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Matt Schuman "The operative word here, I believe, is not "present", as Landon wished to argue, but "define". I challenge everyone on the list, for an exercise, to "define" the eighteenth century. " .... "As I believe I have demonstrated, the problem lies not in the periods themselves, for, regardless of starting and ending dates, we know roughly when the eighteenth century was, and we know that Rome's rise vaguely coincided with the decline of Hellenistic Greece. The problem here is the rigid periodisation of history which makes absolutely no sense. When the "present" is said to begin is entirely dependent upon one's own point of view, and the argument they are trying to advance." I agree with you that defining the present is arbitrary. I merely meant that our felt present, as in another thread, presumably meaning the current generation (??), has influences from before that present. As to the eighteenth century, why bother? As you seem to imply. How can we periodize anything? Sometimes it is merely useful. The dawn of the Age of the Computer Mouse starts around 1978 in Xerox labs, for example. One way is to tag periods to a theory of macrohistorical evolution. No more one century stuff. Really large intervals. No law against it. And no name for the intervals, just 'tick, tick', like a clock. In fact, a theory chases after causality, and that would be hard to define. So we can define instead a 'causal nexus' around a periodization, if the transition between periods shows a definable 'evolution' as a causal nexus. If this 'evolution' shows self-organization it might do what Prignone finds with his oscillaing chemicals, a cycling slosh. Anything that cycles is a clock. Speculation, but... My eonic effect foots the bill. We find that world history has its own clock, and we hear three ticks, whatever we mean by self-organization (and we can disown the connection, the point is clear). That's an hypothesis, which can serve as motivation, and then be set aside. But the beat is clear in world history, IF we understand the whole and part relationship. And if we can define the transitions between our periods, something that is rarely considered. Is it instantaneous? Surely not. We need a division that is a double periodization, a differential era going from A to B, if we can find them. We can, from our eonic 'clock'. Then, to make a long story short, we have two periods with three transitions and a third period just starting with the third transition. The whole of world history since Gilgamesh, three ticks. These transitions are sliding scale then. We see the first transition starting up at the end of the fourth millennium, and we find, by -3000, two great civilizations, in Sumer and Egypt. Then the next transition, in ball park figures starts up after -900, and our second era is underway by -600, then finally, 1500 to 1800 starts our third era. Roughly. What can we say? Three beats and a 2400 year interval. Chance? Chance or not, we can periodize world history easily with this, for it corresponds to a clear 'causal nexus', IF we can define the 'start zones' as parts in a whole, and define what it is that is evolving and how an evolving part relates to a whole evolving. We can. Although it takes some doing. So your eighteenth century disappears into what I call the 'modern' transtion between about 1500 to about the beginning of the nineteeth century. We rarely consider this period as a unit, but it is highly useful to do so. From the Reformation to the era of the French Revolution is an historical unity as a tiny period in evolutionary time, one that starts from A and ends at B in a definable sense. But no labels, please, except arbitrary ones, like 'modern', easily replaced with tagmarks. We tend to confuse the 'modern' with the 'early modern' and the 'postmodern'. In this view, we have a large 'tick' and then Era 3, following its Transition, and that era we call 'modern'. We tend to look back with postmodern second thoughts, and perhaps these are justified. But it is still modern. We could invent our own postmodern Era 4, IF we can match the scale of change for Tick 3. That would be the equivalent of undoing/redoing/surpassing the Reformation, Scientific Revolution, English and French Revolutions, dewigging the Enlightenment, stopping globalization, etc... Or doing them one better, peacefully, rationally... The only thing I know of that tried this was the Bolshevik revolution, and that game discovered a logistics problem. You see, we may be stuck in this 'modern' Era 3, at least for some time. Any real change must, in any case, be volitional action that can replace the system clock! Not an easy feat! We don't have to decide, or know what the future is to see that this periodization on a large scale resolves many problems, looking backwards. This model requires more work here, but I think we can see the answer to both your questions. In antiquity, everything is revolving around the period starting around -600, after its transition, as this opens a new era, and the Egyptians and Sumerians (long gone, the Assyrians, say) disappear. Then Rome, as is obvious is moving inside this boundary. This is only one small sector of a large area, stretching from West to East, and a comparable timing is clearly evident in China. As to the modern, we see this transition to the modern, and the eighteenth century is the rough and arbitrary third of this wherein what is to come is taking shape, the English Civil War being the bellwether. So our 'present' then is a relative concept. If you dislike this idea, we can drop it. But we could define all sorts of 'presents' with what we have. The 'modern present', our existence in Era 3, or something closer to home, a personal present, which has, as you say, very little exact meaning. But the 'modern present' does have a meaning. For it has definable characteristics, e.g. a type of economy, or a scientific culture, etc... It is not so easy to drop these defining events of the modern transition, for they define our greater period in ways that the superficial pace of technological change and its promotion leaves invariant, as Marx suspected. Be that as it may, this is not an injunction against change, only that change within a static interval is different from the clear pattern of our three big transitions. It is not so easy to see how this pattern emerges. I would call it 'discrete large scale evolution' matched with the continuous 'evolution' of the individuals or cultures inside that larger system. To find a true present requires freely leaving this history to match its dynamics with our free cooperative effort, and that remains problematical. So we could regress to Zoroastrian expectation syndrome and make a religion out of waiting for the next tick of the crocodile's clock. Your move. Don't tell Hayden White I said any of this. John Landon http://eonix.8m.com nemonemini@aol.com
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