2. Mysterious
Drumbeat
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An Unexpected Challenge to Darwinism
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2.
Mysterious Drumbeat
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| 2.1.2 An Unexpected Challenge to Darwinism | ||||
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The eonic effect is something we can see all at once, and at many levels. Like a fractal, we zoom in on separate areas, and then zoom out to see the whole, and our snapshot can be taken together with Chapter Five. We need to construct a model to help us visualize this pattern. If we work up the data with some simple periodization what we are seeing will stand out. But in one way we are done—a non-random pattern is indicated. We can pause here, anticipate our conclusions, and consider in a nutshell this still fuzzy perception of the eonic effect, before zooming in on its details. It goes immediately into an evolutionary category, ‘evolution of some kind’. We cannot be making Darwinian claims on the descent of man, sight unseen, given such data for visible world history. Darwin’s theory of natural selection fails a photo finish test. We tend to get stuck on something like Darwinian evolution because we can’t imagine any other way for ‘evolution’ to occur. Yet our pattern gives us grounds for what at first might seem one of the least plausible: incremental advances in block regions in a sort of stepping stone process. Our thinking has been too conservative. Armed with some real evidence, we must change our sights completely.
Thus, if we look closely at this data, especially in the core Axial period, we see that this ‘evolution of some kind’ is global in its action, acting selectively on different regions. Its effects are local, and yet match a pattern in a global sequence. It seems to switch on and off and induce change on schedule over distributed regions. It acts on parallel cultures, and parallel components of culture, simultaneously, and directly on creative consciousness and is involved in the generation and transformation of religions. But we cannot really say this process ‘acts’, for it is clearly mechanical in one way. It does nothing, yet suddenly everything is done. Its effects as circumstantial evidence show its hand. Rapid advances and flowerings of philosophy, religion and science are correlated with its action. The observer is sequentially dependent on its action since his protocols of discourse show clear interaction with the pattern. This non-random pattern shows a dynamic acting at long range, signs of evolutionary progress, and ethical action built into this dynamic, as an abstract ‘should’ (i.e. the system ‘should’ induce change on cue, the minimum ‘should’ of a feedback device), and an embedded rationality, as it were, that is beyond easy description. And yet, paradoxically, we cannot safely violate any principle of historical homogeneity, nor claim that these periods in question are inherently any different from any other period, and everything we see there ought to be something, more or less, than is present to us in our time. That seems to make the question incomprehensible. But the paradox is resolved if we think in terms of creativity, or more generally, what we have called self-consciousness. Then it is clear that while creative action is potential at all times, the eonic effect shows it to have clustered evolutionary patterns. That’s a very remarkable fact, but it doesn’t violate the principle of homogeneity. Here traditional accounts are misleading, for the factor of self-consciousness often hides behind theistic visionary experience. In the best-documented case of the Greeks in their Archaic and Classical periods we see the rapid remorphing of an entire culture in a brief time-slice, with the seeding of a complex literature, political experiments resulting in the birth of democracy, and a crescendo of art. This process operates in the large, yet manifests itself in the creative action of widely separated individuals. It transcends the specifics of individual cultures and civilizations, and we must carefully distinguish the action of a system from the action of individuals. Finally, we can see that the Old Testament arises in this context, and contains implicit observations of the eonic effect. We spot a mysterious system at work and it operates in parallel and (intermittent) sequence, therefore directionality and thence teleology become relevant. We cannot assess teleological issues if we are immersed still in the system in question. But we can, looking backwards, assess changes of direction. This effect is clearly staging a kind of globalization. The three clusters or turning points in a sequence also show geographical patterning that follows a basic rule we will discover. They are like transitions driving this evolution, with massive innovations at the key times and places. These ‘fast interrupt’ phases are about three centuries in length, the so-called Axial Age being two things, a generative and first flowering period. The pattern is associated with several new religions, and the emergence of democracy is directly correlated in two steps of the sequence, dying out after its first appearance. This will provide a clue to a hidden theme of freedom and necessity. This sequence generates great art en passant. The period of the emergence of the Old Testament as a literature, almost parallel to that of the Iliad, is directly correlated to the middle phase. It operates beyond the individual civilization and performs a kind of phasing intersection on a given ‘civilization’. Civilizations in the right time and place tend to have a temporary edge. But the full effect is clearly global and doesn’t pertain absolutely to the area of transmission. Including the modern phase creates problems with ideology, making caution necessary. We are inside this system still, but after its last manifestation. We tend to be blinded to the full scope of what we see, and what we conclude can easily lead to wrong results based on the imbalance created. This system does not follow some ‘economic evolution of history’. It is much deeper. Economic history is one isolated aspect of the picture. Overall it is clearly strategic, seems to start at a Eurasian center of gravity in the Middle East, and generates globalization, each area of transition seeding a field of diffusion. It never acts twice in the same area, reappearing each time in an adjacent prepared region. This ‘evolution’ is therefore able to somehow scan whole regions, or respond to parameters concealed to us, remember its tracks, and leapfrog to new starting zones. It never determines a whole, and leaves its trace in human activity, which executes all action as theme and variations. It acts through creative incidents and individuals. Its action is entirely different from ‘natural selection’ or survival of the fittest. Instead, if anything, we see a ‘natural’ selection of the less dominant and almost helpless innovators in fast development regions followed by a trend toward equalization and integration. It shows direct correlation to intensity of creative advance. Note this is not the evolution of creativity. Men at all periods are potentially creative. But the periods in our pattern show an especially strong relative intensity. The only name for what we are seeing is ‘evolution’ in the dictionary sense, a process of ‘rolling out’ in a developmental fashion. Nothing in it contradicts the facts of variation, genetic drift, or genetic mutation, save that these ought reasonably to be taken as a side issue. We will not speculate as to whether processes that can morph whole cultures could also treat genes as information switches. But this is an immediate reality check on Darwin’s theory. Many of the processes claimed for genetic evolution are strongly correlated with a detectable dynamic suddenly appearing from the time of writing. This is non-random evolution because we see ‘system return’ on definite ‘event regions’, an extraordinary fact. We are left with several possibilities: this ‘evolution’ is an entirely new process, it was present all along, or else switches on at critical stages of development. It is clearly ‘macroevolutionary’ in some sense, and transcends or overlays genetic evolution. More intuitively, instead of random evolution we see three waves of focalized advance in selected regions that feed the whole via diffusion, an obvious way to evolve something, plain vanilla evolution, but this Darwinian selectionism is not. Darwin’s theory, in fact, was always a non-standard ‘exotic’ theory, a free lunch claim. The whole evolves through the part, and shows clear directionality, and correlated system response over millennia. The problem is that while we can describe it that way, we can’t ‘see’ the mechanism, so to speak, nor account for the sudden jump in complexity that attends each step in our eonic series as new and complex ‘information’ flows into the system from nowhere. Whatever we call it, and the issue of what to call it is secondary (we can also dispense with or qualify the term ‘evolution’, e.g. ‘eonic or stepping evolution’), we have some hard data here, observed at close range, relative to Paleolithic, which Darwinists have not observed at this close range. Clearly, applying Darwinian thinking in this situation could lead to disastrous counter-evolutionary effects. Look closely at the middle periods, such as the falloff in the post-Axial. The ‘fittest’ do indeed survive better, and the trend toward decline and empire takes hold. A period of great innovation comes to an end. And many of those innovations do not make it. The Ionian Enlightenment is buried, democracy barely gets off the launch pad, emergent science fades away. We suspect our ‘system’ has to prompt these innovations, and then restore them after they fail a ‘fitness test’. We must take the result as is, historically given and buffered from whatever other evolution in deep time our speculative theories propose with limited evidence. Since this ‘evolution’ in history shows clear directional aspects, and is able to change direction, we might suppose it has changed direction from processes said to have occurred earlier in the descent of man. We can see that the Darwinist is going to lose history, hence also the Paleolithic descent of man. For we will see that ‘history’ in this sense must overlap with earlier phases of the descent of man. The regime of natural selection as theory makes no sense, never did make any sense. Now we suspect what the real evolution must have been like. Culture, we should note looking at the eonic effect, doesn’t arrive through and can degenerate under the pure regime of natural selection, whether of individuals, cultures, empires. Advance and innovation require an end run driver to bypass the sandbanked victors of the survival regime. But there is still the consideration that Darwinists might claim that their account produced the lead up to history via natural selection. We can move to protect our subject by showing that they probably lose this lead up also, by looking at the so-called Great Explosion. From there we can move to the study of history on its own terms, without the red herring of Darwinism lurking in the background to confuse thinking. Darwinism, by claiming purely random evolution, always left the relation of causality and chance ambiguous. Confronted with the eonic effect, we see precisely that extra process, ‘cause’, or ‘force’, subject to its inexorable confusions, present to ‘drive’ evolution, it being granted that such language is purely formal, subject to revised language, and that this system is something highly complex. As remarkable as that is, it is nonetheless precisely what we might have expected, and warns us that our easy assumptions about higher complexity arising by chance were off the mark. Notes: The need for a model We have our non-random pattern. But what are we seeing? Such a system is confusing because we must distinguish two levels, overlaid. This problem can be seen from the history of religion. If the Axial religions proceeded from a transcendental domain why would they be so open to historical contingency, failure, and the obviously deviating renditions that we see? We are seeing two overlaid things, an intermittent process connected with the eonic pattern, and its realization. The emergence of the great religions is especially confusing because we can detect a process at a higher level of abstraction, one we don’t see, that morphs local contents into something new. How can we increase our focus on such a large dataset? We are going to create a qualitative systems model that mirrors the data (without explaining it). This model is never anything more than a special kind of timeline, using differential periodization (two dates to enclose a turning point). We have something so complex it is beyond any simple theory. And yet we can ‘see’ that this is a process of ‘evolution’, which we will call the eonic evolution of civilization. The data only makes sense as a fragment of some greater pattern, probably an alternating sequence. The three turning points will become transitions in that eonic sequence, and this will instantly clarify the Greek Miracle, the Old Testament myths, the Buddhist anomaly appearing against a Hindu backdrop, the rise of the modern, and much else. This kind of thinking is at risk of so-called ‘historicism’ and can easily fall into a gulf. But for once the fantastic is inevitable, as long as we discipline ourselves to an austere phenomenological account. Even terms like ‘evolutionary driver’ are marginal, and we must adopt the strict limits on our references to ‘active agents’ or forces of an unknown character. This sequence is about innovations in clusters, and can be taken as an ‘evolution of freedom’ in its alternation of degrees of freedom, which we will take as changing states of self-consciousness, seen as eonic determination and free action. This dataset is really asking for two ‘theories’ in one, the evidence of parallel interactive emergence, and the evidence of an eonic sequence. The two work together, and produce a remarkable stream and sequence effect, whereby the high level evolution filters the low level temporal stream of culture. We must define our position inside of this sequence, since we have no grounds for concluding that it is complete. The model we adopt is called a discrete-continuous model and this has the desired property of defining the observer’s relation to the sequence. The rest of the book is more or less an elaboration of these statements, and the model should lead to intuitive observations of historical blocks. Relative transforms Looking at the eonic effect, especially the Axial interval, we see what often look like absolute innovations, but which, on closer examination, turn out to be amplified relative transformations, spurts of growth, incremental remorphing. If we turn on a sunlamp in a garden, we see, by and large, not the absolute growth of plants from seeds (although that may occur too) but the relative accelerated growth of those plants. The causal domain is contextual and may show two levels. The sunlamp has nothing to do with the ‘causal stream’ of plant growth processes. In the same way history in and outside of the eonic effect is autonomous and proceeds by its own logic. The eonic effect is built in, yet a distinct process. With the eonic effect, this question of relative transformations makes it hard to understand, although the high-level effect is obvious. Something crosses a temporal boundary, goes through changes, and then issues as a new result. These occur all the time, and are not basically mysterious. But our pattern shows some truly remarkable examples, apparently in echoing sequences over millennia. For example, the elements of monotheism or Buddhism existed before the Axial interval, but the prior elements are transformed or swiftly repackaged during the period into the historical forms that we see in history. Thus, it seems, the transformation has no relation to the content, as such. Note that ‘acceleration’ is a relative transform, and, despite the spontaneous yet inaccurate use of the term (from physics) for our transforms (of a system not like anything in physics), it gives some idea of the presence of a ‘forcing factor’ involved in the changes we see. The idea of a ‘forcing factor’ or ‘ghost force’ arises almost by definition in such a system, a fact that will ‘debrief’ a number of theological issues! Such thinking is very loose, however, and terminology to describe such things is borderline at best. And why is this any different from similar effects at all periods of history? The answer in one way is that there is no difference, and yet we can clearly see that there is a difference. There is no difference in the case of the sun lamp, yet its presence or absence does make a difference. Nothing can match the period of the Archaic and Classical Greeks. This cluster relative to world history allows us to infer, but only indirectly, the existence of something out of the ordinary. Systematic accounting of periods and their relationships resolves the paradox, an unsuspected teleological component, visible as directionality, in particular periods and places, not withstanding their completely ordinary character in all respects. That makes correct system analysis difficult. In some ways, the best approach is simple high-level inspection, disciplining any and all metaphysical resolutions. A complication, system and free action Our pattern is fairly straightforward in many ways, but, as noted, a close look shows a severe complication, but one that is fortunate in another way. We must distinguish between what individuals are doing and what a system is doing. Sometimes they coincide, especially inside the pattern, sometimes not. Our pattern seems to act on a fuzzy region, is not determined completely, and the way in which individuals express that pattern can vary tremendously. Thus, the element of ‘free action’ must be the executive of the ‘system action’, but the two might not fully correspond. This factor goes a long way toward explaining the confusions of monotheism. The construction of the Old Testament clearly reflects the ‘system action’ during the Axial period of the eonic effect. But the account enters via the mythmaking filter of those who recorded their account. Myth rapidly takes over. |
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