3. A FREQUENCY
HYPOTHESIS
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3.2
Modern
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| 3.2 Modern To Postmodern | ||||
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The context of world history as a whole backdrops the modern turning point. Turning point with respect to what? And, what is the force that can turn anything? We can turn in circles, or, perhaps what we intend from the term, ratchet beyond return to a new stage, or plateau, of becoming that leaves ambiguous the continuous field of initiative, the individual’s sense of his own options. And we are driven to equivocate these ‘turning points’ as acts of political will, technological liberation, or the tides of economy to end with a myth, philosophy, or science of instantaneous historical forces whose leverage remains mysterious, amidst much hue and cry as the conservative protests than the ‘old order’ is being undone, that the signs of progress are those of decline. We are going to turn this idea into one of an ‘eonic transition’ in a larger system. The riddle of the modern is easy to resolve, if we zoom out, and we need to move backwards toward antiquity to find the relations of eras among themselves. Then, we will see that world history falls naturally into three massive clusters, seen in three turning points, equally spaced, and echoing each other, with a very ingenious placement of successive eras. This is an empirical fact, to which we will try to bring some elements of theory. It is our conjecture that these are connected. A close look here shows the simplest of hidden dynamics. What about the middles? That will be the fascinating part. We will create an exercise about ‘floating fourth turning point’ to challenge this claim, or least to try. That in itself corresponds to ‘free action’, attempting to buck the trend, against the transition areas showing ‘eonic determination’. ??? TP1
the ‘birth of civilization’, TP2 the rise of the
classical civilizations, the Axial period, TP3
the onset of the modern world, ??? Christianity, Islam, Buddhist Mahayana (often via proxies), Bolshevism are typical ‘TP4’ contrary actions, attempting to overtake the master sequence, with claims on the far future. None, in the action of teleological madmen with eschatological ideologies, has so far succeeded. We tend to dislike lists that don’t connect with primordial beginnings, but this one simply starts arbitrarily, with the appearance of writing. It is not hard to show that these three turning points alone are fundamental to world history, but the point should not, and could not, be dogmatic. Even if you were a defender of TP3, ideologically, you would have a hard time specifying, or replicating, the vast scale of this historical change in direction. Everything that occurs in the wake of the transitions defaults back to micro-action, and it may not fulfill the potential indicated. The period 1500 to 1800 shows a massive relative transformation, and we see the context of the rise of the modern. The circumstantial evidence in general shows us a ‘driven character’ to the sources of much of what we call civilization. We call this ‘eonic determination’, or macro-action. The factor of ‘eonic determination’, or jump-starting, does its work, then seems to switch off, and the results pass into ‘free action’, in our phrase, and the outcome is not certain. It is insulting, but free action, so far, has a poor record. Take slavery . The modern system almost didn’t make it here. Abolition waits and waits, as slavery gets worse, then suddenly abolition appears precisely in the generation of the modern Enlightenment . Chance? Thus, the solution to the riddle of modernity is to look at the larger scale. Then we see that we have no choice but to adopt this approach, or something like it. Large-scale historical transformations simply start out of nowhere. And then we notice the resemblance to the modern case. In fact, the rise of the modern is almost like a repeat of the Greek Axial period. In one way, this approach makes no sense. To introduce the idea of discontinuity seems to invoke an artificial device. But it will help us drop the fruitless quest for a causal theory of modernism, and simply look at blocks arranged in a pattern over millennia, the reason for our original perplexity becomes obvious. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment the foundations are laid for a new era of world history. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the basic innovations are set. Then the three-cornered hat passed into the early versions of the business suit, as a threshold or divide was crossed in the generation after the French Revolution . We assume we are advancing from this period, but the reality is that it creates a plateau effect. In part this is the result of the rise of science, or so it seems. But a closer look shows a broader series of innovations. It is significant that our sense of the modern is faithfully reflected, if antagonistically, in the spontaneous sense of the postmodern. Note the term ‘modern’ is ‘eonic’, i.e. a reference to periodization, time. Our basic declared viewpoint is, or might be, that of the Enlightenment . But, all at once, this is under attack, and in general our perspective is not the same as, or need not be, ‘endorsing’ some Enlightenment viewpoint or ‘Project’. The main issue is its association with our turning point, and the suggestion it is a response as much to antiquity, as a ‘philosophy of the present’, which may incorporate and then transcend that. And what of postmodern critiques of this? Can we really pick and choose ‘isms’ to pass judgment on the rest? Strictly speaking our view could end up incoherent as we endorse all the main outcomes of eight transitions, including the theocracy of the Pharaohs plus the Exodus revolutionary script in the next period, and we should be disembodied observers gazing on history, noting the views at each period, then the change of views associated with our turning points, before and after. Instead, we are in the wake of one of these, forced into a dilemma of objectivity: are we postmodern critics of the Enlightenment or Enlightenment critics of postmodern deviation from historical directionality? We don’t have to decide. But after a while, with the right scale, we can see the most obvious significance of the Enlightenment period all over again, in stark simplicity, as a new era challenges antiquity. We can at least follow the contours of the ‘eonic effect’, keeping a close eye on its behavior as it changes gears. Then we suspect that the momentum of modernity, which has no intrinsic connection with some Enlightenment philosophy, is bound up in something larger, and that the postmodern, if anything, is a part of that. And we can’t shake off the sense of ‘progress’ in the succession of periods. A tacit ‘should’ lurks in the analysis. Either we should modernize or not, but whatever the case, we seem to have little choice in the matter at this point. Our modernism is a far broader result than the Enlightenment, and constitutes an overall integration of elements from religion, to science, to culture. It is not a very complicated problem. History fights back. The great Ionian Enlightenment didn’t make it, and was buried for millennia. Perhaps some prefer a Spenglerian future. Sometimes the issue of the Holocaust is raised as a challenge to modernity, or the Enlightenment. While the question should haunt any perspective on history whatsoever, it is entirely odd to lay the blame for this at the doorstep of modernity. That postmodern Spenglerian future is there, close at hand, if you want that. We will soon see another example, the decline of antiquity in the wake of the Axial Age . Another turning point seems to have lost its impetus, and a second reverse turning, more like meandering, undid much of its effect. In fact the rise of the modern seems to pick up where a second turning point left off. What’s going on? Look at the Greek Axial period. Then at the Hellenistic. Then at the postmodern phenomenon. Nothing says our turning points will prove lasting. Once they are done the direction deviates, perhaps. Is this happening again? The whole period from the Reformation up to the nineteenth century creates a net effect that forces the issue of global renewal. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter what ‘ism’ we assign to it, by 1800 it is a fait accompli. The unity of advance in all fields is stunning, but we tend to see it incorrectly due to the exclusion of large-scale history. We see this as the rise of the West in some consideration of what we call ‘Western Civilization’. But we are starting to see that the rise of the modern is connected to a greater whole and that we need a new ‘fundamental unit of analysis ’ beyond the ‘civilization’, to use the phrase of Toynbee. The evolution of an autonomous civilization doesn’t quite work as a concept if the real issue is one of timing and the diffusion of information. ‘Modernity’ is a concept of periods, of timing, not of civilizations. A New Age of Democracy Let us track the history of democratic emergence in our system, to begin to notice something extraordinary: twice in a row, democracy shows correlated jump-start emergence in the eonic sequence, more, just at the point of the divide. We see the sudden appearance of a string of democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, just as our modern transition is concluding. We can see that this is no coincidence. Why might this be? All at once we suspect the reason, armed with a ‘frequency deduction’. A system that ‘generates freedom’ can’t overdetermine the result. It must be men who create their own freedom. Yet outside the eonic sequence democracy (before the modern period) is rare, non-existent, our eonic something needs to give it a boost. The point of the divide is exactly the right moment, when macro-action stops and micro-action takes over. The modern American democratic experiment follows this logic exactly, and we see a mysterious constellation of brilliant founders just at the divide, followed by a functioning democratic experiment settling into a steady state. Clearly democracy as micro-action is at risk as it sets sail into the uncharted waters of its mideonic period.
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