The Evolution of Morality--
At Close Range

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

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 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

 We already have enough data to reconsider the basic weakness of Darwin’s theory with its inability to account for the evolution of ethics. The current models of population genetics with their claims about group and kin selection are forced into a corner at the limits of purely genetic explanation and the attempts to account for altruism. But if we look at the Axial Age data we can see that evolution in our emerging sense shows two religions appearing almost out of nowhere, one theistic, one atheistic, almost—we see relative transforms in each case. This process is far beyond anything Darwinists can conceive, and we end up flabbergasted by the sheer scale of this spectacle in our backyard. The evolution of religion and that of behavioral morality are not exactly the same, and yet the two must overlap. And in any case our still incomplete picture already gives us a reality check: the issue has a macroevolutionary component. But the point is that religion is not an adaptation to environmental conditions, but an independent process mixed with general evolution in the large. We are confused by the output of the system, i.e. a particular religion associated with our pattern (as opposed to religion in general), and the system itself, which does something ‘wholesale’.

In one way the category ‘religion’ is (possibly) redundant, since it is really a function of the development of consciousness (often with an overlap with the category of ‘state evolution’, i.e. law codes for transcultural regions). We see that ancient men perceived what we call ‘evolution’ as a religious phenomenon. But then, in that case, the master clue is at hand to sorting our elemental confusions. We are confused by our inability to distinguish the process as it emerges historically as a human creation in an eonic context and the deeper dynamic of the process itself which stands beyond the particulars of the individual religions, here Buddhism and the proto-Judaic corpus. Even a cursory glance at the full spectrum seen in the Axial period provokes a conundrum. For we find more than just religion. And if we zoom in on the Indian case we see a whole field of religious experimentation preceding the later outcome. Part of the problem here is that, despite the advances of science, we are still very close to this period, and tend to be caught up in the misleading historical accounts. We have no concepts to handle this kind of sudden phasing, nor any ability to put our theoretical present in correct perspective. Thus we fail to grasp what we are seeing at the gestation of these two religions in the Axial period. But we must suspect just how far off the mark Darwin’s style of thinking really is. We can see from the Axial period the phenomenon of ‘distributed evolution’, sourcing in one cultural stream, then proceeding towards a more general environment, crystallizing as a ‘religion’, complete with self-generating ‘ethical codes’ confected on the spot from the input stream culture’s mythological corpus. We are in the minor leagues of theory still, confronted with operations on this scale.