This structuring greatly simplifies the study of world history, if used with care, for it matches the natural contours of the ‘law of historical action’ itself. Inside the V-cone virtually the whole process of civilization falls into place. From there one proceeds to outline the periodized fields of study into generative eras, and their sequential dependencies, and the confusing study of diffusion.

We are inside evolution. That is, we are downfield in relation to an evolutionary episode, and we construct our future in relation to the processes of eonic emergence that seed new history. We can summon up a distinction of ‘data and model’, ‘three folders and folder 4’, to remember that our collection of evolutionary data is different from theory-formation, that ‘theories of evolution’ are themselves emergentist and are evolving in parallel with what they are trying to explain, not theories at all in the sense of the Newtonian granddaddy theory of ‘timeless laws’ of massive cosmological bodies, or of external privileged objective observers.

We have insufficient data for a complete statement of theory, but we do see civilizational evolution in relation to the eonic sequence we have indicated. Any historical statement as theory about ‘evolution’ will start to generate its own future. Explanation will demand a theory about the temporal evolution of these theories. We see that our theories of evolution are indirectly responsive to the French Revolution, in reverse images. In fact the history of science is directly imprinted by transition, and even shows strong structure near the divide period, as the world of models passes from Newtonian to ur-Quantum Mechanics in the great era of Lagrange and others. And yet the models of deterministic systems are barely getting underway toward a nineteenth century flourish. Our folder 4 is evolving along with our system, and is really a series of ‘free action inputs’ to the system itself. And your theories will be eonic emergents, no theories at all, since they all violate a mysterious level-hierarchy and will prove to be ‘free action scripts’ promoting or staying the process of transitional emergence. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this if it is honest, and does not claim the rubric of ‘science’ in a round of three card Monte proposed by Darwinism. The issue of science is that of sticking to facts. Darwinism wants to be a causal theory behind a statistical theory, that is a decision procedure about action and the ethics of action, and very dangerous action at that, survival of the fittest, an impostor in the realm of social change. It is the fallacy pointed to in the posing of theories, thought true at all times. Our approach answers to this. Instead of a complete theory of eonic evolution, we have ‘free action scripts’ containing the issues and emergents of the modern phase. There can be no generalization true at all times that we know of, and therefore the very basis of theory is set aside. We start, Looking Backward, with ‘Folder 4’, like a fourth turning point, free action, creating a new stream against the past set. This might be swamped by the sequence or be a theory of history, etc,… 

Folder 4 … We have made a clear distinction of ‘three folders’ study, as the creation of an empirical map of ‘eonic evolution’ (narrative world history), and the gesture of ‘opening Folder 4’, creating a theory of the evidence, a quite different activity, on the basis of unmistakable evidence of dynamical structure. A theory will start to change its own future. A map is a ‘zoom level’ device to guide action, based on assessments of detail and descriptive contour. With this map we start ‘downfield new-aging’, constructivist modernism, here claimed to be sequentially dependent to a high degree on the indicated phase period, etc,… That is all we can manage with the eonic effect, at first, for the clock starts ticking on theories of the pattern. The first mistake would be to make a theory of modernism apply to the whole, when the clear indication of the eonic sequence is the relative isolation of different worlds.

This peculiar distinction arises from our ‘reverse end run’, in the sense of the American game, around the two forms of ‘historicism’, or the general moving toward historical or evolutionary law, and the general defeated in theory by the move towards the concrete, and the unique. While our mood might tend toward the latter, long historical perspective reopens our perspective on the existence of a general historical ‘law’. But consideration shows that this ‘generalization’ reveals only an incomplete shard of frequency, and that this might in turn be only a unique evolutionary realization of civilization. We approach this new perspective until we reverse in the opposite direction toward the realization of our free action. We are left with a system of periodicity that transcends yet cradles the unique t-streams of living and vibrant culture and proceeds uphill toward a new direction, that we infer as integration, but whose endstate remains unclear, an ambiguous in relation to our own intermediate free action.

We see the difficulty of posing as meta-observers looking backward formulating theories of evolution. The sources are at a higher level of potential. Objectivity, in the formulation of theory, is a difficult requirement, for we cannot easily produce a theory explaining the modern transformation at a higher level than its highest manifestations. Nor can we find relief in the pose of value-neutrality, although this is a valid gesture. The problem of value-neutrality is that it must be value-free, a requirement the inventors of the notion failed completely to fulfill, although the root idea is of great importance. Most statements of social mechanics are derivative subsets of the rich, almost mysterious, seminal Enlightenment, itself a mere ‘patch’ in the greater field of the transition. This gave birth to positivism but is not the same thing. Indeed, most social thought as it emerges in the nineteenth century after the period of the Enlightenment is hard-pressed to not be swept up in the tide of dialectical proliferation that so obviously accelerates in the generation of the divide.

It is useful to be brief, for the utility of this approach is that it chauffeurs one back to the activities of specialized investigation as soon as possible. Our ‘zoom level gateway’ structure can expand at any point, and yet our eonic pattern will remain invariant. We can collect eonic data on demand and add evidence until the printer protests. The point is to grasp the relations of phase and diffusion or sequential dependency. We are sequentially dependent on the ‘industrial revolution’, more or less obviously. The same is true of Shakespearean or Racinian tragedy, a fact evident from our inability to define the term ‘tragedy’, let alone write one. These relations are empirically rigorous, granting that the ‘fundamental unit of analysis’ hovers between a photograph of the problem and a full explanation. Note however that we can always, in principle, transcend this sequentiality. In practice, it is not so simple. As any modernization theorist would confess, the ‘fast sequence’ of eonic generation is hard to duplicate downfield as a repeatable sequence. But we should aspire to liberating the rising tide of free action surpassing TPX immersion.

Civilizations are only passing clouds, free action, the solidity of dynamical motion is the sequence of phase. We could never hope to stabilize a description, nor feel satisfied with the particular decisions about subtheories, whose alternation would not essentially change the basic pattern. The method is extremely powerful and could, at will, given time and occasion, lead to twelve Toynbean volumes plus twenty four more, and better done, because the method contains its own correctives, imposes no pattern of its own, and ‘hugs the facts’. The data in evidence for the overall pattern is almost an embarrassment of riches, and the sudden addition of new data from more and more and quite difficult specialties turns us into an evidentiary Midas, or the Man with the Million Pound Note: we often ‘understand’ without being able to explain anything, and get a loan against a future theory of ‘eonic causality’ from the clear systematic structure of the eonic effect in the widest range of culture. We can start, and move through the e-sequence, by looking backwards. Note the resemblance, unintentional and after-the-fact, to the Hegelian ‘looking backward’ and the relation to Kant’s challenge.