We come to conclusion of our survey of the eonic effect and the properties of our eonic model resolve in beautiful fashion at one stroke the paradoxes of the rise of the modern. Our eonic sequence with mathematical precision leapfrogs to the frontier area of one its prior oikoumenes. This is the clue to the sudden explosion of modernity at the fringes of its previous zones of action. The data of the eonic effect is at first very puzzling, but its suggestion is very direct on this point: the rise of modernity is an eonic transition, best seen as three centuries in length, 1500 to 1800, climaxed by the Great Divide in the generation of the Industrial Revolution, thence generating the rapidly expanding forms of modernist globalization. How can it be this way? A discrete-continuous model comes to the rescue by displacing the question onto the greater scale of world history since the first ‘modernities’ of Sumer and Egypt.

This issue has long been distracted by the seemingly Eurocentric implications of such a view. But the modern transition is only marginally a ‘European’ phenomenon. Every stage of our eonic sequence has suffered this entanglement of the staging area and its emergent oikoumene. The modern case is no exception, but we can see the rapid-fire attempts of the period of the Enlightenment to produce canons of universal culture under the aegis of Reason. Central to modernity is the rebirth of Science, but this should not distract us from the need to understand the greater spectrum of effects gestating in our transition. Consider the triggering effect of the Protestant Reformation: it partitions Europe into two sectors, and feeds a new future from behind this partition.

The clear suggestion that the Protestant Reformation, next to the parallel emergence of Science, is the first stage of a sequence leading to the Enlightenment ought, even at this late date, to give pause to religious traditionalists who wish to defy the momentum of the eonic sequence with postmodern retrogression. The rise of the modern has all the requirements for a Second Axial Age, and traditionalist attacks on its secular character have missed the point. The paradox is resolved in the German Enlightenment, whose descant on enlightenment rationality constitutes the conclusion of the Reformation, and its full potential reveals the false contradiction of the sacred and the secular. The stages of the modern transition resemble the Axial phenomenon of Axial Greece in the Archaic period onward, the seventeenth century being the pivot point whence emerges the cornucopia of effects so visible at the point of the divide.

Sixteenth century: Reformation, Copernican Revolution, German Revolution
Seventeenth century: Scientific Revolution, birth of Enlightenment, English Civil War, birth of liberalism
Eighteenth Century: Flowering of multiple Enlightenments, English, German, French, American. Industrial Revolution, French and American Revolutions
The Great Divide: the climactic conclusion of the modern transition
A New Age Begins The onset of a new era of world history rapidly shifting from its frontier jumpstart zone toward globalization
Five Centuries of Modernity Just as with the Axial Age where we saw an approximate three centuries of dynamic seeding, followed by two centuries of rapid realization and a heated flowering, so with the modern period we see the same two centuries after the Great Divide in a prolonged take-off. We must be wary of falling into the same slide of decline and chaotification that overtook the ancient world in the post-Axial period.

The amount of study required for this immensely complex transformation is immense, and yet we can suddenly see with a bird’s eye view the whole transition, which has an overall unity and coherence, operates holistically on multiple aspects of culture, and generates a clear metanarrative of evolutionary action. The seeming contradiction between slow continuous development from medievalism and rapid emergence in the discontinuous action of the eonic sequence disappears in our formulation.

We should reiterate that we are not speaking of Western Civilization, nor is modernity a phenomenon of Christian culture. The effect echoes directly the eonic master sequence in regenerating the gains lost in the post-Axial chaotification of antiquity. In light of the eonic model, we see that at every stage a local cultural complex is the staging area for a renewed generation of a globalizing oikoumene. This is a very strange way to take the question, at first, but used with care, this idea will resolve the hopeless muddle of historical analysis stuck between continuity/discontinuity arguments with respect to the Middle Ages. We have even thrown light on the intractable difficulties of Eurocentrism, because we can see that the ‘modern transition’ is just that, a transition, following a frontier effect, that takes off right on schedule just at the fringes of the old Roman oikoumene. The effect thus has nothing as such to do with ‘European civilization’, a notion that will blind us to what is going on. We can then look at the phenomenon of the Great Divide, one of the most spectacular moments of world history, notwithstanding the considerable postmodern dialectic to which it has been subjected. 

The Great Divide As noted, if we adopt the transition model for the eonic pattern, we indirectly imply that there is an end to the transitional interval and this gives us one of the great interior ‘predictions’ of the eonic model. We saw this in the case of Greece and Israel. 2400 years later to the decade, another example is evident. This means we should examine the period around 1800 (or, more roughly 1750 to 1850) to see if we can detect this effect. In fact, we have stumbled on the explanation for one of the most remarkable periods in world history, a generation of massive innovations encompassing all aspects of culture, from the Enlightenment to the birth of modern capitalism to the French Revolution and the rebirth of democracy. We can see now that the intensity of this period is no accident. We note also that much that was innovative in this period was clearly gestating from the time of sixteenth century.

Our transition very clearly ignites in the sixteenth century, with the Protestant Reformation, the first of the great modern revolutions, and parallel to this we see the rapid emergence of the Scientific Revolution. The conflicts of the Reformation yield to the real birth of modernity in the seventeenth century, and we witness the birth of the Enlightenment period. By the end of the eighteenth century the basic interval of the transition is complete, and we see the remarkable phenomenon of the Great Divide, at close hand. We suddenly have some accounting for the fact that the generation around 1800 is immensely fertile and packed with innovations in all fields. Then, just as clearly we can see the system changing gears, as it disengages from the eonic sequence into its mideonic New Age, in an explosion of novel developments in the nineteenth century. This is confusingly associated with the birth of modern capitalism, but the overall picture is more complex than simple economics. Capitalism can fuel economies, but it can’t produce an Adam Smith, the source of its own software. The emergence of capitalist software (rapidly degenerating into ideology) clearly constitutes an eonic emergent, and belongs to the eonic sequence.

As we come close to home in our examination of eonic evolution, the issues of ideology become critical. The answer is simple, we make no claim to have transcended ideology. The affirmation of modernity, hence the eonic sequence, is itself ideological. But we have a failsafe: our eonic sequence forces us to examine all ideologies in all their combinations. As to the rise of the modern, it is a fait accompli by 1800, a ‘very important turning point’, a proposition difficult to refute. But our model allows the response of ‘general TP4 exceptions’ and this appear without fail almost at once, climaxing in a general postmodern reaction in our contemporary time-frame. We might counsel a close examination of the post-Axial period in antiquity and ask if the undoing of modernity in such a vein, with the loss once again of democracy and Science, would constitute a fourth great turning point in history, falsifying our eonic model. It is nonetheless critical, having summoned up an eonic model, to consider its implications. At the point of the Great Divide, we are done, and the eonic sequence shuts down. The effects of ‘system action’ are complete as the process shifts to ‘free action’. Our analysis offers no guarantee that the agents of modernity are anything better than mechanized exemplars of a misunderstood secularism. A reactive process is inexorable, but in the travails of globalization, we can hope for some substance in the claims of eonic progression, progress or not.

The construction of our model didn’t require the transcendence of ideology, since all we have done is employ periodization. To resolve the issue of ideology, we must find some way to define the observer of the system we are describing. In fact, we have already done so and called him an eonic observer. But this creature, so far, is no disembodied spectator of eternal history, but an agent performing the realizations of the eonic emergents in his local timeframe. The problem is that this observer is a creature of the very system he wishes to describe. But we can at least describe this whole eonic effect, leaving open its interpretation(s).  In fact, we are all already 'eonic observers' and every time we use the term 'modern' we give expression to this fact. We have already noted the way we sense the eonic effect without quite seeing its overall scale or meaning, and this is a good example. We have a clear sense that a new era of history comes into existence, and our usage is independent of the content or geographical region in which this is to occur. We have a tendency to speak of 'Western Civilization', but as we can see already that this is misleading. Miletus, one of the prime sources of the Greek transition, would technically be considered 'Eastern', and the braiding of Athens and Jerusalem, to say nothing of concealed elements of Indian religion, make the term problematical. Not only that, but our usage of the term 'civilization' is conditioned by the focus on a different 'unit of analysis' instead of the civilization. Our focus as an alternate unit is on the transition and the oikoumene it creates.

It seems to make no local sense to cut history into pieces, but we can see that 'modernity' makes complete sense if we think of it in terms of a 'modern transition' of about three centuries from 1500 to 1800, at which point the system crosses its divide into the modern period proper. What about the year 1499? Is this pre-modern? We never really answered the question as to why we take a transition as three centuries in length, but the modern transition makes this especially clear, for the whole period has a greater unity that makes it plausible as an integrated transformation. Our model is some sort of approximation that answers to the issue of directionality directly by the scale of its analysis. There is no contradiction between continuous evolution from the Middle Ages and the discontinuous effect of the eonic sequence. Both require study.

That the Protestant Reformation seems to contradict the final theme of secularization misses the point entirely, and it is not hard to see how the climactic point of the Enlightenment springs from the revolutionary and implicit issue of freedom that the Reformation dramatizes so clearly in its 'revolution against theocracy' and emphasis on religious individuality. The sixteenth century is as innovative as it is convulsive, and its climax in the Thirty Years War initiates the sudden clearing of the air that produces the equally remarkable seventeenth century, the birth in seminal form of almost all the institutions of the modern world. The second half of our transition then produces the flowering of the Enlightenment, and we have noted this as the Great Divide. Thence we have the new world of science, democracy, liberalism, and capitalist economies by which we tend to define modernity. But it is important to note that our transition is a complete spectrum of possibilities, that it has several Enlightenments, and that it is not exclusively associated with capitalist economics. Capitalism is an outcome of the modern transition and not the other way around. 

It is natural to try and find the causal antecedents of modernity in the middle ages, and there is nothing wrong with this. Our stream and sequence analysis suggests this double aspect. But now we have a larger model with some wallop and it suggests a deeper 'causality of another kind', on the level of the eonic sequence itself. But it never adds up. The Magna Carta doesn’t really explain modern democratic revolutions. Not since the Axial period have we seem such a rapid fire transformation, and what is more this resembles the Greek transition in considerable detail, from the rebirths of democracy and science to the appearance of a period we call the Enlightenment. 

The great master chord of modernity is the emergence of the idea of freedom and the nexus of ideas surrounding this. In this sense the emergence of liberalism has to considered for what it is, an independent synchronous emergentism in parallel with the rise of science. It is important to consider this point since the sudden downshifting into positivism shows the attempts to construct a universal canon based on the successes of causal reasoning in physics. This will derail the whole system if allowed to proceed without challenge, and that challenge appeared almost immediately at the Great Divide, please note. Positivism is one of the first regressions in our system.  It is important to consider this point since we tend, in an age of later scientism, to define modernity in narrow terms of a type of rationality based on scientific universalism. But the birth of the modern was more complex than this, and it more accurate to say that 'causality and freedom' together form the 'dialectic' of modernity. 

It is ironic therefore that the idea of freedom contains all the elements of the mystique of the sacred and yet expresses this in secular form. The modern transition wants nothing from a 'sacred age', and in any case creates a pluralistic stage of religious freedom in which the heritage of antiquity can find its place. And our transition spawns a virtual novelty, the revolution, whose effect is clear almost from the German Social Revolution in the early sixteenth century in concert with the Reformation, itself certainly another revolution. The cascade of revolutions, to the English Civil War thence to the French Revolution, is characteristically symptomatic of modernity, but an endless controversy arises over their significance. It is too little noted that most of these revolutions fail, and that that modernity appears from a broader spectrum of causes than simple revolutions against traditional political forms.

And yet, willy nilly, these revolutions, almost symbols rather than causally constructive, are the omens of the emergence of the great early liberal age. This issue has been clouded by the great confusion that overtook the concept of revolution in the wake of Marxist thought. We can only conclude with Marx that these revolutions were 'bourgeois revolutions' that produce liberal success stories whose continuations as projected socialism occurred well outside the transition itself. The issue of some kind of post-capitalism, an important issue for the future, without a doubt,  simply does not occur inside our modern transition, one reason no doubt that Marxists were unprepared for unexpected outcomes of trying to undo the modern transition as soon as it appeared. Clearly our eonic model, which doesn't really settle the question here, nonetheless accurately reflects the facts of what the modern transition does, and shows why ill-conceived models of revolution based on the misleading evidence of its embedded revolutions have gone awry. This is not a new form of legitimation of capitalism (in the sense of making it a teleological stage of history), only that its emergence in concert with liberalism is a prime eonic incident, where ad hoc revolutionary schemes were simply harebrained adventurism. That says nothing, again, about the future, and we must emphasize that injecting historical inevitability into the post-eonic future is most ill-advised. Our model comes to the end of its last transition and comes to a stop, a great advantage--or disadvantage of this kind of model. 

One revolution that did succeed was that of abolitionism. We can listen respectfully to Christians attempting to explain why Christianity began the struggle against slavery, but we can only conclude in the end that the modern abolitionist movement appears like an apparition near the modern divide and gets the job done, where before it was mostly talk. That some of these abolitionists were Christians is hardly convincing. They show eonic determination as 'Christians in the eonic sequence' while Christians outside the sequence showed very little effort in this regard. It is nonetheless true that abolition is gestating from the Axial period (or before) and that the birth of freedom, however stillborn and partial, is also rightly taken as an achievement of that prior stage of the eonic series.

 One of the most significant movements of the last generation (roughly two centuries after the divide) is the rise of postmodernism as a reaction against and critique of the Enlightenment. Our view of this must be conditioned by the realization that our eonic model proceeds to describe the eonic sequence, its termination in the nineteenth century, and then stops. It makes no predictions about the future of the system. The dynamism of the eonic sequence is tremendous and no reactive philosophical initiative or revolutionary re-start is likely to succeed in overcoming the momentum of the modern transition. But what exactly does this mean? It is not possible to peg a simple ideological viewpoint to this immense and strangely balanced emergent era. We can see that this transition creates a net effect that stretches across all conceptual boundaries, showing its effects in every area of culture. To undo the total effect of this evolutionary era would be a catastrophe and throw civilization into retrograde confusion.

We can see that confusion has entered the postmodern viewpoint, even as it fulfills a critical task spawned in the very Enlightenment it would reject. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with a critique of modernity itself. But the typical postmodern rejection of histories or metanarratives of freedom, for example, flies in the face of our insight that the 'evolution of freedom' is at the core of the drama of man's historical emergence. We should note at once that criticisms of such 'metanarratives' are appropriate challenges to the ideological or teleological formulations of many modern philosophies of history, beside the equally false teleologies influenced by Darwinism. Our account is indeed a metanarrative, truly 'meta' indeed, and yet it is ironically a kind of reversed postmodern perspective itself, because it contains its own critique of teleological ideology. Nothing in our account of the modern transition makes a final teleological claim on the far future, nor is it automatic grounds for the rote repetition of watered down imitations of its own dynamic.

Thus the real interpretation of postmodernism springs from our own eonic model which projects a 'post-transitional' period when the swiftly accomplished achievements of the early modern stabilize and seem to leave a vacuum of impotent efforts to replicate its action. The eonic model spawns its very definite but highly generalized prescription of the right course of action: history as Freedom is emerging from the evolution visible in the eonic sequence. We are both executing its own and moving to transcend the passivity it generates, and this leaves the ambiguous question of what constitutes true social change outside of the eonic series. The way to start is to be able to at least maintain the vigor of the innovations initiated in modernism, thence to study comprehensively its multiple aspects, wary of the downshifting 'flying off on a tangent' that begins to lay claim on the Enlightenment yet perpetuates a limited version of that mysterious moment. Here the philosophies of freedom castigated by postmodern critique must in fact be the source of right perspective, along with a correct disposition toward the powerful impetus of the Scientific Revolution, whose place is both crucial, yet limited, since it makes no definite contribution to the right understanding of cultural evolution. Our transition has already solved this problem via the independent parallel emergence of resonant opposites, e.g. the causal analysis of reality produced by science, and the thematic of emergent freedom produced by evolutionary liberalism. 

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