1. Introduction
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Outline
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Introduction |
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| 1.3.1 Outline and Summary | ||||
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Our prime objective is to demonstrate a non-random pattern in world history, which we call the eonic effect. We need to keep the argument simple, and yet cover an immense amount of ground, a lot of which isn’t needed to make the basic point. The argument is like stuffing a suitcase for a journey. We need to include a number of side study projects, on the way. The material is designed as two, or really three short books, inside a larger book, taken as accessory to the main argument. Those three books are Chapter Two alone, Chapter Two and Three together, and Chapter Two and Five together. The reader can read Chapter Two, the first two sections, and branch out from there. He might read Chapter Four and Six taken as inserts to Five, to deepen a bird’s eye view of the pattern. The end sections of Chapter Two, and Chapter Three create a new kind of historical/evolutionary model, and can get tricky. It can be skipped to start. By and large, except for Chapters Two and Three, the reader can follow the argument in the main top-level sections in each chapter, leaving the subheadings for later study. Each chapter has a series of Endnote essays that can also be skipped at first. All of a sudden it gets easy. A glimpse of the whole generates a sense of coherence that makes the pieces of a puzzle fall into place, a ‘how the widget works’ perception. Your built in ‘historical software’ will kick in rapidly with an intuitive high-level perspective on world history, achieved by a quick tour, with or without a lot of details. We conclude this introduction with another look at the Intelligent Design debate, with its innuendos and religious bias. In a global environment parochial Western monotheism requires some distancing. We need to completely break down the ‘god’ concept, whose confusions are a form of terminal semantic entropy. The sense of ‘design’ and the argument by design are different, and this argument is the object of refutations by figures such as Kant. As we proceed we must be careful to distinguish our subject from theistic historicism, and renounce claims taken on faith of the action of divinity in history. And the misuse of the names of divinity creates great confusion. We adopt a procedure on such language, and in the process consider the limits of many other such words, e.g. ‘spiritual’ or ‘material’. We invoke the modern legacy of Biblical Criticism, and need to rescue the Old Testament from the labyrinth of theology as ‘eonic data’ best bequeathed to a secularist. One version of the current design debate invokes the idea of a ‘black box’ to discuss developmental genetics. We can produce our own version with a notion of ‘history’s black box’. We see ‘design’ in history, but can we really speak of a designer? One problem is that religious evolution shows design, complete with theistic and atheistic religions appearing in parallel in the Axial Age. We then look at the Kantian critique of metaphysics, with respect to issues of divinity, soul, and free will. Our inability to resolve the antinomies associated with these makes any theory difficult. On the issue of free will we can adopt a concept of ‘self-consciousness’ as a practical remedy. And we can study history in light of the idea of freedom without claims of free will. We cite a passage from the Preface to Kant’s first critique to remind ourselves that critiques of metaphysics are double-edged, and apply as well to empiricist assumptions. We will also look at the Indian Samkhya with its idea of extended naturalism. Our idea of ‘self-consciousness’ can put us on the look out for the basis of an ‘eonic sutra’. We then look at the issue of reductionism. Since facts and values are distinct, yet braided, in the study of (historical) evolution, we are confronted with the necessity of both embracing and yet challenging the basic assumptions of current science on the laws of nature. How do we get from physical systems to life systems to cultural systems? Ideas of self-organization arise, but, while history shows ‘self-organization’, this is at the level of meaningful human agency and we need to sort out systems from individuals. We are ready to begin in Chapter Two. A mysterious tempo or timing mechanism seems to operate in world history, the clue to the operation of some kind of system. Seeing the synchrony of sudden advance in five independent regions in the period centering around –600, we are moved to reconsider our views of history and ask if this phenomenon is unique or one in a series. As we move backwards and forwards, the pieces of a puzzle fall into place, to become a still larger puzzle. We discover a long-range evolutionary process operating behind the scenes, and intermittently in a sequence of focal emergence, probably starting in the Neolithic. It is able to return on itself, produce parallel effects in simultaneous hotspots, and induce a kind of relative transformation of whatever it finds in its path. The effects are comprehensive at all levels of culture, and affect art, philosophy, the birth of science, political evolution, and the substance of religion. The complex non-random pattern thus visible we call the ‘eonic effect’, and it generates three great eras of world history. We can see clear coherence in the succession of our three turning points, and that shows that we are confronted with true evolutionary directionality, which raises the question of teleology. We cannot safely conclude anything about the latter based on a limited sequence, save to see that it is a factor. We can see that our system is ‘developing’ in various directions, based on intermittent stages. The problem is that it is far more complex than simple teleology. We see a splitting into different directions, as if to explore diversity. And we see that teleological thinking is itself an ‘evolving’ entity in the system, with different ones appearing at different stages. So we must be very careful to claim only directionality, changes of direction, taken empirically looking backward. We can’t predict the future of our system, the more so since we are in a peculiar ‘present’ of that system whose endstate is unknown. Based on the eonic pattern, we construct a simple model. We will try to show one connection to an idea of Kant. The model tries to reverse-engineer the pattern with a few simple questions, does world history show signs of general sequence? and, is there an ‘evolution of freedom’? We will use the term ‘evolution’ for our data. But something very strange happens as we move to include our present in the domain of evolution. Any theory of evolution that closes on the present and includes its own observer suddenly seems to diverge from the familiar world of primordial evolution. The term ‘evolution’ suddenly seems inappropriate. But in fact we can see that the issue of the embedded observer is crucial, and that our tactic is valid, subject to safeguards. Omitting the observer is a fallacy of Darwinism. This disadvantage is really an advantage, since we can’t forget the ideological factor in our theories. Are there any theories? We then look at the suspicious resemblance of the eonic effect to the reports of a Great Explosion in the earlier descent of man. This resemblance makes us immediately suspicious of some high-speed evolutionary driver present earlier. Our eonic data allows us to construct a photo finish argument as a challenge to Darwinism: we see a late version in history of what, in some form, must have been present earlier. If we see ‘evolution’ of some kind in history, and this involves complex cultural constructs that must have been present from the beginning of man’s evolution, then we must conclude something is missing in currents ‘stories’ about earlier man’s emergence. Once we know that evolution can occur in short high-speed bursts, Darwin’s stock plummets, and we call for a ‘time out’ on current claims. Chapter Two and Three introduce a new method of historical study, along with a ‘short history of the world’, and the basics of an eonic model. We examine the basic issues of historical theory, defining the relation of history and evolution, and sorting out issues of historicism, design, and then proposing two levels of ‘universal history’. History shows signs of a system, yet operates as free activity, crowds and populations of free agents. How do we reconcile this contradiction? We propose ‘self-consciousness’ as intermediate state between the deterministic and free will, in order to have viable medium on which Big History can operate. We need to make explicit the transition from evolution to history. The key to doing that is to realize that while free activity makes history, we can see looking backward that this shows structure, a developmental sequence. We can call the latter ‘eonic (macro) evolution’ and the former ‘history’ (eonic microevolution). We can thus examine the transition from evolution to history as an evolution of freedom, by any definition, and we see the action operate on this free activity. What is this action? Is it deterministic? Are these laws of history? Actually, all we can do is track relative changes using periodization as seen in the eonic effect. We must not violate an assumption of historical homogeneity. All history is about the same, but some periods stand out. We see the difference as creative clustering, just as we see economic booms. That’s the difference. But this implies that everything present in our turning points is potentially possible at all other times. It is like jumpstarting a car. The car can run anytime, and has a prior potential. The jumpstart sequence is intermittent, and then stops when the ‘car sequence’ begins. This is the clue, and one reason we find history confusing. And yet we can’t easily match these special periods. In fact, it was Karl Popper who produced a classic critique of what he called ‘historicism’, next to Isaiah Berlin’s critique of ‘historical inevitability’, and we are stuck with a seeming contradiction, big history is doing something, yet all we see is free activity. We can resolve the paradox using our distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness. Man’s state of consciousness can change, evolve, and show states of heightened creativity and ‘willfulness’, if not will. And the eonic effect is on-off, intermittent. We can see that it is a question of different degrees of freedom (not free will necessarily) or self-consciousness that allows out system to ‘determine something’ and yet leave the result to ‘free action’. But so far man cannot initiate or control events at the centuries level even as the record of history shows directionality. We take another look at the question of historical laws with the title from a famous book by Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself. We turn that into a question. Does Man make himself? Based on what we see there seems to be a strange driver behind the open fields of free activity operating at random on the planetary surface. A sort of ‘self-organizing’ focal sequence seems to emerge and alternate between periods of rapid innovation and middle or ‘mideonic’ periods of a different character. We see the need to proceed carefully since we suspect something, an ‘evolution of freedom’. We do some scratchpad figuring: man must make himself, to be free. Yet he must have evolved to that state from not being free. What does the term ‘freedom’ mean? Aren’t we in trouble with the issue of ‘free will’. We don’t have to decide about free will. We can simply talk about ‘free action’, and relative degrees of freedom ‘on the way’, the ability to do things, perhaps, even consider the ‘idea’ of freedom. We need a specialized terminology for the eonic effect, and will use the terms ‘eonic determination’, to describe the action of the system, and ‘free action’ to describe the way man reacts to this system, and what he does when the system switches off. The term ‘eonic determination’ ought to refer to ‘laws of history’, but those are out, and we don’t know what it is that is ‘doing this system’, so we will use a placeholder for the effect. But clearly many of the major innovations we see in the eonic series show eonic determination. All of the effects we see in the Axial Age, for example, show eonic determination, i.e. the effect of intermittent seeding or amplification. This creates a strange system, yet we are familiar with this distinction of system and free action in economics. An economy is a field of ‘free action’, i.e. of economic choices (the system does not control them, almost by definition, as against a controlled economy). But over time, looking backwards we notice cyclical behavior, often with an aggregate parameter measuring progress, but cyclical in some sense. That is, the field of free action shows structure of some kind, ‘macroeconomic determination’. Normally we think of ‘evolution’ as occurring long ago, then somehow completing and yielding to history. And yet we tend to think that natural selection, since it produced man, is some kind of universal law of evolution, operating at all times. It is true that natural selection operates by default, but we can strongly suspect this isn’t real evolution. Yet, because of Darwin we tend to think so, and since it is a ‘universal law’, we think, it should still be operative, and we ‘should’ therefore produce further evolution to produce evolutionary advances. A huge fallacy has entered our reasoning, the Oedipus effect. And we can see that this is one of the results of Darwin’s theory in the period after him, with its surge of Social Darwinism. The confusion was sufficiently rampant that T.H. Huxley himself, later in life, dissented from strict Darwinism by pointing to the paradox, that while we affirm a law of evolution as natural selection, we tend to contradict that in practice. Why? This discrepancy is immediately obvious given the new data of the eonic effect, and we see the trap. Evolution by natural selection didn’t produce the result, man. There are other explicit ‘evolutions’ involved in civilization, art, religion, and so on. We are mixing two levels of evolution, and different ‘evolutions’ at different stages. We can see religious ethics undergoing relative transforms in known history, and this means we have a candidate macro factor for this second process operating against any natural selection. There is a problem with ‘theories’, then. They tend to mimic ‘physical laws’ as ‘historical or evolutionary laws’, i.e. they say that some process or force operating at all times produces a result. But we can see that it isn’t like that with evolution. It is not a universal law. In fact, we are starting to suspect that theories themselves are bound up in our pattern, and that what we see are ‘people in action sequences’ armed with theories popping out of the eonic pattern. The Scientific Revolution is an example, since this event sequence, and its theories show eonic determination. So the transformation of the system is itself producing these action sequences, religious, political or otherwise. We must invent a new term, ‘action script’, to describe the outcomes of the eonic effect, their ‘scripts’ instead of ‘theories’, that is, statements about what ought to be or is to be done, rather than descriptions of what a theory says will be done. There are no ‘oughts’ in laws, but there are clearly primordial mechanized ‘oughts’ in the ‘eonic evolution’ we see, i.e. as if the system ‘ought’ to change direction. We are ready in Chapter Three to survey world history and can proceed first to a thumbnail ‘short history of the world’ that could be a branching point for the rest of the book. We need to prime the pump and produce the key concepts of our model at the onset, and then proceed toward deriving them from scratch in the full pattern. The shortest world history is simply our list of three turning points, like the top-level view of a fractal from which we pick regions to zoom in. With this starting point, we can begin a series of expansions on our pattern, and begin to discover a set of properties for our model. We have an eonic sequence of turning points, seen in their eonic emergents. These turning points become transitions (transitions of what? We don’t know, but can follow the logic). We see that each stage of our sequence can split in parallel. This is parallel interactive emergence, visible in the Axial period. We notice also a frontier property. Our sequence never returns to the same place. We have the clues to what our system is doing, whether we understand it or not. We can see our transitions in terms of a ‘stream and sequence’ process. A cultural stream crosses the boundary of the eonic sequence, and we see the spectacular effects. A close look shows this is the explanation for the Axial Age. We see that the situation arises naturally on the surface of a planet where the logistics of change seems to require a leapfrog indirection of development, to stage the implosion of the whole. If development is focused on one area, the empire problem arises. If it is too diffuse, the integration never happens. Then we try to move backwards, and begin to suspect we are seeing only half of our pattern whose beginning is in the Neolithic, or before. We will formulate a frequency hypothesis to deal with this. A different way of looking at transitions in our eonic sequence is to consider the ‘stream and sequence’ effect. Looking at the Axial Age we see the stream of individual cultures cross a temporal boundary as a matter of frequency. A low-level process is abducted into a high-level process and a general evolution is produced from a local one. If we look at Archaic and Classical Greece, and ask why this period stands out, we are unable to find a reason in the particulars of the ‘stream history’ of the Greeks. But then we see that the period in question is a function of the eonic sequence in its frequency intervals, and that it switches on as if ‘on schedule’, granting the fuzziness of the rough time periods. All at once the ability of the large-scale process to interact with the low-level stands out as the key to evolution. We need to be clear at all points about our last turning point since this is nearly contemporary, and invokes ideological questions. We need to define what we mean by ‘modern’, and distinguish the transition to the modern, the end of the transition called the ‘divide’ and the modern period as such. As we choose a highly selective set of turning points, we seem to have left the middle eras in the lurch. But this is the point. We have two universal histories, one trying to ‘reach’ the other. Our transitions create a kind of sequential dependency, and we trace the diffusion from its sources. In fact, we see that our two great religions generate explicit formations attempting to ‘reach the whole’, distributed evolution. We seem to be courting disaster by bringing ‘evolution’ into the present. But we detect ‘evolution’ only by indirect inference in the compression field of eonic emergents (which may produce potentially different outcomes). We are inside this field, and are deprived of its signature for ideology. The model is sketched, and completed in Chapter Five, and summarized in the Appendix. The basic idea is of a discrete-continuous model, i.e. one that shows the intermittency of the eonic pattern. We look at the dilemma of conflict theories, and economic interpretation of history. We look at world history and note that the ‘eonic sequence’ is not the same as the economic ‘evolution’ of general economies, and will later distinguish ‘econosequence’ form the series seen in the eonic effect. We proceed to look at the ‘modern transition’ in terms of our model, as a ‘switched on’ interval, and show how its ‘eonic emergents’ show a strong clustering near what we call the ‘divide’, the rough point at which the transition interval is complete. This turns out to be a good test for this type of reasoning. All at once the massive innovations near 1800 start to make sense. It’s not chance it happens this way. Then we look at a subpattern of our eonic sequence, the discrete freedom sequence, or the double emergence of democracy in our mainline. We can hardly ascribe this to chance, and we see a mysterious connection between the modern and ancient transitions. This subsequence is part of our dataset relevant to the photo finish argument, and the one good clue to our eonic mystery. Our sense of causal argument is breaking down, but we can see that we have stumbled on a theme carefully addressed in the philosophy of history, beginning with Kant (and Rousseau). This antinomy of freedom and causality is the smoking gun, and at the same time a definite limit on our ability to produce theories. Thus we proceed to a brief invocation of the philosophy of history, as we close this chapter with Kant’s Challenge, which asks us to find the resolution of a pattern of universal history. Even as we move towards the creation of our model, we see its connection to the philosophy of history as seen in Kant’s essay, which contains a generalization of the critiques of Popper and Berlin in its question. We can see already the connection to our pattern, and we can even try to connect our model with Kant’s system, with a look at his Third Antinomy. But for the demonstration of the pattern, Kant’s idea for a universal history, and his Challenge as stated in his classic essay, are enough. Kant’s thinking is quite complicated, and can be more useful at the end of our demonstration. Armed with the basics of the model, taken simply as periodization, the rest of the text speaks for itself. This periodization is so elemental it seems obvious, and yet it conceals a deep structure. We start all over, and expand on our pattern incrementally, and model, beginning with a look at the rise of the modern. This chapter can be taken as an insert in Chapter Five, where we try to quickly survey the whole pattern. It starts in the present and moves backwards, but first we need a flashback to the origins of Zoroastrianism and its relation to the Old Testament. In an intermittent system we see one stage possibly reacting against the next, very different from continuous history. To understand the modern, we need to backtrack to the Axial period and beyond, to see how ‘secularism’ is trying to be a New Age of history. In fact, we have the clue to antiquity, for this ‘new age’ effect was happening then. However, our turning points are not absolute sources. They tend to produce relative transforms, witness the very early Zoroastrian theme that becomes built into the Judaic stream. We see the resurfacing of this ‘end times’ theme in the modern period once again, with Hegel and Marx, and others. We have produced the term ‘eonic evolution of civilization’. But this kind of thinking can be applied to the substreams of civilization, e.g. religion, or science, or any other category as we examine what happens to a stream as it intersects with the eonic sequence. So, we can look at the ‘eonic evolution of religion’, and this will help us to both understand the Old Testament, and to make sense of the Protestant Reformation. This point will be pursued further in the endnotes to Chapter Four. At the end of this chapter we will look also at the ‘eonic evolution of science’ in the same fashion to try and understand why the Scientific Revolution suddenly appears in the middle of the modern transition, why it died out in the mideonic period, after the ‘first’ such ‘Revolution’ in Classical antiquity. From there we begin with the collapse of Communism, liberal societies as we find them, with their distinct economic systems and the leftist reaction to them, looking at the double emergence of democracy, the difference between liberalism and democratic liberalism, the ideology of Adam Smith, and then Hegel’s ‘end of history’ idea, as seen in the rendering of Fukuyama. Then, on the move, we reach the Enlightenment, its counter-Enlightenments, and the rise of the early modern. The discontinuity of the early modern is a problem that haunts all causal theories of history. And it joins the list of three sets of failed theories, one type for each of our turning points. As noted, the endnotes discuss the highly confusing ‘eonic evolution of religion’ and the way in which religions arising at arbitrary times, versus those that arise in our transitions, show differing character. This overlay is hard to sort out, but once done resolves the paradox of an ‘age of revelation’. We then start to explore some of the history of the various New Age movements, and the confusions of the ‘postmodern’ strategies reacting against modernism. We can initiate our brief look at the realm of Indian religion, with a short essay on Samkhya. In Chapter Five, we reach the core of our subject, and try to connect the era of modernity with greater antiquity, attempting to survey world history from the perspective of our three major turning points in more detail, as they turn into transitions in an eonic sequence. We take Chapter Four as an insert, and start over, invoking the so-called postmodern, and then look at the way this is really a ‘post-transition’, and that this relates to the way the modern transformation produces a divide near the end of the eighteenth century, one of the most seminal moments in world history. We are outside of our eonic sequence, inside the third great diffusion field it creates. The postmodern challenge to ‘metanarratives of freedom’ needs to be addressed, since we have found a ‘discrete freedom sequence’, the double birth of democracy in two successive turning points. This is an empirical dataset, and reopens the issue of Big History. We must ‘deconstruct’ flat history. We need to start making a map of the ‘eonic emergents’ in our three turning points, by putting ‘tracers’ on each of them. Put a tracer on ‘liberalism’ and we see a classic ‘eonic emergent’. We need a strategy on issues of Eurocentrism and our method supplies us one. We are not going to deal in ‘civilizations’, but will use a new ‘unit of analysis’. Our first stop, moving backwards, is the ‘divide’, where we see the era of the French and American Revolutions. We pause to consider the problems with theories of revolution, and their legacy in the nineteenth century. We have all sorts of revolutions in the modern transition, all distinct types, and the Industrial Revolution is one of the most massive. The economic interpretation of history tends to confuse us, along with ‘historical materialism’, and we see that while our eonic sequence concentrates effects in a directional fashion, economic fields disperse and cannot be held to explain the long range dynamic of history. A similar caution about technological evolution is needed. We have three sets of effects, the technosequence, the econosequence, and the eonic sequence, which claims the ‘rich emergents’ at high level cultural evolution. We then connect to the early modern, on our way to see the significance of the Middle Ages in our pattern. Isn’t it both odd, yet suddenly obvious that our pattern should slump in its middles? This leaves the question, ‘Middle of what?’ We tend to confuse Middle Ages with Dark Ages, and clock this from the fall of the Roman Empire, in the West. But we are really after bigger game, and what we are seeing is really a ‘mideonic period’ that includes the Roman Empire, and whose sources in the era of the Roman Republic bring us back to our Axial interval. Suddenly we are no longer in some ‘evolution’ of Western Civilization, but in the middle of a much greater process encompassing five areas of parallel advance, visible in Greece, Israel, India, and China. The rise of the West will soon be seen in the context of this greater pattern as a frontier effect, clearly visible in the Axial period, with Greece, for example, being a relative frontier with respect to the Middle East. All of a sudden we see the significance of the Old Testament, as a record of this transitional period. It is built around a phase period, with the incoming stream a set of myths annexed to the period just before the Exile, when the corpus takes shape. The Greek Archaic stands out as one of the prime generators of a new tradition, and its swiftly moving emergentism wanes as suddenly as it begins. Soon our systems are generating new oikoumenes, and empires, and the emergence of democracy and science in ancient Greece as soon shows their waning. We have a clue to the confusions of decline and fall, and can see that the real issue is the eonic sequence. We see in full scale the nature of our transitions as a ‘stream and sequence’ effect, with the streams of five cultural areas crossing the eonic sequence. Taking the example of Archaic Greece, we see the way the incoming stream is transformed at the eonic boundary, and the clue to the Indian, Chinese, and Judaic cases becomes clear. Especially we note the way the Old Testament is layered to conceal an account of eonic transition. Why stop here? We see the game. We reach another ‘mideonic’ period prior to the Axial Age, as we close in on the sources of Egyptian and Middle Eastern civilization in the period of early Dynastic Egypt and the age of the Sumerians, almost like clockwork in an interval of 2400 years. We reach the limit of our data here, but can easily guess that this pattern is appearing at the point where historical records are being kept, and we can produce a frequency hypothesis to extend this backwards two more steps, although this is not necessary for our thesis. We have the eonic effect, as two universal histories one overlaid on the other visible as the intersection of the eonic sequence with the hotspot areas of seminal transformation. We notice that the issue of diffusion becomes central, and that our pattern shows an acorn effect, or what we call jump diffusion. Suddenly the significance of the rise of modernity on the fringes of European Eurasia becomes obvious. We have our pattern of universal history, and we can attempt to link our model to a frequency hypothesis. There the views of Spengler and Toynbee are critiqued and we take Toynbee’s idea of the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ and create a new one, our transitions, and their sequence. It is not the civilizations that are evolving, these are streams, but the sequence itself as it moves through a series of successive transformation regions. And we can introduce our ‘grid terminology’ as a kind of graph paper for transformations on the surface of a globe. Finally, in Chapter Six, although essentially done, we provide more content for our eonic argument, and turn around and start at the beginning moving forward, arriving once again at the rise of the modern. This is the same chapter as Five, except in reverse. We begin in medias res with the parallel emergence of higher civilization in Egypt and Sumer, and our model can now handle this fact of seeming ‘double starts’. Our theme of the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ can help us to see that while the appearance is of Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, the reality is of a definite transition, one we call the ‘birth of civilization’, which we can see is misleading since the process was well underway in the Neolithic. This can help to see that the Sumerian world is really giving birth to a field of civilizations that are sequentially dependent, as they drift into empire. The period of advance is brief, and the system becomes static early on. It is in the next phase that we see a decisive new set of advances, among them the ecumenical religions. Our system is starting to integrate vast areas and needs a new cultural glue to create new communities and cultures, and the great religions move into this void. In Chapter Five we looked at sequence, here we wish to start following the branches of our patterns, from West to East. We can see the almost exact concordance of Judaic history to the stream and sequence effect, but we must be careful not to get entangled in the Biblical account. In India we can detect the clear eonic architecture of the history by the contrast of the Buddhist and Hindu streams. In China, a greater continuity is at work and we see the remarkable way in which a transformation occurs a third of the way through the historical stream. In Greece, we see the birth of democracy, and the emergence of the tragic genre, in remarkable concert. Our system moves slowly but surely into its mideonic doldrums, and we can see that everything seems to wait for the next phase, which comes right on schedule in a new frontier area, Western Eurasia. We have returned to our starting point, the rise of the modern, which precipitates the final stage of globalization, still unbalanced, appearing via a local transformation zone. The term ‘rise of the West’ no longer seems appropriate, and we can see that the difficulty of our system lies in the transitional imbalance created by its sequence, even as it moves to integrate and globalize. We end in the year 1848 in the rough shutdown of the modern transition as this proceeds toward the difficulties of its globalization. We see that the pattern we have discovered answers directly to Kant’s Challenge, and can see that the dynamic of our system clearly expresses a directional sequence, visible looking backwards. We must be wary of drawing teleological conclusions about a greater whole, a point clearly anticipated by Kant. We have a devastating photo finish argument against Darwinian accounts of the descent of man, and its application to history. We can rescue the idea of progress from its current demise, but taken as ‘eonic progression’ distinguished from ideologies of progress. The demonstration of non-random ‘evolution’ in history constitutes the long sought instance of something in the realm of purposive macroevolution, and enforces a reality check on Darwinian assumptions. Overall, we see an actual instance of historical emergence entirely unrelated to the process of natural selection. Whatever our views of evolution in deep time, history itself provides the only final answer to our perplexities over the evolution of man, and we can find very close to home a resolution of the difficulties. If we head west across Kansas, we suddenly say, “Look, the Rockies”. In the same way we can form an ‘image’ of an historical whole, without complete knowledge of the details. The interior evidence of this system adds up to brimming, but finally leaves us confounded. But the number of paradoxes the eonic map clarifies, without fully explaining, is so great that we know we are on the right track, notwithstanding the brevity of our eonic sequence. The facts of history confront us with something strange, and deep. |
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