Bennett on modernity
One of the curious bits about Bennett’s The Dramatic Universe, and one reason he got himself sidelined in the ‘work’, is the way he ended Volume IV with a realization of the significance of the rise of the modern. It was an innocent, and basically intelligent, gesture that sprang from looking at the whole of world history.
It is curious that Bennett stumbled on a piece of the eonic effect, but couldn’t see it because of his preoccupation with the schematic of ‘epochs’ which doesn’t get it straight, but he did suddenly see that the modern period had objective historical significance in its own right. This of course isn’t the party line in either the ‘work’ or the general field of New Agers. They are constantly trying to restore the legacies of antiquity and/or denouncing modernism as a form of decline.
As study of the eonic effect can put the issues in their right perspective, and we can see that the pattern indicated is objective, and that the failure of all these spiritual reactionaries to grasp this point is a sudden source of suspicion. There they are, as if speaking for God, and yet their game is a hack, a miscomputation on a very basic level of world history.
