We come to the conclusion of our eonic analysis, and this leaves on the threshold of a new era of history, just after a third transition, and just getting under way. The mythology of New Ages and epochs is one of the most persistent confusions of human civilization. And yet we can produce a resolution of the question by considering the simple suggestion given by the eonic sequence. The endless attempts to posit a New Age beyond modernity struggle with the obvious perception that the modern transition is the only serious candidate for this status. The pattern of the eonic sequence is remarkable enough. But the uncovevering of the discrete freedom sequence is especially compelling because it shows how the emergence of freedom is bound up in a greater process of evolution, and that this reaches very close to home, encompassing our immediate present, and directly associated even with the revolutionary processes and episodes that broke the mechanized continuity of medievalism and issued forth a New Age of world civilization. Not only that, this evidence gives us one and the same ‘spiritual deduction’ of historical legitimacy as that claimed by the retrograde anti-modern proponents of traditional religious histories, such as that in the Old Testament.

The modern transition is fully the equivalent, and then some, of the period seen mythologically in such primitive fashion as the Age of Revelation, now seen by us as a particularly beautiful, but misinterpreted, part of the eonic sequence. Not only this, we can walk away with the Old Testament, revised as a ‘secular’ document of man’s historical transformation, and a most remarkable addition to our account. The modern transition is an enigmatic hybrid of the Greek and Judaic Axial periods, and its secular outcome is entirely appropriate, although its interpretation tends to be confused by the proponents of secularism themselves. In fact the distinction of ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ histories has broken down, even as we are able to play on both sides of the fence.

We have seeded our development of the eonic model with various Kantian thematics because this is one of the best ways to mediate the ‘spiritual/material’ dialectic, in our case in favor, no doubt, of an extended naturalism. There are various approaches that are equivalent, and useful, as long as they do not precipitate the chronic plague of metaphysical presumptions involved in ambitious spiritual theologies. An equal caution is required of excessively reductionist combinations of scientism. We need a new language of concepts to balance the foundations given by science, and the spectrum between the said to be obsolete Descartes and Spinoza, concluding with Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Marx, encompasses the fullest field of possibilitities for that new discourse, on a foundation of science, along with the all important idea of evolution, appearing we note again at the point of The Great Divide, and swiftly kidnapped by positivistic interpretations that have confused its meaning. There is no escape from the implications of modern philosophy through physicalism. A new and higher science that can embrace this new vision has not yet been achieved, and its first requirement is precisely that ‘science of metaphysics’ that Kant demanded as a prerequisite. The issue of secularism is not that of the sterile, and undecidable, debates between theists and atheists, but of the net effect of modern phenomenon, from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, at the point of the Great Divide. The place of future religion remains ambiguous, as it should be, since we are suddenly in our present, free to act, for better or worse, in any fashion.

The clear suggestion that the Protestant Reformation is the first stage of a sequence leading to the Enlightenment ought, even at this late date, to give pause to religious traditionalists who wish to defy the momentum of the eonic sequence.

Sixteenth century: Reformation, Copernican Revolution, German Revolution
Seventeenth century: Scientific Revolution, birth of Enlightenment, English Civil War, birth of liberalism
Eighteenth Century: Flowering of multiple Enlightenments, English, German, French, American. Industrial Revolution, French and American Revolutions
The Great Divide: the climactic conclusion of the modern transition
A New Age Begins The onset of a new era of world history rapidly shifting from its frontier jumpstart zone toward globalization
Five Centuries of Modernity Just as with the Axial Age where we saw an approximate three centuries of dynamic seeding, followed by two centuries of rapid realization and a heated flowering, so with the modern period we see the same two centuries after the Great Divide in a prolonged take-off. We must be wary of falling into the same slide of decline and chaotification that overtook the ancient world in the post-Axial period.

The amount of study required for this immensely complex transformation is immense, and yet we can suddenly see that the modern transition has an overall unity and coherence, operates holistically on multiple aspects of culture, and generates a clear metanarrative of evolutionary action. The seeming contradiction between slow continuous development from medievalism and rapid emergence in the discontinuous action of the eonic sequence disappears in our formulation.

The revolutionary struggles of modernity are suddenly seen to be part of our pattern, although we must, using our model, be careful to distinguish the incidents of revolution as human free activity from the larger system whose analysis does not quite fit the flawed and ideological theories of leftist revolution that appear in the modern transition. It seems paradoxical at first to bring the idea of evolution into the details of the modern transformation, but in fact our analysis shows the rightness of this, and the homogeneity of human evolution at all stages of man’s emergence, from the Paleolithic to the present. It is ironic that Darwinists tend to exempt history from their analysis, even as they provoke the confusions of Social Darwinism. Our insight has been that if we bring evolution into the present and future, but discipline the idea on two levels of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’, we distinguish the larger system of evolution from the fields of free action on which it operates and avoid the contradictions of the Oedipus Effect that are the curse of the incoherent Darwinian nonsense being inflicted egregiously on culture by incompetent biologists obsessed with the genetics of organisms.

Our strategy of using two levels for our analysis allows us to say this, to point to evolution, even as we separate the field of human action from the greater process that we have called the eonic (evolutionary) sequence. By comparison the hopeless crudity of Darwinian thinking cannot achieve this distinction. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of the data of the eonic effect and of our model is the way it shows ‘evolution’ to be more than some mysterious event in the distant past, one about which we are driven to mythologize. It is a living process that can operate across times and places, and seed time-slices of cultural streams. It is small wonder that the Axial Israelites, or rather their immediate successors, should have thought such an awesome process which they barely detected in their own place and time evidence of divine action. But we must graduate to a more intelligible account, all the while claiming the Old Testament to our own analysis as an early stage of eonic history. The action of the eonic sequence is directly visible, yet its source is unknown to us. We have shown the uncanny resemblance of this, using our eonic model, to the noumenal/phenomenal distinction elaborated by Kant. And this should indicate to us that facile exclamation of terms of divinity will only produce paradox. A similar caution is required of the grossly abused substitute metaphysics of natural selection proposed as the new universal myth of evolution.

In fact, we can see that the enjoinders to ethical action injected into history by the religious formations generated by the eonic sequence remain as relevant as before, subject to the inexorable recasting created by the modern transformation.  The issue here is not the obsessive dogmas of ethical theism given primitive form in the tales of Moses on Mt. Sinai, a tale clearly without proper historical foundation, but the need at all points in man’s self-evolution to bring ethical considerations to his endemic tendencies toward mechanized action. This decline from self-consciousness at all points is the danger that man must live and transcend, and his ethical intuitions, brought to sudden chaotification in a kind of postmodern devolution of Nietzschean impostors, remain the central need of historical realization.

It is here that the suggestion that evolution occurs by natural selection creates a red herring and an unnecessary distraction from this task. And this remains true independently from any suggestion about the foundations of ethics, or the relativity of good and evil that beset philosophical sophisticates. As we look backwards we see the dangers of mideonic deviation and sluggish performance resulting in the loss of progressive action. We have no simple means to preempt this threat of instant decline save the clear reminder of history itself of the need for vigilance. Here the traditional religions are running out of steam and have provoked confusion in their misunderstanding both of their own sources and of modernity itself.

We should note in this regard the rapid appearance, almost like clockwork of the diffused versions of the Indic religions appearing in the Axial Age. This alternate version of the ‘New Age’ appears suddenly, once again, at the point of the Great Divide, and proceeds to seed modernity with the outstanding legacies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and much else, in a spectrum stretching from rank superstition to the highest forms of religion. We must note the way in which the eonic sequence suffers a peculiar limitation in the action of the frontier effect. It is liable to leave behind the achievements of its earlier transition zones. The red herring of ‘European Civilization’ is one of the confusions of modernity. But our analysis has shown that there is no such civilization, as far as the eonic sequence is concerned. The sudden upsurge of the modern transition is, as with all cases, a global phenomenon with a local jump-start zone. This zone encompasses  principally the key players of the modern transition in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, which creates a buffer area whence the new era can be born. With mathematical precision this transition area hovers around the Protestant partition in German, Holland, England and France, and takes off globally in the nineteenth century. This initial imbalance of the starting point on the way toward global oikoumene creation is the liability of this form of evolution and the drama of our times with its reactions to Eurocentrism and imperialist degenerations of the transitional start zones. 

We also see that the question of religion, and their ‘reformations’ remained incomplete at the time of the Great Divide, western monotheism alone having undergone the process of eonic transformation. Thus it is no accident that so-called New Age religions have appeared explosively in a descant on modernity, and this process requires a ‘second Enlightenment’ in order to retransform the nature of modernity and secularism in light of the highly advanced religious cultures outstanding from the Axial Age of antiquity. Our eonic system and the net global system are thus two different things, as indicated from the beginning. The problem is that a ‘second Enlightenment’ can’t be had for the asking, since the original motion is inside the eonic sequence. The expectations here are therefore likely to be disappointed as great confusion arises over the nature of religion, secularism, and science. Just the situation in which we find ourselves.  Whatever the case the New Age is real and the creation of a true secular culture, so far incomplete, is a task for the future, one that will be ill-served equally by the doomed restorations of traditionalism, and the deviations of modernism taking the form of scientism.

 As we close our analysis of the eonic effect we are left with a final mysterious question: have we reached the end of the eonic sequence? Note that our analysis has demonstrated that we have exited the modern transition in the period of the Great Divide, thence to enter a sort of New Age of modernity as a new stage of history given by the eonic sequence. But was this the last transition? We have no means to finally say. The character of the system has changed as the system action shuts down leaving ‘free action to realize freedom’ in its wake. Although it is appropriate to leave the issue open, the tentative answer to our question should be in the affirmative, that the spectacular driving motion of the eonic sequence has completed its action in what is probably a driving motion initiating in the Neolithic period. Now it is sink or swim. There is a very strong reason for thinking this: as we become aware of the eonic effect, its future action would be blocked by just that awareness. Let us note that ‘suspicions turning into outlandish myths’ arose very early in history concerning the cyclical character of history, and the blending of this with Zoroastrian eschatology has resulted in a ‘world historical mental confusion’ about the action of a system whose simple character could never have been deduced by those immersed in it. At least it can be said of this confusion that, while it did suspect the coming of a ‘new age’ in the future, based on glimmerings about the past, it was anticipating the wrong future, which accomplished itself by taking man by surprise. That must the last time it could happen, as full knowledge of the past, and the implosion of globalization, makes any transitional staging area highly problematical.

Even as we say this we should consider that the real ‘end of the eonic sequence’ might have been precisely the Axial Age. All the elements that make up civilization as we know it made their appearance. However, as we can see that in the wake of the Axial transition everything fell to pieces, with democracy, a bare hint, engulfed in empire, science simply fading away barely kept alive in the medieval period by the Islamic world. In general the drift into empire and the inability to deal with slavery condemned the whole advance. Thus the resurgent modern period resembles a kind of spooky feedback process setting the system back on its course. Who could predict this kind of disconbobulation won’t happen again. Nonetheless, our eonic sequence, despite the appearance of some recursive action, never really repeats itself, and once having established a viable outcome is not likely to produce an unlimited set of repetitions. And we suspect that we are in a situation not unlike that at the end of the Great Explosion when a stable plateau had been reached and the consequences of that transition allowed themselves to unfold in a long period of working out its implications. We sense a similar character to our own times, as we seem to be looking backwards at the relatively brief impetus of development producing civilization, a mere ten thousand years. The issue is to avail ourselves of the immense fruits of this progress without getting stuck in the mechanization of social consciousness that is so evident from much of the evidence of history. And this leaves us with the question, not of revolution, but of the real means to social change. There is no simple answer here, and we seem left with the ambiguities of economic evolution as a substitute for the deliberate creation of future stages of change. We can no longer say that this possibility is utopian since the means to produce real revolutions is evident from the eonic effect: create three century transitions seeding innovations in all phases of social life: art, philosophy, science, and religion, and politics! Clearly we have reacted to, but not initiated, change on that scale, the fiascos of revolution being prime evidence of our incapacity. Thus the future remains unclear.

This remarks are the bare minimum restatement of the ideological issues that appear in the convulsions of the Great Divide, followed by the action of the nineteenth century left. The character of this period was ambiguous in so far as the realization of democracy and the achievement of some future social state beyond liberal modernity became collated producing the remarkable confusion that we see, including incorrect attempts to mimic the French Revolution’s dynamics with a set of wrong assumptions. While this might be a premonition of the future, it has not been able to clearly establish a theoretical basis for action. But whatever the case, it could hardly be true that if we think we have reached the end of the eonic sequence we have also reached the end of development, or that the de facto outcome(s) of the modern transition have an eonic legitimation. The point is only that the eonic sequence rescues systems stuck in mud, and gets them moving again. The end of its action leaves the future open to man’s self-development. This is not the same as, but in some ways resembles, the Hegelian ‘end of history’, in the sense that a process of self-conscious action is completed. It is remarkable that a figure such as Hegel should appear in this regard with such an idea. But our thesis is something quite different, and we mention Hegel in order to warn against a confusion of ideas. The ‘end of the eonic sequence’ is not the end of history, but its beginning. Hegel’s philosophy has been given the interpretation of endorsing liberal capitalist societies as a final stage of development. But this is only true by comparison with what has occurred in the past with the gross inferiority of social forms from which we have awakened as if from a nightmare. Perhaps Hegel merely expresses the hope that a new plateau of development will not regress to primordial primitive statehood. But, in any case, his metaphysics is really a preposterous story about an evolving world spirit, an entity that has no definition in the framework of our thesis. The swift leftist attack on this misunderstood philosophy of history restored the potential of a free future of social innovation, a phraseology overly euphemistic if we consider the difficulties of actually trying to surpass the present. Our verdict should be left in neutral gear by reiterating our sense of the discrepancy between economic and eonic evolution, econosequence != eonic sequence. More we can’t say, and, having reaped the benefits of a model that began with a critique of predictive historicisms, we should conclude without similar prophecies our model doesn’t support. However, we are not at the end of our study, but at its beginning, armed with a highly practical form of historical analysis that reconciles the many pieces of the puzzle of human evolution for the first time.

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