|
Our short tour of the eonic effect is complete and we
have discovered a truly spectacular, but subtle structure behind world history.
That the result should reveal, not laws of history, but a play on the
determinations of free action as self-consciousness, as if a dynamic of
oscillations of degrees of freedom, is an altogether elegant solution given to
us by nature to the search for a science of history. In a descant on a Kantian
theme we confront a contradiction: there must a science of history, and, there
cannot be such a science. Deftly, in a prodigious display of global action,
nature resolves the paradox in the evidence we have found for the eonic
sequence. And in the process we have found the close connection of this to the
enigma of evolution. It is strange, at first, to consider that history and
evolution could show a connection. Indeed, we have gone further to consider that
evolution reaches into our present, and future, and yet, armed with our new type
of model, this consideration allows us to carefully buffer our assertions about
evolution from those about the free activity that constitutes the real core of
the historical chronicle. We are left with a new answer to the question of the
meaning of evolution. The persistence of Darwinian thinking lies in the
impossibility of imagining how evolution could really occur. But the eonic
effect shows us just how easy it is to miss the process, miss it altogether,
without even suspecting how the seemingly impossible is accomplished in short
bursts of directed action, able to leapfrog and play hopscotch on the surface of
planet.
The
biologist Dobzhansky made the well-known statement that nothing makes sense
except in the light of evolution. The problem with that was that nothing quite
made sense in terms of natural selection, and now we see why. We can extend this
statement to the assertion that nothing in history makes sense except in the
light of ‘eonic evolution’, in the evidence of the eonic effect. And this
statement forces us to revisit the question of the descent of man with a strong
suspicion we have found the missing clue to how the earlier emergence of man
might have taken place. If we find discrepancies of periodization suggesting
changes of direction, with creative flowerings in the most complex aspects of
culture, from art to religion, then we can legitimately suspect that some
earlier process resembling the eonic effect is at work, able to drive species
level changes in ten thousand intervals. More we cannot safely conclude, save to
enforce a similar caution on the presumptions of Darwinists, now seen to hold a
very weak hand in their speculations turned dogma.
Whatever
the limits of our description, a task to whose further elaboration we should
promptly adjourn, for we are at the beginning and not the end of our subject,
the pattern we have discovered shows the highest degree of coherence, and this
independently of the ‘facts of the case’, the immense subhistories, we have
deliberately stylized, of each sector our global pattern. We
can proceed to initiate an expansion of our outline into an historical
chronicle, mindful that our approach, while making no claim to be beyond
ideological assumptions, can nonetheless catalog all that can be imagined. The
result is not a 'theory' of evolution, for it is probably true to say that we
never see the dynamic directly, but an 'evolutionary map' whose correct use lies
in the lineage of our own 'action scripts' arising in the diffusion field of the
transitions in our immediate past. To the presumed objectivity of the scientist
observing evolution, our model gobbles up the ‘action sequence of the
Scientific Revolution’ and makes it an eonic emergent in the very evolution in
question. Bringing evolution into the present in this fashion shows at once the
clumsy generation of Social Darwinist ideology to which current Darwinism is
condemned without relief. This 'evolution' is to be distinguished by what
represents it, the 'self-evolution' as free action that we have designated as
'history' in the braiding of these double aspects of one eonic sequence. This is
a perfectly valid, and non-genetic, definition of the term 'evolution'. The
further advantage of this approach is that 'free action' is quarantined from
'theory interacting with the present of action', with its concomittant Oedipus
Effects. Thus, even as we have brought evolution into the present we have
placed it out or range, for our proper business is not ‘evolution’ but to
fulfill the emergent processes that are amplifications of our prior stream
history.
We
tend to displace 'evolution' into the distant past, but our analysis brings it
into the present and future, even as it separates this from the particulars of
realization that constitute our distinction of 'system action' and 'free
action'. It is important to note this fact, since we are proceeding through a
thicket of ideological questions whose mediation requires correct use of our
eonic model. But the account is buffered from even the author's ideological
viewpoint by the way each interpretation is forced to speak the language of the
'eonic emergents' of the modern (or other) transitions and these constitute
complex zoom targets that enforce a discipline of multiple perspectives. By
invoking a 'transition', we avoid the treacherous description of an unseen
dynamic and indirectly summon up a 'dialectic' of, e.g. all the interpretations
of the Scientific Revolution, seventeenth century sources of liberalism, or the
various Enlightenments, French, English, German, etc,... Any one dimensional
line of interpretation will immediately produce a tangential 'modernist
realization', all to the good, but almost always short of the comprehensive
shotgun spectrum by which the eonic sequence establishes its progression beyond
reversal against antiquity. In this sense our modern transition truly produces a
New Age.
There
is an irony to eonic history, and its modern transition: it starts 'debriefing'
its great ancestor, the universal history of the Old Testament. The first order
of business is rapid religious change, the Protestant Reformation, and one of
its side effects is the rapid emergence of Biblical Criticism. But as we have
seen our eonic analysis by stripping the Old Testament of its mythological props
leaves in place a distinctively new perspective on what constitutes its core
thematic, and we can, to the consternation of religious traditionalists, produce
a superior secular upgrade to what is manifestly the Bible's primitive yet
beguiling 'eonic history'. This great text might finally come into its own as a
secular document. Suddenly the account of divine revelation has turned into an
eloquent testimony to man's evolution, and more directly the 'eonic evolution of
religion', a complex subject we have not fully unraveled. Our account gives a
powerful place to the history described in the Old Testament, but the nature of
our model produces something different, and shows us the two levels on which to
take this history. The mythological rendering of what we see is 'eonic history'
constitutes the aspect of 'free action' giving expression to the system action
of the eonic sequence, which must be in part reconstructed via archaeology, and
cross comparison with the synchronous transitions, such as the Axial Greek, that
it resembles.
Our
prime objective was to demonstrate a non-random pattern, and this we have
achieved. Its correct interpretation is second task. A broad general
interpretation is relatively easy. A comprehensive description is a considerable
undertaking. And through all of this we have produced a powerful challenge to
standard accounts of the descent of man, albeit as an empirical pattern, and a
theory of the evidence for that. We never 'see' evolution, we only see a
coherent phenomenon taken together over millennia, expressed through human
activity, and we only interact with and execute the 'action scripts' and eonic
emergents that emerge from the transitions in the eonic sequence. The
result can only be called 'evolution', and this is counterpointed by its
emergent embedded history rising to overtake the eonic sequence itself.
|
|