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

The Book

The Modern Transition

Finally we return to the rise of the modern, armed (at last!) with one of the missing pieces of the account, 'eonic jump diffusion'. That means simply that this 'primitive' (but fertile) backwater called Europe is one of the last untouched areas of the eonic sequence. This model here is 'now you see it, now you don't'. It explains the data but seems at times unintuitive to consider the problem always taken in terms of local factors, as a production of universal eonic sequence. The problem is seen as resolved in the sheer intensity of the modern breakthrough, and its timing. And also in its generation of the tell-tale rarity, democracy. 

The rise of the modern world, in the 'west', will generate an immense tension of Eurocentric unbalanced development, and the reaction at the end of the transition is powerfully visible in the wake of the phase, starting in the nineteenth century. 

The Reformation is really the first modern revolution, by any definition, for it is an armed insurrection against a political theocratic, transnational authority.

Note how the boundary created by the Reformation is porous, so to speak. Much confusion arises in trying to show that Catholic countries show advance in parallel with Protestant ones, trying to contradict Weber's well known thesis. That misses the point, and our model shows why. The only question is the abstract partition pumping the flow of novelty and diffusing process and information, and the whole advances in the differential morphing of the part. In any case, it is no accident that rapid advances appear behind the Protestant partition in Germany, England, Holland, mediated in France, and that modernism will prove a fait accompli by the nineteenth century. 

‘ET6,…’:

  From Reformation to Revolution

In the great roll of time and civilization the great advances of antiquity have surged forward, generating the great traditions of China, India and the Occident. The slowing advance has seen in the Occident the coming and passing of Rome, and its force lap on the frontier of Europe, there to convey the fruits of the great streams originating in Sumer, recharged from Athens, Jerusalem, India and Rome, to reach a fertile soil. The emergence and spread of Christianity, Islam, and the quite different Buddhism  have reached the limits of their expansion, in the complex field of oikoumenes generated from the classical phase. Paul Kennedy, at the beginning of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, asks, “Why was it among the scattered and relatively unsophisticated people inhabiting the western parts of the Eurasian landmass that there occurred an unstoppable process of economic development and technological innovation which would steadily make it the commercial and military leader in world affairs?”[i]  We have already asked the same question of Archaic Greece , and the other transitional areas. And the answer, in part, has been to see the factor of periodization  beside the factor of eonic jump diffusion, the takeoff in the open fringe, if this can be balanced by good diffusion from the sources.

As of 1500, we see all the inheritor civilizations of the classical phase in a state of convergent stabilization. The field of civilization has reached the same point of ambiguous inertia evident in the centuries before –1200. We know what to expect. An untouched extension in the outer V-cone will abruptly experience takeoff. Find the areas adjacent to the last advance, inside but near the edge of the field of diffusion, sequential dependents as yet untouched by the eonic sequence . Suitable jump diffusion zones are few, Japan, Southeast Asia, Siberia, Europe? One ironic fact is that Europe, still out of the eonic sequence, has benefited from strong sequential dependency, and is really very ‘close’ to the great diffusion tracks of both Sumer and the classical phase. No field could be as ready as Japan, but it is far from the sequence center of gravity, and isolated. It is interesting and not surprising that Japan will suddenly and so easily move into the transitional network, even with the t-stream mismatch. Here the abstract nature of the relations of parallel emergence can help to see that Japan is virtually a core member of the phase onset, whether triggered by early diffusion in the sixteenth century, or with aspects of true parallel independent emergence. Once again we see that the phase change is not a ‘cultural’ evolution, but a temporal phase process.[ii]  But in the west we see a whole constellation of emerging t-stream candidates. Not the Italian city-states, but this field of emerging nation-states will undergo the expanded analogue of the Hellenic polis. A preponderance of diffusionist influences from the entire eonic sequence has reached the west, including, with the help of the Islamic transmission, the tradition and texts of the ancient beginning of science. The oikoumene integrators blending ‘ET5, Greece, Israel’ have done their work. We have the clue in hand, to which must be added another, on a provisional basis. A question, how achieve balanced development over a large area, Eurasian, finally global? Start from one source and spread outward? Yes and No. We see eonic jump diffusion, but overall we see something more. Some degree of overall balance must first be achieved. In the classical phase we see expansive parallelism and multiple sourcing, followed here by concentrative integration. We can conclude nothing safely of this except to consider that we see balancing in action. Our thesis propounds a system V-cone working as a whole. Here we see the need for a (big) small piece to move in relation to the whole big piece.

Finally, macrohistorical perspective and the incidents of earlier transitions should alert us to the ‘t-stream and e-sequence’ effect, that of the temporal stream of European history emerging from the Middle Ages , undergoing sudden change as it enters the phase period after 1500, or somewhat earlier, on this on the assumption of our frequency hypothesis. We finally have the basis for a new kind of explanation for the sudden rise of the west, twenty-four hundred years after the previous era of phase. Generate the new global oikoumene from the available jump diffusion zone of Western Europe. Proponents of Western Civilization will wonder at this. But this is our fundamental unit in action. A three hundred year kludge blasts open a gateway to a new oikoumene generation. After 1500 the system is opening outward and intensifying inward, in the unbalanced ‘cultural evolution ’ proceeding against intractability from a local source. And a new global culture is coming into existence even as the prime cultural acceleration is thus relatively localized. The effect can be understood by considering what would happen if the system now repeated its previous bout of parallel and separate development. It would waste itself in collision. In any case, the period of phase begins on schedule, in one area, relative to the global whole, rather than in multiple parallel areas, as in the classical period.

European history, in many ways, would seem a mystery. Why did it take so long for it to enter the civilizational nexus? It was always relatively close to the great centers of advance, and yet remained relatively static, once reaching a Neolithic plateau, until its ‘sequential’ entry in the period of the Roman Empire into the field of the V-cone. China, much further away, charged at ‘ET5,...’, entering the V-cone as a generator of an entire great tradition. Already in the era of Egypt we see mysterious stirrings of high barbarism that show rational and religious activity at a high level based on solid foundations in the diffusion of the first Neolithic that reaches Europe and stops, even as the Middle Eastern sources and centers move quickly to higher plateaus. Two great transformations, ‘ET4,…ET5,…’ come and go without triggering the passage to higher civil integration via a transitional sourcing. But it receives the great lessons of the ancients in a great vehicle of sequential generation, medieval Catholicism, abetted by the contributions of the Islamic world. This ‘delay’ would seem difficult to understand only because we assume arbitrary evolution of local cultural characters induces the transformation to come. But now we see why it stirs, and takes off; it has waited its turn, as it were, as the stepping approach of jump diffusion moves in its Mesopotamian circle, and then fills the Mediterranean, and prepares the field. Thus, only with the long period of this sequential dependency , first under the Romans, then with its enrichment from the Judeao-islamzation of the ‘ET5’ generative era is it able to respond in the next phase period. And when it does, it is especially ready. Finally, note that Europe has not seen a transitional era, while, the Middle East, Indian, and China have already done so, in a process that never repeats itself. They would seem crossed off the list of candidates. Innumerable other fringe areas would seem candidates, but their status is in reality less capable than we might think. Indeed we see a number of ambiguous signs across the Eurasian sphere. But our ‘e-sequence expansion’, that never backtracks, leaves Europe as virtually the only potential zone sufficiently prepared to respond. But the result has little to do with Europe, for the jump diffusion process partitions the environment and takes off behind a religious barrier. A strange fact, but consistent with the terms of discussion. There is hardly anything more to explain, apart from the nature of the eonic causality, and what exactly we are dealing with! We have completed our first task, the simple delineation of macrohistorical directional pattern. The point is that this explanation, although it explains nothing as to the greater causality, nonetheless warns us that perspective is essential, and from that viewpoint, a problem of analysis that is almost inconceivably complicated partakes finally of a simplicity. As we zoom in on the host of individual factors we will soon become lost if we forget that eonic jump diffusion is the an aspect of the perplexity.

‘ET6,…’: Eonic Jump Diffusion and the Rise of the West

From the first moments before dawn in the fifteenth century, we see the clear ‘jump-start’ effect in the generation of Machiavelli and the explosion of the Reformation. “The century of European history between 1460 to 1559 was a period of rapid, comprehensive change…Was the shift from old to new a shift medieval to modern? The answer is yes, with qualifications”[iii]  From this point onwards, the acceleration is pronounced and unflagging until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and generates an explosion of revolutionary turbulence, from which emerges the new industrial society we call ‘modern’. As in the ancient world, the first changes hug the proximity of the earlier age, visible as the (late) Italian Renaissance , and then appear in the outlying areas, moving in south/north direction. The clear appearance of focal intensity in a Northern band of Germany, France, Netherlands, England, is exactly to be expected, and passes immediately to the New World as a great extension of the effect. The overseas expansion and global connection, nationalism and new forms of warfare, the onset of early industrial transformation with a price revolution, a demographic surge, the scientific renewal, the first phases of social revolution, the Reformation as a religious evolutionary transform or ‘re-formation’, the crystallization of the early forms of a new tradition in the rapid appearance of national literatures climax in the passage from a first to a second stage in the seventeenth century. Here in many ways we see the character of the changes begin to reveal the results of their random stirrings in the beginnings of human direction to the transformation: the beginning of the Enlightenment, the real Scientific Revolution, and the generation of the new forms of economy, culture and economy that will initiate a new pattern of world history in the passage through the cauldron of revolution and industrialization.

The transformation clearly begins to show its truly new character from the middle of the seventeenth century, as if what came before were nothing more than the breaking of ground. The Reformation begins to yield to the Enlightenment, the age of Copernicus to the age of Newton, the forms of governance stir in the English Revolution to generate the forms of the new liberalism, with a ‘socialism’ hiding behind it, and quite underpowered. The final piece of the new world is rapidly taking form before the onset of industrialism in an earthquake of democratic revolution, globalization, and economic expansion.

“ ‘We are at the dawn of a new era!’ exclaimed Luther  more prophetically than he himself imagined… ‘Rarely is a work undertaken out of wisdom and precaution,’ he declared, ‘but everything is undertaken out of ignorance.’ The man who initiates creative action can seldom know where his steps will lead him…But if Luther was a prime mover, the forces that soon set all Europe in motion were stronger than any single man.’ ” [iv] These statements are an essential reminder that eonic determination is only a state of free action in a fashion of mysterious creativity, this lest we assume some ‘eonic determinism’ as the unfolding of a blueprint of modernity. The forces setting the rest in motion, set men in motion, who wager their first efforts against eonic momentum. This is the chaotic drama of eonic determination and free action in a braiding that is difficult to untangle, but whose implications are clear from the creative search for the forms of a new order. Not since the days of Athens has the world seen democracy. And yet within a century and a half during this transition it reemerges in a tremendous wave of equalization. Notwithstanding the suggestion of Weber’s great thesis on Protestantism and the capitalist transformation of econosequence, capitalism has no absolute claim on the rise of the modern. The point can be seen in the issue of slavery which starts to make a comeback in the fringe zones. We see a race against time, as it were, to ‘initialize’ the whole outcome. We see Luther, but already factor out Munzer and the German social Revolution. Soon Thomas More will speak, Copernicus rouse science from slumber, and we will see the figure of Hamlet answer to the fourth Richards.

Our account demonstrates a relationship of elements in eonic sequence, and then lapses into silence. To complete a theory, we must answer to how the discrete, if we explain its what, translates into acts of will.  Only a global account can explain the dispersed emergentist outcomes in a fuzzy evolutionary region. In fact, we can at least see there are distinct types of transitions. ‘ET5, Israel’ contracts nearly to zero, while ‘ET5, Greece’ passes into the unlimited field of ‘ET5++, Rome’. The modern field attempts to beat the odds in a hybrid. Weber’s insight remains cogent, beside Adam Smith and Marx. In any case the modern age could be as spiritual amidst the secular, as the previous was secular amidst the spiritual. Current efforts to court the aura of physics by demanding ‘materialistic’ theories of historical change simply beg the question, and sweep the basic issue under the rug, denouncing all other explanations as idealistic, or hoping that the historical motion of persons, cultures or systems will receive explanation if their ‘orbits’ are derivable from the transfer of differential equations to entities more complex than physical masses. But this approach never asks how the law of motion is translated into the motive of action. The assumption is that economic motive is materialistic while other motives are idealistic, in a confusion of puns, evidently. We are left, after our non-causal correlation of events with zones and periods, with this basic question still unresolved. But we do see the strange appearance nonetheless of an historical system the Israelites saw from a different angle. The balance of our evidence passes toward the threshold of ‘historical evolutionary system, type unknown’, but with the symptoms of self-organization on a global scale, in the ‘tick tick tick’ of our fundamental unit. Perhaps it’s a problem in optics. We see the rustling of the bushes always a step behind the mysterious sasquatch effect whose traces are the universal history in which we are still immersed. Out of the blue we see evidence for discrete sequence returning us at once to the hard discipline of mathematical enquiries, with no early answers to the most basic question. This basic question can be put in its most direct and challenging form, what effect, in a form of understanding relating the discrete and continuous, the hardware and the software, and these in relation to consciousness, illuminates the sudden ‘free action decisions’ of a Luther, or Copernicus, as a great transition is set in motion? The answer should be deserving of Archimedes, “give me where I can stand”.

We have given the confusions of the Great Year a wide berth, but it is interesting to relent for one thought from the (vexed) thesis of de Santillana and Von Duchend in Hamlet’s Mill. For it is unfathomable by what unconscious brilliance Shakespeare transforms the ancient Icelandic tale of Amlothi into the quintessentially modern Hamlet. For the deepest archetype of cycles lies buried in the myth of the Maelstrom as Amlothi’s Mill:

Tis said, sang Snaebjorn, that far off, off yonder mere, the Nine Maids stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern, they who in ages past ground Hamlet’s meal. The good chieftain furrows the hull’s lair with his ship’s peaked prow. Here the sea is called Amlothi’s Mill.[v]

Soon the idea of progress will be born. Once again, like the crocus in spring, the idea of tragedy comes first, flowers, and is gone.

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