3.3.1 Synchronous Parallelism: A Minimum Principle?

This is clever sort of sequence. Note what it seems to be trying to do, globalize, but with a minimum principle. Like a pinball machine, the right thwack (relative transform) at the right spot, a little dose of high octane every several millennia. A straight intermittent sequence might be too weak to encompass the whole. It can’t overspecialize on one area, instead it seems to jump around. It needs to get as much done as possible at each brief step, perhaps with parallel experiments, to enrich the final whole. Actually there is no such ‘it’. We can specify no active agent doing anything, and soon discover that man does everything but some periods seem to stand out in an overall pattern.

We notice that our sequence splits in a mysterious synchrony, showing a truly global system at work as our turning points perform a spectrum distribution into parallel streams, as seen already in the Axial Age. How this works we don’t know, but the result is clear, and all of a sudden we see why the Axial Age puzzles us. Our sequence now looks like this, with eight hotspots:

The rise of civilization: Sumer, Egypt

The ‘Axial’ phase: Greece/Rome, Middle East (? Canaan), India, China

The rise of the modern: sector of Europe

Our eonic transitions are more complex than a simple sequence, they show parallel interactive emergence. That’s an immediate caution against naïve teleological thinking. Our system is a sort of multiple multitasking monster, branching out in different streams. Now we have the clue to the ‘Axial Age’: it shows sequence and parallelism, a shotgun approach, perhaps to increase the odds of success, or the quantity of variety. This is dangerous, the system could lose direction, and globalization  will induce collision, although at the Axial period distance is still sufficient for local experiments. But it is probably no accident the next step in the eonic sequence shows a univalent pivot area moving toward universal transcultural categories. It must soon reset direction after its Axial spreading fan phase. Religion and secularism will then be destined to collide as the separate streams converge on a unified track.

Note that each target area creates a field of diffusion to spread its wares to its environment, a sort of distributed evolution. We must be on our way to replace the term ‘Axial’. It is not a unique period. The other periods look ‘axial’ also. We tend to miss the common denominator, the ‘fundamental unit of analysis’ being elusive. But we can see that ‘states’ appearing in the first stage resemble ‘religions’ appearing in the second. While the two are not the same, their cousin status as collectivist/libertarian dialectics is close enough to some common denominator to our sequence. Note that each stage is a kind of ‘relative beginning’, as if the system were starting all over again, but using ‘stream elements’ flowing into the period of transition. Note how our pattern discontinues parallel emergence at TP3. Now we have the answer to Eurocentrism. Modernity seems like ‘European’ history, but in fact, as our system globalizes, parallel interactive emergence would backfire, and the transition stages a globalization platform almost immediately.

It is pretty hard to produce a theory of this pattern, until we see its minimum principle, and we really have two theories in one, an Axial Age and general sequence, connected by their defiance of spatial and temporal continuity. Our pattern looks like a fragment, and is not starting at the beginning, but in the middle, perhaps in the Neolithic. We see three surges in a mainline that is not bound to a particular civilization. But it is a strange mainline, because it can also produce parallel effects in its surges. It seems to start in two places, not one.