We cited this essay Jim Blaut and Jared Diamond here in the previous post.
In light of that post, here is a section from World History And The Eonic Effect on the sudden rise of the modern, with a brief discussion of Blaut.
6.1.1 Frontier Effects and The ‘European Miracle’
There is mysterious seminal generation springing from the period ca. 1500, indicated by the onset of the Reformation. Over and over our sense of historical modernism draws us to this point of the so-called ‘early modern’, and into a controversy or equivocation over its significance as one of the great turning points of history. Relative to world history, progress explodes in the sixteenth century, despite the puzzle over the Renaissance. The abrupt start after 1500 is constantly suggested and then challenged or retracted because its proponents cannot account for it, or sort out the fact that a discontinuity might interrupt prior continuity. We can easily see the reason for the confusion, and its resolution.
We might suffer switching gestalts at this point between continuity and discontinuity. We should recall the discussion of Kant’s Third Antinomy, and the clue seen in the discrete freedom sequence. We adopted a better terminology to consider a semi-physicalist metaphor of acceleration, or an idea of the sudden clustering of eonic emergents, or the progressive remorphing of medieval stream elements to the point of ‘sequence intersection’ at the divide, ca. 1800 (1750-1850). The question of discontinuity, then, is resolved by zooming out to see that it represents a clustering of innovations gathering speed after 1500, and peaking near the Great Divide. There is no ‘discontinuity’, but in a directional system the sense of a sudden breaking away over the interval closing on the divide emerges spontaneously.
This sudden change in direction is reflected in the puzzled observations of a host of historians. 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…”. William MacNeill, in his The Rise of the West, calls the career of Western civilization since 1500 a vast explosion. Geoffrey Barraclough, in Turning Points 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”.
Marshall Hodgson, in The Venture of Islam, speaks of the Western Transmutation, 1600 to 1800, and sees the connection with the earlier period, generated from Sumer, but his analysis focuses on the history of technology, and fast-forwards to exclude the Reformation.What happened can be compared with the first advent several thousand years B.C. of that combination, among the dominant elements of certain societies, of urban living, literacy, and generally complex social and cultural organization, which we call civilization.
He has two of our three dynamic intervals. Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence asks, “Granted for the sake of argument that ‘our culture’ may be ending, why the slice of 500 years [from 1500 to the present]? What makes it a unity? The starting date 1500 follows usage: textbooks from time immemorial have called it the beginning of the Modern Era.” There is no implication of decline or decadence after the interval of transition, since a new era has come into being. The conclusion of the eonic sequence should be great new beginning.
This sudden take-off (relative to world history) has always been intractable for students of the question, and driven historical sociology into a frenzy of Renaissance resurrections, dialectical Big Bumps, Marxist social stages, Weberian econo-religious explanations, or, in the deliberate self-contradiction in two separate books by the historian E. L. Jones with his ‘European Miracle’.
The idea of a ‘European Miracle’ has been the object of an immense fuss on the part of the Marxist Jim Blaut in his attacks on this and on Eurocentrism in the theories struggling with the modern paradox.The European ‘Miracle’ In two works designed to contradict each other, the economic historian E. L. Jones in his work, The European Miracle, with its description of the suddenness of the rise of the West. In a subsequent Growth Recurring he approaches the question from a different angle, the controversy over the discontinuity of industrialization at the end of the eighteenth century, the Rostovian take-off model, whose controversial implication that economy levitated in the last decades before 1800. In his first work, Jones is documenting change from 1500 to 1800 as very sudden, and, in the second, claiming that the so-called Industrial Revolution is a fiction because it is too sudden.
But the way that he has structured his question suggests, if not the answer, a cameo model for the real overall explanation, given by the eonic effect. Three hundred years is not too sudden a ‘sudden’, for it is enough time to make a discontinuity continuous, so to speak. It is also a ‘break’, short in relation to millennia. And it starts to cluster near a divide. His objection is that history cannot suddenly divide itself into different pieces. But perhaps it does do this, and the contrast of treatments Jones gives shows how this is accomplished.
Blaut, in his critique of European ‘capital accumulation’ as the source of the ‘European Miracle’, stumbles on the answer as he ends by calling 1492 the breakpoint between two fundamentally different evolutionary epochs. The Marxist viewpoint was close to this because its ‘eonic’ division into stages requires a discontinuity, which is never explained, and this required explaining the rise of capitalism after 1500 (against counterclaims it already existed or started earlier). But the emergence of capitalism is simply another ‘relative transform’ in our account, which transcends the economic interpretation of history, which can’t define the purely abstract transition that occurs (roughly) on schedule, beyond the content. 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. The trick here is to look at stages without names, created by periodization in the abstract.
The problem with purely economic perspectives is that the ‘rise of the modern’ is much richer in structure than what we expect from accounts of political, technical or economic change, and indeed includes the generation of a whole new ‘social software’, witness, e.g. the coherent unit as an emerging whole of political philosophy from Machiavelli to Marx. Is this chance? This drives one commentator to stumble into a classic rumination on the equivocation of the term ‘modern’, “The conventional periodization of political history assumes that a profound break in the continuity of Western political speculation occurred around 1500, this date presumably marks the beginning of ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘premodern’ political thought.”
As noted, the periodization question of the ‘rise of modern’ has many casualties in the realm of theories. Three sets of failed theories litter the foothills of the eonic effect, those of the rise of the modern, the birth of civilization, and, to the extent they exist at all, efforts to explain the Axial period, along with the whole spectrum of interpretations of the classical civilizations, to say nothing of explaining the history indicated in the Old Testament. Without exception these theories have all failed. Suddenly we realize they are really all asking a similar set of questions about an invariant puzzle. The question of the ‘modern’ remains baffling until we see it in its greater context. Then the remarkable resemblance of the rise of the modern to the Axial interval, and especially Greek Archaic appears, for example. Armed with the eonic model the difficulty is seen at once, and the problem is kicked upstairs into the macrohistorical, hence evolutionary, domain, in our sense of evolution. We must summon up the use of discontinuity and not suffer theory-failure if we ask by what ‘discontinuity’ Martin Luther cast his inkwell at the devil and penned ninety-five theses. The question is one of the formalism of models, in the large. We have two universal histories, and we apply causal explanation inconsistently.
The issue becomes confused for another reason, 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 Burchkardt. 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. A close look shows that the last sliver of 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.
It helps to see that China never really suffers a Middle Ages in the Western sense. The Renaissance is really picking up the pieces of what should have been the West’s normal heritage. 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. 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.