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Conclusion
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We
rearrive at the rise of the early modern as the third of our transitions. Our
formulation automatically subsumes all the discourses of the postmodern and many
New Age periodizations and resolves the issues of controversy this often
creates. The emphasis on this early modern, in all its now seemingly primitive
glory, is the right one, and we should be wary of any attempts to 'refound the
modern' in a postmodern reaction. These postmodern critiques, however, are
themselves part of the greater sequence and are an essential caution at the kind
of 'modernist fundamentalism' that degenerates into ideology. Note that our
distinction of 'system' and 'free action' distinguishes the effect of the modern
transition, and the way in which it is realized!! Keeping this in mind can
save us from many confusions. It is important to see the way this kind of model
changes our perspective completely. The Enlightenment is at a very high level,
and it doesn't follow that our realizations do justice to it. In fact, it is not
a philosophy, but a period in the eonic sequence, and embraces its own
contradictions. After that we are on our own, and many claimants for the
Enlightenment rubric are spurious derivatives. What's more, the postmodern
critiques of teleological history are essential to consider, but our model
outsmarts these critiques by absorbing them, and restricting itself to
directionality.
The need for ethical action Darwinian
thinking has disappeared, and the future won't be won by natural selection,
or social competition. We see the need to realize social action that can do
justice to the eonic sequence, at the highest potential we can bring to it.
This is the real 'microevolution', a term we should now proceed to avoid.
The factor of self-consciousness is essential to right development The example of the post-Axial This
issue is no small matter; if we look at the period after the Axial Age we
see how everything fell to a lower level and never recovered. We need to
make efforts to see that this doesn't happen all over again. A similar consideration arises in the critique of Eurocentrism. We
have found a resolution of that issue also, but must demand the need for
vigilance on this score. We can see that the issue of Europe and Western
Civilization distracts us from seeing that 'evolution' is global, transcultural
and has nothing to do with the Europeans. The 'European' transition was a clear
frontier effect, and as much as anything used the Protestant Reformation to
divide Europe so as to produce a protected transitional zone. Clearly the
keynote of the eonic sequence is globalization, not the separate histories of
particular transitional areas. We should note also that globalization is
something far broader than economic and needs to be seen in terms of the
creation of a global oikoumene in cultural rather than purely economic
terms. This concludes our brief survey of the eonic
effect, and we are almost flooded by a cornucopia of issues and themes that it
would be better to examine in separate essays. We have discovered
something we have called 'evolution', and rightly so, keeping in mind the way we
have qualified its usage. Darwinian thinking is very far off the mark, and its
unconscious application to history can be very destructive. We have produced a
new kind of 'soft theory' (not really a theory at all, but a theory of the
evidence) to mediate the Great Transition as the emergence of human freedom from
evolutionary passivity. We are left wondering if we are at the 'end of the eonic
sequence', and whether we will manage to stand beyond the driving motion of
eonic evolution to enter free history for the first time.
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