Econosequence, Technosequence,...and Eonic Sequence

We must, as already noted with our distinctions of economic and eonic history, separate technological and economic change from the action of the eonic effect. The reason, we will see, is that Big History in our sense doesn’t control these other sequences. It influences them where they overlap, but, by and large, they are human sources. A man can create something, innovate with a new technology, but that can happen at any time. Technological discovery can happen anywhere, anytime. And economic behavior stretches over vast areas. But the eonic sequence is carefully concentrated in its effects. In fact it seems to act by a minimum principle. Suppose you had a limited amount of energy to interact with civilizations, and you wish to act on the whole set of them. How would you do that? The eonic effect shows, amazingly, one way to do that. Pick a set of hotspots, act briefly, hope for good diffusion, and make sure the next time you interact that it is not in the same place, but not to far away to have to start over.

The eonic sequence is different from the random activity of economies, it stands in relation to a larger pattern. Economies are large fields of economic free agents. Economic activity spreads over a large area, occurs continuously, has its own history. Its dynamic is different. All these things can overlap, interact, but essentially they are different processes. Note that ‘something like capitalism’ is almost present from the beginning of world history, since Paleolithic man starting trading in obsidian. But the intersection, overlap, of ‘econosequence’ and ‘eonic sequence’ can sometimes produce a dramatic effect. The Industrial Revolution is a good example. The eonic sequence generates a new form of capitalism. But, from then on the result proceeds as econosequence. This approach resolves, by the way, the severe confusions that caused Marxists to tie their heads in knots with incorrect theories. There is something broader than the evolution of economic systems.

In general, in our distinction of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’, technical innovation is a function of the discoverer’s abilities, hence falls into our category, ‘free action’. It doesn’t really need that ‘extra’ from the eonic effect. In a similar way, economies spread out over large areas, indeed globally. These, therefore, also fall into the category ‘free action’. It may of course happen that econosequence, technosequence, and eonic sequence overlap briefly with spectacular results. A good example is the Industrial Revolution, and one reason we tend to take it as the generator of modernity, but that won’t work.

The truly foundational advances, especially the most elusive cultural ones, tend to be clustered, and, no doubt because they are energy intensive, intermittent. These, and consider for example the case of ancient Greece, tend to be non-randomly distributed, hence are something more than ‘free action’. We assign them to our (undefined, save by periodization and geographical focus) ‘eonic determination’. We cannot avoid this distinction if we see that the innate abilities of members of particular cultural streams are probably evenly distributed in every generation, while periods of great advance are non-random, indeed in a sequential pattern. We see at once why people are puzzled by the Gutenberg Revolution, and the Chinese inventions of gunpowder, printing, the compass. The field of technical innovation can occur at random, hence to the most technically savvy. The flow of these innovations into the eonic sequence supercharges that sequence, but doesn’t cause it. We will note later the strong resemblance of the Greek transition, so-called, to the rise of the modern. Note that the first had none of this technology, while the second surged even further with them.

There is more to history than economics then. Historical materialism, left or right, was a great idea, but it is misleading us. The reason is that while economic phenomena can obviously influence society, its functioning is dependent on the social evolution of institutions to make it work at all. The modern world is often said to be a ‘capitalist age’, but that is not really the case, in the sense of a fixed stage of history, in the Marxist sequence. The rise of the modern, the transition, after all, was mercantilist. What we call capitalism suddenly crystallized near our ‘divide’. The general change of culture was very open ended.

The Third Wave One futurological treatment of the current transition to the so-called ‘information economy’ is that of Alvin Toffler, in his The Third Wave, which charts the curve of growth in the expansion of technology as a series of waves whose sequence suggests the greater exponentiality of development and sees a new current stage in the acceleration of technological development of information processing, placing the time-zero of this exponential rendering of the human time-frame near the emergence from the Ice Ages, a First Wave Neolithic Revolution. A Second Wave machinery of steam and heat yields to a computronics of information as the scale of economic interaction generates a noosphere by Internet. “A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.” [i]

This would certainly seem true, if we can define the term ‘civilization’, and if we can explain away the explosion of cultural change since 1500, to be renounced as Second Wave. A Third Wave would need to be nimble on its feet to surpass the second without its slingshot effect, or its interior morphing of so many aspects of culture. But this is what Toffler proposes, and, agree or not, it is a perfectly reasonable proposal, until one considers that it would require a ‘total revolution’ by control of an entire global culture. Toffler is saying that perhaps this will happen spontaneously. But the only spontaneous forces are the revolution s that created the modern Second Wave, and they began with the Reformation. Why was this so?

If we look at the net gains of innovation, and cultural acceleration since 1500, a broader picture emerges than either the purely technological or the economic, and the period after ca. 1750 becomes the rough springboard launching a whole series of phases of technology and culture, Second and Third Wave, the two therefore different phases of the same transformation.[ii] Toffler’s technological projections have proven apt within the context of the computer explosion and of the sudden trans-nationalization of capitalism, in another supposed ‘Great Divide’ that many have ascribed to the period ca 1960, without quite specifying its meaning.

Our future shocks are real, and we always step into the future blind, in a sort of dead reckoning, like ancient mariners departing without instruments of navigation, chasing a rumor of the East Indies. But Toffler’s scheme suggests that the entirety of civilized history, more the period from -8000 to the Industrial Revolution, was ‘all of a piece’ because of the uniformity of its agricultural mode of existence. Perhaps in some sense this was true. Then, ten thousand years is succeeded by a second period of two centuries of industrialism, to be followed by a Third Wave whose length is then completely ambiguous in relation to these earlier anomalous intervals. Time for the Fourth Wave.

Toffler seems to imply we should be trading our ‘outdated’ democratic Second Wave political system for some new structure adapted to the Third Wave. It is important to wonder, then, what is the Third Wave, and how will it generate political forms with the creativity of the period 1500 to 1800? In fact, there is no Third Wave on these terms, for the institutions that generated the Third Wave are direct offspring not of technology but of the cultural evolution that created the modern age, in tandem with the basic Industrial Revolution, whose period of emergence after 1750 is often taken without reference to its truer rising ‘takeoff’ since 1500, whatever is to be said for its darkling gestation in the Middle Ages. In any case, although there almost certainly is a real discontinuity called the Industrial Revolution, it is much simpler to see the period 1500 to 1800, not as a phase of industrialization, now old-fashioned, but a deeper cultural evolution, in which for the first time in history economic and technological evolution achieved a dramatic breakthrough. It is a confusion created by attempted to periodize the historical sequence on the basis of technology and economy alone.

The rise of the modern is something different however from economic and technological development. Technologies put instruments in place. Economies put markets in place. Our eonic transitions alone put people in place, and we see that this is an effect far deeper than anything known to social science. As we move backwards toward our second big turning point, we will see that our eonic sequence puts a whole series of Israelite prophets in place, seemingly as a function of time. How can social science manage? Newton toiled away on his alchemical manuscripts, and Kant found his first Critique turning into three. We need a fourth wave technology that can do art and makes ethical choices, do the right thing, to model the eonic data. The technological equivalent of the cyborg version of man is now coming to the fore. Can technosequence overtake eonic evolution? We see at least that they are not the same thing.

The emergence of democracy cannot be easily seen to emerge from technological innovation, any more than the operas of Mozart, the rise of the novel or the three-cornered hat, to say nothing of the Enlightenment itself. Democracy shows its first feeble emergence in the period just after -600 in Archaic Greece , in a fashion more clearly demonstrating its blend of economic and predominant cultural aspects, but quite before the Second Wave. It’s timing is eonic, that is, it shows correlation with the broad discrete sequence of civilizational cycles itself. In general the study of Archaic Greece is illuminating, for we see the familiar ‘onset of modernization’ with a still primordial ‘economic’ revolution , and hardly any technological acceleration, and not very much therefore of the ‘modern’ at all. It happens in relation to eonic sequence, not the economic or social conditions of its time period, although these are also important, to be sure. But its absolutely seminal character can never be taken away, and the period created the real seeds of the much later Scientific Revolution, for reasons having little demonstrable relation to technology or its evolution. No theory except an eonic or other cyclical one can account for these facts.

[i] Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, 1980, p. 1.

[ii] For a snapshot of the ambiguous transition from ‘mechanical’ to ‘information’ devices, cf. Geoffrey Austrian, Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (New York: Columbia, 1982), “An engineer might indeed …calculate the horsepower developed by this clerical force”, p. 58.