It is interesting that the roots of millennial conceptions in their current form emerged from the ideas of Zarathustra, in the second Millennium B.C., passed through the vehicle of the Persian Empire into the parallel world of emerging Judaism during the period of the Exile and thence into Christianity and Islam. By this reckoning our crisis is quite ancient indeed, as recycled eschatology. [i] It is difficult to reconstruct the exact sequence whereby the Saoshyant, or savior, of Zarathustra passes into the Qumranic world and thence into the messianic conceptions of early Christianity, although the Book of Daniel shows the clear footprints leading back to the era of the Persian Empire in the time of Cyrus the Great.

This direct and decisive influence of Zoroastrianism on the beginnings of monotheism, in the West, must force us to examine this historical context of our religious beliefs. The world of Biblical Criticism, generated from the era of the modern Enlightenment, was slow to confront the strains of the Zoroastrian prophet in the figure of Jesus, a classic exemplar or realization of the type. A forgotten irony of history, still indirectly evident in the disposition of the Old Testament mood, is the way in which the ‘small scale’ Israel proved a more adept vehicle for the transmission of Zarathustra’s vision than the stolid Persian Empire of Darius and Xerxes that amplified the already distorted form into the common world of antiquity. Perhaps with the coming of the Millennium we will reach the end of the unconscious ‘Zoroastrianism’, our psychic archaeological site, whose archetypes powerfully influence our social mythhistories, the strange entwining of historicism, futurism, the eschatological, that animates millenarian expectation. [ii]

That the clear record of the period of Exile given in the Old Testament should have preserved the forgotten connection of eschatological ideas with the parallel Zoroastrianism in the world of the Persian Empire is a piece of a great puzzle, whose relevance to our subject is simply the temporal correlation with the onset of a new era in world history. It is the period ca. –600 that is in fact our subject, for it is this era that is the source of the great transformation. It is the mysterious era of the birth of the great religions in concert at the fountainhead of the traditions of classical antiquity. [iii]

The blend of Judaic monotheism, as it emerged from its Canaanite, thence Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, with the themes of Iranian dualism and eschatological messianism during the period of the Exile and after, resurfacing strongly during the Qumranic period near the birth of Christianity, is one of the most confusing overlays of the period of cultural advance and integration that occurred ca. –600, thence to generate the pillars of a great constellation of traditions. This complex parallel emergence and interactive blending constitutes one of the central mysteries of the western religious tradition, one part of whose content is so clearly a product of cultural diffusion. It will seem less mysterious once seen in its broader outline of eonic evolution.

The Judeo-Christian tradition assigns to either the Hebrew Prophets or to Augustine the invention or discovery of the ‘linear conception of time’, in a revolt against the cyclical histories of the ancients, although the root idea is clearly Zoroastrian—in the form that comes down to us. Norman Cohn, in his invaluable Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come, a history of the legacy of Zarathustra, describes the contrast between the essentially static world views of the earlier Egyptian, Sumerian civilizations, and the revolutionary implications of the new conception of the prophet Zarathustra, to see the world in motion and moving beyond itself to a final resolution. The portrait of a lonely prophet transforming the Aryan combat myth in the anvil of fiery visions to issue forth the seeds of eschatological religion is a gripping one, and would seem in large strokes correct.

And yet the reality must be more complex, and requires answer against the backdrop of world history as a whole, and a correct perception of the cyclical myths so common to ancient societies. For Zarathustra, as the inventor of Zoroastrianism, could only by conjecture be the first to conceive of historical directionality, as it must surely have begun stirring with the invention of writing and the first inklings of historical time etched in the records of hieroglyphic stone. Few are the first to invent anything, and our immediate impulse, on seeing the eonic effect, would be to find the first concepts of history near the birth of civilization itself. And the sense of history might predominate at the dawn of civilization, yielding to a sense of stasis in a medieval, what we will call a ‘mideonic’, context. The linear and the cyclical are really aspects of one process, their reconciliation seen in our eonic pattern, once the driving motion of cycles of emergent civilization are found to be themselves the true source of progressive motion beyond stasis. [iv]

In any case, it is the crystallization, almost the beginning rationalization, of these first Zoroastrian sources that is characteristic of the Occidental religious traditions, whose effect was also, unfortunately, their exploitation as theocratic imperialism, and the inadequacy of the basic mythological format inherited from Iranian dualism. From its archetypal roots, the eschatological idea forever resurfaces, as evidenced in the notions of early modernism, as they influenced, for example, the English Civil War. The eschatological nexus moves between its twin realizations, the slow, and the fast, the one conservative, dangling the carrot of hope, the other radical, pedal to the floor acceleration and social tumult. It is no accident that much contemporary social criticism attempted to expose the fast version embedded in leftist communism, looking the other way at the slow version granted the weight of religious tradition. Indeed, Norman Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium, describes this very influence of the basic theme on the sources of revolution. But while the influence is direct, the source of revolutionary impulse is different. Nonetheless, a very simple explanation has been lost: the Qumranic period, that of the creation of the religions, shows, not the pious unfoldment of revelation, but underground eschatological revolutionaries attempting a last ditch ‘end of history’ revolt against the Roman Empire. The preemption of the theme as ‘religion’ in the form we know is decidedly caught up in historical amnesia.

The world of Zarathustra, in the field of civilization springing from Sumer and Egypt, was one frontier seedbed of the great religions to come, as ecumenizers in the frontiers of the first rise of the State. State formation, as the fundamental achievement of its first creators at the beginning of civilization, had rapidly become a relation of ‘core and field’, ramparts and political nuclei confronting a field of diffusion, whose chaotic irregularities might well have driven anyone to Zoroastrianism. Beyond the ramparts, the will of Pharaoh or the codes of the Hammurabis do not reach, and the form of the state must confront its own self-division. The idea of the ‘kingdom beyond boundaries’ is born. This field was both the first oikoumene, and yet, no oikoumene at all, a feast for the new political form of the Universal Empire, and the earliest gestation of raw capitalism. It is this ambiguous challenge to society and the ambition to extend its field in universalism, in the open spaces and frontiers of spreading civilization, that gives birth to the essence of the religions to come, as ecumenical movements. This transition from the laws of the State to ecumenical confrontation with the ‘boundaries from law’ as the field of ‘spiritual dolmenization’ in the chaos of edge worlds is characteristic of the secondary stage of our pattern. And it is the oldest vein behind the current confused religious or socialist challenge to ideas of evolution or economic self-organization. Self-organization is eonic and generates no higher order as a magical statistics in the field, short of the most obvious secondary constructs, such as missionary religion. The seeds of ecumenization were already sown at the beginning of civilization, showing a clear progression from state to ‘islam’. The point is that the dynamic of civilization at its core shows, not cultural selection, but the attempt at the integration of the temporal streams of culture arriving from hyperborean minus infinity, in the descent of man.

It is in this void that the vision of Zarathustra, or ‘Zarathustras’, took shape, seeding an idea, that was to pass through the next great era of history to become almost amplified to hurricane force in the ‘islam’, as the ‘kingdom’ of god. The root idea is transparent, as in the challenge of the Hebrew Prophets to the grim world of the Assyrian slaughterbench, civilization in high failure. The tale of the Exodus will give another expression to this, with its obvious symbolism of ‘beyond the will of Pharaoh’ at the frontier in the external ‘kingdom’. What then is a Prophet? There could be many answers. And the anthropology of prophets, still non-plussed by the shaman, yields no simple definition. But here, the perspective to see men ‘beyond the boundaries of law’ might be one. These prophets appear at the boundaries of the rising oikoumenes.

Exposed as myth, the ‘zoroastrian’ theme or archetype nonetheless endures, for it is less unreasonable than it seems. It expresses a sense of the convergent nature of history, and is in fact superior to evolutionary theory, raw, as applied to human culture, if these imply we should act by antiquated animalistic ethic so as to evolve in a continuity of tens of millennia, an absurd thought. The sudden appearance of ‘endstate’ religions, Zoroastrian and Buddhist, so close to the beginning of civilization, is confusing, but appropriate. The ‘end of evolution’ might as well be the object of our actions in the dispositions of liberation, as indeed the parallel and symmetric Buddhist world will pronounce, in the vision of No Man, beyond Man.

The study of history, better yet of physics, must aspire to free us from the fantastic confusions of eschatology, without necessarily rejecting its realizations as common sense in the convergence of exponential process, or the study of unrealized futures. Current scientific images tend to exclude this perspective altogether, which is understandable, for there is simply no easy way to make futurist notions precise in terms of ordinary concepts of natural process and causal systems, and the first step must always be the surrender of incorrect ideas given dogmatic status in the distorted intuitions of the transcendental. This argument, however, can work both ways, if we find our concepts of physical mechanism in a reductionist shortfall that cannot account for our experience. But then much speculative mischief is granted a stay against the ambiguous future of rigorous physics. The ironic fact is that physics is itself evolutionary and could not be called an anti-teleological subject unless we knew its future. We can attempt a partial heuristic generalization that any evolutionary system that shows ‘cycling’ will automatically generate ‘end state’ conceptions in those immersed in its action. And this is what we see in the cascade of millenarian confusion that emerges in the context of civilization.

That the core idea of ‘Zoroastrianism’ has little necessarily to do with Zarathustra can be seen by the instant inheritance of its basic dilemmas into the domain of historical philosophy, to which science finds itself allergic. Its prophets saw design in History, and had designs against it. Beside the rise of modern physics, we also have the rise of the modern conceptions of Universal History, whatever we mean by this term. Stripped of its mythology and the fright of great devils, we find the anticyclical in action near its age of ages, and the mystery of morals in the doubloon of two headed ethical gods.

We can braid science and the metaphysics of Universal History together by casting the issues as questions, does greater history have a dynamical structure, and is this structure a causal system? The challenge of science to the religious teleology is of course one of the aspects of the debate over theories of evolution. But here evolutionary thinking tends to miss one point clearly evident in the Zoroastrian archetype, in the very conception of the ‘end-times’. For evolutionary theories, as we have seen, claim a law ‘true at all times’, while the eschatological, behind its myths, sees the better reality of man evolving against all these times, to become free of its eternity, in counter-evolution. Not evolution, but liberation, is claimed as the choice of free action. And even as we will find the cycle in the eonic effect, we will find convergent factors proceeding against its motion, whether in the vision of Zarathustra, or the symmetric passage beyond the Great Wheel of the Buddhas.

And yet the legacy of Zoroastrian dualism has not been a good one. Its siren song proceeds into myth and religious dogma, thence into the unconscious, or so much psychological analysis would assure us, especially if the myth is so ill behaved as to suggest a leftist utopian imminence, or the bright future of the New Ager. Men indulge in futurism, not solely because of the unconscious archetypes the psychologist finds in them, but because of the nature of the historical circumstances in which they are involved, which are not explained by simple notions of temporality, reduced by analysis to Jungian archetypes. Rhythmic events create anticipation, and these generate archetypal confusions, and it is no accident such ideas took force precisely during the period of the Exile, although the exact reason for this is a long study. It is futile to denounce Joachim de Flores as a millenarian specimen. He saw modernism coming. And this was not mystical prophecy, but lucky guesswork, a cyclical hunch. It is important to properly distance oneself as metaphysical archaeologist from these great contributions to our heritage. But there is nothing inherently wrong with futurist, if not omega-eschatological thinking, a fact forgotten by much impassioned criticism of the apocalyptic. We could as well blame the primitive nature of our mathematics, as a tortoise mocked by the hare of visionary prophecy. We should be forced otherwise to outlaw science fiction, and give the Taoist Now the sanctity of state religion.

The root idea of the trans-temporal partakes of a ‘whole/part’ concept and its possible fallacies, and then falls into the confusions of transcendentalism, and the preposterous claims that commonsense repackaged as mythology is the preserve of temporal religious or historical bodies. Thus Nicholas Berdyaev in The Beginning and the End, reveals the nomadic form of the idea dressed to pass like a shiprat between religions, and exposes the philosopher behind the geometer preaching to Flatlanders: “Doubts and objections have been raised about the possibility of a philosophy of history. It is beyond dispute that it is impossible to construct a purely scientific philosophy of history. We live within historical time. History has not yet come to an end, and we do not know what sort of history is yet to come in the future. What element of newness is still possible in the history of mankind and the world? In such circumstances how are we to grasp the meaning of history? Can history reveal itself before it reaches its conclusion?”

Freed of theological trappings, this statement expresses a valid insight struggling to emerge into scientific, post-theological, thinking. As the eonic effect makes clear, temporal bound thinking is delusive, for we attempt to ape the meta-observer with theories of evolution from the vantage point of the ‘present’, a point with no advantages. Separated from its theological dogmatism and ideological pleading, we must reckon with Berdyaev’s doubts and objections, but this impossibility is established only if we are certain an added dimension to our space-time imprisonment is beyond our perception, or at least the power of our geometrical understanding. Beyond the reactionary exploitation of such thinking as an argument against change or constructive effort, lies a pungent criticism of the ‘local present relativity’ of historical observation and judgment. If we are inside a ‘system’ we can thoroughly wonder if our conscious reckoning can ascend from the illusions of mechanism to fathom its own historical position. Berdyaev, an ex-Marxist, is a critic of the material version of this idea applied to the last apocalyptic revolution. Whatever the difficulties of this, the implication of historical non-convergence of social systems is an equally deleterious idea, grimly challenged, not by eschatology, but the eonic transformations of discontinuous history.

Another eschatological variant lies in the idea of the virtual future. The idea of the virtual future is paired with the prophetic and eschatological, and lurks at the wild frontier of thought, wanting its own theoretical eschaton in a Theory of Everything, for confused Flatlanders. The notion, whatever its status, thus reappears and is a part of our modernism, our ‘Zoroastrian’ upgrade as avid futurologists, or consumers in the flood of books of science fiction, Captain Nemo’s version of the ‘coming struggle’. History has replayed its ‘Zoroastrian’ trick all over again in benign form in the modern versions of the science fiction genre, a fact that should render us suspicious of any claimants to its generation as ‘first thought of by Zarathustra’, for it is closely connected with the natural projective ‘virtualizing’ psychology of human thinking. [v] The first futurist was perhaps the man with bow and arrow, possibly as the evolutionary psychology of expectation and the targeting of future motion. [vi]

At least we should set aside the correlation of our crises, political, ecological, religious, philosophic, historical, with the millennial expectations of round-number turning points, the New Age after 2000, quite confident its only significance will be the predominance of hangovers on the grim dawn of January 1st, 2000. Futurists prophesy the revolutionary implications of new technology. New Agers, by the confused phantom of an Aquarian calendar, see a new dawn of spiritual awakening. Apocalyptics, in a final countdown to the Second Coming, must suspect the anticlimax of a new millennium and the eschaton of unfulfilled futures. The eschatological premise lurks in many guises in normal thought, a fog wanting geometrical clarification, in a politics of Flatlanders. It is significant that man should hallucinate ‘action from the future’, evidence, one should suppose, of the nonlinearity of an historical system undergoing transitions on a scale greater than that of volitional becoming.

Our secular Zarathustras live in the acceleration of history, the exponential curve as myth. But the scale of change is relative, its tempo seems at one point rhythmic, at another accelerating. The analysis of crisis quibbles between recent sociological malaise, a form of madness started by the Sumerians, and some catch-22 in the flow of time itself. A change of government, a philosophic fashion, a complex of economic statistics, a shift of paradigm, attempt to redefine the instantaneous moment of change in a passage of biospheric time. And what we will do is likely to be little that we have willed, if the future-seizing plan betrays the tragic hero’s very original synthetic sin. An honest Taoist should find prophets disreputable persons, and human ‘will’ the activity of straw dogs. If our study of history finds evidence of Progress, we should wonder if its agent is the tragic hero, in a sense of this term long lost to modern usage. At a moment of rapid human progress the Greeks invented the Tragedy, and should be the true creators of the science of simulation. Oedipus Rex, stripped to its essentials, seems the pure study, the future out of control. Why do our dramas show no progress in the art of tragedy? By a Brinks Job of categories we might subsume the ‘tragical’ under the rubric of Progress, in the tragical mood of its first exemplar, Aeschylus. None is required, except to clear its good name, so tarnished by the pessimistic romanticism of the willfully hopeless.

Closer to home, we have reached perhaps a turning point in evolution itself. [vii] William McKibben, in his ecological threnody, The End of Nature, sees the world of man’s primordial Eden, the Biosphere, passing away forever into a construct of human thought, the foundling of such ecological redemption as we might invent. [viii] The passage to a silicon evolution in the emergence of Artificial Life seems science fiction, as it accelerates toward science fact, as the end of organismic imprisonment, the soul finding its soulmate in the computer virus. Francis Fukuyama finds, in The End of History and the Last Man, that we have reached a political final state, the end of world-historical political evolution in the form of the liberal state. [ix] If this is true, it should better be called the Beginning of History, the real New Age, if its creature could reach future history as a New Man. Perhaps the secular prophet of our modernity was the tragedian of the Globe and the scale of comedics a threatened biosphere, as a culture without a tragic theater tries to cathart before the trials of a world historical Richard the Fourth, in all his guises. Finally, in the vault of time, the scale of the historical passes to the moment of Earth time and the evolution of life, thence to embrace a Big Bang and even, in new crypto-Zoroastrian theories of physics, a final relativistic Omega Point of converging world-lines at the “end of time”. [x]

The Eschaton of Geopolitics, First and Last Whigs

Our eschatological crisis seems to be the geopolitical endgame of the Western system of nation states emerging after 1500. The five centuries since this watershed are already visible as a unit of transformation, and one comparable in scope to the birth of civilization, and the passage of classical antiquity. On the scale of millennia, against the backdrop of world history, its revolutionary breakthroughs of liberty, more even than its emergent new systems of economy, constitute an enigma of cultural evolution, a decisive movement against historical trend that is difficult to account for. The great, to many, unexpected, turning point of the times, at the end of this period, is the collapse of the Russian Communist world system, whose outcome was an ambiguous variant of this nationalism, casting the spell of a future internationalism it was unable to achieve. This monumental convulsion in the dynamics of global modernization as the ghost of Universal Empire declared itself the endstate in the outcome of modern politics and industrialism, and was so denounced as crypto-eschatological prophetic futurism, especially by those who prefer to claim the genre, and wish their own version of this Event. In retrospect we see Communism as a descendant episode of the ‘turning’ at the core of the French Revolution in its last and most radical phase, and whose permutations were endlessly echoed across the nineteenth century, in a recursion on a vast scale whose failure seems prefigured in the mysterious logic of that earthquake, and whose arrested transformation seeded the ideologies of permanent revolution.

It is the first fact of modernism that we constantly recycle this core period of leftist surging followed by royalist restoration, action and reaction, whose pivotal years lie between 1789, and  the ‘last’ gasp, 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto. [xi] This is the point at which the world system crosses what we will call a Great Divide, and the realization of modernism comes into being, albeit as a revolutionary collision. The ambiguous mood of 1848, and its gloom of leftist disappointment, fills the nineties air in its implicit form in one and the same sense of shock at revolutionary failure, even as, once again, the failure of capitalism to fail takes off in a long Boom in another such sequence. Beyond this, the grand historical questions remain of the place of revolution in the dynamics of history, its rarity beyond the rise of the modern world. Its place is clear and yet mysterious. Between early antiquity, and the modern transformation after 1500, freedom in its liberal meanings disappeared, after a first birth, and certainly did not reappear as a result of incremental social evolution. After 1848, the revolutionary tide was ebbing even short of the abolition of slavery, as Leftist ideas expanded into a fragmented sociology of permanent revolution.

The triumph of economic liberalism makes one think its dynamism the primemover of the modern transformation. The perspective of world history as a whole shows that this is not so, for this too is a creature of our modern transformation, the great take-off of the Industrial Revolution clustered near the end of the eighteenth century. The brief years of the French Revolution stretch across the nineteenth century amplified in the challenge to its outcome and the charge that modernism was hijacked at its onset. As if in contradiction to all of this, and untroubled by the structures of antiquity, the American Revolution, in a fashion so reminiscent of the Greeks, achieves its open society in open spaces, at the frontier of a greater past, and in the paradox of cores and peripheries. [xii] There is no paradox, for there is no definition of Freedom in open spaces, not yet open societies, save the impulses of free action. The definition of ‘freedom’ is the wild-card of dialectical conflict, and the prize of ambiguous propagandas. The modern political transformation revolves around one simple issue, one only, will the trend toward liberty move to fulfill itself as equality? If it does, modernism succeeds. If it does not, modernism fails. In the background the ambiguity hints at another question, if liberty is freely constructed, why is its appearance conditioned by history. And if this is the case, how can it be liberty?

The term ‘open society’ invokes the phrase used by the philosopher Karl Popper who, in The Open Society and its Enemies, in a classic definition of the liberal achievement, attempted to indict all theories of macrohistorical change as ‘historicism’, in the context of the Marxist historicism, and to see in the Communist ideology the bitter fruits of Platonic or Hegelian authoritarianism. Those familiar with Popper’s view might note we have hoist his argument on a petard, and used it against Darwinism! Thence we can proceed to resurrect ‘historical forces’ past his critiques of their substance as historicism. Popper’s arguments made the assumption that Communism invoked ‘historical directionality’, while the emergence of democratic or liberal freedom was historically exempt from this, more than arguably since ‘determined freedom’ would not be ‘free’. We see our double negative in the wings, and our ‘freedom when?’ question. Here, Isaiah Berlin’s Historical Inevitability, cited already in relation to evolutionary and historical generalization, enters also as a challenge to the ‘inevitability’ of the Communist ‘law of history’. Popper’s important plea for the open society attempted to deny the existence of historical forces on the grounds of their inherent totalitarian nature, in prophecies or predictions of historical laws, in the exclusive emphasis on the power of rationality to create the future piecemeal. But unfortunately these ‘historical forces’ are very real, however difficult it might be to define them.

The simplest way to consider this reality of historical forces would be to look at the discontinuity of modernism as a whole relative to greater antiquity. And ask why society ‘opened’ at all, and so briefly, in the age of Solon, and then waited so long for the renewed fulfillment of this ancient dream. It is a difficult question to answer, if posed in this form. We will see its relation to our ‘evolutionary hotspots’. It is worth recalling to account the great statement of Engels, irregardless of his Communist meaning, in the context of its tragic irony and unfulfilled hope:

The objective, external forces which have hitherto dominated history will then pass under control of men themselves. It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history; it is only at this point that the social causes set in motion by men will have, predominantly and in constantly increasing measure, the effects willed by men. It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. [xiii]

What ‘forces’ are these that we are referring to? Engels, less sophisticated than our two critics, not really of Communism, but of Stalinism, had the better argument, but one that finds Communism and liberal democracy both in the same litter of modern political emergence. There must be other grounds to decide between them beyond a denunciation of historicism. The very nature of the statement implies that with ‘full consciousness’ these forces can be modified, creating a ‘funny when’, the point of transition between historical forces, and human free action. Failure to consider this difference of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ laid the argument open to the rebukes of ‘historical inevitability’. We might also consider that history ‘opened’ into a new economic order, and that this order is not therefore the generator, but the outcome, of a greater historical process whose end, convergence, or status relative to the forms of the state, is—1848 in a nutshell.

The Communist Revolution was also in many ways the last episode of the First World War, to say nothing of Fascism and the Holocaust, and found its mood in the world of the trench war, and the mutinous disgust of republican loyalists, a fact too often forgotten in a world of blinded nationalisms surviving its assault.[xiv] The winners now have the ideological edge to ask universal citizen endorsement of the magic of the market in the name of Freedom and the macroeconomic model. [xv] Why were they challenged at all? The moral account of capitalism might forget that a single episode of capitalist imperialism reduced the population of the Congo from twenty to under ten million, and annihilated the Hottentots in the name of Darwin.[xvi] Hobbes saw the point well, and we see the sheer scale of capitalist violence beyond imagination spawn instantly its grotesque Leviathan parody in the Stalinesque mirror image of the Hobbesian logic.

The confusion of terms, Left and Right, makes us forget the conservative hybrids that thrive to undo the open society, in the arrest of change. A sort of de Maistrean pall hangs over Hollywood. Already the memory of the Communist venture, in this forgotten desperation, seems almost an apparition, and its claim to the meaning of the term ‘revolution’ in the lineage of the earliest modern revolutions not altogether transparent, indeed suspect, even as it concealed a bourgeois revolution behind the different intention, Hobbes’ Leviathan with a socialist mask. [xvii] Beyond the Finland Station, at the passing of the Communist system (without bloodshed almost as a media event, a hopeful sign that the rule of information can transform the law of empires only to confront the law of mass-media), the Russian failure is remarkable for its ambiguity, as one of the greatest experiments in politics in all human history, and as such a desperate defeat of the hopes for creating one human community without the divisions of class that emerged with the rise of the state itself. [xviii] Fraternity sought against liberty, and finally without equality or fraternity, leaves the field to an uneasy liberty without fraternity, and a promissory note for equality.

The problem of Communism is that such an experiment invoked from simple starts to complex generation its own simulation of undiscovered ‘social laws’ attempting to replace the previous set, with as unpredictable results, inflicting on itself an instance, quite ironic, of ‘alienation’. The confusions, indeed, the intractability, of bureaucratic control of economy were its sad lot to discover, although the claims that market processes can solve this problem without displacement is the second opposite myth of modern economics. It would be naïve to assume the capitalist world, more revolutionary still than what some have even called the ‘counter-revolutionary’ communism, is exempt from similar surprises, although its inherent strength allied to the mysteries of convergent statistics, would seem to guarantee its future, and its monopoly on the definition. [xix]

In fact, neither viewpoint in the great ideological struggle has ever succeeded in defining the nature of the (inconstant) economic system that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. Marxism was understandably criticized for its constant anticipation of an endstate in the promotion of crisis, and whose complications forever make uneasy its workhorse alliance with the liberal societies they embrace. But Marx, followed by Schumpeter and others, tried to find the evolutionary character of the economic order in its modern revolutionary transformation, economic or political, as he attempted to grope for the idea of the capitalist revolution as a discontinuous break in the account of ‘stages of history’. This hybrid character confounds every theory. The history of theories in the whole period, 1789 onwards, is a difficult one, the ‘law of history’ thereto the one indispensable item required for effective propaganda. Everything revolves around the idea of a ‘modern transformation’, and its correct analysis. But this cannot be had by focussing exclusively on the modern period alone, and it cannot be found as the evolution of economic systems. [xx]

Looking at the past two centuries, beyond the factions of Left and Right, one must wonder sadly if the outcome is not a lost opportunity, beginning at the point where, after centuries of slavery, the modern system was in a position to match economic, social, and political liberation, and instead simply derailed in dialectical confusion. It requires no used-car Marxism to warn that the macroeconomic slogans so believable against Communism have little validity on their own terms in the sense of theory. Ideas of spontaneous order and Taoist economic self-organization are as vacuous as anything from a utopian tract. The obvious superiority of capitalist production simply begs the question of social justice, a point so obvious, virtual industries of propaganda must confuse the issue, to veil the sacrifice of social justice. If you wish to have justice and social equality, the system has no future in its pure form. End of analysis, and the other side of the idea of historical inevitability, an idea we have invoked against Darwinism, issued forth by Isaiah Berlin against Communism. If we find a flaw in Darwinism, we will likely find one at once in its best friend, the statistics of economic organization, real enough in a system of markets if this is found by experience. Here is a case where Darwinism confuses thought. If random chance can produce elephants, it can solve all social problems, especially if these ‘laws’ are scientifically established as value-free, fallacy rampant.

This is not to deny the obvious benefits of capitalism, but these can only be found by empirical experience, and experience shows the gruesome tradeoff theories are created to conceal, and the motives its determinism wishes to justify. All these theories forget they have invoked ‘freedom’ on Monday for Wednesday’s theoretical ventures in value-free determinism by the modern mutant, the macroeconomist, as mathematical Oedipus armed with a book of differential equations. The only solution is for free men to cease exploitation to get the thing to work, something they have no intention of doing, and the whole chance is lost. In fact, we do frequently see this effect in some of the consumerist versions of capitalist society, often harangued to pieces by leftist cavil, lest the system might actually work. Our concern here is simply that there are no macro-historical theories, books filled macroeconomic models to the contrary, justifying such thinking, which can however explore the basis for economic self-organization on an empirical basis. Viewing the confusion amidst plenty unleashed by the rise of the modern market order, it should pass to the student of history to point out, whether ideologically or not, that the conception of the evolutionary market order, in general, is flawed, and historically inaccurate, as a usurpation of the idea of cultural evolution, and in any case a point to ponder in the wake of Communism, lest the unfolding of unrestrained, and unchallengeable, market order drive the system to renewed collision against itself. If they won’t listen to the left, they will end by hearing it from the ‘other’ right.

Defenders of extreme classical liberalism have convinced too many to be blind to the fact that the market order grants the few more arbitrary power than at any time in history. Beside the horrors of totalitarianism, the modern market order is itself a ‘total’ boundary phenomenon by default, whatever its champions care to call it, behind libertarian window-dressing, for it allows no choice to those who are invaded by its mechanism in the statistical gulags of economic confusion presided over by the value-free social scientist. The frequent application to Communism of the term ‘Leviathan’ as a synonym for tyranny was, evidently, a misuse of Hobbesian terminology, whose meaning applies impartially to monarchy, democracy, or plutocracy, failing to apply at all to the relations of core and periphery. Communism could only become Leviathan as an arbiter of global order, the only point at which Communism could be said to begin. Its failure leaves the global system of capitalist relations the Leviathan principle. And that is a hodgepodge leaving the cultural brushfire of the free-marketeer a kingdom of fourth richards.

The utopian idea is now apparently discredited, judging from the sermons preached against it, the object of ridicule, its mere mention grounds for conservative denunciation. But the utopian idea appeared in concert, almost to the decade, with all the advances of modern emergence, and leaves a question mark about the future if its significance is exhausted. The wheel of fire turns, between Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Thomas More’s Utopia, the one at earliest modern dawn in the world of the Renaissance, the other as if the first hint of the new period of change getting under way after 1500, with Martin Luther, and the forgotten world of Thomas Munzer, social revolution, and the economic rise of modernity. It is interesting that the generation between the two clocks the onset of the modern transformation, and the difference in tone is significant. Because politicians are ‘realists’, if not failures, Machiavelli is taken as scientific, and moral interpretation of change as utopian. The abolition of slavery, and the struggle for Freedom were once utopian. Perhaps the postmodernist age will renounce Machiavelli, as the first modernist. [xxi]

The resemblance of Communism to religion, as an ideology more believed than understood, has often been noted. As J. L. Talmon notes, discussing St. Simon, in Romanticism and Revolt, Europe: 1815-1848, “The crying need of the new industrial age was for a new religion…Saint Simon called this new religion of his ‘Nouveau Christianisme’. [xxii] Beside its utopian cast and economic focus, communism had many of the hallmarks of a novel religious movement of social integration. This point is illustrated implicitly by the notion of Jihad vs. McWorld, in a study by Benjamin Barber of the fortunes of post-communist globalism, where the remains of what Communism was so ambitious to replace rush to fill the void, and challenge the international implications of economic forces generated by, yet swiftly transcending, nationalist sources. [xxiii] Many will protest understandably the use thus of the term ‘religion’, in vain, if the historical exemplars are listed to view, as candidates for the term’s ‘real’ meaning. But this early socialist snapshot, before the labels were changed, evokes the technocratic ideological fervor of ‘religious’ Communism, however ‘unsacred’ the result. Communism in many ways reopened the fanaticism of the Thirty Years War with its confusing ‘conservative’ futurism as a materialist catholicism so reminiscent of its Persian ghost and first incarnation in the wake of the Assyrians, and Tiglath Pilesers, in the times of the severally one Isaiah.

The first form of monotheism as ‘religion’ was the Persian Universal Empire with its ecumenizing ‘Zoroastrian’ ideology, as the universal empire seen first with the Akkadians, thence to the Assyrians, was humanized as the birth of ‘islam’, in the age of the Hebrew prophets. This resemblance, we will see, is more than coincidence. But then what in fact does the term, ‘religion’ mean? The term is perhaps beyond rescue. It is completely misleading, in the kaleidoscope of look-alikes, and savage ‘re-formations’ wishing to be Reformations. A more fruitful perspective is the eonic view, whatever this means, which focuses on the turning point factor behind ‘religion’ with its clustering of ecumenizations around the forms of the state and sourcing precisely from our pattern of eonic generations. We can see the issue of totalitarian origins is bound intrinsically, if only by definition, with the historical trend of the rise of the state itself. Indeed, the first great state in history, the Egyptian, was a totalitarian theocracy. [xxiv]

We are perhaps witnessing the entry into the first age since the English Revolution when the great forces of the Left might seem to have spent themselves. Or perhaps this is another illusion of 1848. Conservative reaction can become genuinely dangerous for it inherits all the powers of modern innovation in the name of a hybrid status quo, and attempts to bind what remains of tradition to the easier advantages of technological change, the arrest of the construction of the genuine liberal society intended by the first democratic revolutionaries. These conservative forces know perfectly well the dangers of capitalist ideology and will attempt to resurrect some concoction of ‘traditional values’ against their own chaos. Are we seeing the onset of what might be called ‘eonic Thermidor’, the exhaustion of the initial forces of creativity and renewal that overtook the Ancient World? It is this ‘Thermidor’ factor, the approach of a steady state, that might contribute to the sense of an ‘end to history’. Shall we see the Great Reaction unmistakably evident in the ancient world, where a period of decisive advance was swallowed up as if nothing had happened?

What do these ideological issues have to do with our subject? We can be clear at the beginning, without apology, that our evolutionary subject involves every ‘leftist’ issue since Martin Luther, if we care to include ‘modernism’ in our discussion of political punctuations, past, present, and future. Between 1500 and 1848+ we see evolutionary process caught up in revolutionary process (and much else that often succeeded better because less turbulent), and evolutionary theory in the shadows prowling like a beast for easy prey, the impetus toward equalization. This recycling of the ‘old slogans’, ‘pieces of eighteen forty-eight’, is an appropriate starting point, or ending, in the consideration of historical discontinuity. We must do ‘evolutionary theory’ in this crossfire of ideological distraction. These ‘pieces of 48’ remain easy to recycle because they remain relevant, in a system stuck, as in deadlock, near 1848, the point at which our discussion, will stop, in mid dialectic, as the efficacy of the powers of modern economic liberation. Our eonic thesis is forced to be controversial to the degree of claiming history shows a ‘leftist’ directionality, as nearly meaningless as that term might be, if only because, to a ‘leftist’ conservative, the rise of capitalism itself was connected to revolutionary liberalism, revolutionary in the broadest sense of historical discontinuity. But we can certainly embrace all sides of the controversy, thus to reflect upon the ‘inevitability’ of a Whiggish outcome, if not a Whig Interpretation of History. Unfortunately, there is no such interpretation, although there are certainly Whigs, defined as ‘half a democrat’ in a resemblance to the American constitution’s four fifths of a citizen person. There is an odd historical directionality in the emergence of liberal systems of all hues.

As we will see, democracy is strongly correlated, as an emergent process, with the basic ‘eonic’ periodization of world history, that is, the era ca. –600 and the modern period after 1500. If we reach further backwards we see, or so some have claimed, the first, before the first, birth in the first nexus of Sumerian city states. [xxv] The correlation, at first trivial, is nothing a statistician would find conclusive, but the interior logic will prove compelling, for we are getting suspicious of statistics. Suddenly, we are in the realm of the modern Whiggish emergence with a desperate question, perhaps there is a Whig Interpretation of History. The problem the Whig Historians had was explaining why they themselves appeared, and why this only happened in the time and place that it did. This complex correlation, in antiquity and then in modern times, must drive a subtle suspicion that something more is involved that the usual economic or other arguments, for similar causes seldom lead to the same effects. The birth of Freedom in antiquity is a difficult puzzle. Many have attempted authoritarian critiques of the democratic based on the quite outrageous presumption that since democratic polity is so rare, it must be flawed. It is rare because politicians, over the course of history, do everything possible to prevent it, and, on the average, succeed. Then why do they change their minds during times associated with the eonic effect ?

Herbert Butterfield in his The Whig Interpretation of History, chides the Whig historians of the nineteenth century who saw history as a process fulfilling their political preferences. [xxvi] Their viewpoint was always at risk of the paradox of attempting to make and justify the very history claimed as a force unto itself. Their views were born in the same era of English history that saw the fundamental creativity of the modern world. But the criticism of Whiggishness, although essential as a challenge to teleological interpretations of historical systems, fails to explain why the impostor Freedom ever made a come-back after its ancient defeat, and did so when it did. We are confronted with the question, why this modernist timing, issues of communism apart, of Whig conceptions? More generally, why after almost two millennia did democratic revolution sweep through Europe and the world as an unstoppable force? Again, why did men suddenly revolt against theocracy, and pursue the rational construction of freedom, as if on cue from a mysterious change of time? Why did this happen once before, and then die out? Broadly, there is the unnoticed problem of understanding why ideas of Progress and Democracy, Industrialism, Socialism, and Communism exploded so precipitously from the ground zero of the nineteenth century, from seeds sown in the period 1500-1800. The phenomenon is itself conditioned by an historical rhythm we must attempt to describe, whether we can understand it or not.

The philosopher Hegel was one of the first to grapple with a sense of the directionality perceivable in the history of freedom, keeping in mind the ambiguity of ‘direction’ in rival linear, or cyclical, interpretations. We should note in passing, almost in a whisper lest his confusing terminology find refuge in our own, that we have (in a set of distinctions the reader must have found baffling) reconstructed quite unintentionally a lightweight version of his ‘dialectic of freedom’, a metaphysical obscurity given dramatic reign in the years 1789-1848. The acuteness of his thinking is however veiled in the philosopher as a metaphysical Sphinx all too liable to misinterpretations, and some earnest questions in the face of his hypocrisy before Prussian censorship. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama steps without hesitation into this Hegelian vein, anxious to sneak the kludges of teleological idealism into the barren mechanics of sociology, and finds in liberal democracy the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution ” and the “final form of human government”. [xxvii] Democracy might be ill-served by the invocation of Hegelian teleology spilling forward like a fumbled football and hand to its enemies all the counterarguments once applied to such thinking by the critics of Communism. Thus Robert Tucker, in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, criticizing the idea of ‘scientific socialism’, notes that “the Materialist Conception of History with its scheme of world periods… is not constructed on the plan of a scientific theory, but on the plan of a philosophy of world history”. [xxviii] One must wonder how this criticism now escapes borrowed use in the post-Communist era.

In fact, the criticism was always flawed. For, what indeed is a scientific theory in the realm of history? Karl Popper, despite his insights, makes the same mistake of finding all intuitions of ‘historic periods’ to be ‘historicism’. All that science can offer is the elimination of all values, along with evolutionary schemata that we have seen do not apply. The Hobbesian macroeconomic model, or muddle, the mystique of the differential equation, flashed in the open, looks quite scientific, but is really vacuous. The original impulse of the German Idealists is visible in Kant’s implied challenge to the purely mechanistic theory of society. Whatever we conclude, Kant shows the immense trouble in finding the correct starting point. Tucker’s critique also attempts to debunk this phase of idealism as a ‘hubristic’ or Faustian ambition to rewrite monotheism as the ‘divinity in man’, an anti-Marxist stratagem, cogent, yet entirely beside the point. The self as All in the All is an idea as old as the Upanishads and bids fair to be the hidden clue to evolution, ironically exposed by a cogent critic of Communism. Especially in Hegel we see a disguised version of the argument by design. But was Hegel a theist or an atheist? We may never know, until we see what he was trying to do, the same thing Darwin was trying to do. The question is ill-posed, an obvious instance of Q1, and the effort of a real philosopher to both escape from it, and, unfortunately, repackage a hybrid in such wise as to pass censorship. Whatever the case, Hegel saw design in history, and, less distant from evolutionary science than one might think, attempted to find a ‘smart law’, the conceptual equivalent of an evolutionary force that can do all the things random chance cannot do. The result is a bit confusing!

As is the idea of the ‘end of history’. Hegel is a poor choice for an ideologist. He looks conservative, almost Burkean, but his instincts were philosophical, and leave themselves open indifferently to dialectical contradiction, by the very nature of his method. There is a danger Fukuyama’s slick argument might convince honest democrats to the point of unwarranted complacency. There is no historical inevitability in the sense Fukuyama indicates. The moment we introduce the discrete-continuous distinction, we see why. The course of the idea of the Hegelian ‘end of history’, the idea that history had ended in 1806 after the Battle of Jena, i.e., the principles of liberty and equality had become the ‘limits of convergence’ of the global system of Universal History, fails as linear directionality, and changes its meaning with context and is bound in the equivocation created by ambiguity between the ‘end of history’ and the ‘end of antiquity’, and Hegel himself a harbinger of a New Age, yet haunted by the memory of the Great Terror, and the wish to justify the passage to new and different futures in the collisions of that era. But the New Age is secure, and grants no further proofs of justice, as liberal systems emerge in temporal form guaranteed no Whiggish certainty by the arguments of Hegel. Anyone who uses this nearly hopeless terminology will play on its abstract meaning as a dialectical deduction in principle traded on its quite different significance in the domain of historical realization. Indeed, the ‘dialectic of masters and slaves’ is open to the objection that while Freedom is the opposite of slavery, it is also the opposite of an intangible ‘mechanical consciousness’. Abolitionism did not signal the end of history, but a cliffhanger hope serious social creation might begin. The critics of ideology (indeed Hegel himself) that rose in the generation of Marx were discovering precisely this distinction, as indeed the Southern critics of abolition attempted to point out. The relation of man to the inherent dilemmas of the State casts this ‘dialectic’ in an ambiguous light. Slave states are merely aberrant. It is the realization of man’s existence in the State as such that requires liberation as a true social consciousness. And this has never been achieved.

In the gothic emergence of the philosophic political consultant from the metaphysical gloom of the German Enlightenment, Hegel received, beside his interesting insights, the criticisms given him by many, such as the other heir of Kant’s legacy, Schopenhauer. [xxix] The world of German Idealists looks after its own, and goes as Captain Ahab goes, in a brilliant flourish. Meaningful summons of Hegel requires the use of his ‘dialectic of stages’. And this cannot be tacked onto a sociological argument about the influence of economics or technology on history, for it is a challenge to the very foundation of normal logic, to say nothing of physical causality. The ‘end of history’ argument proceeds from the philosopher Kojeve, thence from Marx. Those who wish to invoke Hegel and bypass Marx forget the route traced by the Marxist legacy, and that Hegel was not a Darwinist (Fukuyama is on record as a conservative sociobiologist). The labors of Marx to construct a material dialectic of stages at least shows his awareness of what Hegel was saying. On most word-processors ‘case not proven’ goes into blink mode. Further, behind the Prussian public exterior lies the fountainhead of the ‘passing beyond the civil society’, amplified by Marx, who discovered Hegel’s secret of the ‘estranged spirit’.

But Fukuyama’s argument moves in relevant fashion toward the ecumenization factor we are beginning to see, in this case, a challenge of revived ‘modernization theory’, and the difficulty of replicating liberal evolution at random in the context of global capitalism. Fukuyama is forced to hunt for the trend toward liberalism, given evidence of such a trend beginning with the early modern, and climaxing in the French Revolution, or the ‘battle of Jena’ divide. In any case, behind the window dressing of sociology, Fukuyama introduces his idealist ‘ace’, from Hegel, with the right instinct that historical directionality is underivable from usual scientific premises. The veneer liberalism of the capitalist state is still a superior form to the medieval derelicts eager for capitalist economy and modern technology, an argument burdened by its Eurocentric mill-stone and ideological modernization theories. This State Department Hegelian innuendo, directed at political dinosaurs, is not without pertinence.

Fukuyama asks, “Do all or most societies evolve in a certain uniform direction, or do their histories follow either a cyclical or simply random path?” Fukuyama proposes to find the historical mechanism in relation to various candidate factors, e.g. the development of scientific knowledge, as a cumulative force whose development can ‘clock’ the ‘irreversibility’ of progressive time and asks, “But if history is never to repeat itself, there must be a constant and uniform Mechanism or set of historical first causes that dictates evolution in a single direction, and that somehow preserves the memory of earlier periods into the present.” This states the problem of historical causality quite directly indeed, and in a fashion that makes the linear or uniform and the cyclical mutually exclusive. But here is the exact difficulty, for the mechanism that Fukuyama might wish could show a cyclical character and also be multilinear, behind the modern rise of science and technology that seems to hold sway only after 1500, and as much a series of effects as drivers of the motion. And what is the relevance of Hegel here? Hegel’s argument is not causal. The ‘mechanism’ of the ‘end of history’ is the dialectic of stages in the emergence of Freedom. Anything obtained from this cookie jar will find itself orphaned in the wilds of physical reduction and its shortfall. Of all the failed efforts to graft Hegel’s thinking onto to historical sociology, that of Marx would seem the best, for he saw the issue violated historical continuity. But Fukuyama’s instincts are sound. Normal causality fails as a candidate for the Grand Mechanism. All such efforts amount to variants of macroeconomic models of growth, and they don’t work. Sneak in Hegel draped in the American flag.

The great historical Mechanism that Fukuyama describes must pass muster throughout Universal History, in the record of civilization. It is not sufficient to begin with the rise of modernity and find therein the resolution of Universal History in its effects, rather than its causes. Thus, we cannot assume the implied conclusion of his ‘if’. What if history does repeat itself? Such arguments assume, perhaps, the Judeo-Christian ‘mythistorical’ discovery of linear progressive time as a fait accompli. But progressive time might be cyclical, and cyclical phenomena might show direction. Another mechanism might be a linear ratchet of progressive cyclicity. Worst of all, some overwhelming force might claim the end of progression or resistance to change, the end of history, and force the children of the future to catacomb against the long-term. The history of Roman antiquity is a significant demurral to any hopes of easy endings by the all-powerful. Finally, after summoning Hegel, in the linear teleology of Freedom, the argument retreats to the directionality given history by the rise of Science. We will see that emergent science is embedded in a cyclical pattern that must deny it the status of directional flagger, although this might change over the course of time. But science can yield only scientific directions in a universe of directions. Science must rise to the definition then of this potential, thus stepping ‘backwards’ into the issues of Universal History. But science so far wishes to resolve the historical to the evolutionary in the account of physical theory rising on the scale of reduction, disregarding the difference of theory and action, and the deficit of reductionist shortfall. The obvious suggestion that science has injected impetus in the wrong direction, so evident in the confusions of sociobiology and Social Darwinism, deprives it of any but ‘local shaping influence’ of technology.

In spite of the unfortunate conservative cast of the originally very radical argument, Fukuyama’s instincts are right, although constantly distracted by the difficulty of reconciling Hegel’s argument, in its misunderstood strangeness, to various other candidates for historical explanation. One of the pitfalls of twentieth century thought is the confusing influence of Nietzsche, evident in the references to the ‘last man’ in Fukuyama’s title. Behind the attractive charm of Nietzsche’s flourishes lies a series of simple historical confusions, along with a misperception of the emergence of art. The fiction that aristocratic societies have some monopoly on the noble and the artistic is contradicted by the facts, among them the appearance of the very greatest art among the discoverers of the idea of freedom, the Classical Greeks, just as democracy was struggling to be born. This era of the greatest art is associated with an historical transition in the center of our eonic pattern and contrasts directly with the later derivative Roman literature in the breakdown of the Republic. This Rightist nonsense was always surprising from a man like Nietzsche. Modern democratic society, even so-called, has outperformed every aristocratic society that ever existed. It is the latter that are the deadweight of history, not the energized masses of modernism.

The inadequacy of the aristocratic pseudo-history is reflected directly in the inadequacy of Nietzsche’s psychology, reflected in Fukuyama’s resurrection of the Platonic megalothymia, as if the prince’s desire for glory were the motive behind for the world historical trend toward equality, so often defeated by the tides of reaction. The heritage of such notions seems the transformation of the most archaic social conceptions of the Indo-European tribalisms entering the stream of greater world history as decaying hybrids of warrior aristocracy embedded in the remains of caste formations. A notable example is the contra-directional revivalism of this in the Indian Code of Manu, whose brahmaninistic restoration of Indo-European veneer becomes one of the strangest of historical reverse-gear trends. Indeed, the last echo of this is present in Plato himself in his reactionary intimations of the older Greek aristocracies before the Age of Solon. There is little hope of seeing this antiquated Hyperborean hangover psychology as the driver of historical realization as recognition. The latter so obviously yet mysteriously appears during our classical phase, and then across the board throughout advancing civilization. The last of the great ‘megalothymotic’ warriors, defying death, are, most ironically, Gautama Buddha, and Mahavir Jain. Intimations of the right psychology lie precisely in Hegel’s system with its distinctions of consciousness and self-consciousness in a fashion so reminiscent of the antique Samkhya of the Indian tradition. The much maligned world of the common man has a better solidity to realize true social consciousness as the society of first men than that of Conan the Barbarian turned perfume sniffer so extolled by Nietzsche. The characteristic generation of ‘first man’ scripts seen in the rise of modern liberalisms, from Hobbes to the Social Contract, are classics in their own right, but might avail of our ‘relative beginning’ perspective, where the Last Man precedes the First, in the recurrence of potential Starting points.

The ‘end of history’ argument is easily dismissed, but it is a factor to be reckoned with, for reasons other than the Hegelian idea of dialectical stages. It is an indirect intuition of the eonic, periodization. One way to consider this is to attempt to reperiodize a new modern starting point. The silliness about Napoleon at Jena will seem better as the wild guess that it is. Thus one futurological treatment of the current transition to the so-called ‘information economy’ is that of Alvin Toffler, in his The Third Wave, which charts the curve of growth in the expansion of technology as a series of waves whose sequence suggests the greater exponentiality of development and sees a new current stage in the acceleration of technological development of information processing, placing the time-zero of this exponential rendering of the human time-frame near the emergence from the Ice Ages, a First Wave Neolithic Revolution. A Second Wave machinery of steam and heat yields to a computronics of information as the scale of economic interaction generates a noosphere by Internet. “A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.” [xxx]

This would certainly seem true, if we can define the term ‘civilization’, and if we can explain away the explosion of cultural change since 1500, to be renounced as Second Wave. A Third Wave would need to be nimble on its feet to surpass the second without its slingshot effect, or its interior morphing of so many aspects of culture. But this is what Toffler proposes, and, agree or not, it is a perfectly reasonable proposal, until one considers that it would require a ‘total revolution’ by control of an entire global culture. Toffler is saying that perhaps this will happen spontaneously. But the only spontaneous forces are the revolutions that created the modern Second Wave, and they began with the Reformation. Why was this so?

If we look at the net gains of innovation, and cultural acceleration since 1500, a broader picture emerges than either the purely technological or the economic, and the period after ca. 1750 becomes the rough springboard launching a whole series of phases of technology and culture, Second and Third Wave, the two therefore different phases of the same transformation. [xxxi] We will move to distinguish ‘technosequence, econosequence’, and what we will call ‘eonic sequence’. Toffler’s technological projections have proven apt within the context of the computer explosion and of the sudden transnationalization of capitalism, in another supposed ‘Great Divide’ that many have ascribed to the period ca 1960, without quite specifying its meaning. Our future-shocks are real, and we always step into the future blind, in a sort of dead reckoning, like ancient mariners departing without instruments of navigation, chasing a rumor of the East Indies. But Toffler’s scheme suggests that the entirety of civilized history, more the period from -8000 to the Industrial Revolution, was ‘all of a piece’ because of the uniformity of its agricultural mode of existence. Perhaps in some sense this was true. Then, ten thousand years is succeeded by a second period of two centuries of industrialism, to be followed by a Third Wave whose length is then completely ambiguous in relation to these earlier anomalous intervals. Time for the Fourth Wave.

Toffler  seems to imply we should be trading our ‘outdated’ democratic Second Wave political system for some new structure adapted to the Third Wave. It is important to wonder, then, what is the Third Wave, and how will it generate political forms with the creativity of the period 1500 to 1800? In fact, there is no Third Wave on these terms, for the institutions that generated the Third Wave are direct offspring not of technology but of the cultural evolution that created the modern age, in tandem with the basic Industrial Revolution, whose period of emergence after 1750 is often taken without reference to its truer rising ‘takeoff’ since 1500, whatever is to be said for its darkling gestation in the Middle Ages. In any case, although there almost certainly is a real discontinuity called the Industrial Revolution, it is much simpler to see the period 1500 to 1800, not as a phase of industrialization, now old-fashioned, but a deeper cultural evolution, in which for the first time in history economic and technological evolution achieved a dramatic breakthrough. It is a confusion created by attempting to periodize the historical sequence on the basis of technology and economy alone.

The rise of the modern is something different however from economic and technological development. Thus the emergence of democracy cannot be easily seen to emerge from technological innovation, any more than the operas of Mozart, the rise of the novel or the three-cornered hat, to say nothing of the Enlightenment itself. Democracy shows its first feeble emergence in the period just after -600 in Archaic Greece, in a fashion more clearly demonstrating its blend of economic and predominant cultural aspects, but quite before the Second Wave. It’s timing is eonic, that is, it shows correlation with the broad discrete sequence of civilizational cycles itself. In general the study of Archaic Greece is illuminating, for we see the familiar ‘onset of modernization’ with a still primordial ‘economic’ revolution, and hardly any technological acceleration, and not very much therefore of the ‘modern’ at all. But its absolutely seminal character can never be taken away, and the period created the real seeds of the much later Scientific Revolution, for reasons having little demonstrable relation to technology or its evolution. No theory except a eonic or other cyclical one can account for these facts.

It is significant to consider the appearance of modern forms of Freedom, and the Communist explosion, in its proper context, of 5000 years, the entirety of what we call ‘civilization’, unable to establish a practical equality of economic justice, except for one brief period near -600. The modern world of Freedom was the child of revolution. This led to the rise of the notion of the ‘permanent revolution’, when, in fact, a flawed system was simply becoming stable. This stability is guarded by reasonable compromises, and the unique experience of American economic and political success. But the issue remains, for the gains of freedom are never secure. The discrete veiling of this fact by those who wish to brand ‘revolution’ as a pathological aberration or the will to power, is a token of the brevity of historical memory. Our memories are short if we forget the birth of a force that sprang into existence before the abolition of slavery. [xxxii] But the original sense, and the real heart of Fukuyama’s argument, is the preservation of the gains made at the ‘end of modernism’, and an attempt to insist the technological gains of modernization should be accompanied by the gains of liberty, even as desperado traditionalist cultures wish the fruits of technology while calling liberal modernization ‘ethnocentric’. [xxxiii]

Could humanity regress completely, find itself reviving slavery, theocracy, aristocratic society? Unfortunately it could, because it has, the more so as its experimental ‘communist’ fail-safe itself deviated and proved an abysmal failure, precisely on this score. What then is the source of freedom? Part of our confusion is the assumption of pure linear advance, and the viewpoint this creates, that particular forms, cultural states, or periods are islands of random rationality adrift in time. Our study might attempt to give a better meaning to the term ‘end of history’, as the passage of a divide, and, more basically, a phenomenon related to what we will call eonic transition. And our study might highlight, and possibly reconcile, the contradiction in these linear views of progress into which the cyclical factor would threaten to return, and in the process make us less sanguine about the inevitability of any simple form of short-term political directedness.

Transition and Enlightenment

The contradictions of modern culture move with the crisis of its correct definition, as the triumphs of science and technology appear to stand in contrast to an ambiguity of social values, in the double heritage of the Protestant Reformation curling around the new ‘tradition’ of the Enlightenment, near the rising collision of Left and Right that began in the sixteenth century. One aspect of our crisis is our misperception, or rather the complexity of differing perceptions, of the transition to the modern world, and the brutal shock it delivered to the institutions and value-systems of a previous period, especially as the result frequently was inferior to what came before, to the confused bewilderment of reactionaries trying to understand the replacement of catholicity with nationalism, or the substitution of religious with economic values. Inconsistent principles of evaluation move in the equivocation between the realization of Freedom, or the indictment of ‘possessive individualism’, and many other contradictions. If we have grounds for historical periodization, these difficulties are seen in a new light. For achievements of previous eras are challenged by a change of direction, that stands in a different relation to the past, than that of linear progress. [xxxiv]

The nature of the modern transformation is itself under attack as a Burkean gloom animates the revisionist or neo-traditionalist perceptions of the long transition from the world of antiquity, to say nothing of the movement of ‘postmodernism’. [xxxv] Strangest of all, a new philosophic scapegoat, the Enlightenment, taken through the debunking of the idea of Progress, is found to be a deviant interlude, like an episode of rational flu in a decline from the High Middle Ages. Men have short memories, unless indeed with de Maistrean or Nietzschean consistency they renounce the hard won freedoms gained in revolutionary struggle. Although the strategy of defending modernism wishes to find refuge in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the rise of the world we have now inherited is far broader than this. The ‘Enlightenment’, despite its magnificence, is not a consistent philosophy or viewpoint, and needs to be seen in a greater geographical and temporal context, with world history as a whole in the background.

 The Enlightenment It was the philosopher Kant who said that while the men of his age might not be enlightened it was an Age of Enlightenment. This catches the correct issue of periodization. And yet the period referred to is more complex than it seems because of the ambiguity of places, times, and themes taken to represent its keynote. Even as the subtheme of rationality undergoes a crescendo, deeper currents are stirring, that will answer to the riddle of why, amidst the triumph of science, the finished work will cross into the nineteenth century in revolution, a romantic descant and Reason bearing the orphan of Dialectic. We see Karl Marx scrambling to graft together German Idealism, English Political Economy, and French Babouvism. Although we associate the Enlightenment with the eighteenth century, its roots are really in the seventeenth century, and its true parentage still earlier in the era of the Reformation, as it rises to the Thirty Years War. There is a unity to the steps, from the breakdown of the Catholic world of theocracy, the partition of Protestantism, the ambiguity of authority followed by the disposition to reinvent the state or secure the elements of new sovereignties, Hobbes and the English War, in the ‘bourgeois’ economic and liberal mode of civil society, followed by the focus on the place of the individual discovered in freedom, to search for a new ethical self, and encountering the physics of the new materialism found from the rebirth of science as a system of the world. An almost timeless age in itself, and yet a moment in a larger sequence, the Enlightenment is seen best in its own context, which is its challenge to the past, more even than the future, as the birth of the idea of Progress bears witness to the rising breeze against doldrums of slow centuries. The confusions of postmodernism disappear, if we see that we are merely post-Enlightenment, find the dialectic a premonition of the world of Gödel and the limitations of systems, beside the birth of engines of steam in the timely arrow of thermodynamic times of departure from Newtonian timeless laws, Industrialism of the new Locomotive. A New Age is born.

We have suggested in a very ordinary fashion that it is this modern transformation as a whole that is the relevant object of understanding, although its analysis must prove more difficult than the heat engine, unless a more advanced contraption can be seen to transform facts into new values, and excuse short circuits of the Naturalistic Fallacy conceived by the philosopher Moore. Finally, the resolution will be a geographical riddle, with enough room for many contradictions.

This idea of an historical transformation embraces a broader cultural evolution than the episodic Enlightenment. Notions of the ‘dialectic’ are almost a recipe for confusing the issue, yet we see in majestic simplicity the ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ imprint the moment with an instantly inconstant parallelism, the Voltaire and the Rousseau. Already in a so-called ‘postmodernist’ age, or one in which traditionalist Counter-Enlightenments are given conservative license, we alternate between defense and cavil with the climactic moment of transition, the Enlightenment, as the talisman of modernity, or the tragic hero’s cusp of fall. The Enlightenment needs, finally, no defense, for its significance is clear in the correct perspective in relation to the world history as a whole. But the real issue is broader, and connected with this transformation, too often seen as the triumph of the economism that is really its first-born.

And this should be our starting point, what is the nature of this the modern transformation? This ‘transformation’, difficult to define, is the core of our subject, and shows us, if we can understand it, humanity’s most recent instance of ‘eonic evolution’ in action. We can attempt to look at a generalized idea of eonic transition to embrace the various theories of the rise of the modern. Marx (or Hegel ) and Darwin tend to stand in front of our vision of the Enlightenment, whose timeless ahistoricity is its strangest quirk, even as it gives birth to an historical discontinuity. Karl Marx, like him or not, is one grandfather of ‘theories’ of the modern transformation, if only because a generation later than Hegel, or Adam Smith, is the first time to really conceive of such a theory, looking backward. Max Weber clearly indicates his in the deliberations of his Protestant capitalist. Even Darwin, to a close look, conceals such a theory in disguise. Such a theory, in Marx’s terms, is a statement of a law of history, of some sort, in relation to ‘slow or fast’ passage between ‘stages of history’.

One of the confusions of Darwin’s theoretical strategy was the effort to de-emphasize the discontinuous as grounds for the supernatural, with a possible ambiguity in relation to purely political or ideological preference or bias. [xxxvi] It is interesting that evolutionism was associated with extreme radicalism during the era of the French Revolution. This issue is altogether ironic, as we will see, in relation to the ‘discontinuity’ of our historic eras, and the correlation of these to social change, revolution, and, indeed, ideas of revelation as they emerge historically.

We can start by looking at the acceleration in social change that starts in the sixteenth century. Grasping its complexity can help to staunch the frantic introspection in search of talismans of modernism. We take modernity for granted as a social paradigm, yet its core is in fact not defined, or definable, as conceptual philosophy, its substance very much a hybrid or parade of emergents cast in the glow of transient self-consciousness, granting its inheritance to its first-born, rationality, which might soon deviate into many confusions. It is this intangible factor of ‘self-consciousness’ that lurks behind deliberate Reason. We call the issue secularization, but this is merely a first line of approach, a description of institutional changes.

This issue of ‘Enlightenment rationality’ is now under attack, but the dispute is a red-herring. For this rationality has already done its work, and set the foundations for a new order. The issue of rationality is often confused with the emergence of moral nihilism as an indictment of modernism. The reactionary is at work, and it was the ‘reactionary’ Nietzsche who proposed this fallacy. His transvaluation of values is a misplaced challenge to the one core of valuation historical direction shows, that of freedom, and the trend toward equality. His contrast of ‘slave morality’ with the earlier values of the Greeks is simply off the mark, and fails to see the dynamic on its correct scale. Few have been so ‘lucky’ with a home-made torpedo as Nietzsche, but it is not hard to put him in his place, granting his moral fatigue with the ‘codes of the Hammurabis’, a first great achievement of civilization, soon the legalism of moral conditioning that preempts the emergence of self-consciousness in the straightjacket of penitentiary dolmenizations.  [xxxvii]

There is a plaintive conservative or postmodernist attempt to root out the Enlightenment’s key concept or idea, its Achilles heel, as if to stay the flood, and fix the kingdom for stragglers, or restore Christendom from a Mt. Sinai of conservative thinktanks. A contemporary conservative phasing wishes to exploit a false antithesis of rival or exhausted forms of modernism from which to move backwards, ambitious for the resurrection of ‘traditional’ values. In reality, no traditional values of the kind aspired to by conservative thought can be found, if they are not consistent with the Code of Hammurabi, which would be the most traditional, by default, the precedent by cuneiform tablet, if we could find grounds for stopping our search in the Babylonian period. It is not nihilism to expose the sterility of ‘Assyrian legal codes’, the crystallizations of ‘law’ that accompany the rise of the state, then transformed as transcendental decree in the phases of religion. It is perhaps here that Nietzsche, much the ‘modernist’ he so scorns, betrayed his own insight. To summon up the ‘codes of the Hammurabis’ is a strange way to put the issue, although it can force us to adopt a completely historical attitude from the beginning, and attempt to understand the hypnotic hold of tradition, and its rough passage into modern times. We unconsciously expected from the evolution of culture, as the modern transformation, a new dolmen of the codes of the Hammurabis, but the real evolution is one of consciousness moving against these crystallizations.

The presumption of greater insight into the values of morality by the men of antiquity is one of the most consistently misleading claims made by champions of the past, with the frequent and related charge of nihilism cast before the wearing away of churches. The views of the ancients are forever a force to be reckoned with, but the difficulty arises as to whether the guardians of tradition should be taken to represent them. As Peter Gay pointed out in his study of the Enlightenment, The Rise of Paganism, the philosophes began by attempting to recover the very sources of classical tradition, moving slowly to surpass them in The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. He calls it the ‘recovery of nerve’, and it is ironically, as will become clear, poised against the cyclical views of time still seen in Machiavelli and the men of the Renaissance.

It is significant that our traditional values arose in a revolt against tradition, as the history of the Israelites testifies, both in its radicalism, and its recursion nonetheless of many themes of a more ancient Mesopotamian (and Egyptian) tradition, whose political and theocratic systems of law and ethical commandment passed into the formulation of the great classical traditions, among them the Judaic. And it is from this distant period of classical antiquity that we expect the foundations of our social conceptions. Westerners generally espouse values that are a mixture of those of the Hellenic or Judaic sources near the period ca. -600. Why do we clock tradition from this point? Why not establish the reckoning of tradition from the period, for example, of the beginning of civilization, or even the Neolithic, whose traces remain to this day, perhaps, in the mariolatry of the Catholic? And what is this ambiguous period in between of the slow growth of legal codification, and its shadowy existence near its own spiritualization as ‘divine law’?

In his great poem, The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot unwittingly perpetrated a great confusion, that a modern disorder is an ‘involution’ of some ideal Christian medievaly. Along with Nietzsche he confused the decline from modernism itself, with the ‘decline’ of late antiquity, in the last of the Medievalisms. Nietzsche was obsessed by the coming era of the last man, or the baseless fear that the passing of aristocracy meant the end of art as we know it. We should celebrate with indifference the passing of the last aristocrat, unconvinced the various Dracula parodies of the overman are more than Hobbesian machines of self-magnification. Eliot and Nietzsche were not alone in confusing involution and evolution, the point is indeed confusing, for we do not have correct terms for describing historical entities. But the perception that the ‘ancient order’ needs to be preserved or maintained is one of the oldest ideas of civilization, probably a notion of the first of the second lot of Pharaohs in their dynastic labors against decline, and one whose logic itself needs to be examined historically, and in terms of periodization. Indeed, a modern chaos we see, but it is more than arguably a transition to a higher state of order.

The social morality of the Middle Ages was a failure, by modern standards, in a world where reading the Bible was restricted to an elite. Now the philosophes are maligned, in a strange amnesia that their protests against religious fanaticism were directed against the torture and execution of heretics, still in their own century. One of the first great acts of the modern world was the martyrdom of Tyndale, a first translator of the English Bible. The simple act of reading the Bible in the vernacular is not a traditional, but a modern value. Another of these confusing effects is the invigoration of the Abolitionist by the tide of rationalism, to spearhead in religion’s name what religion had so long proved unable to accomplish. The interactive effects of tradition, Reformation, and the Enlightenment in relation to economic and political transformation are here near beyond analysis.

This view should yield no relief to inquiry or complacency about the pitfalls of our situation, or expectation of automatic improvement. The cataclysms of the twentieth century demand a reckoning. But it is not as such a moral crisis of traditional values, but a moral, or post-moral, opportunity to proceed to the infinite valuations of real consciousness, free of the echoes of cuneiform judges in the dinosaur centuries of frozen kingdoms. Modern times! We see more the Chaplinesque jerkiness of sheer confusion, in the creative ferment of existence without the fixation of systems of behavioral organization. The search for traditional values must be preceded by the question, which tradition? The emergent classical world rapidly produced Chinese, Indian, Persian, Judaic, and Greco-Roman value constructs, and then proceeded to blend them, sometimes in very confusing ways. The sudden global context reveals little more than a collision of these many traditions. The Enlightenment tokens the beginning of a new tradition of Humanism, with all the dangers of an Esperanto, that is almost inevitable because it addressed from the beginning the issue of the coming new global world.

The disorder of modern life, in the wake of the Enlightenment, is poorly diagnosed as a collapse of the conservative’s traditional values or the postmodernist’s crisis of rationality, notwithstanding the clear danger of ‘all around collapse’ into purely economic selections of the almost perfectly balanced achievements, not of the ‘enlightenment’, but of the modern transformation as a whole. In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson, in a search for the elusive ‘moral sense’, examines the circumstantial evidence of our modernist relativism in the correlation of crime waves and this existentialist ‘nihilism’, and tracks down the guilty culprit, “We all live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment.” [xxxviii] The fashion of cavil with the certainly ambiguous Enlightenment seems an odd symptom of the times, filled with a puzzling disillusion, rollercoaster fright, genuine reckonings of the costs of progress, and hopeless efforts to seek refuge in tradition. [xxxix] But his basic question is apt, “There is no settled explanation for why the Enlightenment occurred in the West, and not elsewhere.” Why indeed? Why did the first scientists emerge among the Milesians? Or the Upanishadic ‘Enlightenment’ in the North India of -600? Or the first urbanization in -3000 in the city-states of Sumer? What do all these have to do with the Enlightenment?

All of these periods were themselves, ‘enlightenments’, and it is ironic that the modern period should, as were these others, find itself the target of a new conservative resistance. For it joins this select list, leaving the upholders of tradition with a series of medievalist distortions. The real issue implied, hinted at, or bemoaned, in most criticisms of the modernist period, is the erosion of the foundations of the Judeo-Christian basis in ethical monotheism, that, grafted onto the Hellenic, created what we call our Western tradition. The process has started all over again for its own strange reasons, with the Enlightenment’s recursion of Hellenic rationality, and the late arrival of the religions of the Orient into the stirred maelstrom of a new global culture. Now Reason must fend again with mysticism in a new ‘failure of nerve’ as Reason seeks its own source in the aspects of self-consciousness. Whatever we think of the Enlightenment or the future of religion, it is not possible to ‘program’ humanity, or western man, forever from the period ca. -600. And even at the price of some chaos, that is a benign fact.

The concordance of ‘enlightenments’, although a momentary clue to our subject, and a gateway to the great and enigmatic parallelism of antiquity in relation to the modern, betrays a fallacy of historical comparison in relation to the uniqueness of different historical moments, and needs to be set aside as soon as possible to be given a new and different terminology that will not imply the identity of such different historical periods or the identity of content in the manifestations in question. [xl] Here ‘rationality’ is matched, falsely, against the ‘self-consciousness’ of the great religious giants of antiquity, to find itself weak in the knees with an instrument of thought confronting the visions of prophets and the glance beyond thought of the Buddhas. But the concordance betrays a similarity of these periods that is not coincidental. Nevertheless, as we move backwards, we see the clue to the mystery of ‘historical transformation’, and its implication of ‘discontinuity’. And this stands beyond the passage of incident we call the Enlightenment.

Suddenly, we seem to be changing gears. To find the essential self-consciousness behind rationality, the confusion of rationality frittered away in mysticism must be risked, in the historical pursuit of its strange pattern of ‘enlightenments’. From the onslaught of Enlightenment rationalism against mysticism and cyclical treadmills of medievalism, the failure of nerve in Peter Gay’s description, we are correlating many species of ‘enlightenments’ into a common denominator. It is then altogether ironic that German Idealism arose in similar descant to the ‘real’ Enlightenment, and is often disowned by those who claim it. We see the relation of this to the modern New Age movement, in a so-called postmodernist age. [xli]

 Enlightenments’ There would appear to have been many ‘Enlightenments ’, as the correlation of the modern term with Buddhist or Upanishadic terminology might have suggested. Peter Gay, in his study of the Enlightenment begins with “the first enlightenment”, and prefaces his study of the eighteenth century phenomenon with one of the Greek. [xlii] The modern world, and the early classical age of Greece, show a remarkable concordance in this respect, as a great period of social change generates an emergent rationalism. The rationalist complains against mysticism, but if we look closely we will see a similar complaint in the Buddha, in his ‘rational’ version of the Upanishadic. This fact might tempt us sorely to generalize this ‘enlightenment’ to see a common denominator in all of our great periods of change. It is possible yet ill-advised. But the general core is the interplay of ‘reason, consciousness, and will’ in a kind of kaleidoscope of infinite effects. This pattern of infinite effects must seek refuge in stable historical matrix, such as that of the modern Enlightenment against the great confusions of ‘will and consciousness’ created by the ancient religions. Gay himself raises all of the issues and difficulties of the term ‘Enlightenment’ in any effort to extend it toward the pre-scientific Babylonians in one direction, or the mythopoeic Hebrews in another, for example. His interpretation is that of the Greek passage from myth to reason, correct as far as it goes. But the Greek advance was multidimensional and very many-sided, and advanced myth, for example, into the realm of drama in an extraordinary way. The transformation, so evanescent, of its polytheism into the glory of infrastructure of the polis lasted but a few generations, yet was the ‘re-formation’ to Enlightenment that we see in our own time. Gay’s analysis in fact shows us that something much more complicated is at work, as the example of the Protestant Reformation might have warned us, not to equate something we would like to call ‘modernism’ with any of its sub-processes. We can include the pre-scientific Babylonians, but not from a metonymy of the term ‘Enlightenment’. We must be ready to set aside all of these terms and create a framework for a better correlation of these periods. Peter Gay, in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (NY: Norton, 1966), Vol I, Chapter 2, “The First Enlightenment”. Cf. also, Norman Hampson, A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (NY: Pantheon, 1968), Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), Paul Hazard, The European Mind (NY: World Pub. Co., 1963), Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (NY: Atheneum, 1967). Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment’”, Kant’s Political Writings (NY: Cambridge, 1971), Hans Reiss.[xliii]

We must be in search of a more general category—we can stand back and look at the contrasting outline of the great creative eras of history, the seminal turning points, in search of an ‘historical psychology’ that can do justice to the ‘keel haul divergence’ of these ‘enlightenments’ as separate, yet parallel, worlds. The eighteenth century Enlightenment is in any case only a part of the entire period of modernism, that includes the Reformation, many revolutions, the Scientific and Industrial evidently non-political members of this club, a host of related or concurrent events, such as Romanticism and the phase of German Idealism whose character were different, but all better associated with the action of the period, not easily wrought by a consistent definition. But the comparison will serve to remind proponents of tradition who reject the modern period of the Enlightenment that it is analogous in a very deep sense to the ancient transitional eras that gave birth to the values they find so beyond their ability to maintain, analogous, but only in terms of a bare skeleton architecture. Our great periods are a ‘resetting of initial conditions’, clearly indispensable if we are not to be beholden for eternity to the mistakes and our own lost remembrance of the past. The present is time of ‘revelation’, or value creation.

In “Toward a New Enlightenment”, introducing a neo-Humanist manifesto, Paul Kurtz attempts to probe the puzzle of the strange chorus of challenges to the Enlightenment, to decipher the cause of sudden retrograde cultural movement, as if in shock that modernization could actually fail. It is fascinating to watch the birth of a new Humanist tradition looking back toward the Enlightenment, but somewhat alarming to see the full scope of the original phenomenon restricted by efforts to select this and reject that. Amputating the sixteenth century start phase, or Kant, Hegel and Left Hegelians, the ‘dialectic’, Romanticism, might seem appropriate or not, but the remainder would not constitute the ‘Enlightenment’ whose scale was something so vast, contradictory, and interconnected with the evolution of a larger system that to select and repeat becomes a new dilemma of traditionalism, requiring a ‘technology’ of culture, perhaps still short of the Freeman Dyson sphere, making alterations in the structure of the Solar System itself, but nonetheless an innocent invocation of coordinated energies, far beyond our current powers.

But this raises the question for our study: if free men created the modern world, can they not create, or move toward a new Enlightenment? In the opposite perspective, what force, effect, transformation, or cultural activity as an organized large-scale cause could initiate a ‘New Enlightenment’ and create a genuine passage over an identifiable divide into such a new era? Conservatives will be horrified. It could mean taking over the government.

The idea will be seen to resemble the basic question of our study: what is eonic transition? Thus we see not an ‘Enlightenment’, but a transitional period dealing with the intractability of large scale social change with an Enlightenment event inside it, as it were. The very question has an ironic relation to that of continuity and discontinuity, social change in relation to social scale, and the forms of runway and approach clearly evident in the rise of modernism, as seen in the Reformation. We can also suggest the difference between the historical contingency of a period called the ‘Enlightenment’, and a ‘rational’ plan or procedure to compute a new one, starting with efforts to corner the supply of three-corned hats, and a ticklish decision about whether we should proceed it with another reformation, and let it all get out of hand with another revolution. The whole game is another ‘piece of 48’, thought, computed and finished by the Left Hegelians long before we were born. This doesn’t detract from the essential interest of Kurtz’s idea. But as we shall see ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action scripting’ are reversed, the catch we have seen in the failures of revolution.

The Rise of the Modern

In the modern world, there is mysterious seminal generation springing from the period ca. 1500, amply tokened by the beginning of the Reformation in 1517. Over and over our sense of historical beginnings draws us to this point, and into a controversy or equivocation over its significance and meaning as one of the great turning points of history. In part the controversy is with radical views of historical change, in part a traditionalist effort to find the continuity in a single civilization. Most of all the ‘economic interpretation of history’ allows analysis a one dimensional perspective. We focus on the economic because its record is continuous and seems to drive everything. But this picture is deceptive. We think we see modernism transformed by economy as historical grand cause, but we might as well consider economy the object of historical transformation itself. Whatever the case, the scale of eonic patterning is far broader than any single component.

The periodization question of the ‘rise of modern’ is well known, and has an extensive literature, and many casualties in the realm of theories. It remains baffling until we see it in its greater context. This ‘sudden’ take-off (relative to world history) has always puzzled students of the question, and driven historical sociology into a frenzy of Renaissance resurrections, dialectical Big Bumps, Weberian econo-religious explanations, or the deliberate self-contradiction in two separate books by the historian E.L Jones with his ‘European Miracle’. [xliv] Before all of these, we find Hegel. His candidate, behind the hieroglyphics of his dialectical system, was found, perhaps, by asking of this mysterious change, what is the symptom? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Freedom! Unfortunately this doesn’t work as a causal argument. [xlv]

The abrupt start after 1500, or 1492, perhaps 1450, is constantly suggested and then challenged or retracted because its proponents cannot account for it, or sort out the fact that a discontinuity will interrupt prior evolutionary ‘ongoingness’. [xlvi] It is of course relatively arbitrary. J.M. Roberts in his History of the World opens by noting, “After 1500 or so, there are many signs that a new age of world history is beginning…” [xlvii] William MacNeill, in his The Rise of the West, calls the career of Western civilization since 1500 a vast explosion. [xlviii] Geoffrey Barraclough, in Turnings point in World History, notes the remark of Paul Valery that Europe is a ‘peninsula of Asia’, a western appendix of the Eurasian land mass, and asks, “How was it that this western appendix came to be in a position to exercise this power, this domination over the greater part of the world?” He cites the factors of technological and scientific proficiency, the revolution in transport and communications, that ‘caused’ this brief hegemony, but in a manner typical of historians stumbling over the eonic effect is driven to note, “So much, I think, is obvious; but it tells us very little”. [xlix] E.L. Jones, in The European Miracle, finds the sudden upswing virtually mysterious. Marshall Hodgson, in Rethinking World History, speaks of the Western Transmutation, 1600 to 1800, sees the connection with the earlier period, generated from Sumer, but his analysis focuses on the history of technology, and fastforwards to exclude the Reformation.[l]

The historian Lord Acton cautioned against periodization, and advised the analysis of problems instead, although he is author of his own remarkable period thinking. But he didn’t explain why this era creates such a preoccupation for the student of periodization. We are in the presence of a periodic phenomenon. The study of antiquity will show why. For here we see, or sense, as we initiate an inquiry into scale, that periodization is the crucial factor in relation to the problems. The problems of science can only be solved on their own terms. But why were so many difficult and complex problems suddenly ‘moving toward solution’ after 1500, more after 1600, in a flood tide after 1700? In general the problem arises from a wrong focus on small turning points, dates, instead of intervals, here three hundred years up to the Great Divide, ca. 1800. In relation to the tempo and scale of world history as a whole, this three hundred year period is a ‘hundred yard dash’ toward a world that comes into being in the nineteenth century in a context transformed from its earliest sources. Thus, one of the classic statements of the viewpoint of sudden onset is that of the historian Lord Acton himself:

The modern age did not proceed from the medieval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and power; in those days Machiavelli released government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set forever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come…It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change. [li]

This remarkable speech, as a trumpet blast of New Age rhetoric, springs from a deeper intuition than even its author might have suspected. It seems old-fashioned now, but it hearkens better to the time when men saw the new world of modernism coming into being with sentimental thoughts about ‘tradition’.

The issue becomes confused, for the first crack of dawn might also be said to include ‘a’ period called the Renaissance, although the exact definition of this term is ambiguous. To be impolite, the Renaissance is a research phantom created by the already postmodernizing Burckhardt. The term ‘renaissance’ is meaningless by itself, in the way it is carelessly used. We must demand a more exact definition, and something more substantial than the history of painting. The large scale social motion of the later period is absent. Tellingly, the elitist, and already ‘postmodernist’ Burckhardt led the way to this instauration of the Renaissance. A close look shows that the Renaissance is the first dawn of our phenomenon, one that accelerates much faster in the open fringe zone, further North. The real advance comes in backward regions.

The Renaissance is still looking backward, trying to recover Rome, what to say of Athens. ‘Renaissances’ have been occurring throughout the entire Medieval and late Roman Period, replacing still earlier recursions of antiquity that have gone on since the birth of the classical period. The useful rough division is temporal, the sixteenth century, or just before, making the issue one of periodization, which cuts off the most creative part of the Renaissance and includes it in our period. [lii] Therefore our approach simply includes the last part of the Renaissance, whose earliest hints are genuine indications mixed with unconvincing efforts to steal any creativity from a still Medieval World and claim them for ‘moderns’. Thus the Renaissance is probably one and the same process we are after in one of its corners. It is like a waiter with a tray of water. He may come between the second and third course. Sequence becomes hopelessly confusing, a fact readily apparent if we zoom in closer and closer, to find that yesterday never really causes tomorrow, in any event. ‘Cause’ is ‘free action’, until ‘cause’ can pay its bills as Grand Cause, and these are expensive, i.e. Universal History.

It is interesting to consider the work of the historian, Carl Becker, who stumbled on one part of the probable answer, his interpretation of it apart, in his study of the Enlightenment philosophes, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, in which he claimed them to be really still in the mindset of the Medieval Ages. It was a doubtful thesis in one way, and a considerable insight in another. It was never clear why such an obvious transitional possibility was ever held against the Enlightenment. But the point is that there is always a double Janus aspect to the modernist transformation that is especially clear of the Reformation, which is still really medieval, although it is entering the temporal divide of what is to come.

This great advance is two sided, casts an ominous shadow, and finds indirect definition from the many critics of European expansionism. The division into core and periphery by leftists is significant, for the exploitation of the expanding modern wave almost seems to be a phenomenon fueled by empire. Immanuel Wallerstein, a proponent in this regard of ‘world system theory’, notes that “Circa 1500, something strange occurred, for which in my view there is as yet no satisfactory explanation. The relative strength of the world-economy and world-empire form became inverted.” [liii] For some the sudden expansion of slavery once again is taken as one of the sources of sudden advance, the cause is exploitation. It is an issue that cannot be settled if we arbitrarily apply causal judgements to large geographical regions indiscriminately, without being clear how change can occur, and occur in the uphill direction. We should assume that abolition is uphill from slavery, a classic instance of the pivot at the boundaries from law. Something no pure economist need assume. The resolution lies in our distinction of eonic determination and free action. Where do the two meet and match, leave alone the almost hopeless question of ‘how’? We don’t know, but we do see a distinction of core and periphery! We will return to this question, cheerfully watching the rise of the modern behind this vast field of peripheral devastation. But the resolution is simple, eonic determination is at a minimum relative to the maximizing ‘free action’.

Our business is the eonic effect, not modernization propaganda. The ‘rise of the West’, on the scale of millennia, is, no doubt, here today, gone tomorrow. And the burden is great, to the point few ever dare in a postmodernist world to defend directional history against its ideological short-circuits. But the attempt should persist. J.M. Blaut, in a critique of European ‘capital accumulation’ as the source of the ‘European Miracle’, calls 1492 the breakpoint between two fundamentally different evolutionary epochs. The Marxist viewpoint was almost by definition concerned with the question of explaining the rise of capitalism after 1500 (against counterclaims it already existed or started earlier). But behind the transition from feudalism to capitalism lurks the future implication of the transition from capitalism to socialism. This slight discrepancy reveals the difficulty in the Marxist viewpoint, as apt as the analysis is. Our system is not moving toward socialism from capitalism, but simply moving, with capitalism and socialism attempting to integrate in parallel, without success. Behind all this lurks the year 1500 and the transition of whatever was before to whatever comes next, and that in accelerated fashion, suddenly crystallizing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in ad hoc contradiction. In Max Weber’s classic work on Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, the issue is implicit, and the confusion very pointed. Weber’s work reveals the classic snafu that arises if parallel eonic emergents, here, capitalism and Reformation, rival among themselves as the ‘cause’ of a social phenomenon that requires a large-scale macrohistorical explanation. His thesis was accused of idealism, although the explanations of historical materialism can fail quite as well. But where is the ‘region’ wherein this is to occur?

One difficulty that haunts all generalizations is the rapid change, if not inconsistency, in the character of the motives, hence motive forces, of this transitional upsurge, whose parallel emergent subsets comprise a larger list than the duet of economic transformation and its effect on ideology or religion. The brief moment of initial ‘force’, as far as the Reformation is concerned, was precisely the plain anti-economic wrath of the fiery ‘prophets’ denouncing Catholicism. How can historical economics account for this fact?[liv] With remarkable irony, Karl Marx was the last hornet from this nest, and his historical materialism was left unable to explain convincingly its own impulse to moral reform, even as it initiated another variant of the modernist reform. Once again confusion over the secular confuses the issue. The secular is defined by the Thirty Years War as an issue of theocracy, not religion as such. The resolution is periodization, and this in relation to geographies, shrinking or expanding, wherein the ‘motives’ of free action might show trending, but as likely no consistency. The last thing you see, if you throw a stone in a pond, is the ‘plop’. We can only hope to clock change, with a clock! And only in relation to starting point. Thus Weber’s thesis was often challenged on the grounds many Catholics show his ‘protestant’ type. But his instincts were on the right track. The Reformation shows periodization, and its starting point shows sourcing, whether of capitalism or not is less certain, etc,…

Beside the evidence of religion lies that of art, philosophy and science, therefore our point is not the issue of religion per se. In general the economic explanation (a religious one is not taken as a substitute) is a too narrow field to explain the complexity of factors that suddenly accelerate in tandem. Historians frequently criticize philosophic history, but the causal analysis of the ‘early modern’ is a cousin in disguise of just such ‘idealist’ speculation. The point is that this era shows its dynamism to be macrohistorically conditioned. This is not entirely to reject Weber’s insight, quite the contrary, his account was attempting like this. The problem is too complex to analyze in any one-dimensional way. The point all explanations tend to is the realization, routed at once by charges of Whig interpretations, that there is a macro-directionality to the period 1500 to 1800 that cannot be found in the direction as such of its incidental particulars.

Accounts of this period fail to make theoretical use of one key fact, explicitly crucial to our argument, the rising geographical polarization of the phenomenon created by the Reformation, and in part the reason for the confusion over the Renaissance, with its Italian sourcing. There is a movement or displacement of change. Why does advance not proceed consistently in Italy, and instead explode on a ‘fringe crescent’, along Germany, Netherlands, England, quite all of a sudden? What account will embrace these facts? We cannot even suspect what is happening until we look at world history as a whole. We see what we will call ‘jump diffusion’ as a movement, and a process exactly reminiscent of the relation of the Milesians to the mainland Greeks. The closest point starts, then the phenomenon moves behind a partition. There is a crescent inclusion and fast expansion independently occurring in relation to a ‘European civilization’. This, at first, is too extraordinary to accept. Misperception often arises through the isolation of ‘modern-looking’ factors that arise earlier, and aren’t supposed to be present in the Medieval period. This is the wrong perspective. One advantage of our eonic approach is to rescue the ‘Middle Ages’ from the denigration given it by modernist thought. History changes direction, and ‘resets’, as it were. Between Aquinas and Hobbes there would seem no comparison, to some. And yet Hobbes faithfully reflects a new starting point.

As we can suggest, after seeing the greater shape of world history, the issue is the achievement of the previous highest level, which can only be the initialization period of the classical era. This is not obvious until we see an earlier example. Thus some accounts pinpoint the humanist character of the Renaissance and the neo-religious character of the Reformation, making the ‘previous’ seem more ‘modern’ than the ‘subsequent’, which faults the analysis of the basic forces at work, which are not philosophic or religious, but periodic, and don’t ‘grow’ in a simple fashion from the much debunked Middle Ages. This would put the ‘humanist’ characters of the Greek and Roman traditions into the modern period also. These confusions only prove the term ‘modern’ to have a meaning straddling periodization and content, with implications of progress by the standards of later times. These implications are not incorrect, indeed, they are the only means we have to correlate the progression of events, but they do not truly explain the phenomenon at hand, if we consider for example, that the modern period also saw a brief irruption of witchcraft and irrationality.[lv] The issue is resolved if it is one of acceleration and periodization, and in a geographical fringe location in a fashion to be described.

Beside economic factors, some see a religious revolution, others the rise of science, still others a technological or information transformation, a price revolution, an age of exploration, or the effects of gunpowder, clocks, compasses, and Gutenberg. [lvi] We cannot but suspect that the appearance, beside the more obvious factors of technological and economic change, of the highest types of artistic endeavor in the turmoil of this new dawn grants a clue to its fundamentally creative character, although these come slightly later, in a wave toward the close of the sixteenth century, and into the seventeenth. Ordinary sociology will refuse these examples. But they are the real giveaways. The history of modern opera is almost exactly correlated with the rise of industry, as of the end of sixteenth century, although opera simply appears, while the rise of industry has antecedents. Its correlative timing is perfect, like a clock beside a transformation. We can conclude little from this except that we aren’t even remotely close to the correct means of analysis or explanation.

These bellwethers are the more significant as delimiters, and clues to passage points. There are many other such clues, ones usual historical study tends to reject, e.g. the sudden reappearance of utopian thinking and writings, as seen by the writings of More. [lvii] Such examples by themselves are dubious, but taken together show the ship starting to pull away after 1500, regardless of the issue of anterior growth factors, such as those of economy. What is the significance of Utopian thinking, now so discredited? Consider its meaning and its periodization, and one is left to wonder. It shows the beginning of the fortunate squelch of ‘realism’ that dominates the periods of sterile continuity. A flood of brilliant ‘state structure’ conceptions and political philosophies will emerge, the first great stirring of which will be the birth of liberalism, in the era of the English Revolution. And the accompaniment of so much cultural parallel motion in the general orchestra betrays the symphony beyond the blaring brass. Such concordances are ‘seen’ but create a crisis of correct theory, and are generally filtered out.

It is the breadth of the transformation stretching across all cultural categories that is remarkable, as is the interconnection. And it is a sudden acceleration in development in a previously ‘primitive’ area, whose focal point quickly becomes Northern Europe. This polarization is too often taken for granted. Attempts to find medieval roots of this era are of tremendous importance in their own right, but as R. H. Hinton notes, referring to the rise of the modern middle classes, “although the urban middle class of medieval Europe is said to have begun its notorious career as early as the tenth century, the teacher is faced with the problem of explaining why it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that this class became the dominant force in society. Why did it take more than 700 years to reach this position if during the whole period it was ‘rising’?” [lviii]

The appearance in the sixteenth century of so many independent yet parallel emerging novelties, of which the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, so different in character, are but the giants, beside a third, the rise of modern economy, shows that forces very deep are at play, that integrated ‘social evolution’ is the dynamic. For we cannot pin one on the other. The difficulty is that this conception of ‘social evolution’ is quite vague, and does not answer the question, what entity is ‘evolving’, where is it located, and by what law it is to evolve? A first answer might be, the nation-state. But this won’t work. One easy way to see that it is ‘generalized zones’, not the nation-state, that is fundamental is to consider the case of Germany, whence much of the modern transformation originates, well before its nationalistic coalescence. Similar parallels in more nationalized England, Holland, and France, virtually prove the independence of the factors. It is quite strange. ‘Zones’ are enough. The process of renewal and advance is not a function of either nationalism, economic development, or the effects of technology, but of eonic zone and frequency, although the economic and technological need to be recast in the proper form as the basic substrate drivers, if not primemovers. In any case, the terms ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’ are not really adequate to the discussion. Energy is flowing from fuzzy ‘zone sources’ toward a periphery. We need to construct, beside a localizing emphasis, a broader scale, possibly global, and certainly ‘world historical’ and see development in terms of fuzzy geographical locations that may or may not correspond to the divisions we adhere to in our cartographic perception of cultural or nationalistic entities.

We see at the beginning a continent riven in two by an immense religious conflict, as one outward manifestation of the shifting tectonic plates. This division is often neglected or forgotten, understandably for reasons of tolerant coexistence, by those who think in terms of the ‘rise of western civilization’ as a Christendom of choral unity, in the era after the Thirty Years War. We have forgotten what the popes did not forget, that a civilization was being torn to pieces, and what the reformers knew, that their basic freedom was at stake, although their conceptions of freedom were not our own. Medieval Catholicism was a geopolitical theocracy, whose Constantinian origin had little to do with religion, and a lot to do with ‘re-ligion’, the rebinding of the elements of the Roman Empire into a cultural whole. This great instrument of cultural integration, beside its direct kin, the Mohammedan Islam, arrives at the threshold of modernity with its seminal foundation laid for a new advance upon the rubble of its breakup. The Battle of Marathon came early here.

In a rising tide of revolutions, this Reformation was the first, although it rode roughshod over the deeper current of social revolution in Germany as seen in the figure of Thomas Munzer, showing a ‘far left’ trying to be born from the beginning, and always failing. Endless debate arises over the thesis of the bourgeois revolution and the rise of this class in relation to this era, along with the capitalist nature of Protestantism. Marxists forever misstate their case, but the basic relation of elements pointed to is broadly correct. The transformations of social classes is relatively transparent, if never quite as simple as a ‘bourgeois’ revolution. It is enough that we distance ourselves at first from statements of large scale causalities for these independently parallel, yet braiding manifestations, or amplifications of these processes.

We then see that relative to 1500-1800 continued turbulence is a function of accelerated passage. Max Weber’s famous thesis about the causal relations between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism is another example of the equivocation that rises from overly focussed causal hypotheses in the small. But his insight is perfectly apt, is this an economic or a religious transformation? There is a ‘something’ called cultural evolution occurring that is binding the different factors, variables, subsystems, culture-components. What culture? It is difficult to resolve the analysis, unless one stands back to see the right time scale, and a basic partition of geography. Then the term ‘cultural evolution’ can be freed of conceptual tribalism tying it to locality,  as a more general ‘zone and period’ structuring. What zone and period?

Is our primemover technological? Economic? The rise of Liberty? Religious evolution? Humanism, and Enlightened rationality? All around creativity? Here’s a question, if Protestantism can be associated with capitalism, can Tragedy be associated with Revolution? Is it a coincidence that Shakespeare invents the Blank Verse Guillotine a generation before the English Civil War? Historical sociology has made a decision to be blindly obedient to one dimensional causality. But the effects are in an immense spectrum. As with the example of opera, the appearance at this time of a man like Shakespeare (or Hobbes), if we thought this more than an isolated chance, should swiftly disabuse us of any illusions of our easy superiority to this still outwardly primitive but deeply perceptive period, and might give us some hint as to the meaning of the term ‘fundamentally creative’, although this will put the term ‘creative’ solely into the category of art, and perhaps confuse the issue, where the creation of new economic forms is also ‘creative’.

 In modern times, the case of opera, and its evolution, is one of the most interesting details of the whole period, and a real theory breaker. In the search for the ‘causes’ of this modernism, passing through the political, diplomatic, technological, philosophic, and religious factors, it remains a sociological orphan, and yet appears in perfect concert with the most creative period of the whole phenomenon, emerging in the late sixteenth century, rising to new heights in the last part of the eighteenth, climaxing in the nineteenth, and then passing away, from Verdi, to Puccini, to nothing. It is time to demand theories of history to acknowledge, if not explain, such phenomena. We are in the presence of the ‘two line proof’ that most theories of development are incorrect in their basic conceptions. What theory will avail of these strange facts?

The evidence of general culture is routinely excluded from more hard-headed analysis, but Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Racine, the reappearance of Tragic Drama, the new opera and music, emphatically contribute their element to an insight into what is happening. Broadly, the rise or crystallization of new national literatures so swiftly in independent parallel emergence and in a fashion later generations cannot imitate is a ‘miner’s canary’ here. In this case again the resemblance, as we can show, to the classical Hellenic period is too close to be coincidence. It is the relative beginning that we do not see, for these literatures also have earlier roots. As to Shakespeare, not since the period of Homer have we seen this effect, of the ‘archaic’ suddenly manifesting the very highest level of creativity. That Shakespeare is only ‘archaic’ in quotation marks and perhaps more modern than we does not change the basic relation of elements. Thus we have a clue as to zone. Now we have a clue as to period. Again, what is the nature of our primemover? Here the advantage of looking at discontinuity shows the way. It is evidence of a discrete sequence. We don’t have to explain anything until we see the greater sequence.

To consider additional grounds for the inevitable appearance of ‘discontinuity’, we might consider that one of the neglected considerations of all discussions of the ‘causes’ of large scale social evolution is the observable tendency of these large scale structures of civilization to stabilize over millennia, and lose the ability to change. Therefore, since our system here is transformed by 1800, we ‘know’ that, with respect to millennia but not centuries, an accelerator of transformation has occurred in the relations of world-historical whole and part, at the outside, between 1200 and 1800. Why an exception and why here in the isolated fringe of the Eurasian stabilization and deadlock, a less advanced area? The latter statement will be seen to answer itself. These remarks get ahead of our argument. We are starting at the end of our discussion. Relative to ‘world historical motion’ the Eurasian fringe is one of the last suitable areas for oikoumene regeneration. It is at least the only one that achieves a breakthrough. But the suspicion must be raised that all efforts to apply ‘this caused that next’ local causation theories will fail in the presence of the ‘system’ character of this phenomenon whose mechanical behavior makes no sense in the usual terms. One way to see this is to ask why so many independent ‘evolutions’, economy, science, politics, religion, art and culture, take off in parallel interactive acceleration. We cannot find a common cause in the usual terms. For the suggestion is that they are moving as one whole, and then accelerating, as of a certain period or threshold.

All we can say is that, as of 1800, a great turning point has been reached. Reaching a divide, the historical process shows evidence of massive instability leading up to it. And this is what we see from ca. 1500. It is evident in the very significance of the Reformation itself and the Catholic response to its appearance, that resulted in the convulsion of the Thirty Years War. This argument can at best be preliminary to a greater study of world history as a whole, to correct the confusion of scale that seeks a ‘zero’ of rising growth in the Medieval period. The medieval world was a magnificent entity in itself, but suddenly the world pulled away in another direction, for reasons that we are attempting to explain. The outcome, a new global oikoumene, gives us a clue.

We are still in the process of creating this outcome, but this is not an objection to the argument. We are inside the ‘new age’, for better or worse. This era of the sixteenth century represents the point at which world history begins, in the West, to cross a threshold into a new age, whatever its source causes, into a period of sudden and explosive change, climaxing in the period of the Enlightenment, the Industrial and Democratic Revolution, and the world that came into being therefrom as the one we recognize as our own, from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Attempts to find the cause or causes of this phenomenon, and the related effort to ‘deep source’ the issue in the early or late Middle Ages, have never proven successful, often because the subdivisions and isolated factors of this period are taken in isolation. One example of this is the unconscious assumption that this system was always tending toward the creation of ‘capitalism’. Quite apart from the fact that history has been ‘tending toward capitalism’ since the time of Sumer and never reaching it, all we can say is that the economic out-product of culture, after 1800, is one that sees a new potential of economy, and one that was challenged at the very beginning, lest we forget, by socialists and communists, that is, an output still in creation as the passage through a divide revealed a new historical first, the means to generate self-sustained economic growth. Capitalism is only one of the perspectives of the vastness of the modern transformation.

The Case of Missing Centuries

Over and over again we find in the accounts of an historical process the need to work around or explain the existence of the eonic effect as if in disguise, in the form of a consideration of the cyclical nature of the long-term emergence of a process or cultural evolute, this disguised as medievalizing. More specifically, author after author is forced to begin his discussion of origins in the period of the early Greeks, continue his account for the duration of this period, and then, without notice, jump to the modern world to complete the ‘evolutionary’ account of this process or historical sequence. [lix]

A particularly striking example of this perception, finally explicit, and one that is driven to an attempt to wrestle with a ‘law of evolution’, whether successfully or not, is Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, an account of the rise of science, or more particularly, the physical and cosmological sciences, whose history fits over the eonic effect like a glove. [lx] It is a fact that every history of science must reckon with. Less frequent than it used to be, denigration of the Middle Ages explains nothing, indeed omits the not inconsiderable developments in this deep source. But there is a clear discontinuity in any account of the rise of science.

Koestler’s very notable account, notwithstanding its questionable ‘debunking of medieval darkness’, is interesting for its extremely stylized outline of this pattern, and one whose particulars we do not necessarily need to accept, as it begins with the ‘heroic age’ of the Ionian Greeks, finds a ‘dark interlude’ in the period of the Middle Ages, and resumes its discussion in the sixteenth century with Copernicus and the ‘watershed’ era on its heels in the seventeenth century with Kepler, Galileo, and finally Newton. This pattern is evident in almost any history of science, and is not contradicted by the tremendously important alternate view that there were important prior developments in the Middle Ages. But it is useful to accept the broad pattern to see it for what it is, the more so as its obvious correlation with so many other parallel developments in the rise of modernism shows that the phenomenon is not a fluke, and has nothing to do with science.

The pattern can be extended backwards, in this as in so many other cases, to include the period of the rise of proto-science in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian periods, although here we do not see the critical period near the beginning, ca. –3300 onward, and cannot distinguish the earlier and later growth of this pre-science. But we can easily find the fall-off and gap in other aspects of culture in the period –2000 to –900. But the sudden discontinuity occurs twice, first among the Greeks, most notably, and then in modern Europe, both fringe areas for their time. The overall suggestion is of a recurrent emergence phenomenon.

This cyclical structure in the history of science itself is only one, but one of the most notable, examples of the actual discrete evolutionary process in action in the realm of human civilization, and its artifacts of science, philosophy and art. As Koestler notes, the creative rise of Greek science that had started ca. -600 as a ‘Promethean venture’, had, by the end of the third century B. C., completed its most creative phase, losing its reputation as it began to fall into decline, to the point of being almost forgotten, for a millennium and a half. In his words, there is only one step from Archimedes to Galileo. He gives the image of a destroyed bridge with rafters jutting out from both ends, with a void in between. His explanation of this distressing gap is partisan, quite understandably and quite forgivably, to the viewpoint of the rise of science, and sees the cause in the ‘breakdown of civilization’ in the Middle Ages, and in the distinction of ‘spiritual and material’ as such, the retreat from material considerations in the religious medievalism whose dominant outcome seems so surprising after the brief surge of progressive culture in the transitional era of the classical Greeks.

The clear and obvious correlation with the rise of the modern world must demand the surrender of isolation in the evolution of science. It is an obvious point, at first. But the difficulties mount. Copernicus has a paradigm tremor, but so does Martin Luther. But men of the sixteenth century were aware, to some degree, or what was afoot. For example, Marie Boas, in The Scientific Renaissance, begins her account, “The Triumph of our New Age”, by quoting a sixteenth century author:

The world sailed round, the largest of Earth’s continents discovered, the compass invented, the printing-press sowing knowledge, gun-powder revolutionizing the art of war, ancient manuscripts rescued and the restoration of scholarship, all witness to the triumph of our New Age. [lxi]

In commenting on this passage, Boas makes a revealing comment, “Happily unaware of our modern consciousness that history is a continuous process, and that each new development has its roots in the past, men in the fifteenth century [?emphasis ours] claimed complete emancipation from their mediaeval ancestors, proud to believe that they were founding a new stage in history which would rival that of classical antiquity in brilliance, learning and glory.” It would seem that this was the beginning of the modern period, and leave us to wonder why it is more ‘modern’ to find history a continuous process, if the first modernists in the sixteenth century (north of the areas of the earlier Italian Renaissance) had such a vivid sense of a ship breaking from its moorings in a discontinuous fashion.

But more generally, Boas’ account highlights the difficulty of accounting for the de facto discontinuity in scientific development vis a vis the world of antiquity. We will see that the first natural explanation, look for deep roots in anterior Medieval conditions, breaks down completely, because the same surge of science occurred once before in ancient Greece under different anterior conditions. No hypothesis but that of discontinuity is left. Almost within a generation after 1500, an explosion of correlated factors undergo rapid change, in the midst of which occurs the onset of the sixteenth century emergence of modern science, not truly evident until the seventeenth. Grasping the causality of this phenomenon, first with respect to science, then with respect to the parallel emergents, then both together, will rapidly suggest the absurdity of most ‘causal’ accounts of ‘modernism’, a term whose definition could prove the ‘last casualty’ of an all-around failure to explain anything. Evidently a Big Bump occurred between 1450-1500 that started everything in motion. This is a bad moment for theories of history, for the search for the laws of historical bumps graduates ill-at-ease from the placidity of continuous times and places.

One difficulty with Koestler’s account is the ascription, so frequent in the many accounts of medievalism, of a ‘breakdown of civilization’ where there was none to break down, the fringe area of Gaul, Germania, and northern Europe having been relatively marginal throughout the classical era. It is the breakdown of the classical period in its own area that cannot be confused with the fringe growth emergence of the European. The history of science allows no geographical component, and yet tempts us to avail of its implicit assumptions, in seeing the rise of science from medieval technology, or such. In fact, we see a process that is periodic, and not only this, but in different places, at different periods. This point may seem debatable, but the fact is that the zone of the first advance and the resumption of advance are two completely different cultural geographical zones that we connect with an abstraction: ‘Western Civilization’, a strange entity with no easy map, for it refers to a tradition, or temporal baton effect, that passes through the Islamic world to maintain its continuity.

The second comment one can make is that the distinction of the material and the spiritual is not really the issue, least of all for a scientist. We will see that this distinction applies reasonably well to the Greeks, but not to the creative period of the Persians and the Israelites, nearby, to say nothing of the Indian and Chinese Enlightenments occurring simultaneously. The issue of the decline of science is seen to be far more complex than the passage from worldliness to otherworldliness, although these express very well ‘symptoms’, to the partisan, of the phenomenon. For the same phenomenon of fall-off is evident in what would be considered spiritual phenomena also. If we compare the period of Buddhism and Jainism at their birth with that of the Vedantic Hinduism of the Indian medieval period, we could well wonder what is going on. What is a middle age ?

It is in the epilogue to The SleepWalkers, that Koestler, a well-known Darwinian heretic, begins to really consider, somewhat more cogently, what is really involved in this long cyclicity of the ‘spiral, or jump-start emergence’ of science. Seeing that the model of continuous progress in the development of scientific knowledge will not work, he notes, “There occur in biological evolution periods of crisis and transition when there is a rapid, almost explosive branching out in all directions, often resulting in a radical change in the dominant trend of development.” And then he notes that this process seems evident in the evolution of thought in the period near the sixth century B. C. and the seventeenth A.D. This perception of two steps in a sequence should of course drive us to consider the question, for which we do not have sufficient data to really answer, of the early period of Sumerian civilization in relation to the rise of ‘proto-science’. It is there, but we do not perhaps recognize it for what is was, not yet recognizably the form of science as we know it, with elements of writing, commercial reckoning, astronomy, socio-religious politics, and divination mixed together as the political mythology of the first forms of the state.

Note

New Ages

We live in an age when the millennial calendar of eschatological Christianity, a very ancient cousin of the idea of a New Age, suggests an illusory finish to our affairs that might distract from the practical efforts demanded by problems that have no miraculous solutions. Behind the idea of the last age lies the idea of a ‘new age’, and the endless echoes of endless antique notions of epochs, ages of man, and great cycles of nature. Ideas of a ‘new age’ braided with those of an ‘eschaton’ and its strange futures are clearly evident in the thinking of the New Testament. The Book of Daniel, however confused, gives the game away with elegant innocence, recording in distorted form the Persian, Zoroastrian, connection, at the precise point we will see significant in our look at turning points. But the idea has deeper roots, undoubtedly, in the earlier Mesopotamian world, we can be sure, since the whole game is invariably trying to put its finger on the eonic effect. Our own millennial deadline is at least near, the coming anticlimax an occasion for a new realism, and some relief from the confusions of mis-timed periodizations. For the onset of the New Age, if this has any meaning, has already come and gone as far as historical Grand Dramatics is concerned. Beyond the issues of the greater future on a scale of millennia, our other crisis might be very real on a scale of mere centuries: a loss of momentum in the unfolding of a new phase of ‘civilization’ from its roots in the period of the earliest modernity. Our moment, that one might wish to move ‘toward a new enlightenment’, instead moved quickly ‘toward a new age movement’, as in that of the seventies.

The confusions of eschatology, new ages, last ages, and cyclical views of history are chronic, and in the recent versions, come with an ideological twist. A further counterpoint lies in the idea of decline, near ideas of the rise and fall of civilization, such as those advocated by Spengler and Toynbee. The latter, although recycled incorrectly as dynamic generalizations about civilizations, are cousin to the ancient notions of ages and epochs.  We will see an irony there. The many confusions lead to a total rejection of all such thinking by secular thought, a position almost understandable. But the famous ‘linear view of history’ is left the field, victim to concealed teleology, to be confounded by a timely if incoherent postmodernist resurgence as action and reaction. History won’t seem to stay in line. Yet secular thought, if it chose the opposing notion, lays the best claim to the ‘new age’. The great shockwave of modernism spreading globally from a local source already looks suspiciously familiar and joins the short list of two previous such tsunamis, the great force of the first civilizations, and the second great wave of change that gave birth to the classical world. One and the same pattern of geographical differentiation followed by ‘globalizing’ integration is clearly at work, with, however, a rising expansion of scale in each case. The resemblance of the modernist transformation to these early divides asks for its inclusion in the short list of three ‘new ages’. Is any of this important? Our eonic pattern moves through this territory, and it is good to be wary of merely recycling these plastications of archetypes. Our approach is different. The New Age obsession is much ridiculed, but contains a valid impulse.

The issue is absurdly simple. The rise of the modern world has often been seen as the beginning of a New Age. [lxii] The mysterious discontinuity of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding efforts to buttress the idea of Western Civilization as a coherent unit with renewed emphasis on historical continuity, is the watershed for a sudden recursion of a social transformation reminiscent of the classical Hellenic period at its most intense. That the early champions of revolution and change, during the French Revolution, saw fit to periodize a New Age in the ‘revolution’ of time by attempting to invent a new calendar of the Year Zero is altogether apt, and not quite as ridiculous as the swift reactions of conservatives were soon to make that seem. The Christian calendars, now globally standard, are completely confusing, for the birth of Christ is a mismatch for historical dynamism, which clusters around –600, as indeed the Old Testament correctly records. Proponents of randomized historical analysis will be shocked to consider that 2400 years to the generation after Solon, Deutero-Isaiah, etc, one and the same hide-and seek ‘metanarrative’ springs forth resurgent. We are still living in the ‘future’ of this moment of the French Revolution, in the sense that the context, or ‘rules of the game’ aspect of our current culture came into existence very swiftly in the century from 1750 to 1850, or indeed, 1848, the year of the last great abortive effort to ‘complete’ the work of the French Revolution. In fact, the rules were never set, and entered into the classic dialectic of those times. This Revolution tends to steal the show, but it is not as such the issue, for it is a result, not a ‘cause’. Instead of the nonsense of ‘new ages’ we can simply formulate the nature of ‘eonic sequence’ as an hypothesis, to see that this clarifies the data, and in the process suggests the ‘new age’ movement already post-cedes the real generative period by about two to three centuries. In each case the dynamic is the same. And this is what modern history certainly shows. That puts us in the period from Luther to the English Revolution, the grinding axle period. The connection with the American Revolution is so direct that the issue becomes obvious.

This greater significance of the Revolutionary period was clearly in the mind of the philosopher Hegel who, ideas of the ‘end of history’ apart, was inspired both to the early enthusiasm for and the reactionary rejection of this event in its excesses, as one of its most notable observers. As Hegel notes in his Phenomenology of Spirit, written on the eve of Napoleon’s approach to Jena, as the supposed (hubristic) World Spirit on horseback:

...our epoch is a birth time, a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things, and with old ways of thinking. The spirit of the times, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one piece after another of the structure of the previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is now indicated only by symptoms here and there...but something else is approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces will be interrupted by the sunrise, which in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

We take for granted what was not at all obvious to men at the time, that freedom, so directly associated with an historical convulsion, could indeed make a come-back, realize itself historically, as an extreme unlikelihood pronounced the impossible ideal by centuries of pompous aristocracy. Hegel, whatever we make of his philosophical system, and notwithstanding his feeling of the end of history, was a philosophic ‘crack shot’ (whatever the flaws of his historical system), and gave a very clear testimony to the sense of a New Age felt by so many. He is the last to see that the ‘evolution of self-consciousness’ is the issue, before the onset of positivism. And the idea of the New Age was a revolutionary one, the Novus Ordo Saeclorum, in the age of democratic revolution. Hegel, followed by the radical spectrum of the Left, is in many ways the most convincing because he is also poised on the fault line now generating the ‘postmodernist’ perspective, finding a ‘new age’ in response to the Enlightenment, a view slightly different from our own. We need not agree or disagree to see the generative dynamics of ‘new-aging’ at work. This all sounds familiar, and shows the seeds of the later ‘new age’ movements to come, half modern, half postmodernist, before the flood of Indic sophistries takes over the whole game. But seminal modernism shows us Nature’s version of the New Age in awesome eruption. It is confusing because the onset is localized and starts with a phase of ‘Westernization’. These issues seem overly subtle, overblown, until you are confronted with postmodernist paradox or prophets of decline creating large social movements. The current diatribes are with Enlightenment rationality, already old hat in Hegel’s day.

Hegel could see that the new era was at risk philosophically, as deficient of the full richness of its antecedents, one that could fail as ‘progress’, so to speak. Schopenhauer was the first to notice the resemblance of German Idealism to Upanishadism (to say nothing of ‘Pythagoreanism’), although that resemblance, whose reason the eonic effect makes clear, can lead to equation and severe misunderstandings. He was of the Enlightenment, and yet not of it, and in a perspectivist counterpoint. We already see the impulse to the ‘new new age’ to replace the new age. The worst current abuse is its use to suggest the period of the ‘modern’ is past and that a New Age should be a reactionary restoration, with not a few implied attacks against the modern chance of freedom. This state of mind is not new. The ‘switched baby’ effect became apparent almost at once, and is an explicit tactic of reactionary forces rising in the wake of modernist ‘falloff’. We reach an era of ‘postmodernist’ irony, where the idea of progress seems to enter its own reformation, in the currency of cyclical rejection, so evident in Nietzsche’s eternal return, and Spengler’s views on civilization.

The generation of the sixties and seventies in the West has seen, beside postmodernism, just this effect in the New Age movement, or perhaps better, a New Age Movement, rising from the multicultural compression of the emerging world culture, in a proliferation of spiritual groups, whose radical therapeutic fringe mixed with an easternizing, semi-theosophical character, proceeded by such a swift and grim law from the language of spiritual renewal to the commercialization of astrology, pseudo-yoga and channeling that one must wonder what happened. We will see that this movement reflects precisely the limitations foreseen by German Idealists in the outcome of Enlightenment thinking. The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns recommences in a different vein, and a global Reformation moves to interact with the full scope and antiquity of the religions of the classical period. This ‘reformation’ of the corrupt and paralyzed Indian tradition is all-important for this tradition will outmatch all other religious traditions and spread globally on the coattails of Westernization. This effect is already ancient in the repackaged ‘sufism’ that appears in the Islamic Heritage, grafted onto Zoroastrianism with its lore and enigmas. The attempt to revive these ‘new age’ variants based on antique notions of the Great Year was a misstep that simply produced instant chaotification of the basic concept. Its roots in the sixties, in association with a counter-culturalism and the last hurrah of the left, reveal the resulting disappointment that a great age of liberation had come to an end in failure, its objectives unachieved. To the consternation of Weberian sociologists with their pampered and economically well-behaved ‘protestant capitalist’, people begin to catacomb out of the ‘iron cage’ and its pressgang socialization, unaware of the conflicts of ideology at the time of the great split of the Left Hegelians, and others, that are the true epigones of this typically modern examination of social consciousness, ‘new-aging’ in its purest form. [lxiii]

And yet the irony of this swiftly decaying movement is to have shown how well the era of the Enlightenment did its work, for it is a multifaceted universe not altogether claimed by its central thrust, the one-dimensional materialistic, soon evolutionary, scientistic ‘Enlightenment mainline’. Confusion over ‘materialism’ is one of the animating themes of New Age movements, but leads to the sterile quarrels over the spiritual in a false distinction of ‘spirit and matter’ that, if anything, fuels the modern mood of reductionism. The issue is not ‘materialism’, as such. One of the first and most direct challenges resurfacing with a great animation in Blavatskian Theosophy, is the precipitation of renewed reincarnationism, itself a complex belief system inherited from the earlier Upanishadic world. Modern thought ends in a treacherous position, the metaphysical negation of the whole heritage of metaphysical thought about the soul. However difficult such matters they cannot be dealt with by the fiat of the Darwin gang. These are ancient, and quite harebrained, issues already controversial in the time of the Buddha, at which time they began their course of cultural amplification into the general stream of antiquity. This was the crucial moment, a new tradition arising in parallel synchrony with the Hellenic, Judaic and Persian.

Below the surface of New Age confusion moves a deeper current of spiritual renewal of the great traditions of antiquity, such as they remain, attempting survival in a ‘secular’ age that has no use for them at the end of history. The issue of ‘materialism’ is simply misconceived. ‘Soul questions’ are ‘material’ to the issue of life, not the afterlife. Beside Hobbesian material man, one of the first and greatest forms of ‘materialism’ or existential naturalism, was that of the early Indian Samkhya, still visible behind the later screen of the much different world of the Bhagavad Gita. In its original form, the transcendentalizing distinction of matter and consciousness-soul is not made, the two being aspects of one ‘material reality’ of three aspects, body, emotion, mind. Further, a distinction is made between ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’ in the classic Upanishadic scheme of the Four States, deep sleep, awareness, self-awareness, awareness in deep sleep (often referred to as ‘state 4’), one that might assist to a better understanding of the history of religion. The hyper-material was beyond any form of manifestation, including that of divinity. It has nearly been forgotten, even in the East, the one of the greatest advances in man’s religious consciousness sprang from a ‘materialist’ evolutionism of this kind. Research in this field starts in the Caves of Almora, no gurus are required.

The point is that much ‘idealism’ is simply a block in front of finding natural process, not only in the products of consciousness, but of the highest and most subtle of its products. The reason is that western religions are historical reckonings of becoming, rather than being. It is fascinating that German Idealism rushed, so to speak, to fill a gap in the Western Enlightenment, with results that so misleadingly echo the antiquity of the lore of yogic psychology, as if to save the theme of progress from the lost heights of earlier achievements. This Samkhya materialism is not the same as the mystical Vedantic idealism it became, nor indeed nineteenth century materialism, whose brilliance and rugged, botched glory is seen to be a highly selective slice of the whole, but whose more fundamental beginning and twentieth century extensions might find, one day, its lost ancestry. In general we see the same parallelism in classical antiquity that we see in the modern period, and in India at the time of Buddha the spectacle of the great ‘other’ route, beside the emergence of Judaism, out of the world of polytheism. 

This movement has also been the vehicle in some cases for conservative mystifications and restorations of the worst kind of false postmodernist traditionalism, including the regime of the imitation Hindu-style guru, to a receptive public eager for mysticism and unaware of the hegemonic nature of Brahmanism and the history of the Indian religion between Buddha and Shankara. This world is beautiful in itself, in spite of its historical shadows, and it is unfair to denounce as ‘gurus’ the modern crop of hucksters trotting down the road with this label. The Theosophical entrepreneur playing Nietzschean Overman in Sufistic or Vedantic robes is a gross fraud. None of these people understand their own, let alone anyone else’s, history. The confusion starts with the Bhagavad Gita itself, where the historical figures such as Buddha and Mahavir are displaced and diffused into the ‘interpolation phantom’, Krishna, Achilles doing yoga. It is also the era of the refugee, Tibetan Buddhism, finding renewal in the West. The issues are complex, in the self-inflicted reaction to its own momentum created by much modern thought, and the encounter of the religions of other civilizations with modernism in a fashion that is invariably distorted. Nonetheless, this recent movement, frequently excoriated, is of historical interest in its own right, and one whose issues and history deserve their own telling, beginning, not in the seventies, not in the nineteenth century, but in the wake of the first phase of global interaction, and the fascination of the philosophes with the arriving data of other cultures, such as the traditions of China. The first achievement of modern culture is a pluralism that can yield a field of renewal to the manifold sources of antique spiritualities seeking to find stowaway passage in modernity, near a technocratic Lord Jim.

This harsh judgement, at first sight, is really a constructive effort to point out why this movement was unable to generate any momentum, much to the relief of conventional social critics, and the disappointment of many of this already passing generation, sad to discover the ‘new age’ label transmogrify into a marketing category. This movement was defeated by the subtler Enlightenment, where we find no exploration of ‘mystical consciousness’ but the rational component of human ‘self-consciousness’, which, like dinosaur DNA in snips, is enough (supposedly) to reconstruct a whole dinosaur. The false charges laid against Enlightenment rationality fail to see the deeper current of consciousness in the rise of the modern, and its instantaneous regeneration of the ‘ancient theme’, the domain of man’s self-consciousness. This current movement, much maligned, is not really a ‘new age’ movement at all, and is as much an aspect of modernism as the Enlightenment, although it is clearly a secondary reaction, rooted in the nineteenth century. The world system is also staging its interactive mill-grinding of all the inherited religions, as if moving to a global form of religion, always in one and the same fashion of ‘abstract Zoroastrianism’ and ‘abstract Buddhism’, so to speak. Despite these criticisms, the effect of the New Age movement tokens a real world-historical passage of religious belief in a second stage, so to speak, of the ‘Reformation’. [lxiv] Quite apart from anything else the modern world simply reenergizes complex advances of antiquity too subtle for the medieval men who were barely able to carry them as baggage.

The idea of a New Age, by the nature of our inquiry, arrives at the domain of discourse that our periodization creates, like a patient on a stretcher, and cannot be turned away. It is a victim of postmodernist reversal. It simply leaves us with a useful question, why does the notion arise at all? One answer is that it is built into the Old Testament in disguise, for example. Its further cousin, the notions of the Great Year, must almost perforce be turned away, for these more than any other have deflected attention from what is going on in the ‘new age’ preoccupations seen in history, to the extent that we can understand it. This is slightly unfair, for we should look at the history of cyclical ideas. We cannot spare the time, or risk of confusion. Study of the eonic effect disposes of the whole issue. We cannot be dogmatic on this point. If you wish to remain confused, there is nothing to be said. What we can do is clock the emergence of cyclical thinking against our different explanation. We see their simple emergence in relation to the eonic effect itself, for this must be their source, just as we spontaneously began ‘new-aging’ at the rise of modernism.

There is really only one way to clock world history as a series of ‘new ages’. The simple, but voluntary, solution is to take the Western advance as clocking a New Age, and be finished with sterile ‘new-aging’, and without ascribing to it Western values unless they are universalist, and some effort to see why the progress of civilization is unbalanced in this phase. For this view will likely founder in the confusions of Eurocentrism and the new multiculturalism, and be lost. Nothing in our New Age argument, ironically, requires acceptance of Westernized ideology. It is better not to be contemptuous of small beginnings. The ‘new-aging’ of the great religions of antiquity will inexorably sweep them all away and move to claim the future of those in social catacombs left behind because structurally excluded in the failure of the Great Commune and the dismal proliferation of multinationalist economic sprawl.

Many debatable ideas of ‘spiritual evolution’ or involution or the energies of higher consciousness, resurface in many different guises as a challenge to the elimination of any aspect of consciousness from discussion. This is understandable, but the results create a confusion ancient yogis would find puzzling. These hybrid philosophies show mostly that their proponents need a good course in physics. The use of the term ‘energy’ in the context of ancient systems of thought, shows the trap. This is a neologism of the early nineteenth century, and has little meaning without its physics context. And yet the confusion over evolution cannot be laid at the door of this mystical reaction. Almost from the moment Darwin published his Origin of the Species, a host of counterattacks began, of which the Theosophical challenge is the clearest example. If you propose positivist evolution, you inherit the whirlwind of resurgent mysticism. The world of the eastern yogi is not likely to submit to Darwinian explanations, and has no ax to grind in any theocratic or anti-reductionist sense, although the many ‘theories’ of involution shipped against the evolutionary are little better than mythology in pseudo-scientific dress. And yet the ancient lore of consciousness and meditation is not so easily dismissed. Armed with Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras a determined investigator can, under the right conditions, by report, arrive at a sapient homo psychology not likely to have evolved by natural selection. Wallace sensed the point, with his realization that the brain has moved toward a future realization, and was potential relative to its normal manifestations.

Many forget that the exotic, but austere, world of the ancient sutras was not a branch of philosophy, but a procedure of liberation, and is in reality looking for its natural home, and might find it better in the domain of naturalistic evolutionism. It is a pity positivist Darwinism is so antagonistic to this world, for the naturalist ‘evolution of self-consciousness’, instead of metaphysical involutionism, should be a natural companion subject. Strange theories of ‘involution’ have often appeared in association with elaborate discourses on the metaphysics of consciousness. These do not match the historical sources from which they are derived. It is said the Gautama used to forbid speculation, sent disciples in advance to villages to forbid questions of philosophy. Great sutras have explicated what innumerable middlemen gurus have claimed as esoteric mystery beyond what was already known to our jungle theologian, as noticing beyond mere seeing, self and world bound by the act of attention. Ideas of ‘involution’ are really ‘deficit mongers’ for ideas of ‘evolution’. We see the mixed ‘high low’ effect of ‘involution really evolution’ if we look closely at the classical period, especially the Greek transition compared with the Judaic. We could not suspect the influence of the Iliad on the Old Testament and the Bhagavad Gita. The ‘involutionists’ come later and have both a better historical perspective, and yet have lost it at the same time. The inability of nineteenth century Theosophists to sort out this issue would be more than excusable if they didn’t plague the field with claims of esoteric omniscience and spiritual authoritarianism that so debilitates the approach to these historical questions.

The idea of a New Age at least seems more optimistic than a Spenglerian decline and fall, and should challenge the rise of ‘postmodernisms’ ill-conceived, or reactionary, and might be a first introit to our subject, with its implications of relevant intervals of macro-historical time. That a New Age could be confused with a ‘decline and fall’ is typical of the ‘upside down’ perceptions that we bring to current events, if we don’t clock them on a proper scale, and which our interpretation of historical patterning can explain with relative ease, along with the worst of the historical red herrings, ‘cyclical versus linear conceptions of historical time’. The conception of a ‘New Age’ is ambiguous for it suggests a unit of ages, and begs for a cause and an inception. It is real enough as a spontaneous sense, as many since the French Revolution, that made one sense of the term popular, have correctly sensed.

We need two ideas from all of this. First, the elemental distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness. If we pursue mechanism in historical process, we will find a conundrum that process, a supposed mechanization of evolutions, accelerates in a defeat of the mechanical. This is one clue to the failure of traditions, the resurfacing of ‘new age’ movements, in the attempt to defeat the ‘mechanics’ of religion. Religion starts from a high ground and reaches a state becalmed in socialization and dead stasis, taken over to the politics of domination. Next, the distinction, for the same reason, warns that endless ‘cycling’ cannot induce the real consciousness for more than a brief interval, one clue (perhaps) to the nature of our pattern. Finally, study of history from the viewpoint of progression, or progress, often fails to consider that ‘consciousness’ does not evolve in the time-frame given to mere centuries. It is as much as a man can manage to realize his prior potential as a creature of his species, let alone move beyond it. And this tends to create the illusion that men in the past knew better of man. In this regard the future takes care of itself, the old, the ancient, the forgotten shaman, is promised by the nature of man its return on the future, by the very nature of the human species. We are deprived of the data to see the true transition to this potential man, and only see the ‘relative restarts’ so evident in the highly specialized but elemental moment of classical India in the time of Buddha and Mahavir.

Contemporary New Age movements, stretched between radicalism and conservatism, are an attempt to recover the sense of the ‘new age’ that appeared after –600 in China, India, and the Occident, when the great religions were born. We take for granted the attitude of denunciation expressed by the Hebrew prophets of the world of Babylon without quite asking ourselves why it is that they took this stance, unless as a committed religionist we accept this as a religious issue of pagan morals. Our eonic outline of periodic architecture gives us no trick answers, or the ability to grind out explanations without close study of actual facts. All we know is that a group of men gave direct expression to religious and cultural ‘new-aging’ and yielded their discourse to immediate successors during ‘downfield new-aging’. Here we have a glimpse at the way in which the ‘codes of Hammurabi’ are transformed into a new form of religious oikoumene glue, input, output. It is indeed a religious issue, for the obvious ‘superficial’ point is that this was an era of rapid religious evolution, as the form and content of monotheism as we know it took shape and became the inner substance of a new field of culture, assembling itself from earlier elements. But the issue is a deeper one, for behind the religious issue stands what history was to confirm, the passing of an antique world, whose last representatives were the Assyrians, and the Egyptians of the New Kingdom, their creative energies spent. Thus, Jeremaiah expresses his furious anathema of Babylon, more than a symbol of the Mesopotamian world that preceded the classical:

And Babylon shall become a heap, a dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment and a hissing, without an inhabitant.

In a similar vein, Isaiah prophesies:

Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. Their bows shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah… [lxv]

What is remarkable is how prescient these predictions were, not as revelatory visions but in their sense of geopolitical becoming, and the sense of the dawning of a new era. Where the Greeks, nearby and simultaneous, experienced a fantastic flowering of culture without grasping what was happening to them, the Hebrew prophets began to perceive as the first ‘futurologists’ the changing shape of civilization itself. And in India there was a ‘Great Awakening’, in China a fascinating play on a combination of Indian mysticism and Greek rationalism.

The great world generated from Sumer had already been in a ‘last phase’ for centuries and the world of developed and developing culture and civilization was very much changing gears in this era. And a close look will certainly discover sooner or later the first primitive version of the still earlier ‘new-aging’. We know it is there, from, for example, the automatic clocking of the Egyptian dynastic tradition from ca. –3000. Nothing could be more natural, once the reason is seen. The tactic of the prophets to ascribe this to the wrath of divinity throws us off the scent, although it gives vivid testimony to those who were involved in the creation of the new, which they interpreted in terms of religious evolution, and the need to create a new conception of the divine. Religious issues apart, they were attuned to the phenomenon of rapid transition itself that was so clearly, to our hindsight and our reconstruction of the earlier period, in convulsive passage. [lxvi]

But the countermovement against modernism is already reminiscent of what happened in the ancient world in the period before the coming of Christianity, but after the centuries of the great flowering. In The Greeks and the Irrational, E.R. Dodds puzzled over the interruption in the Greek Enlightenment:

Looking at the picture as a whole, an intelligent observer in or about the year 200 B.C. might well have predicted that within a few generations the disintegration of the inherited structure [of the pagan religious world, the ‘Inherited Conglomerate’ of Gilbert Murray] would be complete, and that the perfect Age of Reason would follow. He would, however, have been quite wrong on both points...To understand the reasons for this long-drawn decline is one of the major problems of world history. [lxvii]

In a discussion of great importance, not only for understanding what happened in the ancient world but of what might happen in our own, Dodds describes, for example, the onset of astrology like a blight and the loss of the seeds of rationalism, and the weakening, and complete loss, of science. The experiments in political republicanism and democracy seem to vanish into thin air as the processes of empire gain the upper hand and remain in place to the modern world. Further, there is the same influx of mystical ideas and religious forms into the western oikoumene. This is the ‘failure of nerve’, a term invented by Bury who gave it to Gilbert Murray. [lxviii]

But unfortunately this explanation will not work, even as the defense of the Enlightenment turns into its very opposite, the yogi’s Enlightenment, indeed that of the well-documented ‘gymnosophist’(naked Jain) of antiquity, for it is not a failure of nerve that is the difficulty. Nor is it correct to scapegoat ‘mysticism’, never defined. Heraclitus was a mystic. There were many men like Socrates in India in the age of Buddha, who wasted no time on ‘mysticism’. The idea of ‘mysticism’ is a sort of sausage created by the implosion of multiple ‘enlightenments’ degenerating into ‘philosophical’ realizations of the original exploration of the domain of consciousness, Vedantic speculations. In any case we have multiple parallel ‘enlightenments’, that of India poised in the domain of ‘self-consciousness’, that of the modern world fierce in its rationality. Is this a contradiction? Is there a connection? That is, between the rationality and the exploration of consciousness so poised against each other? As far as our subject is concerned, they are one and the same, taken in long perspective.

It is fascinating, despite the idealist cast, that the German philosophers rushed to ‘complete’ the Enlightenment with just this concordance of the two. It is a gesture the more convincing, if altogether rigidly bound in speculative metaphysics, for its intuitive rediscovery of the factor of ‘consciousness’ beyond and behind the issues of rationality. It is further extraordinary that historical dialectics, despite its infelicities, attempted to recast this, perhaps unsuccessfully, in its original materialist form. We are left to truly wonder at all of this, the more so as it appears like a jack-in-the-box joyriding the modern divide. One of the strange mysteries of the Enlightenment, in its inclusive ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, is the appearance of the Upanishadic strain in German Idealism. The obvious appearance of ‘garbled Samkhya’ in Hegel with his brittle version, the ‘dialectic of consciousness’, is a mystery in itself.

Dodds’ important description of the problem is far from complete in the sense of ‘taking sides’ with one party that failed, and not grasping why. Many parallel fields failed together. It is futile to blame Oriental religions for the ‘failure of nerve’. These oriental sources, along with the clearly analogous Greek mysteries, all arose in parallel with the Greek Enlightenment in the era ca. -600 and interacted in a way that was quite natural. One tends to wring one’s hands and complain of superstition and cultic mysticism or the sudden onset of neo-reincarnationist beliefs, once again so characteristic of our own time, and it won’t do much good. For the effective historical force of all these factors was precisely their parallelism, and parallel decline. We see the original period through the lenses of traditions that come much later.

In any case, if a phenomenon happens twice, it is important to study it to understand what is happening. There is a clear difference in the modern era, for the forms of religion, East or West, are all in decline, where in the earlier period they were in the ascendant. The difficulty is not that of the secular versus the sacred. It is easy to confuse the scale of the Greek Enlightenment. It barely registered in the consciousness of the Ancient World. The schoolhouse is there, but the students beyond the august portals of the Academy were still in the Hyperborean age. In part, the Greek advance is still embedded in the net of Greek Religion that cannot but cause a cultural stumble as the faint echoes of Xenophanes are lost, and many ancient elements resurface, and revive, such as the cults of Cybele, and Isis, beside the genuinely new, but ambiguous or off key, philosophies of the Stoics, Epicureans.

And beside the rationalist view there is the equally significant cultic side of the Greek flowering with the mysteries of Eleusis, near which arises the strange phenomenon of Greek Drama. We cannot subtract these from our consideration under the rubric of a master theme of rational advance. Nor can we play favorites with the simultaneous appearance in antiquity of Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism (and soon-to-come Christianity and Islam). It is a symphony of many melodies. And the beginnings of science were virtually unknown to most, and remained at best seminal. Finally, the false distinction of the Oriental and Occidental is little more than geographical. A case could be made that the Occidental shows a different ‘tuning’ in the spectrum of ‘Being and Becoming’ leading to its better disposition to progressive culture. This theme is a trifle tired. The idea of ‘progress’ is a modern one, whatever its intimations in earlier times.

As we move backwards, it is fascinating to compare China and Greece, and then China and India, and then India and Israel, at the roots of the classical source. We see in Taoism a kind of transition between philosophy, and religion. In India it is the Upanishadic movement that corresponds to the parallel transitions, analogous to the emergence of the prophets in Israel, as the great New Age movement. Behind the picture of religious innovation, we can find a context of small states, economic development, and political change not unlike that which we see in Greece. In fact this backdrop is the ballast for the whole phenomenon. In India it produced an age of great ferment reminiscent of the Greek, notwithstanding the different spectrum of perspectives. In one description,

When Buddha grew to manhood he found the halls, the streets, the very woods of northern India ringing with philosophic disputation, mostly of an atheistic and materialistic trend. The later Upanishads and the oldest Buddhist books are full of references to these heretics. A large class of travelling Sophists—the Paribbajaka, or Wanderers—spent the better part of every year in passing from locality to locality, seeking pupils, or antagonists, in philosophy. Some of them taught logic as the art of proving anything, and earned for themselves the titles of ‘Hairsplitters’ and ‘Earwrigglers’; others demonstrated the existence of God and the inexpediency of virtue…Large audiences gathered to hear…It was an age of amazingly free thought, and a thousand experiments in philosophy. [lxix]

This could exaggerated. This ‘materialism’ in not what we make it out to be on the basis of modern thought, and is in danger of grafting a modern conception onto an ancient context. But the fact remains that the later world of Hinduism is almost further from this era than the modern, which doesn’t mean the essential issues might be there better seen still. The world of Samkhya rings a distinctively modern note. The remarkable aspect of early Buddhism is its ‘rationalistic’ touch, and its gesture to bring the primordial confusions of consciousness into some kind of ‘tuning’. This is evident in the distinct blend of philosophic rationalism and meditative consciousness that casts its aroma in the world of Buddha, and those who came before the rise of the monotheisms, or the idealistic philosophical Vedanta. The men of this time were not so much materialists as ‘still not confused’ by the relentless coming state theocracy

The closest thing to this in recent Western thought is the distinction of consciousness and the unconscious, although the terminology of Hegel clearly rediscovers the distinction. These are not the same thing. Note the complete reversal in the usage of the term ‘conscious’! Great confusion arises in the distinction, for it is artificial and schematic. This ‘self-consciousness’ is so overdramatized that we forget it occurs in the behavioral repertoire of everyone, at the distinction of ‘seeing’, and ‘noticing’, although the latter introduces the factor of will, which is not addressed in the sequence of four states. Like Eskimos with many words for snow, the originators of this distinction saw many shades of the spectrum. And this has been a great mystification. The issue of ‘consciousness’ is often posed in contradiction to that of ‘mechanism’. But the distinction ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’ is itself the same argument played, as it were, in a higher register. For the challenge is with respect to ‘mechanical states’, as opposed to less mechanical, more ‘conscious’ states. The implication of the ancient Samkhya, albeit without a proper physics, was the overall reduction, or unity, of all states, in a distinction of ‘octanes’, qualitative degrees, rather than any violation of the basic ‘mechanicalness’ of things, animals, and men. Here purpose is seen as ‘mechanical’, its transcendence of pertinent release as ‘state 4’.

Taken lightly, this approach solves the problems of an historical psychology, and can often assist us in the study of religion. But note that the distinction is essentially generic and, although well-adapted to stylized eonic history, begs the question of practical endeavor in this area. ‘Historical self-consciousness’, as little more than historical enquiry, ‘knowing all together’, is a perfectly valid, although partial, expression of the distinction. Yet, by insisting on understanding as a component of awareness, the study of history can return the issue from its often obsessive emphasis on ‘technique’, as of the classic yogis, which often simply confuses the issue. As to religion, we can see that the sources proceed from ‘self-consciousness’ to the mechanization of religious ritual consciousness, and these suffer continuance, and new age discontinuity. In the West, the absence of psychological categories tends to explain the passage, or drift, toward divinization of natural historical phenomena. The use of the term ‘sacred’, or vacuous definitions of the religious in terms of the ‘numinous’, are the giveaway. They are forgotten memories of the experience of self-consciousness. And these issues are a significant commentary on the failure of traditionalist thinking to recover the sources of religious history. The passage from the heights of self-conscious beginnings to the mechanical permutation of psychological archetypes perpetually frustrates the intangible wish to recover the past.

As the world of the New Age movement shows, the authority of the ancient spiritual teacher is not an easy or safe playground and long precedes the emergence of contemporary freedoms. Be ye Lamps unto yourselves, the Buddha warned. As if they foresaw the world to come and the horrific and dangerous variants about to spread into the world as esoteric exploitations, we are left the sutras of the Samkhya Karika or the Yoga Sutras (much better a good treatise on vipassana from, however, the denominational Buddhist sources) which essentially states everything that one needs to know in non-denominational form, without esoteric trappings, although it is difficult to make practical use of this now. The great sutras are old and confusing, but they map out the entire domain as public knowledge in defiance of the ‘esotericism’ peddlers. Some of these people are very dangerous, for they will charge life and dollar for no more than the injunction, ‘pay attention’, our original distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness. To restate the issues of Samkhya as they resurface to challenge modern psychologies, we must be clear that these terms far precede the emergence of current Hinduism, and were clearly wrenched from their sockets by Gautama to stand exterior to social participation as categories of liberation. Finally, we see the ironic significance of Hegel, for he unwittingly injects the idea of freedom into the legacy of the ‘samkhyas’, albeit in its idealist version. Meanwhile, in the same generation Schopenhauer is the first to note the fact that triple appearance of this ‘challenge to illusion’, three times sourcing in our pattern (in parallel, we must note, to surging materialism), the Upanishadic, Pythagorean-Platonic, and German Idealist. Issues of consciousness are crucial to evolutionary history, for the grades or octaves of ‘self-consciousness’ both realize and defeat the mechanism of historical change, the ambiguity a clear reason for their obscurity.

We are already turning against the momentum of our own ‘new age’. Beyond the misleading perspectives of postmodernism, there should remain a genuine sense that the modern transformation can be seen as a single era of evolutionary passage. Any number of viewpoints now sense this secondary turning point. But this is misleading, for it is simply a variant of the first, as the ideological partition in the wake of the French Revolution makes clear. Fritjof Capra, in The Turning Point an analysis from the seventies of the symptoms of cultural crisis in the context of the recent ‘other’ movement of the New Age, observes that “we have to shift our perspective from the end of the twentieth century to a time span encompassing thousands of years.”  [lxx] Regardless of viewpoint, this is a fundamental injunction. We forget the brevity of the modernist transformation. If we clock its onset from the period after 1500 to the period of the early nineteenth century, we see a tide of a mere three hundred years, in a progression of slow millennia, whose rate of change is not uniform. As we distance ourselves from this period, we can see that no period since ca. -600 can match it.

Capra’s idea is associated, somewhat vaguely, with the Toynbean scheme of the genesis, growth and decay of civilizations, and the period of ‘cultural transformation’ that generates the passage from a static to a dynamic state of culture. There is again an implied ‘postmodernism’, a critique of the modern world, with an imputation that ‘something is over’, perhaps our ‘civilization’ has begun a process of decline. But Capra’s suggestion of themes, from leftist economy and the ecological, the passing of the ‘patriarchal age’, the implications of modern physics and the nature of ‘systems’, relevant to the deep cultural acceleration that we are experiencing, are not untoward, and are neither Toynbean nor New Age, and are really asking about the nature of course corrections to a stampeding modernist elephant, a difficult question to inherit from two centuries of ‘new age’ confusion.

In any case, Capra’s view connects historical cyclicity and the idea of a turning point itself, to which we can turn in the next section. To understand our present turnings we must master our relation to the emerging pattern of turning points, as cycles, perhaps, in world history as a whole, and the great turning point of modernism itself, with its stupendous collision of left and right, techno-industrial and demographic acceleration, and religious and secular conflict. It is like an issue of logistics. You can’t turn anything unless you have the conditions right. And for some reason the period 1500-1800 had these intractable issues right, or right enough to be the generator of long term future change. Whether our near term future can manage this begs the question, at the outset, of the difference of happenstance and foresight, or planned change, with little evidence man is able to manage his own generation, let alone the labors of milling centuries.