope in reality is universal, and moves to garland the fruits not only of its prior stages, but of the universal dimension of evolution in the greater community of man irregardless of its coordinates in relation to the eonic sequence. Despite the clear religious component of modernism, visible in the Protestant Reformation, the modern period deserves its secularism, whatever its postmodern reactionaries think. The rise of the modern has greater evolutionary status than the mideonic constructs of the great religions. The problem is the entanglement with Eurocentric illusions and imperialistic realizations, all of which threaten to spoil a great advance. These religions are impostors and have no transcendental status whatever. To be sure, we can bestow no teleological blessing on any particular outcome, as such, short of guesswork, on anything like ‘secularism’, and this should induce humility. The seeming comeback of the great religions is quite to be expected, but no argument against our thesis. The drama of the Enlightenment debriefing religion is prime ‘evolutionary’ progression, in our sense, and the ‘postmodern strategy’ to undo secular culture can certainly delay but not prevent the future. This has nothing to do with the theism/atheism obsessions attempting to play the politics of postmodernity. By our analysis, instead of a postmodern, we are in a post-transitional period, a better way to put it, still close to onset of a great New Age of world history, whose potential we must hope will not end betrayed as have prior stages of civilization. If postmodern philosophies echo and descant the very Enlightenment they critique, then they join that canon in reasonable fashion. But if the idea is to replace the modern transition with a new New Age negating the rise of the modern, the odds against success are very great, unless simple decline is a possible candidate. Although in a postmodern period the rise of the modern and the Enlightenment is under attack and the critique of imperialism and empire seems to replace the discourse of democracy, our emphasis on the early modern is the right one, in terms of the overall ‘eonic evolution of civilization’. Our transition is taken as the dawn of a New Age. The nonsense about New Ages is unending, and our eonic mainline gives us a useful way to set the record straight and we can categorize the modern transition as the dawn of a New Age in some hope to still the commotion here. Although our use of the idea of a ‘New Age’ is informal, and has no theoretical status, we can, for all intents and purposes, depict the third transition as rapidly emerging modernism in terms of a ‘New Age’, the third in visible world history, the more so as its challenge to the outstanding religions of antiquity is so reminiscent of the ‘relative transformations’ of the Axial period. Beware of those pronouncing the Enlightenment a failure and proclaiming the new New Age for some guru or others ambitious to exploit a postmodern strategy. This is in part a warning to postmodern or New Age illusions some replacement of the rise of the modern could occur through small-scale cultural initiatives alone. We cannot predict the future, but it is obvious that such tactics are likely to produce chaotification. Study the Hellenistic period carefully to be rid of this illusion. That does not mean the outcome of our transition is a fixed given we should take passively. Quite the contrary. But if the New Age idea means anything it would be that time and the wheel of history are a challenge to pass beyond the religions of the so-called Axial Age. That is not the same as endorsing some ‘secular’ viewpoint now too narrowly defined. Part of the confusion lies in the way the great religions emerged in the New Age of the Axial period, and the wrong expectation that this phenomenon will repeat itself in our time. It just won’t happen that way and the rapid proliferation of reactionary spiritualities will unexpectedly show the bankruptcy of Axial imitators. The great Buddhas seen in world history deserve our reverence and respect but their efforts alone are not sufficient to produce the evolution of culture, the reverse is the case, and their authority is without basis in this greater context. The great confusion over New Age ‘evolution’ shows these gurus have very limited historical understanding, and certainly no grasp of evolution in the large. One of the confusions of the term ‘Axial Age’ has been the sense of uniqueness of this prior period gave to myths of revelation. And this has led to some sense, or false hope, that a new Axial manifestation will restore a religious age in a post-secular restoration. In fact, we are overdue to retire the useful term ‘Axial’ and have already rewritten our series of ‘New Ages’ with a new abstract terminology of eonic transitions. The term ‘age of revelation’ is now seen for what it is, and should be set aside, mindful only that if we used it at all it would apply as well to the age of secularism and its equally ‘sacred’ ideas of freedom. Note again how three great civilizations crystallize around the antinomies indicated by Kant, divinity, soul, and freedom. We must move to complete the Enlightenment with a new civilization that can integrate these three veins of human dialectic in a robust secularism, equally a ‘religious’ culture, with a Great Sutra of Freedom. We have almost whimsically taken on the lore of cyclical theories, to challenge the Spenglers and Toynbees. We produced one without much trouble, our incomplete eonic sequence, for the data asks for one. We must be clear we are speaking of cyclical progression, empirically given as with economic cycles, and not cyclical recurrence in some metaphysical phantasm of cycles. The cyclical progression of ‘Mondays’ in a sequence of weeks is not the same as the cyclical recurrence of their interior events. One reason to produce a ‘cyclical’ theory at all is to challenge the prophets of doom and decline who will attempt to point to some ‘decline of the West’ as a postmodern comeback against modernity. This view reconciles perfectly the ‘opposed’ linear and cyclical views of history and gives new meaning to ideas of evolutionary progress. The center of gravity of our modern post-transition might well change, but this is not an issue of the imperial powers of the first and early inheritors of the modern system. It is good to be wary of the Toynbean formulation. Toynbee begrudged the modern world the breakthrough Enlightenment, and seems to find at the point of globalization the need for religion as some phantom of the internal proletariat. We are wise to this game. These religions are mostly mideonic sludge at this point, and don’t correspond to the Axial source. We need to graduate from the Axial theme to what it aspires to, the totality of human culture, recast in the keynote of the new age rapidly taking shape. We have spoken of ‘eonic evolution’, yet evolution also pertains to all the content of historical culture, in the broadest categories of our two universal histories. Our eonic mainline selects a small strain from the greater totality of human culture. We need to learn to live in a teleological system, without lunacy or teleological fanaticism, to see the ‘telos’ in the whole, beyond the flagship brevity of the part, granted only the limited directionality of the stages of the sequence. We already see the dread ‘teleological antinomy’ at work, appearing in record time with the characteristic jackknife over ‘freedom’ and its definition, in the wake of the divide. It is perhaps better to close swiftly, our job incomplete, as a reminder that we can see historical coherence, the eonic effect, but that our study of its implications is a project of almost infinite scope. We don’t end programmed with a new ideology. We have invoked a pattern of such high potential that we are almost struck dumb in awe and must be wary of too easy conclusions, preparing to expand on our data still further. We are not at the ‘end of history’ but at a point near a new beginning, and our two-level model allows us to distinguish ‘initialization’ and ‘realization’ in the history of democracy in our discrete freedom sequence. It is important to consider this point, e.g. in the case of American history, since the empirical evidence of historical directionality in our sense is quite different from a teleological statement about the outcome of our eonic transitions. This is especially important as our model closes on the present, and starts to mix with current action. Our model invokes a potential in the recent past and nothing justifies bad performance in the realization. There is no ‘manifest destiny’ propaganda possible, although such things become rampant in the succession. We are soon in the realm of the Social Darwinists, the destruction of the American Indian, and the historical inevitability of capitalist economics. The dangers of ideological misuse of principles of historical inevitability are easily challenged by this high potential, so obvious near the divide, and from which we select realization sequences. These realization sequences rapidly downshift from this higher potential. In fact we could almost call the initial outcome a reactionary muddle, a point visible in the wake of the French Revolution. The downshifting into Darwinian thinking is suddenly exposed for what it is, a limited rendition of the idea of evolution appearing once again near our divide. In one generation a fix on the outcome is set, and we are in a new context of lower potential, visible in the Paley-Darwin debate. It is dangerous to posit simple conclusions here. We need one book apiece for each of the eonic emergents making up our ‘transition map’ of modernity itself, a term we haven’t properly defined! We have selected Kant for instance as a guide, explicitly picking someone near this divide, but a close look shows quite obviously a more complex picture, and we have said nothing of Hume or Bentham, and others, whose thinking tends to carry the day in the realization of current modernity. We see the limits on all attempts to contract definitions of modernism, and our transition shows an immense shotgun spectrum of emergent novelties, some of them late gestation cases, e.g. feminism, clearly found with eonic tracing near our divide, then again in the seventeenth century. Our use of the term ‘evolution’ might still seem strange to some, but a little reflection shows its rightness, and the need to break down false concepts, granting that what we are really describing is the transition between evolution and history, speaking formally, in our sense. There can be no rivals (granting our approximations) for a process with its finger in so many pies, and this refers only to human evolution. The action of this evolutionary process is stupendous, and barely visible to the naked eye. But this is what evolution should be, development on the surface of a planet, with directional stages. The sheer scale and comprehensiveness of this pattern preempts any other candidate. At one and the same time, this is not dogma, and we can see the need for a far more detailed version of our too brief tour of the pattern. This is not about a theory of evolution, but an empirical map of its stages, and these stages show a different action in succession. A good example is the emergence of the state, then the reaction to the emergence of the state. ‘Freedom in the state’ becomes ‘freedom from the state’ in the secondary eras of the Axial period. This usage of the term ‘evolution’ has been arranged on a sliding scale ‘from evolution to history’ stretching from the Paleolithic to the far future, and we can thus apply it to our present. But even as we do so it slips into the background, replaced by the eonic emergents or incremental transformations that are alone visible to us. This keeps its meaning safe, and disallows such degenerate usages as we find in the unconscious Social Darwinism now current in such vulgar fashion. Like a bull in a china shop Darwin’s theory appears to confuse the subtly modulated macro process we see behind the emergence of civilization. Please note, social competition, survival of the fittest, conflict for the local future, these are no longer prime evolutionary drivers. We should note that we begin to see the significance of the Old Testament in a better light, for there the eonic emergence of prophets with a proclamation of justice, seemingly so miraculous, is in fact morphably analogous to a construct of the discrete freedom sequence, and we see that once again in the modern transition. This isomorphic dynamics we see over and over, and we can begin to appreciate the Old Testament for the beauty it is, but primitive altogether, and in desperate need of graduating to a strictly secular interpretation. Thus we may conclude that, seen close up, at the highest level of abstraction there is no difference between the Greek and Judaic Axial phases, and we call both secular, reserving ‘sacred’ perhaps for the encounter with the Other in the second universal history generated by the first. In general, Kant’s Dialectic suggests how a core mechanization of ideas transits between soul, will, and divinity (or abstract totality), crystallizing in the forms we see historically. We have propaganda-proofed our model by leaving it at a high level of abstraction, but hopefully the reader has gotten a sense of the prodigious scale, and ultimate simplicity of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’. We are a long way from the simplistic account of Darwinists. What is it that is driving cultural evolution? The clear and obvious answer high-octane ‘self-consciousness’ that produces the ‘innovations behind the innovations’ at the crucial stages of our eonic sequence. This is something deeper than technical innovation, genius, or spiritual attainment, and we can see its prodigious scale, modulating elements of culture in long-range action and short term bursts of clustered individuals. Formally, ‘evolution’ applies to our (greater eonic) present, or else we can say it has yielded to ‘history’ as free action, exiting from the eonic sequence. This transition from evolution to history stages our photo finish exception to Darwinian claims, since the point of transition clearly slides between the Paleolithic and the present. We cannot say that human nature is a fixed given, therefore, based on selectionist scenarios in the past. Too many episodes of prior evolution have been lost, and we can only discover ourselves in this greater historical present, as we are, and to be. Although the results of modern civilization look impressive they are not so far as one might think from the world of early man in deep time, and we are left to wonder if the ‘origin of the species’ man as this transition is still incomplete. We are also left to wonder if this is the end of the eonic sequence, and if man must complete his own self-evolution in the passage of the Great Transition . The origin of the species Man is not the legacy of the Paleolithic but the expression of his own freedom in the greater present of history, past and future. |
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