Study of The Eonic Effect

You are right, the account seems incomplete. It is meant to be like that, like a rain cloud heavy with potential, about to burst. However, for that very reason the material has a fullness that other treatments lack because they have to sell you on something. Instead what I do is simply map out a totality. However, it is quite easy to generate specific interpretations in many fields, but our method does this wholesale, and it is time for us to do that.

The model does its business and then stops: the prime objective is to demonstrate a non-random pattern, then show that to be a valid candidate for 'evolution', then show how the relativity of our accounts of history and evolution suggests, no, demands, that we find something analogous in deep time, for earlier man. That is the eonic effect shows a photo finish exception to this generalized history-evolution. A component of historical/evolutionary directionality has been missed. We can at the very least beat Darwin to a stalemate, and then slowly pull ahead on the grounds that, while our facts are incomplete, the evidence of the Great Explosion, taken rightly, show us most probably precisely that missing factor.

You are right, there needs to be more specific material matching the argument to historical time periods, e.g. the eonic history of Archaic/Classical Greece. But the scale of the work expands exponentially, and we confront a logistics problems. Still, the basic issues are dramatic and any system showing coherence gives you an advantage to its study. The day is coming when my 'idea for an historical database' will bear fruit and combinations of historical software and google type search engines will facilitate the study of such an unforgivably huge system, with thousands of components, each with its scholarly literature. But til then you can get a very reasonable bird's eye view armed with the basic model, rightly understood.

I will try to reiterate some of the key issues, feel free to be more specific sometime about anything that doesn't make sense.. The text of World History and The Eonic Effect is a struggle to describe a phenomenon of vast size, with results that tend to dwell briefly on isolated subjects and then pass quickly to something else. It really needs about a one month course, and would make a great way to study world history. Also, the text is really four books in one, and I have put one of them online for anyone who wishes to follow these remarks. So don't worry if you don't fully complete the reading. You have four books in one, and each reflects on the other as it starts over again from a different angle. Also, you need an active project of historical study to energize abstractions that add up and then suddenly cloud the brain. Reflect on how you could use this to study world history, and/or restate the basic themes yourself. One problem is that we are embedded in the phenomenon under description, and that means we have to understand the Peak Moments at a higher level than their sources! Impossible? We must zoom in on these sources and refine our understanding of what actually occurred. No simple theory of the usual type will describe this phenomenon, although its connection to a variant of certain types of systems is also clear.

Basically, instead of a theory of evolution we attempt first a theory of the evidence, toward which an empirical evolutionary map is given to make the issue specific. This makes the context science, at all points we are confronted by historical facts, which we have to get straight, on the centuries level. No grand speculations like Darwin's applied to deep time are allowed. If you don't have centuries level evidence for what you call evolution, then you are a scam artist.

These three different things need to be kept separated, and the question of a real theory of evolution on this basis is indicated but not completed. HARD! The map focuses on a periodization matrix of three transitions, the eonic sequence; the theory of the evidence considers a frequency hypothesis, which is falsifiable; while the theory to explain the theory, so to speak, the Theory of Evolution, passes through some very dangerous, though fascinating, shoals, suffers several shipwrecks, but recovers to another existence as a post-Kantian, non-Hegelian philosophy of history, which actually, in my mind, shows the way to a real 'science of history'.

I am surprised you have done as well as you did. Good show! The reason you feel left in the lurch a little is that I disciplined myself to stay away from a commit on basic metaphysical questions, the classic three being divinity, soul, free will. The eonic pattern is too good to waste on Still Another Eloquent Weltanschaung. Once we see the eonic effect we lose our taste for metaphysics and are stunned into silence. The eerie silence of the mysterious presence of an evolutionary driver operating over millennia doesn't call for purple passages anymore. We just get on with the legwork til further notice. By and by the more general conclusions will emerge. But we must be reformed scientists, reformed philosophers, and most of all reformed religionists. We must approach the limits of our knowledge gradually over time, and in the meantime we get a payoff from this approach, we actually see in practice, if not theory, how evolution operates, at least at the stage of man. We can see how a global system can exist that can generate direction.

Kant's Big Three have ruined every attempt at a science of evolution/history. Why not try the 'bread and water' approach and not speculate. We attempt with one arm behind our backs to 'do history/evolution' without committing on the three classic questions. The question of divinity is thus bypassed, although the result is neither atheist or theist, check the material on the nth God Name Sequence in the Introduction. You have to start from scratch there if that's your game, a new extension to the sequence, etc... We don't need theology anyway, we have something better. Questions of soul won't go away, and I would allow a disciplined exploration of, say, Buddhist views on 'soul', subject to critique, but for our purposes the metaphysics of soul can be reduced to the distinction of hardware/software, that is, science already has its modus operandi here, although noone says so in public. The question of 'soul' simply means, Define The Organism, does it have three dimensions of space, one of time, or does it have a greater dimensionality, etc...

There are many approaches to that. But the point is that we have to make do without a definition of the organism! Anyone is free to amend this, solve the case once and for all, I am not dogmatic, but the positivist effort to do just that is a Serious Joke, very important, but not one inch beyond Descartes. Kant saw the desperation here, and produced an upgrade to Descartes, and in Schopenhauer we see a version of that compatible, sort of, with modern scientific thinking.

The crucial question is that of 'free will'. I think we should adopt a Kantiann insistence on free will, on a personal basis. But not in my model. We needn't assume anything, and that suddenly shows us something. Since we don't commit, we need a de facto equivalent that can have a material basis, that's the point of my self-consciousness topic. Self-consciousness can mimic determinism or freedom, and pass between the two. That's the beauty of the concept, one well grounded also in reality. So our basic method passes through the gulch between freedom and determinism. And yet it is a tale of the evolution of freedom. We don't need 'free will' to demonstrate an 'evolution of freedom'.

Note, then, in any case, that there is nothing to be puzzled about, because we don't dwell on the metaphysics of these three theory breakers. We scramble to the end of the exposition without deciding on these three. At the end I would recommend, as noted, a Kantian version of the free will issue, as a decision consciously adopted, but the actual model is designed chameleon style around 'self-consciousness' which is a rascal that can scramble between freedom and determinism.

Nonetheless the book is about the evolution of freedom, but set up in a way that doesn't require axiomatic beliefs about free will. The way freedom arises, then, is it is associated with the eonic sequence, and the way in which the eonic pattern stages its own undoing, as the historical proceeds from the evolutionary. And this is exactly foretold in a kind of Kantian framework.

Thus we have restricted our metaphysical commitments, but we are still just on the borderline, and the question of metaphysical freedom, cautiously approached, and disciplined by the model, is our one venture into the twilight zone. A system with one extension. The resemblance to a transformed chaos model is remarkable.

Before answering your next paragraph let me note the codependency of theory and historical evolution. In general, as we let 'evolution' proceed into the present, and potential future, a strange thing happens. Our methodology of science and philosophy shows 'eonic periodization'. That means we are using the output of the system to study that system, a complication that makes any effort at exact science very difficult, in current forms. We have to scrounge for some meta level. We can't just pick and choose philosophical systems and apply those to history. We must find the masterkey to all of them. That's why I took a deep breath in mentioning Hegel. I wish to bypass that, but Hegel grasped that the key to the Big Theory, he didn't use those terms, was to explain how Theory itself evolves. He spoke in terms of the history of philosophy as a mini philosophy of history. You could make the same argument for science and its history.

Excellent questions. And I think towards the end here you have answered your own question. One reason I seem opaque here is that I am terrified a gang of New Ages will run away with some concoctions of mystic eons or cycles. I may as well feed hamburger to piranna fish. But the issue of cycles is significant. People have noticed for millennia that history seems to show cycles, but they could never get it straight, for a reason that is now clear. Five thousand years is the minimum data set to show a system of three transitions, and two two cycles, with the third showing recent start up. The endless confusion over historical cycles is finished, I think, by my model. Let's be empirically definite: you can use simple trial and error and pattern matching. Result? we find a definite periodicity of 2400 years. Why, I don't know, and since I have only the absolute bare minimum of a three beat sequence, I will be wary of taking that as a theoretical known. So we simply catalog this fact, and note how everything falls into place around it. Note that these are falsifiable observations, and I take great pains to not let them enter the eonic model itself which is designed to work with any frequency hypothesis. We are just near bedlam here, and it is important to be scientific stretcher bearers for the madmen lost to this question.

There is a distinction between progressive cyclicity and cyclical recurrence. The later shows the same event in each cycle, the stuff of dismal 'cycles of history' mythology. The former simply shows the progression occurring in cycles. The cycle of Mondays is progressive cyclicity. You can measure the GDP every Monday and it will, we hope, have shown progression, although the measure is cyclical. A locomotive chugging out cycles of work shows progressive motion. In the eonic effect, the 'cycles', if they are that, show the clear signs of progressive cyclicity, and I illustrate some key examples: science itself, is twice correlated with the eonic sequence. We see its twin birth in Greece, and the modern phase. It acutally almost dies out in the middle period! There's the answer to directionality and cyclicity: each cycle reamps the processes that didn't make it in the previous period. The system resets direction until the process shows a stable independent growth. Note then that science flunked a natural selection regime. A similar case is visible in the discrete freedom sequence, the double birth of democracy. Look at Greek democracy, it lasted barely two centuries, really less than a century, although it had an afterlife down til Roman times. And so on. The system, thus, sets direction in cycles of fast interruption.

Your reference to attractors is to the point. My original studies were all in systems theory, and I explored chaos, quantum formalism, all the complexity theory stuff, self-organization. But then I changed gears toward purely phenomenological mapping using periodization. A turning point was Robert Rosen's Anticipatory Systems, a nearly unread book, whose purport was to extend control theory to anticipatory systems (the question is discussed seriously by John Casti in one of his books). I didn't go very far in that, but the point became clear that this eonic system needs its own custom made theory, and that at the same time it will be of the type of the self-organization theory, and yet show a futuristic aspect that is, if not teleology, then at least a direction setting explorer. This approach, out of ear shot of hysterical Christians, will prove the escape hatch to a very beautiful theory of the evolution of religion. We can see how the Old Testament describes, not the acts of God in history, but a directional system settting up a future potential that realizes in its middle interval as a series of experiments from that starting point. That kind of approach is developed toward the end of the book, although I remain tightlipped, and hide the implications in jargon. Maybe time to call a spade a spade. But if you look at the chaos of monotheism, and yet see its historical meaning and value for its time and place (eschewing the issue of cramming atheism down people's throats in the name of science) as a generator of a new stage of culture, the infelicities of its actual realization suddenly make (gruesome) sense. Why would a divine religion produce the harebrained result of antisemitism? In my type of eonic model the answer is almost instant: a discrete-continuous system will tend to jackknife in the middle, and we see that twice, once with Buddhism, once with monotheism. So the payoff from this type of model is immediate. Note that the 'eonic evolution of religion' shows two religions appearing in concert in the Axial phase, along with much else, and one is theistic while the other is atheistic. We see that our system is deeper than the 'god idea'. It plays a spectrum of possibilities. In general the key theme here is that of the 'fundamental unit of analysis' and the way in which this allows us to unify the evolution of civilization as the 'evolution of the state' and the 'evolution of the religion', and see them as janus-faced exemplars of a deeper dynamic. That could help religionists to grasp their position of being sandbanked in a 'secular' age, which is not so much beyond religion, as sublated into a higher system that suddenly remorphed into the modern realization.

I can't do justice to your thinking here in a post already a bit long, and will return to it, along with your concluding query below about earlier stages of evolution.. But let me say quite quickly that this issue of Protestants is definitely an 'eonic effect', in the sense of being a 'relative transform, or eonic emergent' process. I have cast my model in a secular vein, but dwell at length in the book on the significance of the Protestant Reformation, the original trigger point for the rise of the modern, and the Enlightenment. Fogel's book I would need to review again, I don't recall all the details, but the Protestant component of the early modern is often misunderstood. Note that the 'relative transform' or eonic emergent, called Protestantism, is not the same as Christianity in general. It is the first stage of the rocket, so to speak, and travels in parallel to its Enlightenment successor. The eonic model shows the rationale for this. The future here is unclear, so I don't predict, but I think that reductionist scientism is not going to make it as a social philosophy, as people like Kant rushing into the fray attempted to point out. His proposals for 'religion within the limits of reason' have never been taken up by secularists, but they show a viable way to dispense with the baggage of traditionalism without ending up in a watered down secularism.

A history of Protestantism is alien to modern secularists, but it is filled with significant history (as Weber well understood) as a generator of early modernity. Our system is trying to shake loose its religious inertia, but never abandons the core, which shows, by the way, a group of Quakers seeding abolitionism. Quakers, clearly, show Protestantism stripped to its basics, just on the verge of being a non-religion, and yet with an emphasis on moral action that is less than present in much of the emerging capitalist society rapidly crystallizing. My point is merely that these cycles of spiritual awakening, so-called, invariably show their roots in the early modern and the modern Protestant churches are sluggish remnants of that early modern explosion. Much religious debate is beside the point, and choking on theistic metaphysics. The real issue is not the belief systems about God, but the historic place of the generators of 'equality' and equalization. Equalization is an evolutionary process, and that is one reason the religions come into being. It is sometimes easier to see this by studying Buddhism than monotheism, and, in any case, the question also has a secular component in the clear correlation of democratic emergentism with the eonic effect.

Let me close there for now, except to say that Diamonds' fascinating work seems to me to founder on environmental determinism. It might be nice to redo his model a la the eonic effect. I will discuss his book some other time.

In the meantime, I don't think this qualifies as a full answer to your problems arising in the study of the eonic effect. I need to produce some more intuitive materials, and would really need to do a whole world history on the basis of the model. But the logistics of that are intractable, and one needs a William MacNeil trained in the eonic model. In the meantime, I will keep trying to produce something that can better appeal to readers not prepared for a Kantian blowout on world history.

I think, however, that the second edition does have everything you need in compressed form, and a little patience and reflection will unlock its secrets.

Here is some more material in reply to your post on the eonic effect.

In reading your book I am reminded of an excellent book by the Nobelist Robert Fogel, entitled The Fourth Great Awakening & The Future of Egalitarianism (U. of Chicago, 2000), in which he applies his discipline of "cliometrics" (quantitative study of history) to understanding what he conceived of as the periodic religious/spiritual awakenings in American history, and how the ideas and values of each were subsequently secularized and infused into mainstream culture, often manifesting as periods of progressivism. It almost seems to be a kind of "eonic" effect,
but on an entirely different scale that you are concerned with.

Continuing my response to your email on World History and The Eonic Effect, I got a copy of Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening, fearful for what I said before, since I suspected he is some kind of neo-conservative, producing a piece on the evangelicals in a generation when exploiting the radical history of the early modern originals can be good anti-liberal politics in the age of Reagan. The book is compelling however, and engages the eonic effect material precisely in its invocation of the Great Awakening.

So, this is prime stuff, and a good starting point for discussion, raising the question of how we can extricate anything from the labyrinth of ideology and politics. The eonic pattern is actually a clear guide, in graphically broad strokes, although our interpretations are going to suffer limits as our distance increases from the modern 'eonic transition'. Note this point. The eonic model only speaks of the 'transition and divide', and then stops. The text stops actually in 1848, the conclusion of the transition and the onset of the 'mideonic era'. Chaotification commences in short order.

Bur you picked a good issue for the eonic model, and it raises the severe question of conservative/liberal/radical egalitarianism, which requires a thorough foundation in the full eonic model, and more than that, the crucial point, detailed, prolonged, and thorough study of the historical sources from the early modern through the early nineteenth century, followed by the tracks downfield of those sources. Let me note that just getting the history of the term 'liberal' straight is a big job, and yet merely a starting exercise.

We are thus hardpressed to discuss current political movements, i.e. at the less than one century level, in relation to the eonic effect whose scale is the Total Movement of the State since even before King Tut. In fact, to put the matter in perspective, type Narmer's Palette into Google and 'get a snapshot' of state formation in the Year One, dynastic Egypt and the question of kings and egalitarians starting from that point. We see that the first priority is state formation, which automatically creates 'primitive civil society, not yet civil or social', i.e. everything out of the scope of the first state formation. That means Phoenicians traders, I guess, just beyond the reach of the first states, soon the first empires. And so on.

Phase two of the eonic sequence shows attempted refinements of primordial state formation, and we see the first great eonic equalization episode (in the eonic mainline) in the Greek city states, prime eonic history, and if you pursue the issue of the Discrete Freedom Sequence in the text you will see the majestic architecture of 'emerging freedom' inside the eonic pattern. We have the key to the Great Divide in modern times, the era ca. 1800. Everything revolves around this point, and we can easily trace modern political propagandas from this point, roughly. We must of course be wary of these terms, and the differentiation of 'freedom' and 'equality' in modern ideologies is a possible complication/trap.

I have given a place to Protestantism in the eonic sequence, but let us not forget that equalization was primarily a secular achievement, and the place of Christianity in that is confusing because, while we do see the Second Great Awakening taking firsts in abolitionism, it does not follow that we can equate a subset of evangelicals or Quakers with Christianity as a whole, which is a sluggish conservative stream.

And let us not forget the real history of the Reformation. Luther created a revolution, of sorts, but he also made his deal with the Princes of his time, while nearby we see the thwarted German Social Revolution of 1525, and the figure of Thomas Munzer, who was burnt at the stake. This cluster of incidents almost explains everything about what is to come and the gruesome effort of the far left to ditch Christianity as a fraud in the realm of equalization. It will always preach equality, and always pay its dues to the princes. Karl Marx, a prime 'late Protestant', said enough. The far left suffered spectacular failure, so we are back to getting equality as a gift from the 'fourth awakening'. I will believe when I see it.

The resolution to these issues is to stick to the highlevel eonic sequence and get straight the basic backbone of the eonic pattern, that before trying to decipher the outcomes two centuries downfield from the Great Divide.

To summarize, I merely wish to broaden the scope of the discussion and justify the ideology of freedom in terms of the macro sequence of the eonic effect. That already spells trouble with postmodern attacks on the metanarratives of freedom, but the second edition actually turns this postmodern theme on its head and justifies a post-Hegelian 'metanarrative' in explicit terms. You can follow that in the text if you like. My point is merely that the affirmation of the eonic sequence invokes the ideology of freedom, and at least with modern conservatives the point requires no defense, since these conservatives tend to be classical liberals, if hesitant egalitarians. Not so with the true reactionaries against modernism who were rife in the attack on the French Revolution, etc.... We are seeing that now in the Islamic world. Immense forces are assaulting modern freedoms.

This creates a basic context for discussion. But it needs a bit more development!!!! The point is that we are talking, not continuous history, but eonic history, and we soon discover that the crucial point, as noted, is the transition and its divide. The modern transition reflects that beautifully with the Protestant Reformation to start the transition, and the Enlightenment and French Revolution to complete it, with the system shifting to the far left after the Great Divide. None of this is chance, and it takes time and study to grasp (it can be quite unsettling) the depth of mechanization of what we take as our modern history. The remnants of the Protestant Reformation are so diverse (most did not even shape up to oppose slavery) as to be impossible to easily classify.

The problem here is that Fogel is an anomalous conservative, I would suppose, and, as I fast discovered, the same Fogel who wrote Time on the Cross, a book that stirred up a huge controversy some time back, and I would like to review that to figure out where he is coming from with his charming but suspect thesis of a Fourth Awakening. These are severe problems, though not fatal ones, and I would enjoy this point/counterpoint as a further study. But there is a bare single index entry for Marx, and to say that the Third Great Awakening at the beginning of the twentieth century is a kind of Protestant formation is to me a misreading of the facts, although it is certainly true that standard leftist history needs a correction to point to the way in which the Protestant formations have quietly performed a lot of mule work in practice for what the revolutionary claimed for itself even as it bungled the job. These are vast questions, but I merely raise a question mark at Fogel's Fourth Great Awakening if this is clearly mixed up with the 'Reagan Revolution' and in a period when equality went downhill even as the Fogel in the right wing think tanks concocted this conservative egalitarian thesis, complete with quotes from Himmelfarb on the back jacket. So I am suspicious, but still intrigued by this clever piece, which may merely mean that Fogel is a liberal in disguise trying to keep the current neo-conservative fix honest on basic issues. I must have missed something here, because Fogel gets quite tricky.

So in a nutshell we have to expand the scale of analysis to see equalization in the context of world history, and to see the way that the rise of the modern begins to show the maturing of the primordial state, only to suffer at once the contradictions pointed to by such as Karl Marx. Fogel's thesis is tricky because the terms of the discussion are so laden with ideological position points in the American electoral system and its current neo-conservative fixers that it is hard to take things at face value. In any case the place of the so-called First and Second Great Awakenings is fairly clear. But let me reiterate that we can't grant kudos to Protestantism for abolitionism. We can only note that subsets of this movement have appeared at crucial times to do specific things, while the general stream remained inert and passive, reacting against change.

Anyway, I hope that helps, and this could be a long discussion/analysis. But we see the larger architecture in its relation to the downfield periods subsequent to the transition periods, leaving us to wonder at the future.

Looking at the Axial Age we notice that within several centuries an immense period of advance faded away and almost ceased to have any effect. This Hellenistic and later decline becomes clear from the eonic dynamics. We are in a similar situation now, and must wonder how long the great achievements of early modernity will last.