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We reach the end of our eonic sequence, as our transition
concludes and our system enters a new era, one that will soon move beyond its
source area (and the Eurocentric confusions of that) toward a global oikoumene.
The rough year 1848 is useful, for we can see that this is the first point at
which one could begin to clearly perceive the eonic effect. And who do we find
here but Marx and Engels generating a post-transitional ‘second opinion’ or
course correction, an activity destined to swift failure. Our discrete freedom
sequence seems to end up an indiscrete Whiggocracy and to have some unfinished
business. Not surprising. Whenever there is a Leveller a True Leveller can’t
be far behind.[i]
End
of Eonic Sequence? We are left with a sense of wonder about the relation of
modernity, and the eonic effect as such, to evolution. Far more than purely
genetic evolution the evidence we have uncovered shows that the fine-tuning of
evolution stretches into the subtlest aspects of culture, from art to politics
and the ideologies of culture. It is at first hard to accept this larger
dimension of evolution just behind our historical present, but this approach is
in reality far superior to the reductionist perspective.
Theory
and Ideology But isn’t there a contradiction in the exploitation of theory
as ideology in our portrait? The answer is that our system transcends the
phenomenon of philosophy, as our realization of its highest abstractions comes
into being a political philosophy and the tactics of action. We can see in the
close relationship of the ideas of freedom and causality that the deeper level
of System Action operates with a generalized mechanics that far transcends the
realm of ideology or Free Action, and glimpses of which we begin to sense in the
spectacular dynamics of both the eonic sequence and its embedded ‘discrete
freedom sequence’.
As we conclude our
portrait of the eonic effect we see that we only observe it as exit from its
action, and that as we distance ourselves from the modern transition the dilemma
of our free potential to create history in the wake of the evolution of our own
freedom becomes a paradox and a dilemma. We see the similar situation at the
conclusion of the Axial Age resulted in chaotification, and decline, and the
expectation of some kind of returning new age or ‘end time’. We must hope
that this time we will become the masters of our own self-consciousness and
withstand the tide of mechanization that overcame the civilization of antiquity.
We should imagine that in the modern instance we have completed a major
evolutionary passage, an interval of man becoming man comparable to what we
suspected was the ‘great explosion’ of the Paleolithic. Our evolution
formalism
and eonic model are set up so
that they switch off in our present and we only observe statements about
dynamics in the past. System Action yields to Free Action and this prevents the
kind of confusion with theories and action we demonstrated with the Oedipus
Paradox.
Although the year 1848
is no more than a rough marker
chosen as a peg to hang a tale, and end a book, it neatly shows the point at
which our pattern starts into its post-transition, and reversal from
localization to globalization, unprotected by any factor of eonic determination
from imperialistic degenerations and the new economic systems, soon to be
downshifted further by Darwinian ideology
. Even a cursory glance at modern philosophy shows how the seminal era slumps
out after the generation of Marx and Schopenhauer. Many other indicators make
the point. This time, seeing the effect, we can take action to recover. We tend
to be mesmerized by the ignited exponential processes (e.g. the demographic
transition) beginning in the transition, but these are not the same. We must
stick to the rules of our model, which suggests the intermittency of our
transitions, which puts us outside of the eonic sequence. That will at least
enforce a discipline of teleological disarmament of all parties.
1848: Teleological antinomies We
can easily spot the crude division point predicted by the model at about the
time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, at the outside by 1848, a truly
spectacular generation in world history. This division is useful because it is
about the exact ‘first point’ at which our ‘eonic observer’ can start to
see the eonic effect, and also because its symbolic significance forces the
issue of ideology.
This choice of symbolic year is about the same as Hegel’s
1806, but more cogently directed to the issues, and merely a useful token for a
rough ending to the transition. It is like the difference between ignition,
liftoff and steady flight getting underway. But is it also the end of the eonic
sequence? We don’t know. But it is an unsettling thought, since ‘revolutions
as free action’ will move to take the place of transitional sequence.
Armed with the
distinction of macro and micro-action we can see at a glance the overall dynamic
at work, however we understand it, and it is unsettling. We think in terms of
linear progress, and then are understandably baffled by the First World War, the
Holocaust. Whatever else is the case, these are well outside the eonic sequence.
These are clear cases where mideonic stupidity is starting up again. Nietzsche
influenced by Darwin
does not bode well for the future.
Can we even maintain the modern transition, let alone
advance it? In fact, we can, but we see in antiquity this dread effect as the
classical transitions run out of octane fuel and lapse to a higher degree of
mechanization, never to recover. That is less likely in this case, although we
see the fall-off take effect as the transitional effect wanes. This is not
Spenglerian decline but a one-time slump-down from a bursting episode of high
performance, followed by a more stable process tending to a more contingent
social drift, and then potentially, we can hope, new advance, but without eonic
determination, a new freedom beyond the
eonic sequence. This is the punctuation, then equilibrium, of the whole eonic
effect. But it is not really equilibrium, and the metaphor is not quite right. A
whole series of take-offs have been ignited, and it is completely within the
rules of the game to realize the dynamic and compensate. The fate of the
Hellenistic need not be ours.
Although our model seems to be confounded by an ideological
modernism or a Eurocentric focus now under challenge, we see that in fact it has
a built-in device to reconcile these contradictions, and we leave our system
just as it undergoes its convulsive reversal from local transition to global
oikoumene creation. It is important to remember that in our model, the local and
long-range future diverge, and no teleological claim on the latter is possible
for the former. And our system aggressively reminds us of this as the sequence
seems to stop in the wake of the revolutionary early modern. This explains the
baffling puzzle arising in the instant bifurcation of our system at the very
moment it is getting under way. And one issue is the teleological antinomy,
latent in Kant’s Challenge, of the potential system and actual outcome, with
its economic emergentism taken as the ‘final state of the system’.
Chillingly apt that Marx (not alone!) proposes the abstract category
‘socialism’, which he refuses to define, as a next ‘transition’. This
thinking merely reflects the antinomy, and it is important to remember that our
model predicts nothing. It is right that it be that way and we can see that
Marxism suffered the fiasco of a ‘local time teleological’ projection. Marx/Engels
as champions of democracy works quite nicely.
Econostream != eonic sequence We
don’t need to indulge in leftist propaganda to see that our model
distinguishes two things: the economic
stream and the eonic sequence
diverge. If someone says that you must submit to economic ‘laws’ in the name
of history, laws that make him rich and others poor, that man is pulling the
wool over your ideas with bogus theory, because we can see that economic
processes pertain only to economies and don’t generate the long-range future
(at least so far, looking backward), these points not to be taken dogmatically.
Our model simply mirrors the debate, its proper task.
How elegant yet somber to observe this system cross this
divide into a new era in rise of liberalism, the turbulence of revolution, and
the passage across the spectrum of the Left to the year 1848, about when our
transition moves toward shutdown in the open field of a ‘new age’. Although
a basic liberal interpretation is well within the bounds of our model, a kind of
default outcome, we should note that this construct cannot be safely used as a
form of legitimation for that.
It is not hard to show that emergent liberalism was an
imperfect outcome of the modern transition. The American system failed even to
abolish slavery, proof that nothing deductive can be extracted from ‘eonic determination’,
in case propagandists aim at a legitimation of modernism via this model. The
sudden chaotification resembles overshoot and undershoot in a control system,
and the instability or equivocation is evident from the first in the twin
figures of Luther an Münzer, then in Locke and the Levellers. As if a last
minute course correction, suddenly turning into a demand for a different
outcome, finds Marx and Engels challenging the whole transition as it were, on
the verge of a disastrous attempt at course correction. Lest we forget, they
took action at a desperate moment in a system that almost failed to accomplish
abolition. We are left with an unnerving question, What else is missing?
An immense ideological veil protects the confusion of eonic
sequence versus econostream. The modern transition rapidly crystallized into the
capitalist societies dominated by market ideology that are prone to the
domination of a new type of elite. We can’t quite mediate that using our
model, and the potential of this system so far outstrips systems of antiquity
that leftist reactions tend to backfire. The world of our transition is nearly
done before the Industrial Revolution, which rapidly generates a secondary
post-transitional culture of the new capitalist society. Looking at the chaotic
movements of world history we should think this development potentially almost
benign by comparison, and the classic Marxist critiques, while altogether cogent
and seminal, tended to misdiagnosis and false efforts to construct an undefined
socialism whose record speaks for itself. We cannot legislate these issues with
our model, which promptly reflects this dilemma without resolving it. We see the
obvious lost opportunity: the founders of the American system could have created
a socialist republic, but were too fixated on Roman history.
However, the whole point of our model is that it allows us
to distinguish two levels, e.g. emergent democracy at its initialization,
however obscure, and the subsequent realization, which may be flawed or fail. In
a global context the dilemma of empire arises very quickly and we find the sad
reaction to the American system rising to produce a challenge to its future. The
rich potential of the eonic starting point is soon forgotten in the mix of
Darwinism, classical liberalism, economic ideology and scientism that assembles
the new worldview. Locked in this box we fail to see the limits to our vision
this induces. Challenged at once by the far left, the new economic society
ambiguously enters its mideonic pilgrimage in experiments still young in the
reckoning of five thousand years. The future of the reign of Capital is an
ominous suspense.
The new world of capitalism must be judged on its own
terms, our job done. We have merely disengaged it from the macrosequence. But we
must note that before classical liberalism
stands the work of its creators, who
never foresaw the results of their endorsement of economic freedom, that orphan
of the discrete freedom sequence. The eonic mainline can’t control the
economic field, as core and periphery imbalance arises. But the difference
between the two can be seen in the way the modern transformation lets loose a
new round of slavery in the periphery, while the core, racing against time,
generates abolition, and not a moment too soon. The American sidewinder system
doesn’t make it, and we have the preposterous constitution of four-fifths
person at the outcome. Downfield course corrections beyond the divide point
prove very costly, and are prone to fall into the hands of those who don’t
know what they are doing. In the post-divide the gates of the penitentiary slam
closed, and the inmates begin to make their own rules.
Like a great oak tree the eonic sequence sprouts a new limb
and this injects new life into the world system, even as the other limbs
continue in their growth and separate existence, forced however to mediate the
immense confusions of globalization. Needless to say we must evaluate
dialectically the nature of the modern outcome by sifting the eonic emergents
defining our transition. There is no simple talisman or formula of success. Some
more complex process has differentiated into a scattershot spectrum of results
and we are inside that field of eonic emergents, assessing their components as
relative free action. We must beware of getting lost in fantasies of a
‘Western Civilization’, although that confusion will prove inevitable, at
great cost to the slowing of globalization momentum.
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