World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
By  John Landon

The Book

Stream and Sequence
An Outline of World History
 

 The existence of a pattern of universal pattern seems controversial but the simple reason for the ambiguity lies in the scale of work required to 'see' anything. To say world history shows three great turning points is almost meaningless unless we have explored the whole range, and in sufficient detail. The sum of the specialized parts is not the same as the unified perception of the whole We must bring some means of understanding to the data, but we cannot do that using preconceived notions. But we see the eonic effect all at once, after some exploration, and then the rest converges quickly toward the detail. Note that this model is highly selective, but succeeds for that reason. For each transition zone is like a gateway to the crucial areas. Thus the 'middle ages' is clear at a glance once we see its context as 'in between' in the interval from ET5 to ET6. We get a feeling for the whole, and a clue to a rapid fire search for the relevant literature in each field. 

This section of the final appendix to World History and the Eonic Effect contains a general statement of the main findings and introduces the two basic concepts, 

1. eonic transitions
2. the fundamental unit of historical analysis

The first is the solution to the second. The fundamental unit of historical analysis is a phrase from Toynbee who attempted to posit the 'civilization' as the basic unit of analysis, but this won't work. It is too fluid. Civilization is the cultural content, not always with a clear geographical referent. The case of Israel, being an example. We adopt a unit based on the eonic sequence of relative phases visible as 'transitions' of intense and accelerated action. A good example is the period of the Greek Dark Ages and the Archaic. Another is the Old Testament period.  

The temporal stream intersects with eonic sequence in a series of phases. The differential structure of the transitions is relatively arbitrary, and essential

Looking back on the ever-expanding outline of history that archaeology and the human record present to our vision, we can isolate to observation an emerging pattern of two historical intervals or 'eonic eras', and the three transitions between them, visible as cycles of cultural and social innovation on a scale of millennia, roughly 2400 hundred years--emerging as a pattern in and of itself, and as the last visible aspect of an earlier structure originating in the Neolithic. It is the transitions themselves, as temporal intervals of localized and rapid cultural change, in their geographical focal areas, that are of first interest, for they constitute the prime generative sources, as periods, of the steps to higher cultural complexity we call 'civilization'. That the three periods indicated represent the three most fundamental, so-far visible, turning points, divides, or transitions, of the entire world system, as of -3000, is easily demonstrable by reference to the facts of known history, and represents the fundamental claim of this study, to be clear that we are only seeing a subset of a greater process in which the New World and the Neolithic show connections, but no conclusive relation, a very conservative assessment, since they appear to fit as well. The claim is also controversial and can simply be taken as a theoretical affirmation under examination. Historicist claims can become objects of belief, we ask no belief. The eonic effect is something you see all at once.

Once seen, it is convincing in itself. Our mode is not dogmatic, but advisory. One's position is 'downfield' with a theory relative to the last action of the eonic generation, assessing correct directed action. This theory will tend to be a 'free action script' relative  to the pattern's last action, e.g. a program of modernism. The selective nature of the pattern seems askew until it is considered that the potentiality of 'free action' is omnipresent relative to the patterning of free action. This means the pattern might be a record of 'octane performance', as relative mechanization, open to higher performance. We have passed the 'law of history' issue, our pattern can distinguish contrasts of 'lawful' and 'unique', 'forced' and 'free'. Like a thermostat, the interaction of system and event stream is intermittent and conveys no prejudice against the greater field of potential which the selection is attempting to reach. The play on different meanings of 'mechanical' is a characteristic of the pattern.

The pattern is a challenge to more simplistic views of historical evolution, and includes the evolution of evolutionism inside its historical statement. Any law of history, theory of cultural evolution, religious teleology, transcendental explanation, or political action script, or theory of economic determination, ought to explain this pattern if it claims superstitious or pseudo-scientific authority. Darwinist evolutionary selectionism fares poorly with this pattern. This basic pattern represents the eonic effect. It does not follow that world history is determined by these phases. Quite the contrary. The pattern shows no more than directionality emerging in relation to general free action. The second phase, ‘ET5, …’ with its spectacular global parallelism, gives us the basic proof that something far greater than local development or individual cultural evolution is occurring. Although our subject is the eonic effect and not Universal History, this pattern satisfies all our initial criteria for a structure of Universal History: it is an elusive, but not exotic, dynamic, and defaults to the obvious; it is on the scale of a driving force, and pertains directly to our most ordinary activities in the long and the short, yet remains in the background; it reconciles, or at least forces us to distinguish, determination and free action; its sequence, to be visible, must require a minimum of 4800, plus an extra three hundred years to posit the end of the second and the onset of a third period. It allows normal action in relation to its effect, without fatalism, although this, and the other points, require clarification. We will call the basic pattern, the Eonic Shard, as a reminder that our developmental sequence is clipped at the ‘relative beginning’ ‘ET4,…’, rendering all statements of general causality at most relative. This pattern is purely empirical and represents only a subset of what would constitute ‘Universal History’.

These phases generate (or re-transform) all the great civilizations, oikoumenes, and higher religions that arise after -3000, either by direct descent or by diffusion, possibly including, indirectly, those of the New World, although in this case, in the midst of an irresolvable controversy over diffusionism versus independent evolution, the evidence is insufficient to decide the issue, for the New World cultures might show evidence of the spawning of a new V-cone (see below, for ‘V-cone’). The New World instance might thrive better on our distinction of phase and ‘civilization’ for, as we look at the close ‘ET5’ correlation of the Mayan and Incan, but not Olmec, beginnings, we see a phase of generative culture, as free action, a cycle behind the Old World and with many of the elements of the ‘birth of civilization’ in a different mix occurring as a relative beginning under ‘exotic’ or local circumstances. But we need to come to a decision about the existence of diffusion from the Old World, something periodization cannot solve. As the New World case makes clear, the new V-cone springing from ‘ET4, Sumer,…’ rapidly swamps all others, leaving unclear the earlier period of the Neolithic and before, or indeed any primordial source of these V-cones. As our slight change of the use of the term ‘V-cone’ suggests, these cones can be subsets, the later of an earlier. The sources of Sumerian, and Egyptian, civilization remain ambiguous, yet we can reset our V-cone from the period ‘ET4’ in the middle East, with two sources. We can reset them again in many parallel instances during ‘ET5’.

In a perspective beyond ideas of ‘turning points’, we have moved toward this idea of a series of transitions whose successive transformations, showing eonic determination and free action, constitute an eonic sequence. Our discussion of the term ‘civilization’ has been to dislodge the idea from the status of ‘fundamental unit’ and return it to the qualitative domain. We have moved to adopt a different approach to a ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ than Toynbee’s ‘civilization’, based on a perception of phases and a reciprocity of eonic determination and free action, and passage to ‘sequential dependency’ as oikoumene creation in the post-transitional period. We can consider a frequency hypothesis and then look at a series of concepts designed to assist the study of the relevant periods, i.e. eonic jump diffusion, parallel interactive emergence, e-sequence and t-stream, etc,... We must retreat to a more generalized concept, the period (and finally the zone) of the emergence of relevant generations of history, remarkably found in these turning points, and look at them as transitional eras or phases, and build analysis around something we might call ‘net activity during phase’, and the eonic productions that emerge.

This approach solves the hopeless difficulty Toynbee had with the ‘civilization’ as entity of a ‘dynamical-organismic’ nature. But the frequency hypothesis remains up in the air as a partial glimpse or window on a greater process that shows no beginning and whose future equivocates our own free future. But the pattern itself shows just this ‘Zoroastrian snarl’ in the endless confusions over cycles, new ages, last ages, and eschatological futurism. Our frequency hypothesis is useful, for even if it fails, we can default to the obvious picture of the Table of Contents and Cheshire Cat cycles of the sequence of civilizations. It can dissolve like Alka Selzer and take cyclical nonsense with it leaving us an empirical map of emergent civilization with its mysterious clusters of fast advance. But the frequency hypothesis seems to work. Nature is operating at a higher level of abstraction than the civilization. Indeed, the case is vexed until we see the overall cyclical factor in man’s free action creation of ‘civilizations’ in a greater structure, a classic instance being the ‘Israelite cross-section’, whose first impetus is not a full blown civilization, but ‘ET5, Israel’, an eonic generator, around which a slew of cultures or civilizations is built, thus to be a tugboat for the two great religions of Christianity and Islam. ‘Net activity during phase’ is thus a completely valid account of the ‘eonic productions’, rather than civilizations, whose creative outcome is the generation of civilizational look-alikes, the great (occidental) religions.

The value and danger both of our frequency hypothesis is that we can see why certain periods stand out, without violating our (modernist) intuition that if we were actually present in the periods indicated, e.g. ‘ET5, Israel’, we would, day to day, see the ordinary flow of history. The danger is that we will in fact demote other periods as secondary. This is not a danger since this approach is precisely the corrective to such thinking. In fact, nonetheless, that is how we do take history, for each of our transitions generates ‘multicultural tension’ of the ‘part leading’ the greater whole, with a particular culture acting as generator. But this approach is quite different, for we see a dynamic attempting to reach the whole through the part. Again, we must be wary of claiming history is not homogenous. Perhaps it is not. But we must think it is.  The paradox disappears if take the hints the pattern itself shows as to the ‘transformations of consciousness’. High octane performance is merely correlated with pattern. There is no inherent reason that we could not recover the same high level of performance. We see our potential. It is like the record in the long jump. We are not inherently bound by it, but we tend to take it for granted, as an achievement in the past.

Another way to see the issue of homogeneity is to reflect on our distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness. The latter is potential at all times, but shows a stunning geo-temporal distribution in the classical period. It is useful, but misleading, to equate ‘self-consciousness’ with ‘creativity’, but we can see that creativity is potential at all times; it is rare, and seems to occur on cue in relation to our pattern. This leaves us with a perception of the difficulty of all our evolutionary explanations, for we could hardly expect our current knowledge to explain cycles of creative renewal over centuries.

We seem to be seeing an expanding sequence pumping diffusion. It is good to be wary of the chart of the eonic sequence. It grants no teleological conclusion, and is not a linear directionality, as the classical phase makes clear. Like a tangent to a circle, linear teleology, if real, would only hold good, if at all, in a brief launch window. Or conversely, cyclical directionality deviates, ETX++, from true linear directionality. The genetic algorithm also shows ‘directionality’ in the barest sense of ‘successive time-intervals’ by some combined ‘rule-statistics’. Our cycles or successive time-intervals might only show amplification of directionality—perhaps in the wrong direction! The ‘teleology spawned by free action’ shows eonic emergence, but is only mechanical relative to eonic ‘directionality’. Here the old Chinese fox, Lao Tse, may have had the deepest wisdom—‘that which does nothing, by which everything is done’.

The terminology, ‘ETX’, can be taken to be neutral, not evolutionist (labeled or ‘viconian’), with respect to the study of the characteristic transitions in their bare architecture, avoiding terms such as ‘axial’. The classical case is the only one where we see the full effect of ‘before, during, and after’ in the long term. In each of our transitional areas, in this classical case, there is a clear finer structure to these phases. The concept of transition is descriptive, with a suggestion of associated causality. There are other ways to analyze the overall pattern. At first our transitions seem too short, then they seem too long, then they seem to occur here, but then over there. One might think that the period from –1200 shows signs of the ‘real onset’ of a new era. But the last two centuries before –600 is the real ‘interrupt’. Note that the Old Testament reflects this ambivalence. A distant memory of an early Moses, and an earlier Abraham is tacked on to an account that rises closer to fact only after –900, sometime after the generation of Solomon. Again in the modern case, this ‘six hundred year version’ would extend naturally to the High Middle Ages when there is also evidence of slow take-off. The question remains open, but in each case the desire for ‘added continuity’ fails to grapple with the need for a model of cultural discontinuity and acceleration. Once this becomes conceivable, the idea of a transition, if anything, seems too long! The real work surges in less than two hundred years. The Greek transition is exceptionally fast, and barely visible till the eighth century. The modern case suggests the reality. The last few generations before 1800 seem to turn on a dime. But the fact remains that our idea of transition remains barely defined, fuzzy regions suddenly contracting around rapid advances that then expand outwards. The ‘interior dolmenization of values’ puts the analysis almost beyond our reach, for the quantitative measure of intervals reflects a qualitative emergentism isolated in source areas. And it is good to be wary of the different cases. The Roman fringe of Greece expands outwards, and produces a very mediocre field. The Judaic remains contracted, disappears as region, yet preserves a qualitative stance that will conflict and caution expansion. All we can do is study ‘input-output’ as it were against a clocking mechanism we suspect embedded in civilizational emergentism.

The Fundamental Unit of Historical Analysis

Our unit of historical analysis is the phase and the field of diffusion it creates. The term ‘civilization’ is poorly defined and serves badly as a basis of analysis, except to designate the content of social activity, for its instances, although structured loosely, are always ad-hoc, that is, the result of temporal choices and incidents, and its extent, duration, and character entirely fuzzy. What is the start of a civilization, its finish, its duration, does it have a beginning middle and an ending with interior structure, be it systematic, organismic, or dramatic? It is the phases that fret duration, resolve beginnings and endings, what arises across or in between what we may or may not care to call ‘civilization’, as constructive incidents freely chosen, yet empirically found to echo these phases. It is useful to bring a term ‘civilization’ into this context. But the scale of time involved shows they are as corporations to ‘economy’. These phases do nothing, but like a conductor in an orchestra—the analogy is dangerous—they organize sequence and ‘stepping’. These phases wedge new middles into the problem of beginning and ending, take over or render superfluous the dramatic metaphor, and fret the statistics of the temporal history like a sluice gate. Any barbarian with a sword can found a kingdom. Is this civilization? Our phases show their hand if we consider this barbarian with a sword before, during, and after a period of transition, and the sequence of transitions as a whole. Then again, a crowd with a constitution, set of laws, a prophet, or a religion, can create a peopledom. Is this democracy? We can watch this crowd before, during, and after a transition, or a sequence of transitions, until, in our own time, having looked back we attempt to discriminate our own free action from historical causality and thereby create a free future or expect a new transition. We can move to define the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’ in terms of an idea of ‘eonic evolution’ as the relationship of phases to their generated fields, rather than the more qualitative ‘civilization’. The appearance of these phases suggests an empirical frequency hypothesis, in a system of unknown source and continuation. This analysis makes a distinction between economic, technological, and eonic ‘sequences’, the former two continuous, the latter discontinuous. These phases can be referred to as ‘ET4, 5, 6’ with a suggestion, unclear, but strongly suggested, of earlier such phases.

The basic ideas are:

an emerging V-cone of diffusion in a state of expansion. Unfortunately we don’t quite see the source of this cone in the Neolithic, but we suspect it to show two stages beginning ca -8000. These V-cones are like Chinese boxes, the later in a former.

a sequence of transitional periods refreshing this expansion. Each turning point thus generates a subcone.

the relations of exterior outstanding culture as they encounter this rippling circle of diffusion.

the given distinction of eonic determination and free action as they alternate (in our approximation) between the transitional period and the middle or ‘mid-eonic’ period.

the templating of those cultures in the right zone and period during a transition

This sounds mysterious, but the basic idea is very simple. Point three, the distinction, to be defined, of t-stream and e-sequence, is essential, for it causes great confusion. The content of civilization is not all generated from its beginning point, but works in terms of the arrival of temporal streams of cultural tribes arriving at the fringe. The Egyptians did not prefigure the Iliad. The Greek t-stream brings its bardic tradition to the edge, and is transformed during zone and period into an element of civilization, one whose influence persists to this day, for reasons we often find puzzling. We see nature’s ingenious way of managing cultural evolution in a disparate field.

One of the difficulties with the idea of civilization, on top of our previous objections, as a fundamental theoretical unit in the fashion of Toynbee, is that it is appropriate to the earlier phases of history, the birth of civilization, and its failure to match the nature of the structures that begin to arise thereafter. The Buddhists, for example, attempt to exit or renounce civilization, and yet create one of a series of civilizations. The common denominator is the phase of eonic determination. The distinction, almost the mismatch, of free action and eonic determination is clear in this case. The Hebraic prophets are the critics of civilization, as observers of the Assyrians. And these ideas are inherently the socio-politics of our own time, for there is no law of civilization, while there certainly is the entailment to create a new concept, or new definition of civilization, to meet the growing global oikoumene. The fundamental unit of civilization then is not the next civilization, but the outstanding eonic productions of the latest phase of eonic sequence, which amounts to our reckoning with the diffusion generated from the rise of modernity in its grossly imbalanced western manifestation. In any case, our fundamental unit of civilization must apply equally to past and present, account for its own observer and his statement of the unit, and account for his interfering free action as no exception to the generalization. The problem is easily solved if we look at the process of oikoumene and diffusion in relation to a transition. The unit of definition applies as well to the ancient Egyptians as to the men, including ourselves, passing out of the ‘modern’ transition. And our ‘interference’ in the ‘law’ fulfills it, if we take to the task of modernization as free action in the wake of the modern transition, viz. the emergence of industrial civilization.

Our substitute fundamental should be, cycles of phase as eonic determination and mideonic sequential dependency as free action in a field of diffusion, and generating an oikoumene. The progeny then are eonic emergents and eonic productions. We must move to define all these terms in a clear manner. The products of this process can be states, universal empires, civilizations, civilization, Buddhist sanghas, Judaic networks, economic structures, etc,… The classical period of phase produced the Israelite and Upanishadic eonic determination and sequential dependency in the generation of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and Buddhism/Hinduism. This is quite disparate, which is appropriate, for we are not bound by our own creations on the grounds that they must follow historical laws. However we can create generative sources that engulf us. But this is a different issue. Similar statements could be made about political and economic structures, indeed religious and political structures blend together. In our modern case, the issue is not yet clear! We speak of Western civilization, but this is not useful.   

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