Zoom Targets and Eonic Tracers

We see the eonic effect at a high level, and the evidence falls into place in a beautiful way. Evidence for our thesis is like collecting seashells on a beach, it is everywhere we look. But we must exercise care in looking at things from a high level. It is essential to zoom in, and also to see the difficulty of assessing not just innovations, but relative transformations

Our data shows us the most difficult thing we could imagine, eonic emergents as relative transformations in clustered patterns in a strange sequence over millennia. But in practice, it is not so difficult to assess the data, to ‘see the eonic effect’. Our basic theory is a cyclical model based on these ‘emergent’ clusters. Another way to put it is our question, does world history shows signs of general sequence? We can’t go wrong with that question. The answer becomes obvious. And yet it is baffling. As though a sun lamp switched on and off in a garden growth accelerates inside the eonic boundaries.

Eonic emergents, as we take them, are highly fuzzy entities, radar blips, and we must zoom in to see what is behind them.

TP1: ‘the first civilization’, the Urban Revolution, writing, hydraulic economics, theocratic religion and politics, ‘Bronze Age’ economies and metallurgy, organized foreign trade, the first ‘nation’, the first ‘state’, intimations of democracy in early Sumer in the first nexus of ‘city-states’, step pyramids, the ‘Sumerian tradition (cuneiform all the way to the Assyrians)’…

TP2: the emergence of great religion s, the prophetic period and early Judaism, Buddhism , Jainism, Taoism, the first democracy, broad republicanism, the creation of Judaic and Greek Mediterranean networks (as opposed to centralized states), the birth of Science, of philosophy, idealism and materialism , geometry, Tragic Drama, multiple alphabetic literatures, the Iliad, the ‘Greek Miracle’ and Greek colonization, the transformation of Greek pottery near -700, the poets Hesiod and Archilochus, the birth of the Western and Oriental traditions, the Israelite loss of statehood and the Exile the Roman Republic, the Persian monarchy, a new ‘Zoroastrianism’, the birth of ‘history’, the Spring and Autumn period in China , Solonic Athens, the birth of the Greek polis as a field of constitutionalist experiments, the Upanishadic Age, Samkhya, the Great Yogas, the birth of the Idea of Freedom, trend toward equalization...

TP3: the Reformation and Thirty Years war, the Scientific Revolution, the English Revolution, the American Revolution and the rebirth of democracy, relative economic takeoff followed by the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution , the reappearance and disappearance of Tragic Drama in England and France, crystallizing nationalism, internationalism, the rise of the novel, German Idealism, deism, new forms of theism, atheism, materialism, secularization, romanticism, socialism, evolutionary thinking, feminism, abolitionism, capitalist economy and economics, the bourgeois society and the emergence of middle classes, Marxism and communism, revolution. Again a trend toward equalization. There is an unmistakable ‘divide’ period ca. 1800,… Especially notable is the clear ‘backbone liberalism’ with its constant companion at the further left, Münzer through Babeuf. The correlation of the Hellenic and modern liberty-equality dyad is striking indeed.

Eonic tracers There are literary hundreds of categories to trace. Take any social category and try to follow its sequence in terms of eonic correlation. We have already put tracers on ‘democracy’, and ‘science’. We can take a few examples only, including a few of the trickier ones.

Example: Liberalism Put a tracer on ‘liberalism’ (including multiple definitions), a part of discrete freedom sequence. This can include its socialist cousins. An almost perfect example of an eonic emergent, indeed relative transform. If we didn’t know already, we would guess, look at the seventeenth century. Sure enough, consider the seminal figures Spinoza, and Locke. But our full transition suggests it is growing out of the Reformation. That’s easy. Many have noted the basic birth in the time of Luther. Not only that a sort of ‘classical summary’ appears just at this point, with the republicanism of Machiavelli, a separate stream that flows into the Lockean world, clearly present at the American Revolution. Note how liberalism crescendos at our divide, and spawns democratic liberalism. Clearly this is part of our discrete freedom sequence. As always with a relative transform we suspect something earlier. We don’t have far to look. In The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, by Eric Havelock, speculates in just this vein, complaining that our core transition shows a ‘liberalism’ that is dying out! Discrete freedom sequence indeed! The use of the term ‘liberal’ for the Classical Greeks is an anachronism, and will not work, but we know at once why this issue is bothering this author.[i]

Such examples, and there are dozens more, are a reminder that while we can validly apply dynamical thinking to our data, that must not be clumsily rendered, and we must also not become blind to the great subtlety of our eonic sequence, and its relations to mideonic continuations and/or disappearances. The high-level method is no substitute for straight linear historical study. We should note that in many cases we do not have superior knowledge or consciousness to properly assess our own data. And, as with liberalism, we are selecting a strain from greater whole, when our task would ask a higher objectivity to observe the full spectrum.

Our eonic emergents stand out against the backdrop of history as correlations of the basic pattern by their degree of heightened self-consciousness. The latter is odorless and tasteless, and often invisible to later view.

Just to convince yourself of the super-sophistication of this pattern, put a tracer on tragedy, in the Greek transition. Homer is perhaps the source (and perhaps some Mesopotamian idea before that. Our system is really about its business with a general literature, that of the Greek Archaic onward being especially rich.

Tracer: England, The Seventeenth Century Looking at our pattern we suspected a priori we would find the source of many eonic emergents here. In fact, a close look shows that emergent modernism is virtually complete in essence by the end of this century. Thus, heading to the library we find one historian unwittingly struck by this fact, “It is astonishing to reflect on the achievements of Britain’s seventeenth century.” The author proceeds to list a good thirty basic innovations from this period.[ii]

Natural Rights: An eonic tracer Evidence for our thesis is abundant, but care is required. Let’s take a very hard and tricky example where the method discovers something automatically, but which we might easily misinterpret. Put an eonic tracer on the lore of ‘natural rights’. We see a variant of the double emergent syndrome, as this nexus emerges in the late Greek, then Roman and medieval versions. Suddenly the modern transition picks up this theme, adapts it to a new circumstance, and does its work thereby, its presence in the classic revolutions, e.g. American, being well known. Our transition seems to do a sort of tossed salad with natural rights theory, then discards the result, job done: at the divide the thematic changes again, and we see Hegel and Marx, and utilitarian dialectic changing or dispersing the whole discourse. We should tread warily here, mindful we no longer speak the language of the transition, yet sorely tempted to reconsider issues of ‘natural law’ (as indeed happened in the legal critiques of the post-Holocaust era). However, our model does not fully provide a basis for a discourse on natural law, and additional assumptions would be required. But we did sketch a version of ‘social contract formation’ as the net action of the eonic emergence of modern political theory, from Hobbes to Rousseau, et al., taken as the ‘eonic compression’ of this clustered emergentism. We should at least wonder at the way nature does its homegrown ‘natural’ version of ‘natural rights’ and wonder at the loss via rationalization of this mysterious lore. The moral here is that our powerful method discovers something very significant, but we cannot use it to determine the content, which requires independent study on its own terms. Still, we are left wondering if we have lost the vitamins in ‘natural rights’ theory.[iii]

Tracer: Narmer’s Palette, Emergence of the State Leonard Woolley, attempting to find a Sumerian source behind Egyptian civilization, says of the Egyptian period of this transition that it is “not so complete as to amount to a breach of continuity but enough to mark an epoch; the changes are coming in towards the end of the Predynastic period and by the time of ‘Menes’ we have what is virtually a new culture.”[iv]

Dynasty 0 This period of transition produces the perfect symbolism of the emergent state in the Palette of Narmer. “The Naqada III phase c. 3200-3000 is the last phase of the Predynastic period…It was during this period that Egypt was first unified into a large territorial state…”[v]

Type ‘Narmer’s Palette’ into an Internet search engine. The evidence from this early is also very tricky. We must find relative transforms of state emergentism, to qualify. That’s very odd, what does it mean? Actually all it means is that the ‘state’ might have existed primordially in very early cultures, or emerged somewhere else in embryo, and a look at the evidence of tribal chieftains of all varieties would caution our thesis, etc… But the basic point is that we suspect the phase interval of the first transition shows strong correlation with the first great emergent phase of the State and its dynamics, soon to haunt history ad infinitum. The situation in parallel Sumer is quite different and resembles the Greek city state phenomenon, with a spectrum of different constructs. Our eonic mainline likes gaggles of city-states.

Feminism Some of our emergents are late bloomers, e.g. feminism. But close tracking, once again, shows early post-divide start up for feminist movements (cf. the alliance of feminism and abolitionism), a sudden eruption just near our divide (viz. Mary Wollenstonecraft), and then again a seventeenth century gestation.[vi]

Statism and religion Many of our double emergents are really triple emergents, but change their category, so to speak. Thus we see strong emergentism in the discourses of the state in each successive transition, the category of ‘religion emerging from statism’ transparently visible in the Israelite transition.

The double emergence of science is probably triple, but in the first so inchoate, with lost data, in the first transition that it is not differentiated from religion or philosophy.

Prophets: relative transforms The appearance of the Israelite prophets asks us to compare the stream entry and transition remorphing of a category. What is a prophet, and what was their history before the Axial interval? “…The geographical parameters are basically the eastern end of the Meditarranean crescent and the nearby Middle Eastern regions (e.g. Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt), and the chronological parameters are about 1600 to AD 300…”[vii]

[i] A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

[ii] Mark Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (New York: Penguin, 1996).

[iii] Paul Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1971), Jeremy Waldron (ed.), Nonsense Upon Stilts (New York: Methuen, 1987).

[iv] Leonard Woolley, The Sumerians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). Walter Emery notes: “At a period approximately 3400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of Neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to one of well-organized monarchy…At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture.” W. Emery, Archaic Egypt (NY: Penguin, 1962), p.192.

[v] Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press).

[vi] Cf. J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Chapter 4, “Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality”.

[vii] Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Seer (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999).