3. Idea For A Universal History
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A Certain Strangeness:
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3.
Idea For A Universal History |
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| A Certain Strangeness: Beyond Space and Time | ||||
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Our developing model has, at first, a strangeness to it in the way it treats discontinuity, jumps between periods and regions, and operates on fuzzy intervals. In fact, it is a consequence of the data we are confronted with, no way around it, and is not indulgence in the fantastic. Examine the data of the Axial Age, for example. Fantastic or not, the data speaks for itself. There is no ‘flat history’ solution to the strange properties we discover there. One reason we are about to discover for this initial sense of oddity is that we may be detecting a system operating behind the scenes, and that is beyond the matrix of space and time. Although we can’t establish this formally, we should launch a preemptive strike against the suddenly obvious perceptions that arise here, and that will provoke some metaphysical spree on the subject of history and eternity. The latter concept has no scientific foundation, and is speculative. However controversial that might be, and no such assumption is required to proceed (the assertion generates its own serious complications, and possible contradictions), we should persist in our new approach on the grounds that it simply makes sense of the otherwise chaotic data. However, in the final analysis, our method and its justification are based on simple periodization and the construction of time lines. No more. If that is strange, then so be it. We will explicitly explore intermittent and hopscotch patterns, on the grounds that there are few post-Darwinian non-random patterns of evolution, but the eonic effect, remarkably, shows strong evidence of one of them. We allow ourselves no statement about ghost forces or ‘forces of history’, spurious entities that arise spontaneously in non-random pattern matching. We simply construct a matrix of dates, and observe the sudden coherence of the result so taken. No objection can be raised against such an approach. It violates no canons of ‘right science’ and indulges only in the simplest elements and constructs. Like a tangent to curve the slight artificiality of the model can simply be taken into account as approximation. Thus the way we have set up our model is deliberate and we should proceed without apology since we can see that a dynamics of world history always eludes us if we try to impose a wrong approach. In the next sections we will extend this further and the great clue will land in our lap, the discrete freedom sequence. All of a sudden a recognizable situation emerges for anyone familiar with the philosophy of history. It’s like walking down the street and finding a hundred dollar bill. We should have expected this all along from the moment we isolated an ‘evolution of freedom’ from our data. This evolutionary concept we must make our own for a scientific age, despite its innuendoes and controversies, and all it means is that we have to find empirical evidence for some ‘evolution’ at a bare minimum level of ‘self-consciousness’ of human freedom, volition, or autonomy, in any sense, short of the metaphysical, and avoiding free will questions. We found that very easily in our data. The eonic sequence is itself a play on the degrees of freedom involved in discussing the evolution of civilization, and we reduced that to the simple question, and dilemma, Does Man make himself? We see the top-level answer very easily if we adopt our model. It is almost better left vague, since our more specific business is simply to map out the stages of emergent culture in world history. Sometimes this kind of construct is challenged by postmodernists as a ‘metanarrative of freedom’. We will look at that criticism, but the fact of the matter is that the very denial of the existence of such things seems to put ideas in our head. Once you say there is no large-scale process in world history the existence of one becomes obvious. So we end up ‘deconstructing flat history’, there to find a metanarrative indeed. As a further exploration of these issues we are going to veer briefly in the direction of the philosophy of history as a redundant approach to our data, for those who wish to pursue that angle. With this in mind this chapter will conclude with a section on Kant’s Challenge where the issues of freedom in history are given their most classic, if somewhat abstruse form. In reality, the problems of historical methodology were long ago challenged, if not resolved, by the hints given in a figure such as Kant. As we discover the discrete freedom sequence embedded in the greater eonic sequence we are confronted with a clue so obvious we can’t refuse it, but this will involve passing through the dangerous shoals of so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, a wretchedly named terminological label whose real meaning for us would be a ‘two domain model that can handle freedom and causality’ in some suitable fashion. If Kant is too much, then our computer mouse or on-off switch example is sufficient. We are going to spend zero time on ‘idealism’ or the ‘transcendental’ and should recast the terminology as a single word. We should point out that current science is itself a disguised cousin of all of this. If we look at the boundary of the speed of light, and the relationships of dynamics and measurement in Quantum Mechanics, we discover that physicists have long since entered this terrain, despite desperate denials, and recast the Kantian two domain approach for their own subject. To say that something transcends space and time sounds mystical until you realize that Einstein’s theory of relativity makes such a claim implicitly. We are not going to pursue physics speculations but we have seen enough to realize that our data is suggesting some quite extraordinary, and so far from indulging in wild speculation we have stepped backwards into something remarkably. |
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