|
The Pattern of Universal History
|
||
|
|
||
|
Modern to Postmodern This chapter and the next simply repeat the whole argument on a larger scale and are basically self-contained 'outlines of world history' and can be taken as reference data banks We essentially rederive the model again in practical terms. These chapters are better approached with the text of World History and the Eonic Effect, and we will simply cite a few key ideas.
It is significant that we see a 'postmodern' period. In our model, however, the early modern is given its key role because of its place in the eonic sequence. This sense of the postmodern reflects the post-transitional period indicated by our model.
Looking Backward: The Eonic Sequence
We are just outside the eonic sequence in our post-transition, and looking backward the full phenomenon. We see
The Enigma of the Axial Age The idea of the Axial Age was proposed by Karl Jaspers and summarizes a growing body of observations starting in the nineteenth century. According to Jaspers’ reckoning, in the period from around -900 to –200 at the latest we detect the simultaneous appearance of major advances across Eurasia. The dates, we will see, are a little off, but the basic idea is clear, and utterly remarkable. Out of the blue, for example, the world of Archaic Greece flowers, the world of the Old Testament produces the age of the Prophets, in India and China we see a similar period of creative renewal and advance. From his The Origin and Goal of History, we have Karl Jaspers’ observation: The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism , sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others. From Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), Part I, Ch. 1 Like a flash of lightening a period of creative advance occurs independently in five separate civilizations. We are confronted with something very remarkable, the global character of cultural evolution, and its ability to transcend individual civilizations in brief intervals of rapid change. The scale of the phenomenon, with its synchronous timing, and direct action on the totality of culture. is almost mindboggling. The sudden waning of this period is almost as remarkable. What are we seeing? 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 a kind of transition with what we will call a divide. We will take the Axial interval as being about -900 to -600. This puts a rough ‘divide’ (end of the transition) near -600, after which we find a brief flowering followed by a rapid fall-off. It is almost eerie. 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. All at once we unlock the significance of the Old Testament: it is a response to the Axial phenomenon. Since this puts us on a collision course with theological history, we need to be clear the action of divinity in history is an unsupported mythology. Now we see however why it arises. Given the findings of Biblical Criticism, our approach, like it or not, is going to that of secular interpretation. The great irony, that the Old Testament, is really a description of a phase of historical evolution, takes some getting used to, but makes so much sense of the data that we end up dumbfounded to find a naturalistic approach to religious evolution. Therefore, it is helpful to look at the other cases first, and the clearest case is in many ways that of the magnificent Greek phenomenon, and it gives us a broad rubric for the remaining cases. It unlocks the key to understanding the world of the Old Testament, and the appearance of monotheism. The same is true of India, where the synchronous appearance of Buddhism in this phase is analogous to that of monotheism. As we begin to consider the direct synchrony of the core period of the appearance of the Prophets we see that it is in many ways directly analogous to what we are seeing in Greece. And the timing matches in all cases. We see that the outcome of the Axial interval produces two great religions. These religions are really somewhat later outcomes and it is the gestation period that is significant. Across the whole spectrum from China to the Occident we see that emergent philosophy is difficult to distinguish from emergent religion since the actual resulting form shows a sort of blending of types, a point clear from such figures as Lao Tse and Confucius. The category of ‘religion’ shows no ultimate differentiation from the broader facets of culture including art, philosophy and political evolution. The Greek Transition It is helpful to zoom in to look at what is going on behind what is obviously the most visible indicator, creative individuals, like tip of an iceberg. Consider the case of Greece. The philosopher Bertrand Russell opens his A History of Western Philosophy with an exclamation of wonder at this generative era: In all history, nothing is so surprising or difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and spread thence to neighboring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them…What occurred was so astonishing that, until very recent times, men were content to gape and talk mystically about the Greek genius. It is possible, however, to understand the development of Greece in scientific terms, and it is well worthwhile doing so. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 3. This is essentially an observation of the Axial Age, but with a clear understanding of the seemingly paradoxical relationship to the earlier phase of civilization.. Greece is almost a test case here because we really see two important eras, the Mycenaean, and then the great classical period. What is remarkable here is the way in which Mycenaean Greece falls apart, enters of period conventionally call its Dark Age, and then almost in an eye blink takes off again in the so-called Archaic and Classical era. There is no explanation by gradualistic development from the Mycenaean. We would attempt to focus on some factor of local causation here were it not for the fact that a similar kind of jumpstart take-off is visible in five other cases, all roughly in the same time frame! We are clearly dumbfounded by the inadequacy of an account of the continuous record. This synchrony is the strange clue that forces us to reconsider what is going on. It is the period of the so-called Greek Archaic that is the crucial source of the great innovations we are seeing. If we examine Greek history we see the Greek Dark Age, centuries after the Mycenaean period, begin to gestate with a new form of culture, after around –900. And this begins a truly remarkable acceleration and take-off in the eighth century. The phenomenon of city-states is emerging and producing a matrix from which one of the great eras of political experiment will occur, climaxing in the brief flowering of Athenian democracy. Perhaps the most significant indicator is the appearance of the Homeric epics, whether or not we consider Homer to be a real figure. This is the fountainhead of the remarkable poetic culture, beginning with Archilocus in the wake of Homer, that will end by being one of the greatest periods of world literature in the entire historical record. This raises immediately the question of the evolution of art, and most enigmatic in the case of discontinuous eruptions in its significant episodes. The sudden emergence of whole literatures is spectacular but by no means the whole picture, and it is important to see the high-level at which this mysterious process is operating. We find something that we are hard-pressed to explain in terms of creative individuals alone, for the coordination in the zone and period of several centuries, is almost beyond our sense of what is conceivable. The poetic stream leads to the great period of Greek drama. The philosophic tradition is founded in the so-called Pre-Socratics. A spectrum of political experiments evolves in the emergence of Athens and its democratic breakthrough. We see also the birth of science, and a whole new series of traditions are born in tandem. This is the period of the Greek Enlightenment, and however else we describe this extraordinarily complex event, we can by simple periodization arrive at a very unexpected puzzle. What is it that can produce such a large-scale passage in such a short interval of time? And it is a short interval. If we clock the major developments, we can see that all at once, by the year –400 many of the major themes of the advance are set, and a rapid fall-off begins to occur. It is for this reason that we might feel the need to slightly revise the dates given by Jaspers. Much of the real Axial Age is quite early, yet almost invisible due to its inchoate beginnings. The period of Homer is the crux, for example. The period of Classical Greece, slightly later, is really a climax of the earlier beginning point. The period of Alexander and the Hellenistic empire is already a decline from the Axial peak phenomenon. Histories of Israel Once we see the basic structure of the Greek period in the Axial Age we can
begin to piece together the significance of the parallel periods in China and
India, and then unlock the riddle of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is
really a set of observations about the Axial Age! One of the problems lies
in the complex mixture of fact and mythology that makes the Biblical account
confusing. But if we concentrate on the core of the Old Testament we find that
it is completely in concert with our Axial interval. The rest consists of a
series of myths or sagas about figures and events that may or may not reflect at
least sine actual history but which do not constitute literal history in any
definite fashion. Thus the figures of Abraham, Moses, the Exodus, the kingdoms of David and Solomon are not unlike those in the Iliad by Homer. There is a very strong possibility of some partial concordance with factual histories, but by and large we are dealing with later sagas constructed as epic. Then suddenly the character of the facticity changes. Although the stories of Israel/Judah are themselves embroidered with mythologizing elements they do in fact describe in very rough terms a chronicle of Canaanite kingdoms attempting to live and survive in the Middle Eastern context of civilization and empire. A ‘coming into history’ is evident as the chronicle approaches the period of the Assyrian empire and then the Exile. The tendency to accept at face value the literal account of the Biblical tale blinds us to something that is almost more remarkable to a secularist than the sacred yarn presented to us in the text, whose composition is itself a highly complex series of layered compositions. Once we begin to put the pieces together with the findings of the modern scholarship of Higher Criticism, we discover an almost perfect example, speaking broadly, of the Axial phenomenon, and inside that an unwitting record of the formation of a world religion, or its sourcing point. Forwards and Backwards Just as remarkable as the Axial Age is its sudden waning and the resumption of continuity at a lower level of advance. In each case a kind of cultural plateau is reached that cannot reach the same heights as those seen at the spectacular yet brief moment of flowering in the Axial Age. In the Occident, the Roman Empire comes into existence and goes on and on, until finally the whole system breaks apart and produces the Dark Ages. Then finally this medievalizing system is disrupted by the explosive and rapidly emerging phenomenon of modernity starting in the sixteenth century. In the other direction, we are suspicious. We should move backwards. We can almost guess what we might find. Is there anything resembling an explosive, fast advance period, of consistent novelties, albeit of relative beginnings in a time frame comparable, ca. 2400 years, to our previous case, yet earlier still? There may or may not be a parallel effect of two or more such hotspots in the same time band. We know what to look for, although our data is beginning to thin rapidly. Do the figuring, -600, back 2400 hundred years, -3000 and head for the library. Somewhere near here someone should be reporting rapid change, or having a discontinuity problem. Let’s zoom in on an innocent Egyptologist. Describing the swift transition from the era of earliest Egypt, Michael Hoffman , in Predynastic Egypt, is driven in some puzzlement to adopt the economic take-off idea of the economist W. W. Rostow as a metaphor to account for the sudden change that produces the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the Pharaoh Menes: The immediate
archaeological problem in explaining the cultural identity of Menes and his
state is to account for the sudden embarrassment of riches that characterizes
the material culture of Egypt between the Late Gerzean (ca. 3300 B.C.) and
Archaic period (ca. 3100-2700 B.C.) in terms of a sophisticated, multifaceted
explanation. Professor Renfrew borrows the term ‘take-off point’ from the
economist Walter Rostow to characterize the rise of civilization and the
proliferation of certain types of artifacts. Over the years a number of
propensities develop within a social system, which predisposes it to a really
major transformation. When that transformation does occur, it is so thorough as
to convey the impression of crossing a critical threshold. Michael Hoffman, Predynastic
Egypt, “In Search of Menes”. Bull’s eye. Remarkable, to say the least, although our data here is not comprehensive However, the degree of match is too close to be chance. The overall structure of parallel interactive emergence and transitional chronology is in principle identical to what we see in the Axial period. What about Mesopotamia? In Prehistoric Europe , Philip Van Doren Stern wrestles explicitly with the evolution/revolution paradox and observes the sudden jump to the first level of civilization in the first hydraulic world of Mesopotamia as it emerged from its mysterious roots of it in the era of the so-called Ubaid and before: Something happened in Sumer during the fifth millennium B.C., when all the rest of the world was still so primitive that the Sumerians had to make their own way. The initial stages proceeded slowly for a thousand years or more, and then, during the five centuries between 3300 and 2800 B.C., culture accelerated so rapidly that in this brief time villages became cities and cities grew into city-states...Roux[Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, London. 1964,] merely says of this extraordinarily rapid cultural development in Sumer that ‘a close examination reveals no drastic changes in social organization, no real break in architectural or in religious traditions. We are confronted here, not with sudden revolution, but with the final term of an evolution which had started in Mesopotamia itself several centuries before.’ Perhaps. But perhaps he is applying our modern time scale to an age when centuries were equivalent to our decades. For a village to become a city in a few hundred years when there had never been a city anywhere before, is, to put it mildly, something more than ordinary evolution. Philip Van Doren Stern, Prehistoric Europe (New York: Norton, 1969) Bull’s eye again. The statement also shows clearly that we are dealing with the puzzle, right on schedule, of relative beginning s. The author clearly notes the puzzle of the t-stream prior to the take-off. This is the sticking point that confuses all analysis, but which our emerging model instantly courts as the proper evidence. We will soon see that the observation should be amended to say that (perhaps) ‘something happened in the sixth millennium in the North of Mesopotamia, when, by a replication of one and the same process, the foundations of a prior parent to Sumer were laid.’ It is not too hard to zero in on that earlier case, but before the invention of writing we will draw no conclusions, armed with a method of relative beginnings that can preempt any need to speculate about still earlier ‘beginnings’. A Frequency Hypothesis We now see the significance of what we call the birth of civilization, which is classifiable as one of our ‘relative transformations’ in what we suspect is a series going backward into the Neolithic. Look at the medieval period leading to the sudden rise of the modern. Now look at the antecedents to the sudden crossing of a threshold in Egypt and Sumer. The resemblance is exact. Let us extrapolate backwards to create a ‘retro-diction’, and leave the issue open to future data. We do that by applying our model of ‘transitions, equally spaced, to the whole period starting before the Neolithic, with an interval of about 2400 years. This generalization is not yet confirmed, but illustrates the meaning of the data we do have very well indeed. This extension will in fact keep our statements honest, because we might forget that our data is incomplete. We are dealing with a fragment. Our model is highly artificial but works so unreasonably well in the range provided that we are hot on the scent of a more general pattern. We will take our three turning points and/or cyclical series and turn the period of rapid change, the drumbeat period, into a ‘phase’ or transition at the start of the ‘cycle’ or interval. That gives us three transitions, and three intervals, the last of which is our own period, our now.
We are already suspicious of the period in the sixth millennium, and there is an already filling gap in our knowledge in the area to the north of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent. A highlands culture zone to the north of Sumer seems to flow outward into the Mesopotamian area, in a frontier effect, prior to the historical period. There is an obvious catch to this argument, which is that the rise of civilization might be simply a new phase of long term evolution, and that there is nothing much to find in the earlier period of man, save possibly at the period of the first appearance of homo sapiens sapiens. That is, our later sequence could itself be an overall ‘interrupt’ of evolutionary acceleration. That, however, is doubtful, since the unseen stages and primordial beginnings are as much in need of the driving factor as the more advanced. Since our model requires only regions and innovative individuals it would be more than able to handle generalizations prior to state formation. There is a uniformity to the entire era beginning with the Neolithic. We must find a region for which later Sumer was once the frontier. Consider by this reasoning the period ca 5700 to 5400 somewhere to the North of Sumer. We can almost see a transition here. We can calculate this might be a candidate for a transitional culture. But we can’t be sure because we don’t have enough data. Invisible Transitions? Now consider the history of Israel. This was a novel breakthrough area armed for the first time with the new technology of writing, and they actually recorded a phase period, and the onset of a new religion. This earlier era didn’t have writing, so we don’t know. And without that closely tracked data we default back to the ‘slow evolution’ mode of explanation, something the Judaic data would not let us do. Now proceed backwards still further into the Paleolithic. We are in the midst of full-blown ‘slow evolution’ theories, assuming that fast transitions do not occur. Yet by incremental steps backward we could suspect that religious and cultural transitions might be occurring in more primitive fashion at these earlier times. We must forever be vigilant about jumping to conclusions about historical evolution. Proponents of flat history consider themselves ‘non-speculative’ but they may prove the worst offenders. As we complete our tour we can see that ‘flat history’ is a species of religious faith in a myth of continuity. Apply this reasoning to the earlier speculations on the Great Explosion, and we see at once the dangers of assuming anything. The Riddle Resolved: The Eonic Effect We have an immense data set to explore, but it's remarkable that we are done, a non-random pattern in our world historical back yard. This can be taken as a set of three turning points, or simply as the Axial Age phenomenon with a question. What is the significance of this brief burst of rapid change? The simplest solution is a frequency hypothesis: it represents a stage in a sequence. The Axial Age is in many ways the smoking gun for non-random evolution in world history. We are confronted with a large-scale process at work that can produce innovations in tandem over vast geographical regions over short intervals. And it operates at the highest level. We are discovering that the term 'Axial' is a perhaps of misnomer. It is not an 'age', really, but more like a transition between different ages. For what we are seeing only makes sense if seen in the larger context, as part of a more general pattern. And as we move forwards and backwards we rapidly discover the complete process. The rise of the modern and the birth of civilization are the only other periods that show anything quite on the scale of the Axial Age. Remarkably they are almost exactly equally spaced in a mysterious interval of about three thousand years.
|
||||