1. Introduction
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The Eonic Effect: Falsifying Darwinism
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1.
Introduction |
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| 1.3 The Eonic Effect: Falsifying Darwinism | ||||
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This study of the eonic effect, the evidence of a non-random pattern in world history, can usefully break the deadlock of the Darwin debate by looking at history in the light of ‘evolution’, taken in our extended sense, as the term goes into free fall. The one thing Darwinists don’t want to find is such a non-random pattern, anywhere. This pattern of three turning points breaks the sequence of historical continuity, and shows us a hidden dynamic in a display of coherence, directionality, and the emergence of values. The conclusion is inescapable: this structure demonstrates the existence of an evolutionary driver operating where least expected. This refers strictly to the issue of natural selection, not the general perception of evolution as a process of nature. Natural selection, and genetic drift continue by default, but these are not sufficient to account for human evolution. We will take this as ‘evolution becoming history’, by our definition. The unconscious Darwinization of history enforces a perception of ‘flat history’ where the evidence shows precisely the opposite, giving us a clue to the riddle of evolution, no matter that we seem to confuse biological and cultural evolution. There is an aspect to (human) evolution that is completely beyond genetics. We can show how this is relevant to claims about the earlier descent of man using a photo finish argument. But, whatever the case, applying Darwin to history is disastrously off the mark. People have noticed this from the beginning, but they displaced the problem into what they called ‘Social Darwinism’, letting Darwin off the hook. Darwinists claim that evolution is random, and that this applies to history also. Has anyone bothered to check the data? We can see from superficial inspection suspicious exceptions. We can attempt to correlate world history, or subsets, with a ‘general sequence’ pattern, and more generally lay down a rectangular grid on the surface of a planet and study the evidence in relation to that. Against intuition, we rapidly discover, since the invention of writing, a rich patterning, a definite derandomized structure. So Darwinized thinking is wrong about history. That’s that. So what does this reality check tell us about ‘reality’, and Darwinian preconceptions of the ‘real’? And how far back does the evidence go? The problem is that this pattern is so complex we can only describe it. Truth is stranger than fiction—one couldn’t have made it up. To those unfamiliar with world history, these turning points might, at first, be challenged as arbitrary, but that becomes very unlikely as we see the overall pattern and even if so a minimal subset of that pattern will avalanche the question of history toward the non-random. In fact, the eonic effect correlates such an astonishing set of disparate facts that we are forced to confront it. At a bare minimum, on the way toward exploring the eonic pattern we see that no value-free social or historical theory could account for the data seen, voiding strict assumptions about a science of history or evolution. Armed with nothing more than periodization we can demonstrate empirically that history shows a coherent pattern. With a little experience the eonic effect becomes obvious. We proceed indirectly, and can use reverse engineering on our pattern and ask a simple series of questions. Actually, ‘does history show a non-random pattern?’ was the first. ‘Does history show signs of general sequence?’ is another. If we reflect on this, then look at history, we discover something that was at first sight invisible, but which suddenly stands out. Since history shows innumerable sequences, a general sequence would be an intermittent overlaid sequence, and that we see. We can extend this with a rectangular grid applied to the surface of the planet, with a related question, to see not only disconnected intervals in a sequence, but in parallel, almost like hopscotch. And this leads to another question that is part of scholarly history, ‘What is the meaning of the Axial Age?’ and we can proceed to review that issue for readers unaware of that question. Finally, looking at any pattern raises issues of ‘freedom and determinism’, and we can ask, ‘does history show historical laws’ and, at the same time, ‘does history show some sort of evolution of freedom, in any sense?’ This contradiction is the key, and this taken as a challenge to natural selection . In general, the eonic effect is an empirical pattern, for which we can produce no easy theory, and is a strong challenge to all views of history and evolution applied to man. Any law of history, theory of cultural evolution, religious teleology, transcendental explanation, or political ideology of universal history, or theory of economic determination, ought to explain this pattern if it claims superstitious or pseudo-scientific authority. Any science of history must begin here and resolve the eonic effect. Darwinism fares very badly here. Since promoters of ideologies and various worldviews will have none of this, take the matter into your own hands. If our theoretical issues seem too abstract open a timeline database as indicated in the text and see for yourself what happens with the close study induced by such a method. Note that any such statement must begin to examine, or at least sample, the whole of world history all at once, something we almost never do. This is something Darwinists never bother with, e.g. speciation data taken globally/locally over millennia, at short and long range. The comparable datasets for organismic evolution barely exist at all. Darwinism is said to claim that evolution is non-progressive and without purpose. This is one of the most defended assertions of Darwinists. The eonic effect throws such assertions under a cloud, notwithstanding the dangers here of ideology. Darwin made life easy for the critic. Darwin’s theory of natural selection makes a very extreme and ambitious claim, a kind of universal generalization about evolution and about ‘reality’, as seen in its assumption that no purposive evolution can be found anywhere. That makes it an easy target. We don’t even have to produce a substitute theory. We can simply show that there exists at least one non-random non-genetic evolutionary sequence showing directionality related to purpose somewhere in the universe, in this case in visible history, and Darwin’s stock plummets. It is futile to claim this is purely cultural evolution if you cannot specify the point at which evolution and history separate. And this Darwinists cannot do. The foolhardy nature of Darwin’s claim should have been obvious from the first, and was to many, in fact. In general, either evolution stretches into history, in which case we can see that history contradicts Darwinism. Or else history stretches backward into the descent of man, in which case we should expect to find in early evolution processes resembling the eonic effect. Evolutionary theory is beset with the difficulty that large-scale directionality, perhaps as evidence of teleology , is hard to observe. It is easy to pretend it doesn’t exist. Even in history the question is not intuitive. Scientists are adamant on this point, because any such evidence shows that current scientific thought is incomplete, somewhere. And yet we must suspect that teleology is a factor. The pattern of the eonic effect can be of great help as the only real evidence, however tenuous, that humanity has at close range of such ‘evolution in action’ in this sense. We will however restrict ourselves to empirically demonstrable directionality. Man is subject to very controlled views of history. Monotheistic historicism and the myths of the Old Testament, Darwinized scientism, critiques of Big History, Hegelian fantasia and derivatives, Marxist-influenced economic thinking, postmodern anti-history, and specialized narrative historiography, dominate the conventional viewpoints. We can learn something from each of these, but all of them are wrong or incomplete in their basic historical interpretations. Specialized narrative history must, however, remain a kind of default workhorse history, and we should be able to produce a large-scale analysis that blends in with the ordinary way we take history. It is disorienting at first to bring ‘evolution’ into the present, but the exercise is illuminating, and shows how our representations are at work projecting the present onto the past. The veiled economic ideology in Darwinism is a well-known fact. We can expose this on the spot as the offending fallacy. Our historical knowledge has grown by leaps and bounds in the last century and we can now see better what’s going on in the last five thousand years. So far from showing randomness, it shows a most definite overall structure. World history is a unique dataset, with no rivals anywhere in nature. No other historical or evolutionary sequence has been documented to the same degree. It is altogether presumptuous to assume that evolutionary speculations about man with nearly empty datasets over millions of years, or even a hundred thousand, can override what we see in history at the level of centuries. That shouldn’t even be controversial. But somehow Darwinists have convinced us that speculations about unseen events are the clue to events we do see, and that do not match these speculations. To proceed we must also confront the issue of a science of history, the orphan twin of evolutionary science, for this category, in search of laws of history, is in principle a valid one in the legacy of reductionism. There is no such science, and all the efforts to decree one into existence have failed. Now a species of vulgar Darwinism in the form of sociobiology is starting to get foisted on data where it won’t fit, producing a hopeless muddle in the dangerous mechanization of ethics. The eonic effect provides the perfect test, as an empirical study, of the hopes for such a science. In fact, the eonic effect shows how a modified discourse for such might be constructed. We should wonder why the standard criticisms of a science of history are not applied to a theory of human evolution. Why are historical theories metaphysics and Darwinism hard science? The first have a wealth of data, the second very little. Where then is the division? Darwinists would like to claim there is none, and apply Darwin’s theory to history. But we can easily show that to be the wrong approach. Natural selection applied to history creates a disastrous misunderstanding. Any such theory of evolution that leads up to human history needs a close look, since there is likely to be a contradiction lurking there. We soon discover the classic limit of conventional scientific method in the philosophy of history , and embrace a broader ‘idea for a universal history ’, to invoke a classic essay of the philosopher Kant, using the idea of a qualitative systems model adapted to the antinomy of causality and freedom. Our subject is ultra-complex and corresponds to no known system, yet has a fairly simple structure open to descriptive modeling. This is a secular viewpoint (whatever that is) and wastes no time on the issue of the spiritual versus the material. This pattern is also a challenge to standard historiography as the sum of specialized histories, although the genre of narrative history coexists seamlessly with this approach. Historians tend to reject ‘Big History’. But there is no absolute justification for this. Critics often speak of ‘overarching generalizations’, and then are silent about Darwinism, as it generalizes without evidence for intervals over a billion years. The idea of random or flat history is an overarching generalization itself, and one that fails once confronted with the evidence. Our strategy is simple, and uses only the most basic evidence, even allowing different interpretations of standard subsections. We can reduce the eonic effect to a series of fuzzy blocks and adjourn back to this context of specialist history. The model lays claim only to large-scale historical blocks. This produces a tool of historical study with a well-earned coherence and able to both summon up theory and displace it into the background without interfering with basic narrative history. |
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