3. A FREQUENCY
HYPOTHESIS
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| 3.1.1 A Short History Of The World | ||||
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Our world history is simple, to start. The eonic effect reduces the whole tale to three chapters, with three transitions connecting them. We see three massive periods of advance, what’s more, with obvious echoes and interconnections, clear evidence of three successive waves of fundamental advance, at equal intervals, and with significant mutual correlations: The rise of civilization The Axial Age The rise of the modern That’s it. Our world history, we’re done. A non-random pattern, but it needs some more tangible dates. The term ‘rise of civilization’ is inadequate and will have to go. We called this the eonic sequence, and can construct a frequency hypothesis to fix this obviously incomplete series in the domain of non-speculative empirical verifications. What about the in-betweens? That’s the interesting part. We are going to create two, or multiple, universal histories. The first proceeds along a mainline, the second is all the rest. We are always in the second, yet, looking backward, we can detect the action of the mainline. We are free to do as we please, in the present, even contradict our pattern, but as we look backwards, we discover that there was a factor of eonic determination, macro-action, behind our free activity, micro-action. So the first requirement is that the present, or recent past, must be outside of the pattern, and in fact it is. We could never have observed the eonic effect, inside it. The handy quality of our type of model is that, unlike a standard Newtonian model which attempts to predict/control the future, it shuts down in the recent past, a strange but beautiful feature, possible only in a discrete-continuous system, one clearly exhibited in the production of Nature seen in the eonic effect. The first order of business is to see that this pattern is not about the cultures invoked in the turning points, but the greater globalization to which they contribute. We can critique the dangers of Darwinism, but we can’t change the difficulties that arise in a system using a minimum principle. We can at least plant the flag of universal history in its strength: it is a tale of universal sympathy, and its subject is one community of man. But how can we create that community? The eonic sequence gives us a lot of hints. Reachability: Two Universal Histories Historical narratives suffer the bane of selectivity. Ours is so selective if flies in reverse. Three small time slices are all we need. Having produced one universal history, we promptly create a vacuum and generate a second, as if one is trying to reach another. So our discussion, and the eonic effect, is really about the whole, with a strategy to reach that whole. Since this invokes some form of globalization, we note that it is not the same as the economic variety. Since the American continent was first globalized by the Indian his destruction by later European invaders could hardly be called globalization. We see that the planet is globalizing, but already globalized. The issue then is to do the job right. We note that the ‘Axial Age’ is really an interval, and that these demarcation labels cannot be instant turning points but must be transitions of some kind. We will label them eonic transitions. We will see, looking at the modern period, that the transitions are about three centuries long. The term ‘Axial Age’ is really two things taken together, a transition, and a period just after that. The Old Testament embeds a confused account of such a transition. On the basis of this we will see that three centuries again looks to be the rough interval. Why do these periods stand out? Because of the obvious correlation of major cultural innovations, which are relative transforms, or what we can call eonic emergents. TP1 The birth of the state, appearance of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations,… TP2 Onset of two world religions, multiple sources of philosophy, birth of science, Greek democracy,… TP3 Onset of Reformation, secularism, English, French, American Revolutions, Enlightenment, another scientific revolution, another birth of democracy, Industrial Revolution,… That’s a very short list. An eonic emergent can be a person, cultural process, artifact, invention, book, or cluster of events. One eonic emergent can be inside another. Each eonic emergent can be a zoom target, to zoom in on, and inside each are more eonic emergents. Pick any category, and follow it. Democracy. Appears twice in the pattern. Take science. It warbles on and (almost) off in this sequence. Why? Trace the history. What we include seems at first relatively arbitrary. This system is an arduous ‘black box’, but it gives us a windfall clue, the double appearances of several items. Democracy starts twice. We will call this the ‘discrete freedom sequence’, and it might prove a clue to unlocking the riddle of history’s ‘black box’. It reproduces a classic Kantian paradox. In our terms, democracy shows eonic determination, macro-action, its realization free action. A surprising discovery, a new twist to the ‘evolution of freedom’. Note the remarkable appearance of double emergents. The double birth of democracy, science, in the eonic mainline. That’s very strong evidence for the type of model we will create, a discrete series inside a continuous flow, or a discrete-continuous model. It’s like a feedback system. Something suddenly switches on, and interrupts continuous flow, or restarts processes that have died out, or slumped. The idea of feedback has problems, it’s not the same situation, but the general idea is the same, a discrete interval or spike interrupts a continuous stream. Our sequence is entirely odd. We see a fragment sequence in a kind of limbo. What’s our status as observers? TP4?
Have we reached the end of this
sequence? Does it have meaning to speak of the future of the series if eonic
determination has switched to free action? Won’t observation dissolve this
sequence leaving us to hope that ‘free action’ has reached some kind of
‘Freedom’, i.e. to replace eonic determination? We can’t speak about the future,
since our free action could intervene. So our model exits standard theory, able
to speak only of the past. However, there is no inherent contradiction in
anticipating a TP4
, any more than an economist speculating about a future economic cycle.
Modernism might collapse, and enter a new medieval period, waiting on a future
TP4. We need to exit this system, able to control such a future. TP –1, –2,…?
Our series starts in the middle of world history. Doesn’t it have an earlier
beginning? Perhaps, but we must find earlier turning points, therefore rich data
of the Axial type, at the centuries level, not just data for general change over
long periods. We need more data, but it is strange that our sequence seems to
start with the invention of writing. We are suddenly suspicious we are missing
crucial short interval data from earlier periods, completely wrecking easy hopes
for a theory. We could all too easily jump to the wrong conclusion. Frequencies
can modulate in strange ways, and a monotone sequence would seem too good to be
true. But we can start with that as a default hypothesis. This issue of a future TP4 is quite odd, but a real problem. If we examine the lore of eschatological and cyclical myths we see that ‘anticipation of a future return’, garbled and misunderstood, haunted the men of the post-Axial period. Perhaps our logic can set the matter straight and sweep away these phantoms of thought. |
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