'Eonic determination' And 'free action'

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

These discussions are very general. But our pattern is quite specific. We can translate this issue into a specialized terminology, adapted to the eonic pattern, of what we will call ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ for our paradoxes of freedom, necessity, and consciousness. The latter, ‘free action’, is not ‘free will’, but a context of choices of action, and stands in spectrum of determinism that is quite different from freedom or direct causality. This ‘free action’ is simply the record of a series of choices, however we explain them. ‘Choice’ is real, and branches history into different directions, as fact, whether the result of free will or not. ‘Free action’ should rise to greater freedom at higher determination, greater self-consciousness. The term ‘eonic determination’ means, ‘whatever it is that causes our eonic pattern’. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it! It is designed to point to something we never see, a placeholder for an unknown.

One way to distinguish history and evolution might lie just here, by considering the transition from passive to active organism, from behavior to free (ambient or locomotive) action, in the ambiguity of the term ‘free’. Perhaps if man is free then evolution ends and history begins, if this is our choice of definition. Or, if he is not free, his evolution continues, and the term ‘history’ is so far another term for this process.

This distinction returns something of fundamental importance to our conceptions of evolution, levels of performance in the potential to act in differing modes. Darwinism tends to assume that the most arbitrary action, as long as it satisfies ‘survival of the fittest’ is the measure of evolutionary outcome. But we can see that real evolution requires as much the achievement of higher levels of qualitative action, irregardless of the ‘survival of the fittest’ test. If qualitative action fails, the system waits until the job is done right. There is no other possibility in many cases, democracy is not monarchy. And this distinction of eonic determination and free action suggests that some outcomes in our history, even if they are the ones to survive, might be the ‘wrong’ outcomes.

System and Individual This seeming paradox of intermittent or ‘eonic’ determination seems obscure, but we reckon with it by analogy in many situations, e.g. the ‘free action’ of soldiers and the ‘system action’ generated from Central HQ in discrete intervals of direction. Another example might be the relation of a business to investors. The investor creates potential but doesn’t execute the ‘free action’ of the business firm. And we always remain free up to a point within that context. Here, however, we have no knowledge of the existence of this metaphorical HQ, and simply see the sequence of ‘determinations’ that have emerged within our free activity. In general, ‘free action’ in an economy is related to some ‘economic determination’, e.g. cycles of boom and bust. Another example might be ‘interpretation of a improvisational drama’, or a play with a full script. The determination of the plot is given over to the free action of the actor. It is worth noting the resemblance to ‘development under a war footing’. Things often show rapid relative transformation during war periods, e.g. radar. They have a prior source and a continuous stream history, but a discontinuous interval of speed up.

Democracy and ‘free action’ Our model faithfully enforces the arcane distinction of emergentist democracy (as ‘eonic evolution’) under ‘eonic determination’ and democracy as ‘free action’. This unexpected distinction complicates our usage of democracy, but Lo and Behold, once we look we see a clear necessity for the distinction: look at the source of democracy and then follow its realization. Twice, we will see, it appears near a ‘divide’, at the end of a transition, and then proceeds to its outcome, in the first instance considerable confusion. Note that the act of generating democracy and its realization are thus two different things, a fact that Americans always take into account as they nervously reckon with the foundational moment and any deviation from that.

The action of a flare The most elusive (and probably misleading) example one could give is the action of a flare on a battlefield. In the dark, nothing happens. In the presence of light, free action sequences start up, or pick up where they left off, and continue for the duration, lapsing into inaction again in the burnout of the flare. These action sequences are improvised, yet show central determination of some kind, or maybe not, deserters. The light does nothing, yet everything is done in its presence.

 Such analogies have their dangers. If these terms are too abstract simply think of the question, ‘Does man make himself?’ in relation to the turning points of history. The difficulty is that we are inside evolution, and must both ‘evolve’, and emerge from evolution, to understand it. The most we can manage are episodes or bursts of ‘freedom as self-consciousness’. And even this shows some kind of ‘evolutionary determination’, by and large, so far.

Note: ‘Microevolution’? Note that history is embedded in evolution by this definition, and could be taken as the ‘microevolution’ to accompany ‘macroevolution’. Note further that ‘microevolution’ is NOT therefore survival of the fittest, but the degree of self-consciousness as human action in history. We see why Darwinism is colliding with religion, whose historic action is the ‘counsel’ to acts of will as self-consciousness. The danger of replacing this with a theory like Darwinism is the degradation of general free action.