Mediating 
History and Evolution
An Evolution of Freedom 

• This is a very short capsule version of the main series 'The Eonic Model', whose purpose is to show the way the evolution and history can be defined, in the light of the eonic effect,  to overlap, with 'evolution' as a macro and 'history' as a micro process, in a formally defined 'evolution of freedom'.  

Start: 

The discovery of evolution created a revolution in human thought, but it ignited a controversy over the nature of its mechanism. Darwin's Origin has a double legacy in that it helped to consolidate the public acceptance of the reality of evolution in deep time, in the process introducing a prolonged debate over the theory of natural selection. Many accepted Darwin's case for the fact of evolution, but were not convinced that his claims for the efficacy of selectionist and adaptationist scenarios. 

One aspect of the confusion is in the relationship of history to evolution, and the chronic confusion of biological and cultural evolution. Darwin's theory has tended to take center stage, but it is really part of a spectrum of ideas emerging at the dawn of modern biology. Figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Kant, Hegel, the embryologists, teleomechanists, or Herbert Spencer, all produced insights that tended to be filtered out of the reductionist program of positivism that swept the field in the wake of Darwin. 

The influence of Herbert Spencer, and the confusion he created, is not directly visible in Darwin's work, but it is there, and the legacy of Social Darwinism gives testimony to the way in which theorists were unable to sort out the differing domains of man's historical development, in the context of biological emergence.  

 The idea of evolution is a very general one, and there is no reason we should be applying biological concepts to the rise of human civilization. The reductionist frame of mind tends to distort our perspective. 

And if we look at history taken in itself we can discover not only the resolution of the paradox of natural selection, but get a truer picture both of the meaning of evolution, and a model of historical change that is a closer match to the facts. 

• We will proceed to define the relation of history and evolution, with this used in the other tutorials to create a special type of two-level model. The advantage of a two-level model as developed is that it allows us to sort our 'evolution', 'self-evolution', and distinguish between the action of a macro factor and the ideologies of those proposing theories! Please note that 'theories of evolution' are historical objects, and join the mix of those things we consider 'evolving', This non-linear self-interaction of agent, theory, and history, completely confuses most discussions.

The Darwin Debate

Darwin's work provoked a controversy that has not abated to this day. Part of the confusion is the tendency to constantly scramble claims for the fact of evolution with claims for natural selection. The former has strong and increasing evidence in its favor, the latter being less conclusive. Indeed the question of what constitute demonstration is itself up in the air. The problem is that while even incomplete evidence for the fact of evolution crosses a threshold of demonstration, the same is not true for natural selection. The actual sequence of evolutionary events that produced a given set of changes is beyond observation, and the theory of natural selection was always a speculative thesis. The statements of evolutionary theory tend to mimic the universal generalizations of physical law, and this betrays the assumption that evolution is amenable at all to such an extension of basic scientific methodology. 

The Darwin debate long preceded Darwin himself, and if we look at figures such as Lamarck, or Erasmus Darwin, we discover the ideological backdrop that haunts all attempts at evolutionary generalization. With Erasmus Darwin the association of evolution with the idea of progress was a natural one, but with the reaction to the French Revolution both he and Lamarck were marginalized in the tide of conservative reaction. The idea of evolution survived its early radical associations in the conservatized rendition of Darwin, whose thinking echoed the economic ideology of liberalism in ascendant throughout the period. This association is completely explicit in a figure such as Herbert Spencer, and the question remains of the relationship of economic systems to evolutionary development. 

Darwin's theory is really a claim for random evolution, and this is what has gotten the theory in trouble, because of its monistic rendition of selectionist explanation based on purely statistical reasoning. It is interesting that Lamarck, his better known theory of adaptation apart, proposed two levels to his model of evolution, one progressive, the other environmental, and this approach, despite its difficulties, can go a long way toward resolving the paradoxes that arise in a theory such as Darwin's. 

The assumption that evolutionary development is random is a strong one, but it is based on a set of reductionist assumptions, and a fossil record hard-pressed to sustain it. The question of history enters at once in the debate over random evolution. It comes as a surprise to discover that we can detect non-random evolution in history itself, which gives us a powerful example of the way real evolution might occur. 

The Eonic Effect: The Evolutionary Present

The first is of the so-called Axial Age. The period of antiquity in the centuries centered around -600 shows a remarkable pattern of sudden synchronous emergence in five separated areas of Eurasia, from Greece, to the Near East, India, and China. The world of Archaic Greece, the period of the core Old Testament in Israel/Judah, the period of the Upanishads and early Buddhism, the time of Lao Tse and Confucius in China, all suddenly appear in an extraordinary timing that defies all simple efforts at simple causal explanation based on local, contingent, or endogenous cultural factors. As remarkable as the sudden appearance is the sudden fall off, and by -400 the phenomenon is on the wane, and the world system settles into a different pace of historical change. 

As we examine this phenomenon its seeming uniqueness strikes us powerfully, and yet we sense that this period is really a moment in a possible series. We are drawn to move backwards and forwards to complete the pattern, and in the process we suddenly realize that the antecedent and successor to the Axial Age are simply the birth of civilization, and the rise of the modern, directly analogous, although disguised variants of one and the same process of sudden take off and change. 

It is somewhat arbitrary to speak of the 'birth of civilization' since there is a degree of relativity to the phrase, and as we move backwards further we find that we could as well include the earlier Neolithic period of emerging village systems at the dawn of agriculture as well called 'civilization'. But the period of the rise of Sumer and early Dynastic Egypt betray unmistakable signs of the type of sudden transition, whatever the term we use to describe this stage of civilization. 

This complex empirical pattern of parallel and sequential emergence we call the eonic effect. 

Thus all our statements about random evolution are made without taking into account the relatively recent discovery of a non-random pattern in world history, one that we would be hard-pressed to call anything but 'evolution' in some sense. And not only that but true 'macroevolution' in a genuine sense. 

We are suddenly confronted with a suspicion about the earlier stages of the descent of man. Sight unseen we have granted Darwinists the account of man's emergence, and the place of random evolution and natural selection (the issue of sexual selection being secondary) in this account is made primary. But we can see that something is awry here if from the moment that man discovers writing he begins to record the non-random evolution of his own emerging stage of civilization. A macro factor present in history leaves us wondering what we have missed. 

And in fact the evidence itself suggests that the many incomplete indications of the Great Explosion when man crossed a threshold into the stage of true man is still another case of the kind of macroevolution that we see in our 'eonic effect'. Darwinian accounts should be challenged at once, since they appear to flunk a photo finish test. 

History and Evolution: Two in One

We have the clue to the relationship of history and evolution. We see that in some sense history is emerging from evolution. We must have, not successive, but overlapping, relations between the two concepts. 

One way to see this is to consider the title of a well-known book, Man Makes Himself, and turn that into a question, Does Man Make Himself? If we look at our data for the eonic effect we see that in one way the answer to the question is No, man does not make himself, because there is a powerful but elusive macro factor, a hidden evolutionary driver. But in another sense the answer must be Yes, man does make himself, for the action behind the scenes is really a kind of increased potential, a cue to man's own creativity. And the situation is changing over time. As history proceeds man's degree of freedom increases and he begins to show mastery of the elements of civilization. And, indeed, the three turning points of the eonic series are only brief moments in a greater field of activity that is not connected with this mysterious mainline. But this is just how we define the terms. Man emerges from passive evolution into active history. 

We have the solution then: we can express the relationship of evolution to history as the relationship of two aspects of one and the same emergent process. Man's evolution shows a macro factor, while the degree of his freedom as a micro factor expresses his exit from evolution into 'free history'. 

Thus we have a strange system on two levels, one expressing the action of a system, the other the nature of the free activity of the individuals inside that system. 

Idea For A Universal History/Evolution

We have stumbled on two beguiling discoveries, one that our history, seen in light of the eonic effect, shows a complex intermittent sequential character, and this shows a relation to a certain type of systems model, which we can develop to bring out the type of system we are dealing with. The other is the sudden appearance of a classic theme of the philosophy of history, which we can express as an 'evolution of freedom', casting our model in terms of the classic dialectic of freedom and causality.

It is significant that the philosophy of history appears in the generation before Darwin, and that we have rediscovered its significance for the question of evolution. This itself is no accident. 

The classic issue of the philosophy of history emerges in the figure of Kant who, to both critique and extend the legacy of Newton, produced the net equivalent of our two level model, to reconcile the dilemma of freedom and causality. This theme can help us to construct both a new type of model, and an 'idea for a universal history'. 

Thus the idea of Universal History finds its classic realization in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in  his essay Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View:

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that 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.

We see that the eonic effect answers precisely to just the implied question in this classic passage from Kant's essay.

We are ready to create a model of the eonic evolution of civilization. 

Stream and Sequence

Given the extraordinary data of the eonic effect we can translate it into a very simple model whose object is to assist in the visualization of the pattern, and to mediate the classic contradiction or antinomy of freedom and causality that we touched on in citing Kant. The basic idea is that of 'stream and sequence' or the eonic sequence and a set of transitions. 

This model simply constructs a sequence of transitions to correspond to the three turning points in the eonic stepping progression of 'axial' periods. We distinguish between the actions of a system, the causal aspect, and the free activity of the people inside the system, what we call 'eonic determination' or system action, and 'free action', which is not the same as free will, necessarily. 

The idea of a stream and an overlaid sequence powerfully expresses what is going on, especially in the Axial period. There we see five or more independent civilizations suddenly in concert undergoing a parallel evolutionary burst. These streams of culture in five places are undergoing autonomous histories, and these suddenly intersect with the eonic sequence in the right time period and this creates a powerful ratchet effect, not only for the culture in question, but for the whole world system, as each of the areas of transitions sets up an expanding oikoumene. 

To make the point clearer we must append a series of additional concepts and set up our model as a kind of database to accept the data of each of the relevant areas and this in relation to world history. But in broad terms, what we see is an eonic sequence starting at the dawn of higher civilization (and probably before that in the Neolithic) in the Near East, and proceeding intermittently via its expansions outward into the Eurasian field and into the Mediterranean. 

There is a kind of frontier effect as each stage impinges on an area at the boundary of the previous stage. A classic case is the sudden appearance of Archaic Greece with its sudden flowering at the fringes of the old Mesopotamian systems. 

Transition and Divide

A great irony arises in this analysis, since the eonic effect reaches into our present, and the last transition in the eonic sequence is the rise of the modern itself. We see that this has nothing to do with 'Western Civilization', but is a 'frontier effect' at the boundaries of the earlier stage. 

Our model gives us a new way to look at modernity itself, as a transition in a Eurasian frontier zone, one whose rough interval stretches from about 1500 to 1800. This kind of model produces a characteristic 'divide', which we can see occurs visibly twice, once around -600 and again around 1800. Suddenly we see why the divide period, the modern Enlightenment, is so packed with innovations, and effect is one of maximum intensity in the interval of transition. This kind of data powerfully confirms the rightness of our approach as it uncovers some unsuspected reasons for the nature of modernity itself. 

This kind of model is at first odd, but corresponds to how we actually do take modern history. And the model has some interesting implications. We are actually outside the last transition in the eonic sequence and moving into the middle period beyond its effect. This raises, however, the question, Have we reached the end of the eonic sequence? Have we achieved the freedom to exit from evolution? 

Conclusion

 We have produced a viable, and highly practical way to mediate the relationship of history and evolution, although our account, specialized for that purpose, has been a bit brief, and the reader can proceed to some of the other tutorials to tie up the loose ends. 

Basically we see that we have a model that can both sort out and unite the two different aspects, macro and micro, of man's emergence. Although this kind of model gives us a mouthwatering suggestion about earlier evolution, we must be wary of extensions, and restrict the use of our model to the descent of man. But this kind of two level model is clearly needed to sort out the endless confusion we see in earlier evolution. 

It is important to keep in mind, however, that this approach substitutes periodization for theory, and that, for good Kantian reasons, the source of evolution is beyond observation. Thus we are limited to a catalogue of the exterior effects visible in the stages of the eonic sequence. That nonetheless can greatly transform the way we tend to take evolution into something less clumsy that what passes for theory in the confused mix of biological and cultural evolution we find currently. 

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