The eonic effect is unsettling. All the major advances in civilization, without exception, seem to be system generated. And we seem to have left out the major part of history! Not at all! It is the mideonic periods that are crucial to the whole question of development. Real history has barely started if at all, and we only see the early flounderings of beginners at the game of civilization. Every step comes hard, and pathologies of civilization proceed apace, a good example being the slow but steady cancer of slavery, which reaches its endgame in the era of the Roman empire.

It is true that the eonic sequence seems to monopolize the development of civilization. But, and this is the point, there is nothing inevitable about it. It nature spawns a set of tools, then we should use them. Not always so simple.

Greek Tragedy Who can write a Greek tragedy to match Sophocles! And Greek Tragedy is a clear eonic emergent. Its fall-off is almost immediate, after –400. The genre seems to die out (although hundreds were composed that we have forgotten). Please recall our statements about objectivity and pattern immersion. We can barely describe what a ‘tragedy’ is as an art-form, and no agreed on definition exists. And we can produce such an artifact on demand due to its elusive difficulty. As a final piece of almost spooky evidence, we may note that the genre of tragedy essentially sinks without a trace until it is reborn-when? In the core period of the modern transition, again with evanescent results once again. So, our eonic system can spawn tragic art on schedule, and what a schedule, at millennial intervals. And yet can cannot even fully grasp this phenomenon. So much for historical theory.  In any case, note that you are free at time to contradict this pattern by fulfilling its potential. As man’s consciousness develops he should begin to ‘falsify’ the eonic pattern (assuming it has a future) by filling in the mideonic periods with self-generated social productions at the peak levels seen in the eonic sequence.

Note how the eonic sequence is not about determinism, but the potential to act. The system generates a higher degree of freedom, but not that freedom itself, since this can only come from individuals. It is here that ‘freedom outside the eonic system’ takes its meaning. We have essentially completed our introduction to the basic ideas, but need one last restatement of the eonic effect, this time focusing on the complement to our transitions, the oikoumenes they create. And this leads us naturally into the question of the ‘mideonic periods’, where the center of gravity of history lies. We will attempt below to rewrite our eonic system as an ‘evolution of freedom’.

Related to this is the mirror image idea to that of a ‘transition’, an oikoumene. The eonic effect is not about civilizations, but the way they are generated, or regenerated. As we studied our sequence we found a definite series of properties that unlock its riddle. The first, as we have seen, is that of sequence and its transitions, and then of parallelism. And then the frontier effect. Finally we can consider what we can call ‘sequential dependency’, which is related to diffusion, and to the way the transitions create a high level of culture that tends to create ‘sequential dependency’ in its descendants creating oikoumenes. The question of these transitions can be restated in terms of transitions and oikoumenes. It is very difficult to transcend this factor of sequential dependency since any attempt to do so might backfire and degrade the eonic sequence from its peak potential. We should hardly wish to do so. We are sequentially dependent on the eonic history of science. We should therefore wish to do science, not react against our sequential dependency to its system generated momentum. In general, each of our transitions creates, if not a new civilization, then a field of diffusion, or oikoumene.

Transition and oikoumene We can begin to see what our system is up to. Instead of evolving civilizations, we see a series of transitions like time-slices of particular civilizations generating new oikoumenes in their wake.

 Fields of diffusion Each stage of our sequence creates a plateau from which diffusion occurs. The cultures in these fields show a kind of sequential dependency. In many ways the breakthrough to higher civilization at TP1 is unique, to the best of our knowledge, and all subsequent civilizations show a ‘sequential dependency’ due to diffusion from these sources. This does not preempt other independent cultural evolution, but which is likely to be sluggish. This pertains to large-scale civilizational constructs, viz. the onset of State formations. It does not follow that smaller scale anticipations of the future as high culture did not exist very early in other places. But we never hear of them! Our eonic sequence is really about global integration, and pumped diffusion.

Another property is the acorn, or frontier, effect: our sequence never steps twice in the same place, but always in an adjacent area just at the fringes of its previous expansion. Notice the way that Egypt and the Mesopotamian field don’t enter the Axial Age list of areas of transition. A tiny corner of Canaan in between the two takes off and produces a new tradition of religious culture. The Greeks are just at the fringes of the core area of higher civilization.  Another spectacular case of the frontier effect is the rise of modernity at the boundary of the Roman Empire. In each case the transitional eras generate oikoumenes, and at the next stage, just at the fringes, the sequence resumes its action. We think this a ‘European’ phenomenon, but that is misleading. We can see already that it is misleading to speak of ‘Western Civilization’.

The frontier effect A key property of our eonic pattern is the ‘acorn or frontier effect’. Note that something global is occurring starting in a series of local areas. But the sequence restarts in a new place each time, like an acorn, just at the frontier of its predecessor. The world of Canaan, spawning ‘Israel’, does not look like a frontier now, but in the era of the mythical Abraham it certainly was, and we even have a ‘pioneer’ story about his leaving the city of Ur in a prime diffusion source, the world of prior Sumer.  Greece and Rome in the Axial period were definitely still frontier areas, relative to the by then ancient world of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Each of our transitions creates a hotspot, then expands to create a new civilization, better, oikoumene. Cultural acorns sprout in this field, and then at the next cycle one of them becomes a new transition. Note how our sequence is generating ‘evolution in the large’ via local hotspots, ‘short term evolution in the small’. We must study the diffusion fields of our turning points.

This property makes complete sense. If we restart over too far away, the sequence can’t continue. But if we are too close, the momentum of the earlier stage will overwhelm advance or make novelty abortive.

As we pursue our eonic riddle we see that its effects transcend the particulars of individual civilizations. We need to consider a new fundamental unit of analysis, beyond the idea of civilization, in a challenge to Toynbee and Spengler. We see that the key to the whole pattern is the way that our transitions create a series of oikoumenes, perhaps overlapping. Basically the perception of transitions is paired with the formations they generate: a series of cultural diffusion zones that spread out from the source. This reflects the reality better because it reflects what we always actually see, a series of cultural layers superimposed, overlapping, or mixing elements from different sources. And a civilization is a territorial entity, perhaps well-defined thus, but the development overall of the whole system proceeds by the flow of information which is not so geographically bound. This point is essential, since the Axial Age, as with the case of the account of Israel, produces its effect with a series of geographical displacements, the result being a literary document, well able to travel beyond cultural boundaries. The same is true of Buddhism, which almost seems to extract the essence of Hinduism, and create a universal transcultural vehicle.

The unit of analysis We notice something strange. Development is occurring over a long interval, longer than the individual civilization. Thus, we have a problem with the use of the term ‘civilization’ in the first case, the ‘birth of civilization’. The eonic effect is transparent, and follows the contours of mainline of development in the emergence of civilization, and at the same time demonstrates the relationships of all civilizations to each other. It is therefore at a higher level than the ‘evolution of civilization’ (whatever that is). Note the singular and plural usage of the term ‘civilization’. We might be better to speak of one World Civilization. World historians, such as Toynbee, tend to think in terms of civilizations as self-contained dynamic units, while anthropologists in terms of cultures evolving in linear fashion. Toynbee posits some very dubious structure for these civilizations. The cultures of the anthropologists are temporal streams proceeding more or less as static kaleidoscopes from the Paleolithic. The only points of evolution are precisely where they cross the eonic effect. We are not really looking at the evolution of civilizations, but of the stepping stone intervals when the eonic sequence finds a civilization in its mainline.

We have a complicated interrelationship of synchronous parallelism visible in the Axial period and the successive transitions of the eonic sequence. We have seen both a sequence in time and a process of parallel emergence in synchronous times. Thus, we notice that our sequence splits in a mysterious synchrony, showing a truly global system at work as our turning points perform a spectrum distribution into parallel streams, as seen already in the Axial Age. How this works we don’t know, but the result is clear, and all of a sudden we see why the Axial Age puzzles us. Our sequence now looks like this, with eight hotspots:

The rise of civilization: Sumer, Egypt

The ‘Axial’ phase: Greece/Rome, Middle East (? Canaan), India, China

The rise of the modern: sector of Europe

Note, however, that the modern transition fails to show this synchronous aspect.  There is an obvious reason for this: as our system globalizes, several transitions in parallel would produce collisions, and the creation of a global oikoumene, for the first time, proceeds better from a single source, if that can universalize beyond its boundaries as soon as possible. A closer look will show a miniature synchronous effect as several different realizations of modernity appear in parallel. Compare France, Germany, Netherlands, England, North America. Our system spawns a whole series of trials, almost like a fail-safe (compare the French and American Revolutions!).

We see that the synchronous parallelism of the Axial period shows us what is happening in Egypt and Sumer: Note the way they show transitions in parallel, just as with the Axial Age. It is not easy to reconcile these two properties of synchrony and sequence until we study the effects of diffusion. If we look at the effect of TP1 we see the way that diffusion proceeds across Eurasia and a whole series of ‘civilizations’ appear in its wake, in times proportional to distance, from the European field to China. In every case we find that the Sumerian/Egyptian diffusion fields is the key influence. This should not neglect the prior cases of just this principle, and the exact application of this to the Eurasian cultures prior to TP1 is lost to us, as yet.

TP1: We need to proceed with caution at the beginning of our incomplete sequence. There may be data that is missing. Why aren’t India and China part of this transformation, as in the Axial Age? We can easily see the probable reason why: as our sequence develops its synchronous aspect also expands reaching a full Eurasian compass only later. Thus Egypt is the first synchronous, frontier effect case in our series. At this stage India and China are apparently not ready and don’t respond. However, these statements apply only to the higher development of organized state infrastructure, on the way toward larger and larger, finally global, integrations. It is certainly possible that very advanced cultural elements exist outside this rising eonic sequence, a confusing point at first. Something like proto-Buddhism/Hinduism probably existed very early and outside the later eonic sequence. There is no contradiction, although this would seem odd at first. The answer is that we can’t complete the argument without more detailed data starting at the beginning of the Neolithic. Then we would see more clearly what we already suspect, a very advanced kind of Neolithic religious/pre-state culture with its own transitions and oikoumenes. We should note that Lao Tse in effect protests the effect of the invention of writing! Very strong verbal traditions not based on writing clearly existed from very early times. Unfortunately the data we have clearly shows the passing away of such traditions as the new technology of writing starts to sweep the field. We have obviously lost a great deal of data from the Neolithic on this score.
Finally, we should note that there are two levels to our pattern, and that civilizations can arise in the diffusion fields of our sequence that have little or no relation to the eonic sequence.

Now we understand our turning points, and especially the first turning point, it is not a question of the individual civilizations. What we mean by the ‘birth of civilization’ is really the first of our turning points, a kind of phasing interval like the ‘Axial’ interval. This is not really the ‘birth’, but the crossing of a threshold. We should note that five thousand years separate the onset of the Neolithic, the ‘birth of civilization’, so-called, and that a similar interval separates that from the rise of the modern period.

A frequency hypothesis The Neolithic period, and the discovery of agriculture, probably had a slow period of anticipatory build up of several millennia or more (it is possible the primordial gist of farming stretches backward far into the Paleolithic), but we see the main surge of a distinctly new period in man’s history in the period after ca. –8000, in the Middle East. That’s the advantage of our method, relative transforms. We don’t need to commit on absolute origins. There is considerable debate over the possibility of multiple independent discoveries of agriculture, but, whatever the case (and we won’t speculate), the cultural changes accompanying the onset of the Neolithic in the Middle East soon overwhelm the rest and this produces the mainline emergence ‘village to civilization’ that climaxes in the first great civilizations in Sumer and Egypt, ca. –3000. There is a difference between a new technology, agriculture, or industrial production, and the cultural transition that integrates it. Later we will distinguish technosequence, econosequence, and eonic sequence, to separate out the three (or more) component streams that often blend or diverge.

We are suspicious, then, that we have only one half of our data. Further we notice a rough interval of about 2400 years. So we recall our basic question, does world history show signs of general sequence? What we seem to have is an intermittent sequence going back to the beginning of the Neolithic:

Onset of Neolithic, ca. –8000 ?? where?

Maybe something ca. 5500, halfway through,??? Where?

The rise of civilization, ca. –3000

The Axial Age, ca. –600

Onset of modern period, ca. 1800.

As to the ‘where?’ we could backtrack with our acorn property and ask what frontier area would precede the Sumer phase at step three. A good candidate is the highland area north of Sumer in the sixth millennium, to the north. And before that? But we can see that our system can jump quite severely and we can draw no further conclusions without data.

Invisible transitions We have just produced one of the most cogent, and devastating, criticisms of Darwinism as we ourselves start having a hurricane argument problem. We can see, for example, a clear transition in the case of Israel in its core Axial phase. This is possible only due to the influence of writing. Now backtrack to the Neolithic period, ca. –5500, thence to the Paleolithic. We can make no statements about ‘evolution’ in the absence of data about the ‘when and where’ of any now invisible transitions  in these primordial periods. We are simply out of luck. Imagine if the emergence of Israel had not been put in writing. Some future archaeologist would at best be able to detect some curious Israelite influences in the stone work of medieval cathedrals or other mideonic diffusion (which is on a far more detectable scale), but would be unable to trace the relative transform effect of the Israelite transition, which he might not even see. We could hardly suspect the relationship of religious artifacts in Europe to events in Canaan a millennium or more earlier.

So, the Neolithic looks to be part of our pattern. But we must concentrate solely on what we have and not extrapolate. We can distinguish a hypothesis about this larger sequence, from the ‘eonic effect’, which is the last three, or even two, steps. Remarkably this fragment is enough and has a very packed interior structure.

We must deal with ‘relative beginnings’, rather than absolute ones. The ‘birth of civilization’ in quotation marks in Sumer and Egypt is therefore a rapid transition that reaches a climax in the centuries clustered around –3000. After that a kind of stabilization arises, as a new type of cultural life comes into being to define a new era in world history. This is the first of our ‘mideonic’ periods, i.e. medieval in some sense not necessarily the same as the ‘Middle Ages’ we already know.

We use the term ‘mideonic’ to denote something like ‘medieval’ but applied to the whole period in between our turning points.

Mideonic slowdown One of the obvious facts of world history is the way mideonic periods settle into equilibrium, and these two worlds of later Egypt and post-Sumer with its derivatives remain relatively the same for over two millennia. We can see it in the tradition of cuneiform, which creates a tradition that endures until the Assyrians. The point is especially clear in Egypt, which is essentially fixed in place by –2500, with very little fundamental change thereafter. It never surpasses its original peak. The Pyramid Age is a distant memory. Century after century the basic framework remains the same. In Sumer what we see is a similar situation, despite technical advances, even though the ‘torch holder’ changes, as the system spawned reveals a moving center of gravity, Sumer yielding to Akkad (not unlike the later Greeks yielding to the Romans). We need something more general than a civilization in this, and other cases. We have a transition in sequence, Sumerian, and a diffusion field from that source. This approach will clarify modernity, which is not the rise of the West, but a source transition and a diffusion field, now in the throes of globalization. Explicit instruments of cultural integration begin to appear after TP2, but the earlier stages drift into empire.

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