The Crisis of Modernity

The Crisis of Modernity The Crisis of Modernity Epochs in Transition: Manifestos, Revolutions and the Ends of History A double reading of Enigma of the Axial Age John C. Landon South Fork Books © Copyright 2016 John C. Landon Published by South Fork Books Montauk, NY Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919554 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Preface 7 Preface Notes 1: Manifestos: poetry of the Revolution 19 Preface Notes 2: Last and First Men 26 Preface Notes 3:The Dramatic Universe 36 Introduction: The Axial Age 52 1. History and evolution 94 2. The Axial Age: A Riddle Resolved 134 3. Conclusion: The Great Transition 286 Appendix 1: An Idea from Samkhya 305 PREFACE Crisis of Modernity (CR) is a companion to Toward a New Communist Manifesto, and at first a disconcerting experiment as an experimental palimpsest of Enigma of the Axial Age (ENAX) and uses the core material on the Axial Age for a new perspective on modernity. This is an exercise in suggesting to historical materialists the stupendous complexity of world history and introducing the generalization of the idea of ‘revolution’ we call a ‘floating fourth turning point’. This preface introduces Enigma of the Axial Age and then coments on the exercise in the new notes introducing the original conclusion. We include the Manifesto Generator of the cited book in an a separate section to this Preface. The intent is to sage a guided study to the Axial Age, thence modernity, in the context of modern leftist revolutionism, and to put the ideas of democracy, revolution, secularism in the modern context into a larger framework. The ideas of progressive epochs, an historical dynamic, axial ages, and ‘floating fourth turning points’ enter as ways to link one book to another, or two ways of reading one book: as we study the Axial Age we see the primordial idea of revolution gestating in the attempts to create the future spawned in that era. In the process the book attempts to highlight the ambiguity of modernity in the context of that earlier period. Secularism is ambiguous because it rejects religion, and yet embraces it, and struggles to find the secular equivalent to the spiritual in its scientific mode. The book is a companion to Last and First Men, and Out of Revolution. The original text of ENAX, which was balanced 7 8 Descent of Man Revisited between antiquity and the modern age, remains the core and yet the material is poised for a double take and suddenly looks at ‘Axial modernity’ and its revolutionary successors. This springboard for a discussion of modernity, secularism, the revolution of modern democracy and its successors in the socialist and communist movements of the nineteenth century highlights the Feuerbachian challenge to religion, yet ‘preaches’ against scientism and the Iron Cage. This is a realization of the original strategy to create two books, one on the Axial Age and one on the modern succession. The radically new technologies of both POD and e-books allow this kind of editorial collage and allow two books in one to descant one against the other. The result will adopt in addition the new illustrated Kindle technology emerging with Amazon’s Comic Book Creator. The result will be a fascimile of a PDF created in Adobe Indesign. The ‘crisis of modernity’ is often taken in some variant of postmodernist discourse, or else in a critique of secular modernism from a conservative religious viewpoint. But our perspective here can be seen better by looking at the ‘crisis of the Axial Age’ and its outcomes. That historical context shows the ominous failure to fully realize the implications of the Axial period and the inexorable decline from ‘initial conditions’ so evident in the realm of the Roman legacy. The Axial Age, we forget, shows the birth of democracy, whatever intimations we might find in the earlier epoch leading out of Sumer, and is ambiguously more than what it religious fans think. Students of the Axial Age are familiar with the emergence of religions in the post-Axial era yet seeded by the seminal actions in that interval. In the same way the core period of the early modern seeded the movements toward social transformation but this time in a secular version that resembles the ancient example in a kind of Feuerbachian mirror image. We need to see the way the trend of modernity might decline and evoke a recursive replay of the modern transition, and this in previous accounts was dubbed a floating fourth turning point, a considerable amplifcation in theory of the idea of a revolution. In the ancient world the crisis of paganism produced the revolutionary challenge of monotheism. In the modern world we confront a similar challenge not yet realized of a transformation of culture beyond the reign of capitalism. But that remains in the future and the question is what we consider the true realization of modernity. The equation of modernity and capitalism at the end of history is a species of propaganda and it is no accident this was challenged almost immediately by the early communists, whose ideas were taken over by Marx and Engels to create a classic movement gestating precisely our idea of Preface 9 a floating fourth turning point. Thus, we see three (or more) epochs or eras in sucession: the Egypt/Sumer era after 3000 BCE the post-Axial Age era after 600 BCE the modern transition and the onset of the modern epoch after 1800 ...shifting from system action to free action we have a floating fourth turning point initiated as social transformation... The latter is highly controversial, on the scale of super-revolution, and can be taken as a gedanken experiment, and also as a characteristic example generated in the ‘eonic model’ of free agency in counterpoint to macro action. Many is graduating from the action of macro history to the realization of freedom and an open future, and here the controversy over the end of history resurfaces as it becomes obvious that ‘free markets’ cannot automatically generate a viable future. To the contrary they require a new reworking in a futuristic economy that can reckon beyond the nonsense of market magic, magic thinking indeed. This is not a blank check to marxist boilerplate, but we do consider the emergence of Marx/Engels as prophetic for the future transformation of culture intuited by our suspicions about the analogs of the Axial Age succession. Let us note that decline was the first and last option, it seemed, of the magnificent Axial creativity, and within six centuries we pass from the theatre of Dionysus to the Roman games, in resurgence of barbarism that overtook Occidental civilizations. We must expect a variant of this in the wake of the modern transition, and we can see already that the foundations of democracy have eroded in less than two centuries, as we can see already the gestating need for a recursion of the modern democratic revolutions. To this we must add the critique of such as Marx in the call for a True Democracy founded in a sociliast key. Sorting out the confusion of concepts here has been the bane of the last two centuries. Here we have brought a new type of historical model. This scheme we called the eonic effect and we have good evidence that this sequence begins much earlier in the Neolithic or before and shows a hidden directionality to the emergence of civilization. The idea of a floating fourth turning point is simply that of an attempt to create a new artificially created, man-made version of a transition outside of this fixed sequence. The example of the religions, which we must possibly indict as failures, is one case of this. The question for our times is, what is the future status of the capitalist process whose end was prophetically forseen by its socialist critics and whose crisis is now all too visible in the emerging calamity of climate change. From victor at the end of history 10 Descent of Man Revisited the capitalist process has graduated to a menace to planetary civiliztion. A transformation of culture beyond economic categories based on free markets has thus resurfaced as a project for revolutionary action. But the failures of Bolshevism must induce a reminder of the complexity of the task, and the need, not for some religious framework, but a larger perspective than that of the narrow positivistic historical materialism of the nonetheless classic legacy of Marx. We confront the need to create a fullsome cultural mix that does justice to the real siginficance of secularism. Marxism was strangely a creature of its period, the post-Hegelian disillusion that sought out an aggressive anti- religion based on what was ultimately too matched with emergent scientism. As with the Romantic Challenge to the Enlightenment in counterpoint to its basic thrust, the real core of modern secularism was more than its Newtonian foundations in science. It included a complex ‘dialectic’ or spectrum of multiple components, such as the duality of ‘causality’ and ‘freedom’ that balanced the New Physics with a larger cultural spectrum, one so clearly delineated by the philosopher Kant. Here we might note that modernity produced a revolution in philosophy and this was truly dialectical in its balance of opposites. The closer world of vulgar nineteenth materialism was a poor successor to this immense contribution to a new philosophy. Such effects exist in many dimensions pointing to a complexity to the idea of the ‘modern’ that we have forgotten. Note on J. G. Bennett and Samkhya Enigam of the Axial Age considers and critiques the views of J.G.

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