Re: The Eonic Effect and the problem of evidence

In a message dated 9/25/2002 9:34:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time, larondin@yahoo.com writes:


> <The idea of pulsed development in an intriguing concept.  But to discuss issues like this (and indeed any of the ideas in "big history") one has to have a really good idea of what happened during such transitional periods in order to get the dating right.  One also needs to have an equally-good understanding of what happened during the non-transitional periods to verify that change did occur at a substantially slower rate.> 


The facts are crucial, but doesn't the model show the obvious, that we see three major plateau's achieved in a sequence, each time from a different platform? 
This question bedevils issues of modernism and postmodernism, where the point is missed that a new threshold or plateau is reached by the early nineteenth century. This has nothing to do necessarily with capitalism or the new economic system. In fact the very protest of Marx is that this new threshold is just that, but not a final state. Marx is so obvious, so clear, that he has become obscure, and entangled in all sorts of theories that disguise the thundering obviousness of what he pointed to.

The question of three century long transitions in the eonic model is, in fact, derived from the modern case itself. You can argue that this is not completely visible in the classical phase, and speculative in the first near the beginning of civilization. But I think you can see the de fact answer in these 'steps achieved' from which diffusion flows outward overwhelmingly. And that to the point where I would predict New World diffusion, for example. 
In any case, three century long transitions is an extra here. The real point is to see that there are two processes overlaid, a macro that appears as discontinuous and a micro that is simply the default flow of history everywhere, random happenstance history.
The overlay of these two is what causes the sense of sudden transitions and this interplay of continuity and discontinuity is the reall effect, not the exact dates of the transitions (which however are reasonably exact).

That, to answer a part of Mike's question about Homer, is the reason we remain baffled. Why does a Homer suddenly appear as a function of time in the classical transition?  I have no idea, but taken together with the overall evidence we see that this is an effect of something more than local history. 
It is better, of course, to take the aggregate of Greek literature here, which is immense in the Archaic to Classical Period. 
The question then is what is the relation to the obvious led up of the tradition of oral literature in Greece? But we see that is not the point. We are not talking about absolute origins, but of the effect of what happens as the stream of Greek culture passes into the phase boundary. 
The example of Israel is chock full of this kind of paradox, but there the theological issues distract us.