The rejection of the entire domain of macrohistory is evidenced in the extreme position taken by the interesting and useful critique of the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, who amplifies Fisher’s Lament in his criticism of ‘historicist’ beliefs in The Poverty of Historicism, where he criticizes grand clichés of historic Destiny and the ‘dramatic’ view of history, the idea that history has a plot or significant structure.[i]  Unfortunately, the term ‘historicism’ has changed its meaning here. The historicism or the legacy of Herder, the complex world of nineteenth century German cultural philosophy, the phantom Book never written, The Critique of Historical Reason of Dilthey, as the emphasis on the unique, and Popper’s critique of historicism, as the historical generalization of physical law, do not refer to the same thing at all, indeed Popper’s viewpoint is very similar, in some ways, to this original historicism. Popper tends to refute clichés that noone would seriously maintain. He also makes the claim that ‘history has no meaning’, with the injunction that man can however give it a meaning. Nevertheless Popper’s critique is to be reckoned with, and indeed our pattern meets the objection. In fact, we see the balance of the two historicisms reconciled in our ‘t-stream’ and ‘eonic sequence’, as the general meets the unique, and the Greek with his poetry, epics, meads, and city states, nearly a backwoodsman, rises to the challenge of the first Enlightenment, and transmits its universalism from its unique matrix across the void of centuries to philosophes in their Voltaire wigs, and three cornered hats.

Before embarking on any form of macrohistorical analysis it is worthwhile to consider the anti-historicism of a thinker such as Popper, for the perspectivism of large scale history can indeed lead to many illusions, and the confusion of ‘historical force’. Our position with respect to this viewpoint that scorched the pot for all macrohistorical thinking in its Cold War vein, is that we cannot easily compute historical forces in action, and are forced to consider ‘relative free action’ in relation to historical force, but cannot conclude thereby the fallacy of the genre. In a play on the idea of the ‘covering law model’ (law as differential equation and initial conditions), another idea of Popper, we see the points of historical initializing, if not their law of dynamism in each of the fretting points of our eonic dynamism. We see the Greek Miracle, an age three hundred years or so in length, fretting an entire world era. Why? To see this play on ‘law’, and it is only that, it is necessary to retreat to the broad contours of ‘interrupt’ periods, such as those described by the Old Testament, or evident in the period of Archaic Greece .

Nevertheless, Popper’s criticisms are cogent. But our treatment slips by his objections. He distinguishes ‘laws of evolution ’ from ‘trends’. We can grant the point at once, and work with eonic trends. He denounces historical prediction in the mode of physics. Our pattern grants us no predictions, save the obvious passage from phase to ecumenization, already evident and a triffle obvious, implied in our fundamental unit. Popper also points out that we cannot predict the future of knowledge itself. This is completely correct, and should be extended to the notion of ‘self-consciousness’. A cycl e is a function of ‘mechanical consciousness’. As we become aware of the eonic effect, it could dissolve. However, the Old Testament passage to the linear historicism of Augustine already shows in primitive form the possible catch in Popper’s argument, turned on its head. The attempt to linearize the cycle has already been tried and failed due to the surprise return of a new cycle of Progress. Nothing is certain in any of this.

Our periods of ‘eonic generation’ are especially treacherous in regard to historicist misinterpretation, for we contract eras at high zoom levels, and make statements of causality. Macrohistory is denounced, by sociologists who make this mistake repeatedly in the transitions points, a most notable example being the Protestant thesis of Max Weber, a causal trespass on Universal History, that earned (it remains of greatest interest as one of the best of the lot) immediate protest from other historians. This has drastic consequences. You cannot (most probably) produce a ‘theory of the modern’ or its rise, unless you look at, if you can find, its macrohistorical context, and its context as ‘evolutionary’.

There is little to salvage from macrohistory as ‘law’, due to its complexity, but we can play without bishops against this position of Popper inherited from the positivist charge of the light brigade, for it is as fallacious as religious providentiality. Despair with small computers and hare-brained New Jerusalem cavalry charges is no proof against laws of complexity, applied to history. In fact, Popper’s view will lead us to the exact points where the issue of historical directionality is the most acute, and Popper most irate, the age of Heraclitus, and then the period of Plato and Aristotle, the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods straddling the raw force of historical directionality at its most dramatic. For he finds the source of historicism at precisely the points of history’s greatest directional impetus, ca. –600, and the modern era of the French revolution! The eonic effect is a virtual falsification of such total rejection of directionality. This is not to resurrect ‘historicism’, but to consider that the real criticism of historicism is man’s inability to properly assess the dynamical forces of anything so complex as world historical development, this quite apart from the lack of data to do so. Popper’s point seems to have been to savage Marxism on the grounds of its prophetic ‘end of history’ argument, or its use of the prophetic mode as dialectical law passing as ‘covering law’ prediction, and his title echoes Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, in turn echoing Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty, and is an important argument mixed or confused by issues of ideology and suggests after some scrutiny an historical connection with the economics of classical liberalism. The aspect Popper failed to see lies in the possibility that democracy, even the open society he defends, itself is bound up in the issues of directionality. Confusion arises because directionality may not be unilinear, as the classical stage of our pattern shows in the most spectacular fashion, in the rise of a phenomenon of parallelism.[ii]

    Theories, Oedipus effects, and free action scripts In a age beset with many theories attempting to echo the methods of physics, the nature of a theory of society is in danger of succumbing to conceptual rigor mortis, combining ideas of determinism that are inappropriate with implications that the observation of the theory-maker is in a ‘special present’ with respect to the past. Karl Popper ’s idea of the ‘Oedipus effect’ is appropriate here: the existence of the theory itself will change the future for any predictions the theory might make. His example was a critique of the prophetic futurism of Marxism, but it applies as well to any social theory, especially the Darwinist influence on the society that emerged in its contemporary field. Yet, in fairness, Spencerism should be taken as the source. The Oedipus effects of our own eonic ‘theory’ are multiple and all cancel out, for the statement of ‘law’ is itself an emergent, and takes second place to the ‘free action script’, made explicit in the issues of modernism. And yet the frequency hypothesis shows the danger, for it implies a new future is a ‘must of modernization’ for the tribes of Borneo. It is merely an hypothesis and implies nothing.

Beside these facts, we will notice something more, that theories are bound as ‘eonic emergents’ in strong correlation with the eonic effect. We have broached the idea of the ‘modern transformation’. If we attempt to produce a causal theory of such a large scale event from a vantage point of mere centuries, we are likely to think we are in a ‘special present’. In fact, the theory itself is likely to be ‘sequentially dependent’ on the period of transformation!! The Enlightenment reaches high tide with a man such as Kant, and leaves the rest with a book of differential equations trying to reduce society to physics. This self-referentiality should caution the dangers of any theory at all, and the realization that action in the local future of a transformation can only produce a free action script, which should therefore constitute the counsel of action, and not the hidden implication to ‘behave in concordance’ with the theory, ‘prove it right’. This confusion is simply rife in the implications ‘apparent but not real’ of evolutionary theories of biological in the field of Social Darwinism.

Historical generalizations in modern socio-economic systems in the wake of physics tend to imply their own complete independence from the valuation of realized action, and in the process might find the ‘basest’ motive the acceptable executive of emergence. The macroeconomic model assumes a kind of Hobbesian utilitarian optimizer of various hues. Models can assume anything they please as long as we remember they are models, and as long as they are not pressed into service as the solution to historical causality. Popper’s critique of historicism is, looked at closely, a moral one. But this is one-sided, and really a critique of Communism, itself a crypto-moral perspective, with a claim for the class-basis of systems of morality. We can indulge the Popperian viewpoint, in principle, by looking at the most ‘extreme’ valuations of ‘null covering laws’, doing nothing, in a quadruplegic (renouncing the world), and/or ‘pentaplegic’ (renouncing mind) ethico-generative ‘law of history’ mode, there to discover the Jain before even the Buddha moving in such a vein, against history, realization, and future, to never destroy an insect. Correlated with our pattern. The problem here is that this generates a ‘reverse Oedipus’ effect, wherein the imputation of doing nothing, does something, perhaps of negative import.

As our distinction of eonic determination and free action suggests, the connection between the two, ethics, and a law of historical becoming, is not transparent, historical force and realization are distinguished. Indeed, a recurrent or cyclical system might show a disposition to achieve higher potential as a system of cyclical progression, try again. An example from antiquity was the inability to achieve a modern style economy because of the slide into slavery , as if civilization were held up for centuries. All the elements of proto-liberalism were there. This kind of issue is strong grounds for the consideration of macrohistory in our sense, a discrete  process embedded in a continuous one, the system can return on itself to redirect, or repeat. Paradox can arise in such a system if the factor of eonic determination, wooly and vague as it is in our minds, seems to amplify two opposites at the same time. The idea of Freedom and the amplification of slavery occur in parallel around our classical phase era, to be discussed. The one must chase the other in different sequences.

Thus, any historical inquiry involves the stalemate involved in trying to embrace, without solving, the ‘fact/value’ distinction, so-called, and being driven to place the data of chronicle in a ‘free action script’, i.e. an ideology masked as theory, or a genuine and explicit valuation in relation to an historical force or process. Our divide generates this distinction, and its resolution, required for a theory of evolution, would itself be a Grand Evolutionary Event. In fact, this ‘free action script’ aspect is evident in most theories of the social sciences. It was explicit in Marxism, where the ‘law of history’ as an ‘is’ coexisted with the ‘ought’ of revolutionary practice. It is built into every model of macroeconomics, as an assumption about ‘motive’ in the creation of an ‘economic man’ maximizing ‘utility’, in proper Hobbesian grimness. It is not hard to find in the famous study of Max Weber on the relation of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, where there is the subtlest probing of the ‘is’ of economic transformation riding on the peculiar ‘ought’ of religious reformation. It is present most flagrantly in Darwinism as the implied green light for ‘dog eat dog’ if this seems of great genetic benefit excusing current predations against the long term benefit of humanity sometime in the next million years.

In general, theories, laws, and generalizations confront their dangerous ‘book of Job’ short circuit in the implied executive principle. It is interesting that Isaiah Berlin ’s study was an indirect critique of the Marxist ‘executive principle’ as it issued forth in eschatological determinism granting no distinction to the ‘law of history’ and its associated ‘free action’. This conservative critique is hoist on its own petard, but we will grant the point. In general, materialist or economic theories of history exempt themselves from valuation to state ‘bully law’ as ‘scientific’, almost with a relish if the basest motive is justifiably ‘lawful’, by the rankest of puns. This simply doesn’t work, if our interest is a theory, and filters our the historical facts of maximum valuation: we see evolutionary structure in the emergence of systems of value. In practice, history shows the valuations of war, just war philosophies, Machiavellianism, etc,… There are only two possibilities: history produces valuation egregiously for no reason, or it valuates at a higher potential than all possible action. We can, because finally we must, adopt the toughest stance possible to satisfy this objection, whatever we do in practice. These remarks are not clear, but can be taken as ‘fine print’ against the ambitions of politicians. This issue of the executive principle, nicknamed ‘Exec 1,…’, the moral implications or scripts of historical determinations, is one that requires the closest care, making the nature of any historical theory almost insoluble, the reason for our sudden hindsight quite virtuous embrace of the totally impractical. But as we proceed toward the eonic pattern, we come close to the action point of ‘historical law’, and should ask what nature shows us, e.g. in the ethical manifestations of emergent evolution, albeit in weak correlation. What do we see? We see a spectrum! And what a spectrum, between the Greek hoplite, the religious war of the monotheist descendants of Zarathustra  and the Jain sannyasin who will challenge and exit history by refusing to even step on insects. This latter example is a reminder that we can make no assumptions about the relations of evolutionary values and evolutionary emergence. For it stands in the opposite extreme pole to the injunctions to justify motive in the name of futurism that vitiate historical ideologies attempting the vein of science.

One definition of historicism equates it with the dramatic view of history, denouncing somewhat egregiously the idea that historical chronicle could have the structure of a plot. While it is not the purpose of this essay to vainly propose once again the dramatic interpretation of history, the critique of this dramatic metaphor is quite misplaced, and deserves an old-fashioned challenge, in a whimsical defiance of Popper . History apparently does drama wholesale, rather than retail, so at least the point is established in the realm of potentiality that history is not a drama. Generally, if you grant the systems analyst his scenario, and the computer modeler his simulation, you are not far from the ‘dramatic metaphor’. Turning a differential equation into a scene changer is the gesture of the ‘minimum dramatic structure’ that might avail the correct periodization  of history. How do you get this scene changer? The study of history will show the answer in many ways. But the analysis is treacherous. In one sense, to allow Freedom is to wave entry to a dramatic interpretation. In another, the action of a law must confront the intractable and not control all events, thereby partitioning continuity into a de-facto scene changer of subevents taken as free action. The classic scene changer occurs at the onset of classical antiquity. And mirabile dictu, spawns the classic emergentist correlate, Greek Tragedy .

The issue of historical directionality is often posed in terms of the appearance of meaning in the events of history, with the implication, probably false, that meaningful history must be taken as evidence of teleology. This betrays, perhaps, the ‘Augustinian’ psyche even of the secular mind. Tragedies precede much religion and show the highest meaning, yet intuit the obscurity of time’s direction, the Greek’s moira. The idea of tragedy suffers a swift decline if it is detached from its sustenance as a dramatic art, as a concealed form of historical generalization. The resemblance to the modeler’s ‘event simulation’ is striking. If this is true its relation to the idea of progress is one of counterpoint. But the model is confused with the data, and a ‘tragic view of life’ enters the lists of philosophic history as a form of ‘pessimism’ in a fashion probably unintended by its creators. Issues of meaning are intangible, and yet we do process them almost automatically every time we watch a dramatic performance, as one example. A theory would seem to be in trouble if it must claim that action as history changes outcome because an agent perceives the meaning in a historical, i.e., dramatic context. But how could anything else be the claim? If we begin to see, or consider that we see, that there is a meaningful pattern to historical sequence, quite unexpected and in a fashion obstinately intuitive that is hard to reduce to a set of axioms, we proceed rapidly to the ‘opposite mistake’ and are liable to be overwhelmed by ‘philosophic conversion’ in the labyrinth of dramatic metaphors or philosophies of history, where the conflict of religious and scientific or secular views have left the issue posed and hardened as a false dilemma between chance and necessity. In any case, these philosophies are heuristic and did not uncover nor will they explain the facts of ‘eonic evolution’, the turning point sequence, shown here, and they are liable to subtly condition historical perception. And yet they might find gainful employment, along with system modeling, in their recycling as eonic tools of analysis. The best dramas would seem to be tragedies, and these show correlation with our pattern, most remarkable. A merely good drama, the nineteenth century ‘well made play’, is a script built around a turning point, rising from its exposition completed in the first third, or so, of the play’s duration. The action is proposed in the first third, formulates its expectation and suspense, and then discharges around this potentiality of outcome. The critique of dramatic historicism is perhaps an old-fashioned reductionist or positivist claim that values are illusory because they have no structure. As the dramatic triad of “beginning, middle, and end” suggests, it is false, for, as most plotmeisters of Hollywood melodrama know, the play’s the thing, and requires a sound but intangible structure to make back a dollar, and the business of the ‘play doctor’ proves it. But good drama is ‘anti-historical’ in the sense of being a distillation from meaningless chronicle. The dramatic metaphor is nonetheless significant for historical analysis since historical events in their long course are selectionizing potentiality. We claim the fact/value distinction to have defeated us. But its mechanics must be just here, even if we can’t put our finger on it, as the great turning points show. The broad structure of history is dramatic ‘scene-changing’ machinery and shows that the ‘drama’ is of inherent scientific interest as an object of study, one not adequately pursued—scientifically. Dramas have discoverable structure, especially if they are ‘good’ dramas. And there is a distinct zoo of plots that recur as an aspect of both human nature and the circumstances in which man has evolved. Our plots are few and follow their own logic, the clichéd ‘logic of events’, and its sudden creative retransformation or improvisation. We might want the ‘mechanical law’ from the ‘mechanical cliché’, to be confounded by the patterning of non-clichéd forms of action as the ‘force of history’. Don’t underestimate Nature, would seem the moral. For our evolutionary surging transitions are creative periods. We should be suspicious of the mechanics of Greater Nature which we assume to be mechanical in a fashion conforming to our own lack of dramatic ingenuity.[iii]

Theories of evolution presume high ground to view the past, and yet, presumably, claim generality at all times. The example warns that claims against all time must accept the full complexity seen at all these times, even as these move to include volition in man’s historical past, present, or future, i.e. ‘tragic’ or simulated, volition. We can retreat to simpler examples, to show that the most complicated forms of culture are ‘evolving’, in the eonic sense, that is, in broad bursts correlated in a sequence of interrupts. Our argument must be self-referential and show the evolution  of evolutionism. It must also simulate free action in the theory’s future, or risk being a theoretical tragedy. Current evolutionary thinking is fretted at such a low biochemical note, that it is simply oblivious to the real complexities, in the pursuit of a sort of ‘bootstrap’ reductionism in relation to the fundamental laws of physics as these are known. This in turn can have important consequences if facts are separated from values  in the statement of law, process, or mechanism. In general a fundamental law of nature, a ‘phenomenological’ law thought to apply to history, and the semantic short-circuit of law as a value enjoinder to free action, collide, blend, and generate an unstated or implicit ‘executive’ principle excusing timely futures from the timelessness of laws.

This form of analysis will rapidly get us into deep theoretical waters, and yet, so far from being unwarranted speculation, faces the real difficulties of complex emergence by tackling, perhaps, the hardest problems first. And one of the hardest problems, one that Darwinism does not really face, is the dynamics of populations, and the fact that any complex form of change must control a significant handle in the geographical event space of populations, no trivial task, and nothing trivial to claim. But we could claim to see this in action throughout history, in the limited realm of data that we have since the invention of writing. We should suggest then Darwinism is a lame-duck theory that doesn’t address the basic issue.

Our age, so impatient with eschatological hope, to consider the metaphor of drama, resembles that moment in the ‘beginning’ of a drama, on the scale of millennia, where the Proposition of the Plot, the logic of its Event, in a play of sound design, must ask a question, what is this play about? And proceed from thence briskly to a realization of this inner tension through the mysterious triad of dramatic beginning, middle, and end to a resolution of its quest. Can there be another definition of the term ‘eschatology’? This purple passage shows how easily Zoroastrianism  can be reinvented. In the age when the computer language Prolog has shown the way to the mechanization of complex logic, these remarks seem much less than mystical in the aftermath of Positivistic hangover. They are also not our license for metaphysical interpretation.

The dramatic metaphor is the Lilliputian suit of clothing that can never quite fit the Gulliver called History, whose ‘end’ is not finite, and whose ‘beginning’ cannot be known. Drunkards of Hope, we might cast about for transcendental solutions to the spectacle of endlessness. Further, the metaphor is dangerous, for the turning moment is the point at which the many subplots must answer to the whole and yet maintain their freedom from an illusory eschatology of exclusive gods. And it is a point of no return in the sense that the infinity of potential passes to a finitude of facts. Endeavors begun with implied hope and salvific expectation are certainly dramas for they end as tragedies. We would waste our efforts if we attempted to foolishly search for the plot meaning of history. It would be sufficient to be minimalist and be alert to the characteristic ‘beginning, middle, end’ in the randomness of events as they enter a shockwave of transitional action. More basically still, the beginnings. And this we can do. We can find a sequence of relative beginnings in the historical stream that decisively condition the generation of improvised eventuality. This is one interpretation of our distinction of eonic determination, and free action.