The Eonic Effect

Looking backward, world history reveals a long rhythm, punctuated by three great turning points, the birth of civilization in early Sumer and Egypt at the end of the fourth Millennium, the broad parallel advance at the onset of classical antiquity, to which increasing perspective should now add the explosion of change between 1500 and 1800. This mysterious drumbeat hides an unsuspected dynamism and answers directly to the enigma of the evolution of human civil existence in a series of discrete periods. This periodization will be called the aeonic, or eonic, effect, as evidence of the eonic evolution of civilization .

The term ‘eonic’ can be taken to mean ‘discrete’, or ‘stepping’, as opposed to ‘continuous’, in long-term units of time. As a contraction of a term ‘aeonic’, its usage is taken from the Greek word ‘aionios’.[i]

The first two of these three eras, if we exclude for a moment the modern due to its proximity in our biased perception and interaction, are seen to be the crucial generative eras of the development of civilization. The first era shows the rise of the state, the second the remarkable sources of the great religion s, the beginning of science, philosophy, the first democracy, and, generally, the foundations of the great traditions, East and West. As we puzzle over the difficulties in all ideas of evolution, we discover that we can find the answers very close to home, in the record of world history.

A closer look, in the arduous inquiries at deeper zoom levels, reveals the need to revise the assumptions of historical continuity with a balanced conception of discontinuity. The latter is simply unmistakable in the world of antiquity, ca. –600, in the extraordinary synchronous emergence of the classical traditions. Suddenly, in China , India , the Middle East and Greece, the forms of culture undergo a cultural acceleration in a synchronous parallelism that is quite mysterious. Everything seems done in a flash. The world of Classical Greece flowers, and, like an apparition, the moment is gone. Israel sees its age of the Prophet s, the Exile, and the emergence of a new religious matrix. In India and China, we find the same, in a period that produces the seminal foundations for a whole era. For centuries to come men look back at this era. The monuments of the earlier age of Egypt and Mesopotamia fall into oblivion and disappear in sand.

This synchronism began to be observed in the nineteenth century, but has failed to become well known, for the nature of its dynamic is difficult to pinpoint. This is not surprising, since we are talking about fields of free activity that show structure over a period of centuries, a seeming contradiction. This synchronism implies the temporal phase is the crucial determinant, independently of any continuous runway leading to the sudden flowerings of individual areas. It is hard to reconstruct, let alone visualize, the correct sequence of emergence. We see the peaks stand out, great religious founders, art, philosophers, new political forms, then a distinct fall-off. But the overall picture is clear. Its implications indicate that cultural evolution is, so to speak, hyper-cultural in a generalized system of evolutionary emergence, an extraordinary fact, and the one great clue to evolution in action.

It has often been noticed, as in this instance, that the record of human history shows a strange patchwork of fast advances, and slower periods that are relatively static. This fact alone should alert us to the existence of historical dynamism. Our use of the term ‘medieval’ is quite revealing in this regard. We call the period from the fall of the Roman Empire until modern times a ‘middle age’. This ‘middleness’ is a clue to how we in fact take our own history, not quite sure why, although we can see that the source of this earlier world lies in the onset of the classical age, many centuries before. This era rose to a height that was never matched until after 1500. The same relationship is now visible in the era prior to this, at the birth of complex civilization. The obvious suggestion is that discrete and continuous processes are blended in the context of a macrohistorical system, if we can define it. We will use the term ‘mideonic’ to refer to the intervals in full between our turning points.

The rise of civilization from the Neolithic takes place quickly around the end of the fourth millennium, in Egypt and Sumer. This is followed by the long eras that characterize these distinct forms of culture, more or less set in their pattern. Then, in the centuries just before –600 we find civilization on the move again, this time, as noted, in a broad field of rapid parallel advance. Another period of take-off this time in widely separated areas, suddenly transforms the whole basis of civilization. Then finally the rise of the modern shows its hand as the next descendant in this suddenly obvious series. But the spottiness of the pattern is not at first amenable to any simple explanation, in part because we have no prior grounds of explanation at all.

The worlds of Archaic Greece, the Hebrew Prophets, the Upanishadic era of India, and the centuries before Confucius in China suddenly emerge simultaneously. From this we can infer the presence of a larger system doing cross-sections, one on a scale greater than its manifestations as individual civilizations. It is hard to imagine how this could be until suddenly we notice the coordination of this system over millennia. It defies all odds of being random, and finds its oddities from the inherent nature of large scale culture evolving on the surface of a planet. A system in a long frequency, we suspect, performing the tricks of ‘systems’ as we know them, something like ‘feedback return’. We can even spot the probable wavelength, ca. 2400 years, although this is conjectural. The rest of the pieces begin to fall into place at once. All the disconnected areas are ‘hotspots’ fretting implosion by a tactic of minimizing evolutionary interaction.

We are confronted with a strange pattern, obviously incomplete, and sourcing in the Neolithic, whose real symptoms are clearest at the sources of our traditions. Thus, if we consider this classical era in detail, it becomes evident that it represents a phase in a greater sequence. The birth of civilization, and the rise of the modern world, for three centuries after the Reformation, show the same absolute high-speed emergentist structure in phase, and are clearly related in an overall dynamic of such transition al phases. These three periods, and only these, show this ‘order of magnitude’ explosion, although the genesis of Islam comes close. This does not include the period after 1800, or license any ideological conclusion some might derive from our purely theoretical argument. Beside this parallelism, then, the long sequence of civilization begins to reveal as a whole this overall hyper-cultural generative structure. Thus we can see, in addition, the inner coherence of all of these periods as a unified system whose realizations we call ‘civilizations’.

Suddenly, we have a clear holistic interpretation of world history in the form of a non-random pattern behind us in the chronicle of known history. It is non-random in the way it demonstrates an intermittent clustering of creative action over long periods beyond the scope of individual will. It is a pattern that explicitly defies the logic of chance, as it generates a sense of coherence. We can even see ‘system return’ processes, like feedback, attempting to restore direction or elements that have died out.

Our thesis is engaged, we see a macrohistorical ‘evolution ’ or ‘rolling out’ associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, suggesting long range feedback or system return, morphing in direct and focalized fast transitions the large scale event-space of cultural entities. We can reverse-engineer this unmistakable pattern with a question, Does world history show evidence of general sequence? The answer is yes, and we see very strong correlation with an intermittent sequence pattern that can only be called ‘evolution’.

This pattern is so elusive that we barely see it, but we sense it, and it suddenly comes alive as we clock its strange timing, and adopt systematic periodization. It is made difficult by the need to examine relative changes, i.e. incremental change in a stream of prior continuity. And we must acquire the knack to distinguish the action of a system and the free activity that is mixed with it, like the difference between the motion of an ocean liner and the relative free action of the passengers in that context. Two categories of motion are superimposed. This is what blinds us to historical dynamics. This pattern explains at a glance many of the contradictions we live with and that characterize our sense of history. The implication is of a process that can act globally, generate rapid change in whole cultures in short bursts, and proceed across millennia in coordinated fashion. Careful accounting of time periods shows this global system at work.

The key to its understanding is to see that its effect is short acting, or intermittent. This intermittency is seen in many categories. A remarkable instance, itself a clue, is the Greek Archaic period, and as one example of the on-off enigma, that of emergentist ‘democracy’, leapfrogging history, as if in a jumpstart process. This seems to hint at a deeper process. World history seems to be operating on two levels. This is the effect of an evolutionary driver alternating in peaks of intensity. We call this the ‘eonic’ or intermittent, frequency look-alike effect, and it is still an incomplete perception, yet one whose significance is obvious even in fragments, in the same way that a few pieces of a puzzle can cohere without any knowledge of the whole. The problem is that it doesn’t follow standard causal logic in its action. What we see is the ‘causality’ of Big History, so to speak. We see a strange intersection of cultural stream and a larger sequence. This shows us the need to look, not at whole cultural histories, but time-slices, or relative transformations of culture. The idea is so strange we would not consider it unless the facts demanded it. But once we realize this is how real evolution would have to be and that nature acts that way, the solution to the puzzle is swift.

We are confronted by the apparent conundrum that a force of evolutionary or historical action, fragmentary but in plain sight, shows no visible relation to the fact of free activity, except the pattern of correlation achieved by the extremely long view. The difficulty in our perception of this arises because we are talking about fields of free activity that show structure over a period of centuries, a seeming contradiction. As we puzzle over the difficulties in all ideas of evolution , we discover that we can find the answers very close to home, in the record of world history. We need to develop a method to distinguish the action of a system from the free activity that makes it up. For that we will need to construct a special type of model.

We have already always noticed isolated aspects of this eonic effect, often disguised as myth, or the generic periodizations we routinely apply to history without noticing they are clues to a larger pattern. We do not see the eonic effect, and yet we are always unconsciously ‘noting’ its presence. This must be so if we are immersed in the very evolution we are discovering. We had to have sensed it all along. The moment we use the term ‘modern’, the ‘middle ages’, the ‘birth of our traditions, or the ‘age of revelation’, we speaking disguised eonic language, i.e. the language of periodization, and their intervals or epochs. Now for the first time we see the pattern as a whole, and the reason for our perceptions is clear.

Man’s history has always confronted him with an anomaly in the peculiar periodization of its dramatic incidents, in the sense that its sequence shows an unmistakable character of relative, rather than absolute, beginnings. If we watch the beginning of the second act of a play, arriving late at the last part of the first, the appearance of transition and relative onset conditions our perspective, as a given of incomplete information. This is not unlike our perception of world history filtered through the great traditions, but before the discovery of early Sumer and Egypt. The Old Testament is really describing such a relative beginning, in medias res. It is describing intermittency, a new era coming into existence, against the backdrop of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, which simply enter the tale as givens with unspecified origins. The Old Testament makes a point of dramatizing the relationship and disentanglement from these apparently sourceless worlds that were simply there as a new era comes into existence. Our traditions have this character of relative onset and seem to source in the middle of world history, with a hazy preamble, in the centuries clustered around the great era of the Classical Greeks, itself synchronous with the period at the core of the Old Testament.

We are thus left with the sense that this era of great beginnings is an entr’acte, and that we are in a tale of changing scenes. And this is a clue to modernity, this ‘new age’ effect at work, once again. And this phenomenon in antiquity is not confined to the West, for we see it in the Oriental civilizations as well, as they seem to echo the same rhythm. Chinese history is variously the legacy of the Shang emperors, or the richer world suddenly coming to life around the era of Confucius. The world of the Buddha and Mahavir visibly both start, and yet continue from, and against, their own antiquity. Here in splendid simplicity is a clue to the whole question of historical evolution. We see the action of a system in evolutionary parallelism operating in a discrete series of relative beginnings. Such a system smacks of a frequency interpretation, and shows a hypercomplex system at work, complete with its own built in evolutionary clock.

This sudden double discovery of structure, moving backwards to the dawn of civilization, and moving in parallel through the intricacies of the great burst of advance stretching across Eurasia in the proximate period of the Archaic Greeks, and Hebrew prophets, presents us with a moment like that in the solution of a puzzle laid out at random when an entire sector is resolved in isolation from a still greater whole. This is not the total solution to the puzzle. Coherence is clearly inferable from one fragment of a puzzle as the pieces show an overall meaning. The great clue bestowed in the silence of millennia debriefs our myths of revelation with its clear demonstration of their meaning in a macro-historical functionality. But our tactics of study must be forensic, and not metaphysical.

Although the eonic pattern is a short sequence (like three beats from a whole symphony) and fails any inductive test for universal generalization or an adequate theory, it gives us a telling glimpse of a purely abstract ‘evolution in action’ and suggests indirectly how emergent sequencing and integration might have occurred in the descent of man. We live in the first generations of human history with records of any kind stretching across the five thousand year minimum we will find necessary to establish the minimum three beats of historical rhythm in a 2400 year intermittent sequence. After this interval since the invention of writing we seem finally able to document an evolutionary sequence.

The rest is a blank, leaving us one clue to the nature of evolution , it shows fast system return in three century bursts, and can do ‘cross sections’ in parallel on fuzzy regions. Thus, for the first time we see modernism as a unit, and can adjoin also the early starting point of Sumer and Egypt, to the isolated classical era, which we had thought, if we thought about it at all, as some sort of mysterious absolute source. We must consider the relations of these eras to what occurs in between, surprisingly simple to do. For we can see that the object of historical selection is to embrace the whole. Thus, we are given a direct insight into the sequencing embedded in world history, and precipitous new grounds, however inconclusive, for macrohistorical considerations.

And suddenly we are suspicious of current evolutionary accounts of the descent of man, and the so-called Great Explosion in the Paleolithic. This pattern shows the one thing Darwinists must dread most, overlay evolution in high-speed differential transformations, in concentrated regions, acting over a short range, mere centuries. Our ignorance of deep time will allow no such simple generalization as the Darwinian theory if we have even the slightest suspicion, here the strongest evidence, of such fast-acting processes. The stock of Darwinism plummets at once, and should be put on hold until we can zoom in on the incidents claimed in absentia as evidence of the theory.

[i] The term ‘eonic’ is also a play on the term ‘eon’, and in addition the electronic term ‘eonic’, often referring to systems of digital signal processors with their discrete sampling of continuous processes.