08-08-2017, 11:30 PM
(08-08-2017, 01:44 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Eric, while the Reformation, Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment were in many ways separate movements, I see all three as part of the development of the Industrial Age pattern. The technology featured gunpowder, steam and the printing press. I also see the Reformation as starting to break up hierarchical authoritarian thinking in a way that helped the Enlightenment in turn. Anyway, yes, things started popping. It was the best of times, and the worst of times.
The War of the Roses? I'm not so sure. While it has many of the symptoms of 4T, and I won't argue the point intensely, there are few to no issues where the Agricultural / Industrial mind patterns are put on the line. That has always felt more to me like an old fashioned Agricultural Age dynastic conflict. There were enough of those back in the day.
Anyway, if you see kings fighting democracy, agricultural elites squaring off against robber barons, industrialized urban areas opposing rural zones, established hierarchical autocratic churches going against upstarts that let worshipers read the Bible... In many of those cases, it is fairly easy to say the Agricultural / Industrial transition is underway, who is on the progressive side, and who has a big leg up on coming out on top. Bet on the urban folk with new money and new technology. The people with dated culture and technology didn't generally do well. When the above things aren't present, the transition to the Industrial pattern may not be underway yet. You may want to look harder at what people are struggling over.
Alas, if the Industrial Age pattern is complete, if networked knowledge, post scarcity economics, ecological problems, nukes and insurgent warfare are becoming the way to go with a new age of civilization starting, all bets are off as we have to figure out how the new pattern has to take shape.
Yes, as I put it in my planetary dynamics view, Uranus was rising throughout the Saturn period. It's not totally either/or. The trends that would prepare the way for the Uranus Age (which is the early industrial revolution and liberal revolution) and the Neptune Age (full-scale industrialism and collectivist trends) were in progress. (And both were also culturally romantic in various ways btw, although Uranus represents more the romantic-classical or neo-classical, and Neptune the emotional and impressionist styles and mystical movements). So, in my metaphor, Uranus was moving up to the horizon in the Renaissance-Reformation period and was almost visible in the Enlightenment period broadly-defined, but did not emerge as itself until the 1780s.
S&H defined the Wars of the Roses as a 4T, and it certainly was, given how it consumed the country and the politics of the time in a violent struggle, but since it was still fairly early in the Saturn period (which in my planetary metaphor is the centralized dynastic state period as well as the early-modern science period, and the last agriculture-based aristocratic period), it featured little if any direct conflict between agricultural and proto-industrial values, as the following 4Ts did. But it turned out that it did establish the foundation for the proto-industrial trends to begin soon afterward. Mikebert and others have identified similar possible 4Ts earlier than the Wars of the Roses which are also not agricultural-industrial conflicts.
In the 1460-1485 period, the way forward was to establish a strong monarchy that would eventually pave the way for the industrial states of the future, replacing the more anarchistic and decentralized feudal system. Circa 1310 under Philip the Fair and Edward I was the turning point that established the more-centralized dynastic monarchy in the Saturn age, as I call it. But it took events over another two centuries to fully establish this trend not only in England and France, but also Spain, Russia, and central Europe, and arguably China too under the Ming. The Wars of the Roses ended dynastic wars and rivalries in England and established the powerful Tudor dynasty, which was eventually to lead the way forward into the English Reformation and its imperial sea-power that would eventually enable parliamentary democracy to spread.