The Axial Age

World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
2nd. Edition
The Book
By  John Landon

Home

 2. Mysterious Drumbeat 
      2.1 The Eonic Effect
              2.1.1 The Axial Age 
              2.1.2 An Unexpected Challenge to Darwinism   
              2.1.3 Purposive Evolution 
              2.1.4 The Evolution of Morality—At Close Range 
       2.2 The Great Explosion 
              2.2.1 A Photo Finish Test   
              2.2.2 Debriefing Darwinism: The Hurricane Argument   
              2.2.3 Beyond Natural Selection 
       2.3 History and Evolution: The Great Transition 
              2.3.1 Freedom, Necessity, and Self-consciousness 
              2.3.2 Darwin, Wallace and the Shiva Seal  
              2.3.3 Non-genetic Evolution 
       2.4 Man Makes Himself 
              2.4.1 ‘Eonic determination’ and ‘free action’  
              2.4.2 Evolution, Freedom, and Volition 

Endnotes  
       2.5 Huxley and Social Darwinism   
              2.5.1 Ideology and Theory: The Oedipus Effect   
              2.5.2 Theories and ‘Action Scripts’  
              2.5.3 Art, Evolution and The Tragic Genre

 In one formulation this phenomenon in its second phase has been designated the ‘Axial Age’. From his The Origin and Goal of History, we have Karl Jaspers’ observation:

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism , sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.[i]

This massive clustering of creative individuals at one of the major turning points in history leads us to a reconsideration of historical, and finally, evolutionary theory. Jaspers’ concept of an ‘Axial Age’ is useful, though flawed, for it tends to be a secular version of an ‘age of revelation’. We suspect a larger pattern where the terminology suggests a unique period. Nor can we find the origin of the sequence. Its goal is a speculative additional assumption. Jaspers’ brilliant insight, with it classic philosophical breadth, is still nonetheless theological, and is really experiencing a reality check on his Christian assumptions, the shock of recognition, the particular seen in the general. He sees the handwriting on the wall, and honestly shows the greater context of his Occidental viewpoint. The embarrassing fact is that the great religions are all later medieval constructions, Judaism included, and, while they correctly sense the importance of the eonic period, they overlay the seed moment in misleading myths.

The problem is the extraordinary parallelism that places the ‘Axial’ period beyond anything to do with religion. This is also the era of the birth of democracy, science, and the proto-secularism of the modern period. These are all pups from the same litter in what must obviously be a form of multitasking parallel evolution, a shotgun effect exploring different possibilities. The Axial Age appears at first to be unique, but then shows itself as a step in a more general pattern, perhaps a sequence? With this question the real antecedent and continuation suggest themselves, the birth of civilization, and the rise of modernity. One problem is that we see a naturalistic phenomenon in the ‘evolution of religions’ and in general a dynamic that has nothing to do with religion at all.

This extraordinary synchronism was for millennia an unobserved fact of world history and only began to be noticed in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that this phenomenon makes Darwinists so nervous there is a regime of complete silence on its very existence. It is remarkable that this data began to crystallize at about the time Darwin produced his theory, but the pattern was not yet clear. Indeed, Sumer remained to be discovered. But the evidence is now obvious to plain view. A global process can act intermittently on a part of world history.

The eonic effect is a superset of this data seen as the ‘Axial Age’, arrived at from another viewpoint, that of asking if world history shows signs of cyclical behavior or ‘general sequence’. It shows us the master pattern behind the component histories depicted in the remarkable Old Testament with their mythologies of theistic historicism. Clearly what is being detected in those texts as an ‘age of revelation’ is the sudden phasing emergentism associated with our eonic effect. We should therefore treat these ancient accounts as obsolete, but with the dignity we grant first discoveries.

We will move to replace the term ‘axial’, indeed finally ‘eonic’, with a completely abstract terminology of so-called ‘eonic sequence’, summarized in the construction of a model to organize this data. The ‘axiological’ character of this period shows us directly that historical facts and the domain of values are completely braided in a process of ‘some kind’ of ‘evolutionary transformation’, a major empirical contradiction to assumptions about the how evolution occurs.

Notes: An alternative perspective The presentation of the eonic effect takes the final result, the turning point sequence, as a starting point. That’s the simplest approach in the long run. But that increases the level of complexity, invokes issues of ideology and modernism. It is also possible to take the issue as an unassembled puzzle, with its major piece, or pieces, the data and perception of the so-called ‘Axial Age’, as a study in itself, and as the main challenger to any theory of the Darwinist type.

The term ‘Axial’ is useful in a first look at the eonic effect, but we will find problems with its definition, among them the wrong interval chosen, i.e. –800 to –200. We will find this collates two things, that the real seminal interval is a transition and slightly earlier, ca. –900 to –600, with an onset of a new period after that. We will use the term in an introductory fashion and then replace it with a more neutral term as we complete our model.

A second Axial Age? A number of writers, using Jaspers’ idea of the Axial Age, have attempted to posit a kind of postmodern ‘second Axial Age’. But we will see that that won’t work. The successor has already occurred as the rise of the modern. Part of the problem is the undefined character of the term ‘Axial’, and the way in which it not transferable to other periods. The complex common denominator in the sequence of turning points requires a careful map of each of the periods in question.