3. Idea For A Universal History
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3.
Idea For A Universal History |
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| 3.1 A Short History of the World | ||||
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As we look at the eonic effect in the greater context of world history, we discover in short order the simple significance of its structure as the evolution of civilization in our definition. And yet we have reached a crisis in the idea of a science of history/evolution. We must adopt some form of extended science, along with an ‘idea for a universal history’, which we will connect to Kant’s Challenge, so-called. This will allow us to see that our pattern corresponds to what Kant called ‘Nature’s Secret Plan’, language we will avoid, but which appeared in a recent sociobiological text on history. We are near the limits of our conceptualizations. We generate spontaneous questions like ‘What caused the Axial Age?’, or ‘What causes freedom?’, questions fated to limp off to a Kant clinic. And our problem is certainly reminiscent of Hume’s strictures on causal thinking. Like Captain Nemo and the Professor all we can do is put on goggles and stare into the reactor core, the freedom generator. The collision of Marx and Hegel has kicked up so much dust that we can hardly raise the question of the philosophy of history anymore. But our data shows us an easy way to backtrack to an ultra-simple version of our own that can benchmark the others. We will develop a ‘method redundancy’ to look at the eonic effect in different ways, with the idea of a systems model, then passing briefly through the philosophy of history, as the formal introduction of the idea of freedom. Before proceeding we need to be clear about historical theories, and as we lay out our eonic sequence we will discover inside it what we call the discrete freedom sequence. That will force us to bail out into a Kantian consideration of the so-called Third Antinomy, to find the contradiction at the heart of evolutionary theories, at least those dealing with man. Our eonic data shows us that the ‘evolution of evolutionism’ is itself pattern dependent, hence we using the output of the system to ‘do theory’, a subtle fallacy that preempts easy solution. Our pattern is so complex that our study becomes very easy: we simply follow its contours empirically. It is this subpattern, the discrete freedom sequence, that will, or might be, a clue to our difficulties. This is a variant of a classic theme, but with a new twist: instead of the philosophy of history we look at its periodization, in the ‘eonic’ evolution of philosophy in its relative modulation, the evolution of the idea of freedom, freedom realized or not. But overall, this is a negative result, in some ways, showing us the limits of our representations, and we will see that it is probably impossible to produce a theory of evolution in closed form. But we can ‘see’ evolution in action, to the extent we can reconstruct its action, and our model will help us to track its effects over several millennia. This tracker, as an evolutionary map, is in some ways better than ‘still another theory’, and gives us all the benefits of historical coherence without the liabilities of metaphysical presumption. Our approach will at least allow us to seize high ground against the pretenders here and has a rock-solid foundation because we take into account what we don’t know. But we need to prime the pump as a sketch of what we are up to and then start over in the next chapter. We need the gist in advance of our model in order to develop it at all. This will produce a first mental image of world history, like the first top-level image of a fractal, prior to zooming in. Our world history is simple, to start. We see three massive periods of advance, what’s more, with obvious echoes and interconnections, clear evidence of three successive waves of fundamental advance, at equal intervals, and with significant mutual correlations: The rise of civilization The Axial Age The rise of the modern That’s it. After a long preamble, we’re done. A non-random pattern. We will call this the eonic sequence, and construct a frequency hypothesis to fix this obviously incomplete series in the domain of non-speculative empirical verifications. What about the in-betweens? That’s the interesting part. We are going to create two, or multiple, universal histories. The first proceeds along a mainline, the second is all the rest. We are always in the second, yet, looking backward, we can detect the action of the mainline. The first order of business is to see that this pattern is not about the cultures invoked in the turning points, but the greater globalization to which they contribute. We can critique the dangers of Darwinism, but we can’t change the difficulties that arise in a system using a minimum principle. We can at least plant the flag of universal history in its strength: it is a tale of universal sympathy, and its subject is one community of man. But how can we create that community? The eonic sequence gives us a lot of hints. Reachability: Two Universal Histories Historical narratives suffer the bane of selectivity. Ours is so selective it flies in reverse. Three small time slices are all we need. Having produced one universal history, we promptly create a vacuum and generate a second, as if one is trying to reach another. So our discussion, and the eonic effect, is really about the whole, with a strategy to reach that whole. Since this invokes some form of globalization, we note that it is not the same as the economic variety. Since the American continent was first globalized by the Indian his destruction by later European invaders could hardly be called globalization. De-globalization? These three stages thus benchmark our definition of eonic determination, which means that history shows ‘three bumps’, and some determination caused them, by some principle of sufficient reason, causality or not. These points, and all other points in between, are made up of free activity, please note. We call that free action. Not particles of mass following a law. The term ‘eonic determination’ will seem to have ideological implications, but let us be clear it can’t be used for that, except on a scratchpad basis. We haven’t even specified exactly what it means, or its precise timing. It is a placeholder for some unknown. It is an impressionistic substitute for an ‘historical law or force’ argument. Actually, taken that way, it is much more useful than the usual clumsy ‘causal’ nonsense attempting to mechanize explanation. This factor of evolutionary determination creates sequential dependency, which isn’t determinism, but a context for action. The previous moves in a chess game create sequential dependency, which doesn’t determine your next move, quite the contrary, you have relative free action against the givens in the past, which restrict your options. It doesn’t have to be that way, and you could say, “I won’t play”. But generally the momentum given is hard to resist. We can’t say in advance whether this factor is good or bad, although the danger is to become frozen in place, unable to grasp why a certain ‘eonic factor’ seems to elude one’s grasp. We are sequentially dependent on the Industrial Revolution. So what? That’s true of any innovation. But then perhaps that creates a mesmerizing set of initial conditions. And so on. Sequential dependency creates diffusion, because the eonic sequence sets up a high potential, which flows into its environment as innovation. It creates distributed evolution. Look at the way Roman literature echoes the Greek, the Iliad versus the Aeneid, then consider the eonic timing. That’s a classic variant case of sequential dependency. The problem is that a zone or period of sequential dependency is stuck without the elusive factor of self-consciousness, the surrogate for eonic determination. Consciousness tends to mechanize in the wake of our eonic sequence. We note that the ‘Axial Age’ is really an interval, and that these demarcation labels cannot be instant turning points but must be transitions of some kind. We will label them eonic transitions. We will see, looking at the modern period, that the transitions are about three centuries long. The term ‘Axial Age’ is really two things taken together, a transition, and a period just after that. The Old Testament embeds a confused account of such a transition. On the basis of this we will see that three centuries again looks to be the rough interval. Why do these periods stand out? Because of the obvious correlation of major cultural innovations, which are relative transforms, or what we can call eonic emergents. TP1 The birth of the state, appearance of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations TP2 Onset of two world religions, multiple sources of philosophy, birth of science, Greek democracy… TP3 Onset of Reformation, secularism, English, French, American Revolutions, Enlightenment, another scientific revolution, another birth of democracy, Industrial Revolution,… That’s a very short list. Each eonic emergent can be a zoom target, to zoom in on, and inside each are more eonic emergents. Pick any category, and follow it. Democracy. Appears twice in the pattern. Take science. It warbles on and (almost) off in this sequence. Why? Trace the history. What we include seems at first relatively arbitrary. This system is an arduous ‘black box’, but it gives us a windfall clue, the double appearances of several items. Democracy starts twice. We will call this the ‘discrete freedom sequence’, and it might prove a clue to unlocking the riddle of history’s ‘black box’. It reproduces a classic Kantian paradox. In our terms, democracy shows eonic determination, its realization free action. Note the remarkable appearance of double emergents. That’s very strong evidence for the type of model we will create, a discrete series inside a continuous flow, or a discrete-continuous model. It’s like a feedback system. Something suddenly switches on, and interrupts continuous flow, or restarts processes that have died out, or slumped. The idea of feedback has problems, it’s not the same situation, but the general idea is the same, a discrete interval or spike interrupts a continuous stream. Our sequence is entirely odd. We see a fragment sequence in a kind of limbo. What’s our status as observers? TP4? Have we reached the end of this sequence? Does it have meaning to speak of the future of the series if eonic determination has switched to free action? Won’t observation dissolve this sequence leaving us to hope that ‘free action’ has reached some kind of ‘Freedom’, i.e. to replace eonic determination? We can’t speak about the future, since our free action could intervene. So our model exits standard theory, able to speak only of the past. However, there is no inherent contradiction in anticipating a TP4, any more than an economist speculates about a future economic cycle. Modernism might collapse, and enter a new medieval period, waiting on a future TP4. We need to exit this system, able to control such a future. TP -1, -2,…? Our series starts in the middle of world history. Doesn’t it have an earlier beginning? Perhaps, but we must find earlier turning points, therefore rich data of the Axial type, at the centuries level, not just data for general change over long periods. We need more data, but it is strange that our sequence seems to start with the invention of writing. We are suddenly suspicious we are missing crucial short interval data from earlier periods, completely wrecking easy hopes for a theory. We could all too easily jump to the wrong conclusion. Frequencies can modulate in strange ways, and a monotone sequence would seem too good to be true. But we can start with that as a default hypothesis. Note: Modernist ideology The rise of the modern is a highly controversial historical entity, and subjects our thesis to charges of ideology, step one. We can cheerfully accept such charges, and the status of this sequence is advisory. There is one simple property of such a sequence that can rescue us from ideology. This is a sequence of turning points, finite intervals. Therefore the third turning point is such a finite interval, and comes to an end, what we call a divide. The outcomes of the mainline are therefore subject to judgments of potential realized. Some such crisis of judgment automatically arises and we will see this in the postmodern critiques of modernity. Our model will encompass these opposites, and makes poor propaganda. Given this divide, we are therefore no longer inside the sequence, since past the divide, as we will see. This makes a huge difference. Theories and ideologies become action scripts, thus output of the system. This failsafe will protect us from producing a teleological monster. We see directionality only. A teleological system and its theory must focus on a unique outcome. A directional system, such as this, can show multivalent outcomes, whose contribution to the future depends on performance. It is like a play. The system produces scene-changes, but the performance is up to you, and requires high-quality action, self-consciousness. We see the Darwin trap already: evolution is winner take all, what happens by definition defines the evolutionary future. Not so, we suspect already. Failed potential may need a recursion, and we will soon find examples. Darwinism tends to negate ethical action, degrading performance by saying that the lowest common denominator is enough. Not true. To do the job at all means to do it right. This tactic can allow us to get our work done and bypass much distracting propaganda going back and forth. Whatever our views, even if we were reactionary anti-modernists, we can all agree that the rise of the modern is a massive turning point in history. That’s all we need, as its interpretations include dialectical opposites. Our distinction of eonic determination and free action will allow us to critique the outcome of this turning point, even to claim the outcome was false, even if the turning point itself shows evolutionary status. That’s the neat payoff in our type of model. In fact that kind of bifurcation of the outcome was just what happened, the rise of the modern produced its own antithetical movements. Thus we have any number of failsafes against ideology here. Our purpose is slightly different, to simply see that this period created an interval of (eonic) evolutionary progression. Dog eat dog Darwinian economic modernism is about to get fired from the team, so if we find any activity less than sainthood in modernist realization that is free game for critics of modernity. Look at the previous turning points. These show eonic determination, but their realization as free action can seem primitive. Future men might think the same of modernity. Behind the distracting mayhem of the capitalist episodes, too often charged as the principal offender here, our real subject is the rich cultural contributions of the modernism’s seminal figures. We will soon distinguish economic action from mainline eonic action, in any case. A good reality check here is the fate of the Indian in the American system. Doesn’t some teleological future justify the harsh fate suffered in this realization of our sequence? In fact, it doesn’t follow at all, and we can already caution the fallacies in such thinking. But clearly there is a problem with the third turning point. Is its inclusion in this list a statement of theory or an action script? If I get out of bed today and ‘do something modern’ I am still confecting still further evidence for the thesis, ‘theory’, under discussion. And someone else could try to falsify our theory by doing something ‘anti-modern’. But our model will produce a surprise. It will distinguish the third turning point from our present, by rendering it as a finite interval, or transition. So the data for that is beyond alteration, given, and can be assessed independently from any statement about what we should do now. This approach will completely quarantine the pattern from ‘current free action’. The cutoff we will see is usefully pegged at around 1800, plus or minus. Thus note that the third turning point ought to be a finite interval, unless we are still inside or else it has already switched off, and we are outside the eonic pattern. That’s what the data suggests, we are outside the third interval. Strange. But that’s the first discipline for teleological hallucination. What we do ‘now’ cannot rigorously be claimed to fulfill the ‘telos’, if any, of the eonic sequence. It might contribute something, no doubt. It’s no accident that a ferocious teleological battle broke out at the end of this sequence in the nineteenth century as rival factions claimed the ‘fake local future’ as the system’s far future. Delusion, we should suppose, on both sides. We can see how ideologies of the ‘endstate’, or of some ‘fourth turning point’, are likely to arise in such a system. Actually, this is a useful situation, and we have a way to discuss ‘universal history’ with ideological safeguards, up to a point. |
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