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262 The Origin of CiviLisation

from the capitulation of Damascus (AO 635) to the wic tory east of Samarkand (AO 750) shows another ciwilisation,¹⁴⁴ crystallising within an incredibly brief space of time. In many respects, this Arab effluorescence produced a ciwilisation which was morę urbanised and scientific than that of the north Eu ropę ans i⁴⁵ The suggestion by Lewis Humford and R.M.Hartwell, endorsed by the research of Needham and his co-workersj⁴⁶ that the modern age had an ultra-long gestation period - in excess, perhaps, of seven centuries - gives credence to the wiew that civilisation can be a gradual, inching process of slow adwance, totally at wariance with the ideas being proposed here, namely that new ciwilisations are dramatic, sudden, explosive discontinuities. Nonę the less, major differences in liwing conditions pertained throughout the sixteenth, sewenteenth, and eighteenth centuries, as compared to today. Such a rangę of liwing conditions seems too substantial to encompass merely one ciwilisation framework, ewen if we accept the rationale of seweral phases of ewolutionary progressions.

The ewidence for continuity is thoroughly conwincing; an inching process of constant change building the accretional patterns of history. Yet major and significant disruptions, each one inwolwing mass population participation (SS:social) can be cited for almost ewery century, giving added credence to the not i on of a slowly coalescing modern age, beginning, perhaps, with the mass migrations from Scandinawian and Arabian centres from the fifth, to the nineth centuries AO. Subsequently, further important upheawals ensued, generating periods of intense cross fertilisation between wideł y spaced cultures; east and west, north and south across Eurasia. The Crusades, the growth of towns and the building of medieval cathederals, the rawages of the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, woyages to the New World, the Italian Renaissance, the rise of industrial capitalism, the scientific rewolution, the enlightenment and the age of reason, one following the next down the centuries. Then came the social ruptures created by the industrial rewolution and the great political rewolutions, in America and France - cataclysmic ewents that helped global population mowements to swell to truły staggering proportions. This unfolding panorama of continuity amid change makes the sequence of past ewents both enigma tic and obscure.

Searching for one forty year spasm of rapid change in this unending saga of social, political, scientific, technological and economic disruption seems an almost ridiculous quest. The owerwhelming impression suggests only an amazing continuity of perennial change. It is precisely to accommodate this continuum that we need to resort to the language of the theory of culture dynamics. The prolonged stage of social turbulence confirms the existence of a sigmoidal growth curwe. An upwards and onwards expansion of a log phase of exponential growth, as used by J.Needham in a chart that compares Chinese and European dewelopment. Furthermore, this somewhat lengthy period of perpetual change lends itsśłf to the concept of graded ciwilisations, without diminishing the not ion that a true ciwilisation genesis arises from a critical culture mass

that has actually reached this autocatalytic self-sustaining juncture. Such an analysis would place the Italian Renaissance along thia ciwilisation trajectory, together with the two periods in recent world history, earlier identified, where ewidence indicates a forty year ciwilisation genesis did indeed occur; 1878-1919 and 1940-1980(7). Mhat, then, was the supposed status of the earlier modern era and the interwening period 1920-1944? Can we now build a cohesiwe picture for the entire aeguence?

The Dynamie Evolution of the Modern Era

On the withdrawal of the Roman authority, the local population in the West retained only patchy westiges, a shadowy aura of the collapaed Classical Age. Ouring the enauing masa demographic mouements of the European Oark Age a cultural grafting of these vigorous, barbarie elements onto the remnants of the older structure enabled Europę to fashion an inereasing unique synthesis, the modern ciwilisation. Thus, superficially, Europę'a Dark Age might hawe serwed a similar consolidating function as the earlier Greek Oark Age had done. In each case, a fusion of continuity with the old and innowation from the new allowed a totally new entity to emerge. The recent creation of the true modern age, howewer, required a far longer firing period, and has now achiewed a stepped adwance along the ciwilisation trajectory. Just as in the earlier example the Greeks forged the Classical ciwilisation by sloughing off the dominant Oriental influences, so the Western Europeans, in due course, were able to stamp their own personality on their emergent ciwilisation, generating morę that was innowatiwe ewen as they relied progressiwely less on their Classical inheritance.

The earlier period (AD 800-1378) was therefore predominantly a westigial ciwilisation from the past, sharing many features with those from antiquity. Obsolete forces included the primacy of the church, and of rural rather than urban society, landed elites and a minutę middle class sąueezed be twe en the aristocracy and the mass of feudal peasantry, plus a generał disregard for the scientific method which had been incipiently ewolwing at the tirne of the Greeks. In nuclear terminology, this entire period of 800-1378, was a proper autocatalytic subcritical stage, building up by chains of positiwe feedback interactions to reach a sel f-sustaining explosiwe climax with the onset of the Italian Renaissance. Yet this was not a true ciwilisation genesis con-forming with the dynamie test we are applying. It centred mainly on the arts and Sciences, the knowledge subsystem, while there was wery little innowation in the other four subsystems; prowisioning, social, economic and production. Applying terminology from the earlier Sumerian ciwilisation, the Renaissance becomes the 'proto-modern' phase; a limited, sectional burst of cultural excellence, similar to other later lopsided explosions of cultural advance. These included the scientific rewolution, the enlightenment, and, of course, the Industrial Rewolution. Thus the Renaissance marked an initial modest step