Wheels within wheels.

[Eric the Green]

(10-21-2019, 12:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Toynbee saw the civilization, and not the nation-state, as the unit of history. A model of a corporation from birth to death is imperfect; corporations can technically die as they are absorbed into bigger ones, and divisions can be sold off. Keebler Corporation (a maker of snack foods) 'died' when Kellogg's bought it out and incorporated it -- but the Keebler trademark remains along with its 'elves'. When Procter&Gamble found that Pringle's chips (P&G had a good process and innovative packaging) poorly fit its other product lines, P&G sold out the division to Kellogg's, which was more compatible selling snack foods. Kellogg's retains the trademarks and the processes.

But we are familiar with corporate birth, rise, decline, and death. Civilizations are somewhat analogous. A civilization is not so easy to define as is a corporation, but perhaps some local tribe or clan starts doing some things better than other tribes or clans -- and starts innovating because it cultivates creativity, imagination, and enterprise. It is better at organizing people to do what they want and get people what they need. The good society, like a good business, brings out the best in people; the bad one brings out the worst, especially in privileged elites who lord it over everyone else.

Toynbee saw no predictable revival of a civilization once it died any more than Adizes says (he doesn't) that an entity like Montgomery-Ward, Penn Central, or Enron can come back into existence. Our current civilization is not a restoration of the Greco-Roman civilization; if anything, ours is an offshoot of the Islamic civilization because much of our intellectual and technological heritage comes directly from it. I can make the case that the Renaissance is the beginning of modernity for the West because it started trends that never came to a real end.  Consider Impressionist art -- in many ways it is a revival of Renaissance tastes with a few twists...contrasting the scenery to the blue of clear skies, the gray of overcast skies, or the green of grass unlike the Renaissance focus on lighting the focus against a dark background. What seems like a diametric opposite is all in all a modification.

The Greeks and Romans did not do algebra and chemistry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not do rhyming poetry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not make steel or use paper; the Arabs did. We use algebra and chemistry; we have poetic rhymes; we use steel and paper, much unlike the Greeks and Romans.

I see things a bit differently, according to my observation of historical cycles. I see many cases, such as in Egypt, the Middle East and Greco-Roman-Byzantine history where a cycle of civilization ended but another cycle began on the same ground and so the civilization was reborn. But these reborn civilizations are not just the same as the old; they were new civilizations too. So indeed, Rome fell, and the medieval era succeeded it and was inspired by it and tried, unsuccessfully, to copy it. But it also learned from and absorbed the Arab civilization, and also the new Christian civilization that arose from within the earlier Roman and Middle Eastern/Greek civilizations. And indeed the Christian and Muslim civilizations were based on the previous civilization cycles and arose from the same root in earlier times within the Middle Eastern world.

My art history teacher said well that impressionism was like some kind of mold on the old style. It was the climax of the old renaissance style; realistic observation carried to the farthest extent that it could be taken. Its use of color then led into post-impressionism, which was the foundation of modern art, in which the Renaissance style was completely overturned and replaced. Thus, the cycle of a new civilization and its dating is thus perfectly indicated by art history in this case, as it has been in the past. 

What happened in the 1890s and 1900s was the start of a new civilization. Just as in Egypt, the Middle East and Greco-Roman-Byzantine, and also in China, in the last thousands of years, our age of civilization is a new version of the previous one, but reborn and indeed carrying forward some aspects of the old, but also bringing in new foundations. In the 20th century, all the old paradigms were questioned and destroyed. Observation and objectivity are no longer the basis of our picture of reality, but must be supplemented by the observer him/herself. We are no longer seen as separated from our environment as human objects seeking to observe a world objectively. The environmental crisis as well as science, art, and a mystical revival spurred by new visions and psychedelic aids, requires that the new civilization be built on an integral paradigm in which subjectivity is recovered and observers and observed become one process. Conservation became a primary goal of our times, starting in the 1890s and 1900s, and accelerating in the 1960s and 70s with the environmental ecology movement. Green is a new civilization, and it must be the future if we are to survive.

So in world affairs; starting simultaneously with post impressionism in the 1890s, imperialism reached its climax as western powers completed their conquest of the world, and began fighting over it. Europe split into two alliances and prepared for the civil war (world wars 1 and 2) that would bring about its downfall as imperial leader of the world. New non-European powers emerged. What has resulted is a developing global civilization in which multiple power centers predominate, not nations competing for world hegemony. Such hegemony is no longer possible. The Renaissance Era was the era of European exploration and conquest. That era is over as of the world wars and the end of colonization. In the United States the "end of the frontier" was announced in 1890; in World War I and II soldiers died by the millions, giving their lives for a new world in which the nations could live in freedom in a global association.

But now we live in a century that so far as not moved on from the past, and seeks to make the old era great again. We are in a holding pattern. Young people and many older people, predominant on internet sites like this, still think we live in a Renaissance/Enlightenment civilization, and sometimes they cast out people like me from their midst if they disagree. Millennials on Wikipedia censor the frontier of the paranormal. Meanwhile, politically, returns to 18th century economics and 19th century nationalism or ancient racism and tribalism have stalled and reversed the progress toward this new global integral civilization. I predict that all this regression and ignorance of the world we now live in will reverse itself over the next 30 years, and progress will resume.