We are ready to move backwards again toward antiquity in search of the right perspective on the rise of the modern world. We have asked ‘middle of what?’ There can be only one answer, and we can move on, to examine the onset of our middle period. As we explore the world of the Classical Greeks we know that we are in the presence of another or our seminal eras, further, that as we zoom in on the phenomenon, it shows a strong resemblance with the rise of the modern world.
3.3 The Axial Age
Our riddle is solved at once, then, by slightly extending the range of examination, to see that while there may be a local explanation for decline, there must be a global explanation for the rise. Our model won’t tell us why Rome declined, only that its (relative) genesis is in the great seminal era of cyclical upturn. We are at the point of seeing the one great clue to the emergence, as evolution, of civilization itself, in this strange phenomenon of synchronous acceleration. All across Eurasia, from Rome, to Greece, to the Near East, to India, and China, we see a sudden burst of cultural acceleration, with a center of gravity around –600, the time of the Exile in the case of Israel. We are back at our starting point, the mysterious drumbeat sounding across Eurasia in the period from ca. –900, and over by –400.
Beginning in the nineteenth century this perception of synchronous emergence in classical antiquity began to crystallize. These are ‘eonic observations’, and the redactors of the Judaic tradition were the first to observe the compression of their history and immediately cast this into the classic form that we have received from them. A similar sense appears in the history of Buddhism. The Judaic tradition is exceptional here, for the Greeks tended not to realize the phenomenon of their almost more remarkable and isomorphic history of this period. Let us note in passing, lest we get confused over ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, that we see the birth of monotheism, but also the Greek proto-secular Enlightenment (matched with the last spectacular flowering of Greek polytheism). The birth of monotheism and science are synchronous, therefore. Our data is a superset of such eonic observations passing so quickly into a great myth. The distinction of sacred history has no meaning. Clearly we are seeing a spectrum of outcomes that blend into each other. But we must be wary of reducing them to a common denominator. Our system is exploring diversity.
The number of cultural processes that undergo rapid transformation in this period is remarkable, and it is not until modern times that we see anything comparable. One problem is that the scale of the process is tremendous, the study of five time slices in parallel. The logistics defeats observation, like a blind man reading a Braille text of a movie script. We don’t quite see the spectacular effect. Normal historiography specializes in the part, but this requires a greater whole. Thus specialized study tends to lose perspective on the echoing parallels reverberating across Eurasia as this drumbeat clocks multiple innovations appearing in the ongoing momentum of the target areas. The Old Testament unwittingly suggests the time frame for this interval, from after around –900 to the proximate period around –600, if we distinguish carefully a kind seminal period from its first spectacular fruits in the rough two centuries after –600.
Thus, in the clearest case we see the world of the Greeks emerge from its so-called Dark Age, suddenly begin a quiet transformation in the Archaic, then flower in spectacular fashion after –600, significantly the period of Solon. The change in character of the phenomenon shows how it is quite suddenly on the wane after around –400, and within a few centuries men are looking backwards to this era as an historical enigma. The remarkable thing is that we see this synchronous phenomenon in a fashion that transcends the possibilities of cross diffusion, which are nonetheless considerable. The Israelites had heard of the Iliad, there is an influence, but we cannot explain the one from the other. We might thus include the emergence of Rome as an additional independently emergent center, yet we see it more clearly as a variant of the Greek city state expansion characteristic of the Greek Archaic, that is, in part a case of diffusion. But with Greece, Israel, India and China we have no basis to claim that one triggers the other. We get the suggestion of something occurring ‘on schedule’.
All we can really do is to try and observe this phenomenon by setting out rough periodization boundaries. Later, on the analog of the modern we can partition our Axial phase as transition and divide, which is easy to spot. We will examine this ‘differential boundary’ below as being about –900 to –600. This puts a ‘divide’ near –600, after which we find a brief flowering followed by a rapid fall-off. It is almost eerie. Within a generation or two the character of the Greek era changes gears and a great flowering is over (this falloff and the divide are not the same). We had thought that coincidental, but it falls like ripe fruit into our periodization scheme. The factor of eonic determination is waning, and the high-octane fuel starts to be exhausted. The ‘punctuation’ is over and the eonic emergents head out under their own steam, if they survive at all. Greek democracy and tragedy don’t survive.
A birth of democracy Let us continue to track the history of democratic emergence in our system, to note once again: twice in a row, democracy shows correlated jump-start emergence in the eonic sequence, more, just at the point of the divide. Twenty-four hundred years to the decade separate Solon and the modern divide! We see the sudden appearance of a string of democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, just as our modern transition is concluding. In the Axial period, we see the fragile Athenian experiment emerge from ‘raw republicanism’ in the sixth century. To repeat, we can see that this is no coincidence. Clearly democracy as micro-action is at risk as it sets sail into the uncharted waters of its mideonic period!
We can probably extend this backwards to our first transition, the system of Sumerian city-states, but the data is blurred, and it is probable that emergent civilization is too primitive for democracy to appear.
M.A. Student of classics, mathematics, Oriental Religion, John Landon lives in New York City