Appendix 2

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

The Book

An Outline of History: The Eonic Evolution of Civilization

 
 

     

  An Eonic Model of World History 

 

 

 We are inside the cone of diffusion of our modern transition which is over around 1800, as a rough date. If you are thinking about 'freedom and democracy', the Industrial Revolution, the scientific revolution, etc,...then it is because of this. We sense a postmodern period, the effect of the post-transitional era as it increases its distance from the transition. Many processes ignited in the transition are growing, some are waning, but whatever the case, we are not now in the transition era. We speak of freedom, but we were, by hypothesis, unable to free ourselves from the past to create the foundation for this. The fundamental unit, remember, is not Europe, and we are free of Eurocentrism. We see the process in the concern over globalization, right on schedule. 

We will have two sections on the modern, one to start, as a jumping off point, looking backward, then beginning with the rise of civilization. Note the later is a fiction for 'ET4, Egypt, Sumer'. We will look briefly at the Neolithic, the better beginning point. But all beginnings are relative, Chinese boxes inside boxes. 

Crucial: Remember, we are 'selecting' three small phases in history in order to reach the whole, the middle. As soon as the pattern becomes clear, start to consider this middle. Consider the birth of Islam. This was an explosive beginning, but not a transition, the achievement of one man, a contingent event, inside the cone of diffusion of 'ET5, Israel', and much else. Same for Christianity, or the Roman Empire. Note the difference. There is no prejudice, the effect creative action notwithstanding, between periods, watch out. 

We perceive directionality, as we look backwards, but this is not a law of history. Beware of teleology! You are not yet free of this system, its direction, future, or retune point,  is unknown. Our system goes into immediate collision after the modern transition, with 'end of history' nonsense, and libertarian-collectivist dialectic of freedom, the 'state', 'oikoumene', and individual, right on schedule. 

 Note the beauty and elegance of the model, nature's own. After transition system action stops and free action comes to the fore, truly free or not. Don't fall into medieval funk.  

Chapters

 
  Eonic Outline
 

 Looking Backward

What is our starting point? It should be our current time-frame, looking back, to find a starting point, our perception of greater antiquity seen through the lenses of the outcome of the modern transition, not necessarily the best perspective, for the modern viewpoint is one that has endured a course correction with respect to much of its earlier production, and its many failures. We are reacting against the past, in the action-reaction sequence created by the transition itself. In the contemporary time-frame the passage to a first global oikoumene is well underway. Poised majestically as the modern divide, we find Kant asking his famous question.   

 Kant’s Challenge  We can see the rough indications of an answer to Kant’s challenge: we see a regular movement in the evolution of free action in the eonic sequence  itself, subject to the limitations of the question itself as it was posed in the absence of parallel and early sequential data. Three broad rolls of ‘statism, religion-democracy-political philosophy’ stand out in direct association with eonic emergence. We see the effect answer to the challenge in the contrast of continuous and discrete correlated with sequence, a generalization of ‘mechanism’ as ‘eonic evolution’ that must withstand Kant’s Third Antinomy. The great irony is that the Kantian phenomenon itself, the German Enlightenment, is a part of the pattern. It is as hard to believe such concordances are chance, as it is to proceed toward correct explanation:

… if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment...

The self-referential appearance of this challenge right at the point of the divide in a prime jump diffusion zone is simply spectacular. We begin to discern the emergence of freedom, most explicitly, in the phase ‘ET5, Greece’ with the implication that eonic determination in relation to phase conditions a higher probability of crossing the threshold of democratic emergence as an attribute of free action. This is a mixed positive and negative result. ‘Free action’ seems helpless against the greater tide of historical momentum. The term ‘freedom’ shifts its meaning across length of history. Hegel had a shrewd insight confused by his idea of dialectic, nevertheless taking this idea to see phase 2 is reacting against phase 1. We see that our sequence generates ‘transeonic feedback’ against its first manifestation. From the ‘beginnings’ of Egypt and Sumer we return past many introits and opening conflicts to one proposition of our active history, the question, how is ‘civilization’ to be defined, have we in fact created it, and if not, how might we at last do so? Note the irony. We look backward to propose theory, and forward to create raw material for failed theories to come. Much historical analysis assumes the existence of civilization as achieved, an entity whose proper designation should best be ‘civilization’ in quotation marks, and whose usage should aver inspiration to create it. Else we are driven to invent a theory of an historical machine that will issue its properties, when in fact the construct is the result of free action, and this, as we presume, decisively fretted in a long sequence under eonic determination. What of such properties that have not been created yet? And thus created, and then lost? Will man create them, or this machine, which then must have a future potential? It is the most difficult question. The point is that we are not only attempting a theory of civilizations, but creating a new one, not just looking backwards at the past but reacting against it, attempting to part the Red Sea and find a new age.

Zoom Level Gateways
These symbols for section heading (not important, don't worry about them) suggest a series of 'etc dots' inside each other. The point is that we must 'reach our subject in a series of steps, each of which must zoom in closer and closer. BUT, we must do the whole, and therefore must synchronously study each region. Not so simple. Yet the eonic effect remains invariant at each level, but not our interpretation, necessarily. Our means of study ends up resembling the eonic effect itself! We begin by 

Looking Backward


The birth of civilization


The classical phase


The rise of the modern

This terminology is less difficult than it seems, once one has a few examples. It will suddenly fall into place as a descriptive methodology. The frequency hypothesis remains just that, beware of it. We are dealing with a short and fragmentary sequence. We can fret our model in these terms and then zoom in for a closer analysis of the interior. Note the importance of diffusion, 'sequential dependency'.  We must know what diffuses from what, a severe requirement. 

 

 

‘Civilization’, in our sequence, is simply ‘transformations of output at ET4++’, and all this as ‘free action’ during this era, with a change of quality as time passes. But what about ET5, ET6? Can we see a wisp of Narmer’s Palette in the Weberian sociologist? ‘Civilization’ is itself, as a term, a conceptual product created during the Enlightenment, an eonic emergent, and, like Pharaoh’s foreign policy, succeeds or fails in its own time, our own, as a world plan, new religion, social (socialist?) initiative, or formula of culture, and a clear ‘dialectic’ of options. We seem to have, not cycles of civilization, but cycles of men attempting to redefine the term. This merely restates the nature of our ‘fundamental unit’, in three recursions, whose elegant climax is, it will slowly dawn on the reader, more than evident in the modern transition, if we see fit to include this in our basic sequence. We are back where we started with the modern transition, which we can now see, in some amazement, fits the pattern of jump diffusion, in this case in the exterior of the Roman Empire. And we see, once again, a fringe area in takeoff, undergoing the high speed transition to new forms of society, first in phase, then in a spreading field of ecumenization.[i]

But our method of analysis instantly closes on the answer to Kant’s question, and then stops short, finding it extraordinary that an emergent directional philosophy (among several) appears cresting on a divide. A strange humor arises, for just as we converge on the answer to Kant’s challenge, the answer falls apart. For the answer is a ‘dialectic of freedom’. And the result is beset with Kant’s Third Antinomy. Yet this is what we see, a causal system, and, matched with, ‘freedom’ generating a new causal sequence, the riddle of our transitions given nature’s solution. One good reason is that our pattern only shows that Kant himself is correlated with the pattern, the ‘answer’ then being the question itself. The voice of history is eerily silent, and may be a kibitzer, but after that deaf-mute in the grand progression of self-realization. Indeed, Kant himself wrote a second work quibbling with his first, for good reason, stating the ‘end’ causes a kind of tension. Further, the generation after Kant fell into a massive dialectical collision on the issues he raised. But, in broad strokes, we already see a wisp of Kant’s question in the raw sequence

States

Religions

Revolutions…?

so clearly correlated with our three turning points.

This seems to imply some ‘evolutionist’ series of stages. It does not. Trying to advance from Universal Empire, the system passes (or tries) to religion, and then tries to pass from religion, back to the forms of the state, as seen in the modern Reformation and secularization. The obvious emergence of liberal-socialist experiments shows the revolution in the revolution, or transition, as these new forms struggle to free themselves from the inertia of the past. Let us note the implications of ‘jump diffusion’: better a revolution at the fringe, than a revolution at the core. Further, this system is no longer fresh. The immensely difficult achievement of real change seeks out the furthest frontier to begin, and in the process ignites a monumental struggle with the outstanding theocratic heritage. The English, then American and French Revolutions, then Russian, reveal all the possibilities, and the hopes and tragedies of great historical change. Here, we see the ‘revolution’ category is of a different character, a ‘transient’ or passage-category as the system, which overtakes current free action, as ideology, passes into a new form, in which our stance is interaction, not external observation. We are in the midst of generating recent emergents, and these tend to blind us to the grand old workhorses of diffusion, e.g. the ecumenizing religions, so sadly drifting into oblivion before the front of ‘new-aging’.

The modern transition has produced a virtual cornucopia of emergents, in a constellation that cannot be equated with the basic driving forces of economy and technological breakthrough that are the characterization of our sense of the ‘modern’, now seen to be an attempt to describe the transitional process, with an ironic ‘post-modernism’ arising with its real meaning, ‘post-transitional’, and an ‘ism’ really quite modern, for it must also assume the transitional process is a one-way transformation.

‘ET6++…: ca. 2000 A.D.

We are immersed in the unfolding structure we are attempting to describe, as the structure of ‘modernity’, that is what we call ‘ET6,…’, that has sprung forth from eonic sequence. Our starting point is the current period of the onset of oikoumene creation, ‘ET6++,…’, in the wake of ‘ET6,…’, now proceeding globally in a fashion almost completely reminiscent of the first Sumerian, and later Hellenic, and other, oikoumenes. The great vehicle of the Enlightenment prefigured the needs of this new era in a breakthrough that still seems to confound the cultural tribalist for it prepared the first seeds of a universal global culture. The universalism of the Enlightenment now draws some fire, indeed, the criticism is that it can seem less than universalist. Postmodernism appears with an appropriate post-transitional perspective. The mismatch of t-stream and eonic oikoumene created by the local entry to a global oikoumene generates all the multicultural difficulties of homogenized culture, and westernized semi-decadence during transitional fall-off. No decline is indicated as ‘law of history’, to the contrary, a great era of progress is possible as free action at tangents to eonic determination. But the collision of socialism and capitalism forebodes the reduction of the transitions full potential.

We are just emerging from…

  ‘ET6…’: 1500-1800

We see the unmistakable effect of relative beginning, notwithstanding small indications from the period of the late medieval, in the sixteenth century, as the parallel interactive emergence of religious Reformation, Scientific Revolution, pre-capitalist economic transformation, overseas expansion, rising nationalism, and the proliferation of seminal literatures. The chord of ‘state formation’ in its sublimated form that will be immediately center stage in the next section on Sumer and Egypt shows its strange eonic recurrence in the rapid appearance of the early political philosophers such as the seminal Hobbes and Locke at the birth of Liberalism. The world is no longer pristine as the world of the first Pharaonic ‘state creation’ and the new generates state-formation as revolution, the breakdown of the ‘catholic integrator’ clearly the first step. The rise of the nation state shows a play and permutation on the greater scale possible created by the rise in communicative speed of the Greek and Sumerian city-state phenomenon, with one and the same dilemma of mutual conflict so evident in the failure of the Greek polis. It is important to distinguish this from ‘cultural evolution ’, or the fates of the individual nations, for what we see in the transition is the focalization in a fuzzy zone and period, quickly becoming concentrated on a Northern European fringe area, stretching from Germany through Holland to England. Thus the process is a flow of information and development of a local ration of cultural patchwork in relation to a global area and the eonic jump diffusion of the eonic sequence.

 

  ‘ET6+…’: ca. 1800

The transition moves toward a characteristic second stage with the appearance of the English Revolution , the real rise of modern science, and the birth of the Enlightenment, really in the seventeenth century, rather than the eighteenth. This is the era of the real cascade of modern effects that will drive the system into its climactic period and passage across a divide. The transition is a divide, and the divide, relatively arbitrary therefore, nonetheless shows a very marked near ‘scene changing’ effect in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The age of Democracy and Steam is attended by such a host of eonic emergents that it is difficult to sort them out. There is no consistent theme, universal name or stage label that we can give to this new age effect if we see the motion toward contradiction in the field of creativity. We see the Enlightenment, but we also see Rousseau, and Romanticism. We see the emergence of capitalism, but we also see the collision of liberalism and socialism. We see the remarkable appearance of the school of German Idealism , and yet the rise of scientific materialism is just getting under way. On a greater scale the transition as a whole shows the two stages, Reformation and secular Humanism arriving in parallel and often in confusing interactive effects. The example of the Industrial Revolution has strange implications, in the sense of macrohistorical boundary conditions. The great takeoff is not just a function of economic or other factors, but is also a function of long eonic frequency. This would seem strange, but it is finally inevitable to conclude, that while this does not explain quite what did cause industrialization, its appearance needed the transitional amplifier to get over the top. It is significant as a further challenge to isolated factor thinking to consider that abolitionism is critical to the whole advance. The system, we must speculate, is poised to fall back into the morass of early failed takeoff in the ancient world, but manages to reach  a characteristic new plateau.[ii]

It is from this vantage point therefore that we look backwards at the entire phenomenon of civilization, and thence to the Neolithic. The modern example is so complex that we can barely grasp what is happening, since we tend to be ship’s mate on one of its emergents. It is helpful to look at the earlier transitions as they throw up the early first signs of this greater complexity. We can also see the outcome of the earlier periods, and allow ourselves to block off the discontinuity with greater confidence. The trick to eonic history seems to be generation from small sources. The other trick is the evasion of intractability by the local small morphing of elements at the fringe of the previous use of the trick whose outcome seems to be large-scale efforts to modify the whole.

[i] As Fernando Braudel notes, the neologism ‘civilization’ “emerged late, and unobtrusively, in the eighteenth century”, p. 3, A History of Civilizations (NY: Penguin, 1984). A prime example of an eonic emergent, and a term conditioned therefore by the process it wishes to describe.

 

[ii]  R. Lerner & al., Western Civilizations (NY: Norton, 1993) contains a useful bibliographical series. The title ‘civilizations’ is better than ‘civilization’. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (NY: Norton, 1966), Norman Hampson, A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (NY: Pantheon, 1968), Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), Paul Hazard, The European Mind (NY: World Pub. Co., 1963), Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale, 1986), F. Nussbaum, The Triumph of Science and Reason: 1660-1685 (NY: Harper & Row, 1953), Tom Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), Lester Crocker, Nature and Culture (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1963), R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (NY: New American Library, 1962), William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (NY: Oxford, 1980), Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (NY: Cambridge, 1975), Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago, 1977), Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophic History (Stanford, 1965), David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (NY: Cambridge, 1969), E. Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London, 1973) Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty Wealth and Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), Christopher Pines,  Ideology and False Consciousness (Albany: State Univ. of New York, 1993), John Plamenatz, Man and Society (London: Longmans, Green, 1973), James Miller, Rousseau (New Haven: Yale, 1984), W.H. Weikmeister, Kant (Lasalle: Open Court, 1980), Nicholas Cipaldi, David Hume (Boston: Twayne, 1975), David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (NY: Oxford, 1966), Slavery and Human Progress (1984), Pamela Pillbeam (ed.), Themes in Modern European History (London: Routledge, 1995), Ferenc Feher (ed.), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1990). The changing perception of ‘Athens’ in the seminal modern era is recounted in J. Roberts, Athens on Trial (Princeton: Princeton, 1994), E. Wright (ed.) Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984), Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (NY: Norton, 1988), H.F. Cohen, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: Chicago, 1994), Basile Wiley, The Seventeenth Century Background (NY: Columbia, 1967),, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1975), R.M. MacIver, The Modern State (NY: Oxford, 1992)

 Kant’s Challenge,…and Hegel It is interesting that as cross our divide we discover from a distance through eonic field glasses the philosopher Hegel wrestling with the dialectic of freedom and necessity, bestraddling the divide with a quiet grandeur of his own. Life goes on, and the moment Kant undermines metaphysics, the game starts over. Anyone familiar with the history of German Idealism will note the obvious but indirect echoes of its themes here, especially with the formulation of Hegel, coming after Kant, whose challenge we have taken up already, in another fashion. But Hegel is suspiciously close to the Vedantic type, in the conservative vein of such weighty matters. Our formulation is quite different, but, in a world of wonders, it is remarkable this wisp of prodigious German energy should crest on our divide touching the core issue of eonic sequence in its elegant but rough-hewn dialectic. Its English cousin would seem the winner, proceeding through Hobbes and Hume, but both are born in the same litter. Are their books hard? Set them aside for a moment, and look at the timing! Hegel must speak for himself without affirmation here, but our eonic thesis should rickshaw this nexus to the forefront (beside the world of the Humes, Benthams, Darwins) with some purely generic ‘hegeliana’, the ‘dialectic of freedom’, etc,... It is too speculative for most, but the level mirroring of software and hardware, as self-referential concept, should allow us to conceive, at least in the footnotes, of the concept of ‘books’ emergent as a function of time.

 Hegel’s geographical prejudices have blinded us to what he meant, and his own place in it, after Kant. Resurfacing after the Thirty Years War, our prime jump diffusion zone spawns a strange philosophic stream as the Reformation realizes its passage toward real modernity. The instant parting of ways that found this idealism the object of near derision is another theme we must pursue in the reckoning of our overall subject, but the opposition of ‘materialism’ (or positivism) and ‘idealism’ needs a ‘time-out’ here, to see that modernism is almost in a multitasking mode, and generates this ‘idealist’ world as a counterpart in tandem with the different materialism springing up in its own fashion, after so many centuries of latency. To a longer perspective a man like Hegel is really an ally, and quite beside the Kantian vein, as Schopenhauer was at pains to point out.  This elegant ‘completion’ of the Reformation at the source and divide of our transition is wonder indeed.

The reason for the concordance with our different viewpoint is that we have constructed a spectacle of eonic sequence, whose ‘causal’ status is ambiguous, and whose emergentist evolutionary process clearly shows the association of freedom and frequency. This stages a hard contradiction seeking ‘reconciliation’ in the sense of these philosophers. The reason for the concordance with our different viewpoint is that we have constructed a spectacle of eonic sequence, whose ‘causal’ status is ambiguous, and whose emergentist evolutionary process clearly shows the association of freedom and frequency. This stages a hard contradiction seeking ‘reconciliation’ in the sense of these philosophers. Ivan Soll, An Introduction to Hegel's Metaphysics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1969). Chapter 2, "The Problem of the Thing-in-itself". George O'Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1975), Jon Stewart, The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evaston, Ill: Northwestern, 1996), David MacGregor, Hegel and Marx (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales, 1998)

 Notes

 

James Miller, Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy, (New Haven: Yale, 1984), Idealism, Politics, and History (London: Cambridge, 1969),  and the works of Sklar, and Cassirer on Rousseau. John Keane, Tom Paine, A Political Life (New York, Little Brown, 1995)

H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1994): piece de resistance discussion of the theme of 'continuity' and 'discontinuity' in the perceptions of the Scientific Revolution. The work opens with a quote from Dryden's observation of the transformation of man's view of nature, and proceeds with the Big Four, Duhem, Djikerhaus, Koyre, and Burtt. Burtt's perception, from history, of the outcome, a triumphant scientific revolution, but the too frequent positivist misunderstanding metaphysics that too obviously hampers the progression beyond physics. The point was clear to Kant, with his conception of the Copernican Revolution of metaphysics, the lagging stepsister of mathematics and physics. The t-stream and e-sequence apparatus fits the whole struggle to distinguish continuous, and discontinuous, accounts of scientific history.

M. Lewis & K. Wigen,  in The Myth of Continents (Berkeley: University of Ca., 1997) provide a debriefing of the myth of continents, the myth of the nation state, the myth of East and West, and the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism. It is clear from our terminology that our field is global, our basic category revolving around our new fundamental unit. The civilization is simply a descriptive wooliness, not a dynamical unit. However, we do see the characteristic 'hot spot' emphasis on selected regions in the eonic sequence. Thus the transition 1500-1800 both trancends Eurocentrism and shows the reason for its existence. Note that Japan is rapidly annexed to the 'European' transition. The relation is one of information, not cultural or divisional categories. It is worth considering the Hellenistic oikoumene, the five centuries from -900 to -400 show the same grounds for a kind of Helleno-centric perspective. Once the period is completed, that's it! And we see the near clockwork precision of the 'postmodern turn' toward global, possibly relativistic perspectives critiquing Eurocentrism in the wake of the 'European' five centuries resolves the contradictions and also reminds us that these transitional zones both amplify, yet can inhibit, the overall cultural evolution of the global whole.

 

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      Last modified 09/04/2005