Beside theories of Evolution Karl
Popper's critique of Historicism & Isaiah Berlin's of historical inevitability must
be considered in any new discussion of Universal History.
Fisher’s
Lament, Tolstoy’s Locomotive, and the Freedom Hunch
If we enquire into ‘what
runs history’, into the possibility of any pattern, structure or law, we are left to
examine the rush of statistics and wonder if it is sufficient to account for the
chronicles of kings and commoners, the flowering of civilizations, and the evolution of
religious forms. The historian H. A. L. Fisher, in one of the most quoted statements of
modern historiography insists that there is no meaningful structure to be found in the
randomness of historical process:
Men wiser and more learned than I have
discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are
concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows
upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no
generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the
development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.1
Increased perspective in the
rising tide of historical data forces us to consider that the eonic pattern reveals the
counter-evidence to Fisher’s Lament. The philosopher Karl Popper challenged Toynbee
to answer to Fisher’s objection.
Even as Fisher wrote, the
discovery of Sumer, better insight into the classical phase, and a
‘post-transitional’ perspective on the rise of the modern was revealing the
eonic snapshot emerging in fixer.
We can suddenly see why historical structure eluded us. The
timeframe of historical motion is much larger than the brief period since the Neolithic.
Since the invention of writing we start to see two and half ticks of an elusive eonic
clock.
Narmer first unified the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of
Egypt. One of the earliest political artifacts known
We find an answer to the issue of historical
regularity, answers, but what was the question? Confusion over the nature of
historiography makes interpretation as ‘historical law’ uncertain at best,
although the pattern essentially replaces the search with a complex evolutionary
‘trend’, unique yet recurrent. In fact we see the answer, without quite knowing
what we are seeing. We can approach the issue by distinguishing history from evolution,
and applying our suggestion of a double negative: the pattern requires a distinction of
‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’. From another perspective,
this is ‘Tolstoy’s Locomotive’, the distinction of ‘systems and
selves’, the distant cousin of the biologist’s distinction of ‘population
and organism’. What happens to people, and the nature of their consciousness, become
two separate issues.
Fisher’s lament, with a tragic flourish, was
perhaps a pessimistic or proto-postmodernist reaction to the horrors of the First World
War, and the shock this created in the hopes of so many in automatic progress. His
evocative statement was made in the wake of nineteenth century ideas of unlimited
progress, and earlier ideas of universal history and is an indirect expression of the view
that there is no discoverable historical pattern or direction. Beside it lie the many
attempts to challenge the great philosophies of history that rose in the Enlightenment
passing into the phase of German Idealism, then followed by efforts to approach its study
scientifically, or the reaction to philosophies of history in the various forms of
historicism, beginning with Herder. Both directional history, as in the idea of Progress,
and the rise of empiricism, in tandem with the scientific Revolution and the discovery of
evolution, rise in parallel and divide, to vie for a philosophic outcome in the
self-understanding of modernism. The world of Hume is answered by Kant, and Romanticism
parallels nineteenth century science, then positivism, and we see the characteristic
parallel interactive emergence effects. The latter are often seen as a kind of dialectic.
The use by Fisher of the term
‘waves’ is ironic, and highlights the ambiguity of his mixture of metaphors. In
the new world of Quantum Mechanics we see a blend of wave theory, mechanics, and
probabilistic ideas confounded together in a way to give a different meaning to the term
‘wave’. In the broadest picture, if we were to look at the great scale of world
history to see it organized into a train of waves, we would conclude in the affirmative as
to the existence of a pattern, attempt to let it assume the duties of progress, or yet
again consider, as might a Buddhist wise to the Great Wheel, that this progression was
either not progressive or a device of novelty concealing meaningless recurrence. The issue
of cyclical and linear views of history reemerges in a new form putting a new meaning on
the idea of progress. Fisher’s lament is ambiguous, for in the implied critique of
linear progressive views of history the distinctly antiquated ‘cyclical’ raises
its head in a concealed form.
Fisher’s lament bundles
together four, or more, quite separate concepts, that of rhythm, plot, pattern, and
predetermination that do not necessarily stand or fall together. That historical patterned
emergence can also be a series of chaotic ‘emergencies’, such as the French
Revolution, is still another crisscross of meaning. A rhythm need have no plot, and a
dramatic improvisation might show little or no predetermination, and yet operate under the
constraint of a conditioned future. Fisher invokes in general the theme of chance and
necessity that has arrived even from ancient times as the enigma of historical action, and
which posed the ‘atoms and the void’ of Lucretius against the Magian and gnostic
world views that overtook the Ancient world with supernatural futurism, and swept away the
developing sciences that could not compete with the religious syncretism of the times. The
issue has ever since been caught up in the swirl of theological controversy, as the
Zoroastrian archetype in stale Augustinian form conditions thought and threatens to make
‘common sense linear time’ a religious monopoly, against the backdrop of
evolutionary disputes over the place of natural selection, hence the random, in all
arguments against design.
The hold of Fisher’s lament
on many quotation-mongers and historical handwringers, as the magic sword to slay the
dragon of macro-history, is also a testimony to the difficulties of the project of
Universal History, and its cousin, the attempt to find laws of history. Conjoin these to
evolutionism, the macroeconomic model, perhaps as cyclical forecasting, and the blends
become arcane. From Augustine, and before, in the period of the Judeo-Zoroastrian
prophets, thence to Kant or Hegel the question of Universal History has remained elusive,
conditioned consciously and unconsciously by the context of concepts of theistic action,
teleological geopolitics, or concepts of linear time, that has led to a healthy modern
reaction.
Beside Hegel with his Napoleon
riding through the town of Jena, we have Tolstoy’s hero at the battle of Borodino in
his (fictional) account of the figure of this spearhead of modernity in the period of his
invasion of Russia. The sense of greater historical determination, if not causality, that
can come upon one is an experience that is not confined to scientists. One of the most
poignant statements of ‘causality’ in the realm of thought is the final coda of
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, whose final paragraph, after a long discussion of the
forces of history, concludes, in an analogy of the rise of the modern non-theistic view of
history to the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy:
As with the question of astronomy
then, so with the question of history now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the
recognition or non-recognition of some absolute unit that serves as the criterion of
visible phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth; in history it is the
independence of the individual—free will…
In the first case [of astronomy]
it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to
recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to
renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not
conscious.
We should brace ourselves
momentarily before this feeling of historical determination, the sense of being in a great
machine, in which even ideas of divinity are processed like all else, without actually
declaring a belief in absolute historical determinism as extreme as that of Tolstoy, if
that is what he is driving at. Tolstoy’s view is a remarkable Newtonian conception
for a man who has just completed the rich and living universe of War and Peace,
surprising for an artist of the times in an atmosphere of nineteenth century Romantic
resistance to the ‘reductionism’ of scientific. His intuition should be a
reminder that freedom has no denominations in paper. And it would seem to be the real
Tolstoy, before he was driven to retrograde religious confusions, to find the complement
of arid mechanics in what was almost a second incarnation.2
It is significant to recall the
context of Tolstoy’s great work. It is beautifully apt, notwithstanding its subtle
conservative cast, to our study of the eonic effect in describing the period of the
Napoleonic invasion of Russia riding the great shockwave of diffusion of the forces of the
French Revolution and the onrush of the expanding wave of modernity that passed outward to
set the phase of a New Age, the Age of the Locomotive. It is almost eerie that Tolstoy
should have quested in vain for the motor of history, and yet, in his epic account,
described the very contextual factor that must indicate its existence, and described for
us the means to find it by seeing it, although he could barely have understood the
implication of his own words.
There is a certain sadness in
Tolstoy’s great work, and not a little of the reactionary, and one who shows a strain
of the conservative de Maistre, the type of the arch-traditionalist who emerges to battle
the forces of modern change. It is not often remembered that Tolstoy’s original plot
was to have described the period of the Decembrists, the modernizing faction of the
aristocracy that in the early period after the Napoleonic era attempted to transmit the
influences of modernity to the reactionary society of Russia, whose backwardness goes so
far toward explaining the confusions of later communism. Tolstoy pulled back from this
plot, placing his drama in the period of the year 1812, to create the portrait of a
society looking at the explosion of the new from the outside and one about to disappear
forever in destruction. Tolstoy, as the tragic ending of his life made clear, was caught
very much between two worlds. And the world he has so beautifully described has tempted
too many to resist the tide of revolutionary freedom.
And yet even as he adopted this
viewpoint of historical determination, Tolstoy impinged on a subtle contradiction, or
difficulty, in the view of so-called scientific history, "Modern history has rejected
the beliefs of the ancients [in ideas of the Divine Will guiding historical action]
without providing new conceptions to replace them." The reason is perhaps that, as a
novelist, he was driven to simulate in his mind an entire structure of culture as it moves
in history. A simulation with Tolstoy’s brain is somehow ‘state of the
art’, although the result was intended as fiction. It is inevitable that one will
sense that there must be higher ‘laws’ at work to regulate this whole, laws in
which the factor of ‘will’ in some concoction of ‘triangulation’, to
use Tolstoy’s metaphor, is not in contradiction to the force of events. It is simply
a feeling that he had about his material. His point is one that will confront anyone who
looks at the intermediate structures, between the high and the low, as it were, the
microscopic and the macroscopic or cosmological, of human society, nation, and historical
context, whose mechanical unfolding remains unaccounted for by the forces of
‘bootstrap materialism’, as the laws of physics and chemistry, the most cogent
source of the very sense of causal determination. It is not mysticism to consider that
these are not the pure products of rationality, for as Tolstoy suggests, the period of
great changes shows the scale of events. Tolstoy seems to be stumbling on a contradiction,
although he sees that it is difficult to put one’s finger crux of the matter, as if
the volition were a sort of machine of Euclidean triangles of the ‘will’, in the
metaphors of geometry and mechanics that haunt his appendix.
It is interesting that Tolstoy
finally falls back on the idea of the locomotive (beside Karl Marx, another admirer of the
historical locomotive), a charming metaphorical non-explanation that nonetheless expresses
perfectly the notion of the ‘historical transportation’ of man throughout his
own historical becoming, in an appropriate context of the new nineteenth century sciences
of Thermodynamics, the first post-Newtonian progeny of the ancestors of the new studies of
Complexity.
A locomotive is moving. Someone
asks: What moves it?…The only concept by which the movement of the locomotive can be
explained is the concept of a force equal to the movement of peoples. The only concept by
which the movement of peoples can be explained is the concept of a force equal to the
whole movement of peoples.
Tolstoy spins on and on, page
after page. The metaphor of a locomotive is quite less than what is needed for a theory,
but far more pompous references to the ‘forces of history’ are not a wit more
rigorous than this, so we can start with Tolstoy’s Locomotive, if it will convey us
to a new theory of higher systems in the futures of thermodynamics. It is also a reminder
that the evolution of the organism is two things, the passage of a population in one
dynamic of ‘transportation’, and the emergence of ‘selves’ in that
population, issues of consciousness. It is significant that the science of thermodynamics
is itself the first step beyond the world of Newtonian mechanics, as it summons into
existence by its theoretical inquiry into heat engines notions of irreversibility not
implicit in the formulation of cosmo-mechanical laws of the early phase of physics.
And yet even as we are led to, if
not rendered fearful by, the sudden perception of historical determination, the idea of
Freedom, beside the idea of ‘free action’, which is something quite different,
resurfaces irresistibly to challenge a sense of mechanics, and drives us to wonder if the
eonic determination of the great struggles to gain freedom during mechanical revolutions
might show a deeper proof of a Freedom Hunch. We cannot solve the ‘fact/value’
dilemma, but we can indulge in enough guesswork to know where to look. This hunch is a
guess that we are dealing with a ‘system’ that can deal in ‘freedom’,
for its trajectory would be different if it was idling near human self-creation, after
cycles of intensive progression. This is no more than an observational sense of puzzled
wonder, historical feedback with a fancy name, or... This could indeed start with a
challenge to demonstrate macro-historical feedback. Philosophers and romantics will be
pleased and then appalled at this thinking. For it really sneaks reductionism back into
the fold.
It is the obvious objection to
pure determinism that a pure machine would not go to the trouble of constructing dramas of
freedom, a direct argument from meaning. There is the simple contradiction in
determination and freedom, and the difficulty of its translation into free action. The
logic behind this Freedom Hunch is simple, and, historicist or not, unconsciously
convincing: the play is meaningful and the plot is about freedom: it can’t be a
coincidence, and the circumstance is not likely to be superfluous. None of which
constitutes proof. But it is this paradoxical causal ‘heresy’ that won’t
depart, yet we cannot shake this other feeling. Usually, we feel either one way or the
other; generally our philosophies have given us tranquilizing assurances of our freedom,
and we require no hunch. Generally, if we espouse a philosophy of freedom, causality will
nag us. If we espouse causality, we are left with a meaningless sequence whose plain and
obvious spectacle is the ‘drama of freedom’, demanding to be the
‘meaning’ of history. This additional conceptual construct in addition to the
distinction between ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ might seem
confusing, but is in fact a reminder that we are liable to confuse ‘free action’
with ‘Freedom’, which is not necessarily the case. For the evidence of history
suggests otherwise, that Freedom is more a function of eonic determination, until man can
define this Freedom in terms of his own free action. 3
In the search for the causality
of history, the trail has always grown cold as the elusive quarry disappears into the
metaphysics of Freedom. Ideas of ‘freedom’ will blind us, if we wish a diagnosis
of our condition. We should grow suspicious, with a hunch about our subject, that
something like Occam’s razor applies to our perplexity. We have a mass of historical
data whose status must reduce to the law of causality. But we have a ‘plot’
whose theme of Freedom continually throws us off the scent. We should quietly wonder if
the elusive ‘causality’ of history is not hiding behind Freedom as the mechanism
disguised to our logical simplicities. Will this generate a contradiction? For if we
reduce freedom to determination, can it be free? If we do not reduce freedom to historical
determination, how might it evolve? We should be interested in the appearance of periods
when the effect of the semi-causal eonic determination of Freedom emerges in the confusion
of revolutionary ‘free action’ whose character shows an attempt to become free.
Although the trend of current
historical thinking, in the afterglow of the ‘positive challenges’ of
positivism, is against the perception of meaningful historical structure, it is not
accurate to say that modern thought is devoid of directional theories or philosophies.
Nineteenth century materialism, allied with Darwinian evolutionism, is often taken as
synonymous with ‘modernism’ where a closer look at the period from 1500 onwards
would reveal nearly a whole universe of viewpoints energized in parallel emergence, giving
birth to the idea of Universal History at the masthead, in its several manifestations, and
the divergence of idealist and materialist strains. The idea of random evolution, an
essential critique of idealist confusions, may itself only be a swing of the pendulum. In
this period, the idea of directed history takes explicit form in the viewpoint of the
philosopher Kant, although we can see its roots as early as the sixteenth century, along
with the subtle and ironic variant of Vico.
Beside the Kantian concept and
the Hegelian ‘end of history’, we see the emergence of the Whig interpretation
of progressive politics, and then the Communist Utopian ‘eschaton’ as the
classless society, and finally, to jump forward, or backward, very severely, the
neo-cyclical theories of Spengler and Toynbee, with all these in the aftermath of the
providential transcendentalisms bequeathed by the great monotheisms, whose successor seems
to be the theme of progress as it emerges in an ambiguous relationship to all ideas of
meta-history. Finally, the subtle implication of the rise of Thermodynamics as a new
extended science beyond the earlier Newtonian synthesis was the directionality of time, in
the measure of a new concept of ‘entropy’. We can’t really find a unity in
all of these. To call Spengler a proponent of directional history is misleading. His
perception of cyclical civilization attempted to criticize the very basis of the modern
direction.
Many of these critiques of
Universal History are clear secondary nineteenth century paradigms and take for granted
the nature of random emergence and restrict historical explanation within a framework of
questionable assumptions, indirectly influenced by Darwinism. Subtract this secondary
research whose first paragraph tips its hat to what Darwin did, taken as proven, and you
have little sociological theory left if his theory is thought false. Yet, are these but
innings in the wake of idealist confusion, the legacy of philosophic history? The
first-born of modernist historical thinking is, so to speak, the idea of progress, not
necessarily the same idea now under postmodernist attack. In any case, the systematics of
historical dynamism is as well suggested as foreclosed by the context of scientific
materialism, where the pursuit of fundamental or phenomenological laws is hampered only by
inherent complexity, and the difficulty of arriving at even a description of the
phenomenon to be explained.
Critics of ideas of Universal
History expose the requirements for an historical law: such a ‘law’, that can be
no law, as determination, or patterning, must not only have its forcefulness, but take
into account or interact with what its agent or actor does or ‘will do’, and
allow the transformation of optionality, that is a factor of human ‘will’. One
of the few solutions, now cast in evolutionary mode blending universal history and
covering law, or at any rate the ‘solution’ we see in the eonic effect, to this
paradox is a cyclical driver with a temporally variable degree of determination,
a statement so far a bit obscure, but which is essentially our distinction of ‘eonic
determination’ and ‘free action’. This tells us to consider or search for
an ‘evolutionary law or process’ that can evolve in relation to free organisms,
or even ‘evolve freedom’, or a ‘free machine’, an idea that
shortcircuits at once, but whose intuitive meaning is clear to anyone attempting to
construct robotic mechanisms, and then recreate their freedom. What our pattern suggests
is that there can be an alternation between directionality and randomness or free action,
a simple solution to the contradiction, if we can find evidence for this, and we can.
History and Evolution
There is a double perspective embedded in the rise of modernism between directional
philosophies and reductionist evolutionary theories. The latter claim the ground of the
former, but our pattern shows them to be prior in more than a temporal sense. The trap is
the failure to distinguish action from law. In any case, science proceeded from history
to evolution while culture itself moves from evolution to history. The injection of
theories into free actions scripts is inappropriate. We have left the question ambiguous,
using ‘Universal History’ for our opening discussion of turning points, and
‘eonic evolution’ for our frequency hypothesis. Eonic evolution automatically
includes its ‘free action script’ factor as the self-referential emergence of
evolutionism and evolving society. We must therefore distinguish data, model, and time of
observation versus time of action start, using the idea of three (or more) folders (past
data) and Folder 4 (statements of theory, theories of historical transformation,
ideologies, etc,..) Marxism and Darwinism both violate this protocol.
Before invoking a large amount of
theory to discuss these questions, it is worth noting that one can far better
investigate the pattern naively, to find that it automatically generates its own
methods. Near most of our transitions and divides we see a surge in historiography, the
Indian included for being explicitly anti-historical. The debate vis a vis Greek versus
Judaic history seems less than relevant. The Egyptians and Sumerians will quality for the
invention of writing itself. The names of the Pharaohs on stone, the Narmer Palette,
qualify (?) as primordial first history. A reason for this is that the evolution of theory
and society proceed in tandem, and the emergence of history is identically correlated with
the pattern. Our system seems to be evolving software to deal with ‘hardware’,
palaces to parliaments. A good example of this timing is the spectacular appearance of
German Idealism on the crest of the modern divide. The empiricist perspective on
historiography also qualities. The parallel emergence of materialism and idealism is
itself significant. We thus see the birth of history in spiral emergence clustered on our
pattern. Coincidence? The eonic emergence of the twin historicisms can also be traced to
the pattern. Thus a study of emergentism, and its divide data and evidence, here will lead
to Herder, and Hegel, etc,… 4
The most contagious example of
this philosophic assault on history is of course the philosopher Hegel, and his grand
philosophic effort whose appearance, timing, and unfolding is itself ‘eonically
significant’, and almost spectacular, but not therefore particularly useful for our
purposes. Significant then, but not directly useful here, for the overwhelming but
unstated implication is that teleological interpretation should be taken as established,
when it should at most be taken on hypothesis, if such could be defined. This is not
unfair, for, in an apparent contradiction, the eonic perspective, with a little
distancing, can make Hegel seem quite fascinating all over again, indeed transparent. We
should let history do Hegel, rather than Hegel history, to reconstruct the significant
moment to which he gave expression. That done, we discover ‘the hard way’, a
much better way, the subtle points he seems to have grasped, as in our
‘rediscovery’ of the freedom effect in our use of ‘cycle’ and
‘free action’. The latter is a good example of sequential dependency itself, and
the way in which the divide period monopolizes (or seems to) the coming period of
emergence. But we see that this has nothing to do with Hegel, but is the effect of the
whole progression. This metaphysical morning Fog rolling outwards at the threshold of
climactic revolutionary/evolutionary emergence is quite spectacular. It happened once
before! Hegel’s ‘dialectic of freedom’ expresses, with perfect eonic
timing, the ambiguity of causal systems in relation to evolutionary systems as these pass
through the value domain toward the emergence of freedom. The reason for these statements
is that much postmodernism, as in Foucault, is obsessed with freeing itself from Hegel.
But the harder you struggle, the worse it gets. We have simply slipped past it by using
it. As Positivists groan and empiricists attack the sacred icon, the bind increases. And
this is only one small perspective in the truly jolly three headed giant called
Kant-Hegel-Schopenhauer, all of whose points of view are rich in themselves. The point of
all this is the resemblance, as instant new tradition, to the moment of Deutero-Isaiah,
the same mysterious effect. It is essential to remember then that this can be flawed
philosophy, and the effect, in antiquity, with poorer resources, seemed like
‘revelation’. German Idealism is a useful ‘debriefing’, not to
sanctify revelations, but to get back to work. It’s conflict with science deserves a
shrug, for science produces a symbol set so rich in itself that it will sooner or later
land in these waters, perhaps with better tools to resolve the basic issues. Who needs
dialectic after Godel.
It is necessary to free our
argument from the entanglement of a ‘dialectical philosophy’ of history (at
least in its derivative forms), whose implications we cannot entirely refuse, for the
resemblance is obvious, but whose principal effect would be to declare ourselves open to
expound logical contradiction as a new form of profundity, a direct rejection of the
dialectic of ‘negation’. Dialectics come cheap, we could invent our own. But
dialectic shows clear eonic emergentism and cannot be refused, indeed, as a guess we would
think it destined to rise and swamp scientific logic itself. The real
‘dialectic’ of Hegel is a quite subtler form of understanding by far. Dyadic
dialectics are easily constructed, but the real existence and correct understanding of a
triad has never really been successful. The dialectic may be a grand enigma, but it has
vitiated many efforts at historical generalization using it as a foundation concept in
modern times, as the history of Communism shows. This is not the same as rejecting ideas
of ‘dialectic’ entirely, for their historical appearance is inseparable from the
evolution of thought, champions of empirical logic please note. Anytime we see eonic
correlation, our pattern will keep us honest, and here prevent us from automatic dismissal
of a particular nexus. Around -600 ‘dialectic’ appears in China, India, Persia,
and Greece. It is also true that ‘dialectic’ degenerated into the doctrine of
the trinity, and the Hindu polytheistic Trimurti! Once again, a strong eonic correlation
leads us, not to jubilation, but to caution. There is always time to tinker with a
‘dialectical theory’, but it is better to do the tinkering with the Lilliputian
lemmas of Aristotelian logic. We can construct our own descriptive
‘dialogistics’ as the ‘existence as dramatic fact of multiple multitasking
contradictory motions of thought’ in any given social context, dialogistical
‘not P’ per footnote-mile in the dull cross-references of disagreeable authors.
Thus the modern world shows the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution appearing in
parallel concert. Short of finding a common causal source of the cascade within which
these appear, we do better to stand back and take a ‘dialogistical’, or
‘wait and see’, attitude toward these ‘contradictions’. All the great
advances of science have come from sticking to the humble lemmas of Aristotelian logic.
And it will be these that will uncover the meaning of dialectic, if there is one.
There’s no avoiding the dialectic. We have dismissed it, and been forced to reinvent
it in the same paragraph. ‘Multiple multitasking monster’ might be a better
term.5
The search for, and failure to
find, a pattern in the work of modern historiography must itself find some explanation in
our discussion, if we are to claim a reversal of a negative general opinion. For the
search for some ‘law of history’ has occasioned much speculation, and as much
refutation. Further, a pattern in history, if its effects are so considerable, must seem
at first paradoxical for it cannot be remote or exotic and should have been the object of
proportionate indirect or unknowing interest before it is pointed out, and yet its
delineation must convey new information. Next, some indication, however minimal, must be
given to the issue of free past or future actions in relation to such a pattern whose
implications are systematic without implying some form of fatalism, ‘today I must
fulfill the pattern’, etc.,….
Our pattern fulfills such
requirements, to a first approximation. The law is no law at all, for it must include the
moment of the observer formulating such a law as a subevent, evidently a theory of waves
that ‘makes waves’. We can construct a distinction of eonic determination and
free action as a first step in this direction. This is like the distinction between
a ‘wave’ and the ‘wave rider, or surfer’, that we have made already.
The reasons for the failed search itself are not hard to find. First and foremost, it
wasn’t a failure at all, but Newtonian indigestion, and in any case the pattern of
historical action as we discover it is on a scale so vast, and its interaction with the ad
hoc (rightly) so contingent in the reckoning of ‘free action’, that its
regularity could not have been expected without, at a minimum, relatively accurate
historical knowledge of world history in a block greater than 5000 years. The
discovery of the existence of Sumer, for example, is decisive. Unfortunately, this is
indeed a bare minimum, quite aside from issues of the inner structure of such periods. We
live in the fortunate first generation since the discovery of cuneiform to be able to
start considering the meaning of this eonic effect.
We could not have expected,
although the scale of cosmology and greater evolution might have forewarned us, that an
interval as long as 2400 years appears to be the basic unit of historical structure,
rather than the ill-defined (but useful for other purposes) concept of civilization, or
that 300 years is the effective duration of effective ‘evolutionary’ or
‘eonic’ impetus. In any case, it is only in the twentieth century, indeed, the
last generation, that our knowledge has satisfied this requirement of data at its barest.
The result is a clearly delineated, yet puzzling, fragment, like a shard of a lost whole,
that leaves us, at first, in the dark as to its nature, but with overwhelming indications
of a natural phenomenon at work. Three parts of the pattern have fallen into place within
the recent context of modern research: the discovery of the beginnings of civilization in
terms of Sumer and Egypt, to which should be added the new information from the earlier
Neolithic, the extraordinary synchronous parallelism of creative advance in the ancient
world near the period -600 in the New and Old Worlds, and the onset of first
‘perspective as a whole’ of our emergence from a period of modern transition.
Eonic determination
and free action
In the contradiction generated by
the idea of a ‘law of history’ as against that of spontaneous action, we can
create a conceptual tool to study the contradiction empirically, those of relative free
action as ‘will by definition’, robotic, free, or otherwise, in relation to a
movement of eonic historical determination (of civilization) as evolution. The latter is
not a philosophic category of causal explanation, but only a deficit of explanation during
the zone and period intervals of the transitional periods themselves, like the heightening
of contrast in a photographic analysis. We cannot find law, nor freedom, but we can see
their contrast in the cyclical change of ratio between eonic determination and free
action, the latter always the coin of realization. We can increase the contrast in a
photograph, and we can look at those periods of history when ‘law’ and
‘free action’ seem to change their relationship. Is this ‘free action’
‘free will’ and is ‘eonic determination ’ determinism? We can
sheherezade this question, playing one against the other, by asking another question, is
the strategy of chess player, the behavior in a market, the initiative of a revolutionary,
deterministic or free action? There can be optionality in relation to a given structure.
Free action can be generative, and seen to have eonic determination in one of the great
turning points. There can be a ‘downfield’ before and after a triggering point
or division of moments. We do not need to answer absolutely if the eonic effect shows the
movements of determination in relation to free action, and shows the distinction in
temporally distinct periods.
What we do need is historicalevidence to make this a useful distinction, for these are not philosophic
categories, but partial categories tailor-made to study our three turning points. We must
therefore be required to show some indication from history of a difference between free
action during eonic determination and free action at other times. Consider the era of
the Greek Enlightenment, and ask why, a period in time is the source of so many creative
advances? In fact there should be four cases: what we will call eonic determination and
mideonic sequential dependency, and two aspects of free action in these separate
intervals. This strange task we have attempted to illustrate. This is different from a
‘theory’ about Freedom in history, the great theme of many philosophies of
history, that has also been their nemesis. ‘Free action’ is not necessarily the
realization of ‘Freedom’, about which we should consider ‘a freedom
hunch’, that the dynamic of ‘free action’ and ‘eonic determination
will generate ‘Freedom’.
To take a controversial (and
slightly obscure) example first, we can just barely see the difference in the modern
period if we compare the ideas of revolution during the English Civil War, and the French
Revolution. And we can see eonic determination pass into sequential dependency exactly in
the generation ca. 1800. In both cases, the English and the French, we see revolution,
although the participants conceived of the process in different terms and ideologies. Some
may not like this example. But it is necessary to consider the paradox that while nature
achieves its purpose, its realization as free action often fails, as the example of
revolution shows. The example of the genre of tragedy is one of the most charming. For we
see the pure eonic determination of the tragic genre, which dies out in the period of
sequence. In these more distant cases, the distinction is very clear, and indispensable.
That the Greeks of the Archaic period ca. -750 to -600 were in a different state of free
action in relation to eonic determination is an extremely strange thought at first, but,
strange as it is, there is hardly another interpretation, for in this period of a few
generations a group of men were able to create changes that that altered the course of
history. Why was this? And why did it happen five times in five places all at once?
The same then can be said of the Israelites, and the forest Upanishadic and Chinese
philosophers. The focal intensity, it is important to note, is both temporal and
geographical, in a fashion we have not yet made precise.
One other advantage of this
approach is that we can consider the distinction of ‘consciousness’,
‘self-consciousness’, as a blend of eonic determination and free action without
invoking ‘theories of the will’, or committing ourselves to a ‘yes-no’
answer to the ‘freedom when?’ question.
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 clich�s of historic Destiny and the
‘dramatic’ view of history, the idea that history has a plot or significant
structure.6 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 clich�s 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 cycle 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 a 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. 7
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 it’s
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 if
historical events in their long course could ever be shown to 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 some default dramatic ‘scene-changing’ machinery
would be the same, Aristotle’s hint, that the ‘drama’ is of inherent
scientific interest as an object of study, has not been 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 clich�d ‘logic of events’, and its sudden
creative retransformation or improvisation. We might want the ‘mechanical law’
from the ‘mechanical clich�’, to be confounded by the patterning of
non-clich�d 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. 8
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 burst 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.
It is fascinating that J.B.
Bury’s classic The Idea of Progress sees fit to begin in the mysterious
interval between the death of Machiavelli, and the philosopher Jean Bodin a generation
later, as he casts off the ‘cyclical theme and variations’ of the idea of the
Four Kingdoms and sees the three stage periodization of world history in a progressive
mode, roughly corresponding to the Mesopotamian, classical, Mediterranean, and European
stages.9 This arrangement of Bury’s account is altogether apt indeed, and
proves one aspect of our thesis, that the appearance of historical ideas themselves
corresponds self-referentially to the pattern we wish to point out. The idea of progress
has been increasingly questioned at its roots in recent generations, after its great
period of nineteenth century flowering. But the critique has itself gone to an extreme
that is not intuitive, and is under suspicion of being perversely wrong. The idea of
progress was essential in the labor of birth struggling against the inertia of antiquity.10
Part of the difficulty is the use of the idea of progress for ideological purposes in
‘banner of the regiment’ meanings, thence to expect it to have theoretical
standing unsullied by its history. The relation of slavery and warfare, and other negative
aspects of the modern transformation, to the idea of progress requires careful
redefinition, in order to rescue the basic idea to the creative ferment of ‘real
progress in action.’11
Theodore Olson, in Millennialism,
Utopianism, and Progress, criticizes the assumptions of the idea of progress, as the
doctrine that "there is a blind force, uncontaminated by historical contingency,
dedicated to the continued improvement of man [that] is the central affirmation of the
notion of progress". This engages the issue perfectly. Defenders of progress often
fail to answer to this sort of objection. He complains that the persistence of this idea
can only be explained by its manifest convenience, and declares the notion to be at root a
form of incoherence, a variant of Fisher’s lament. Although it is certainly true that
proponents of the idea of progress do not often realize the difficulties of their
position, use the idea ideologically or in a salto morale, and suffer the
confusions of this fact, Olson’s statement is as open to challenge as the view under
fire, for its assumption is that there is nothing to drive progress. If we suspect that
there is, the argument fails immediately.12 The eonic effect reveals the
evidence that there is. ‘Progress’ shows itself clustered around three great
turning points of history, the last of which gave birth finally to the idea itself. But as
we begin to realize the existence of an historical patterning, we can easily misapply the
idea of progress to its explanation, but to deny completely the progression as progress of
civilization from the time of Sumer would be almost absurd.
But in any case here is an
example of the way our pattern will reopen an old perspective, and promptly be frittered
away, if we do see the net equivalent of a ‘blind force’ or
‘progress pusher’ in our historical surges, and give it any cogency without a
commitment to the real difficulties of historical systems, and these in the heritage of
Newtonian dynamics, and the development of analytical reductionism. Quite apart from
defining the meaning of progress, and its relation to issues of ‘facts and
values’, to hypostatize a ‘force’ to match the data in this or any other
historical study, in the heritage of or on the grounds of the breakdown of post-Newtonian
systems, will provoke more of the same endless controversy, unless we can truly catalogue
this force in a reductionist manner without invention or metaphysical trappings. Since
this is exceedingly difficult to do, we are struck dumb, and must confine our activities
to empirical correlation, but with an ‘epur si muove’ of suspicion about the
larger motion of historical development, the more so if we begin to realize such a process
could not result from planned human futurist activity. This takes us out of the business
of stating historical causality in the same breath as the assertion of historical
progression. There is a great irony here. The linear sense of time, the idea of progress,
the obvious connection to the Augustinian, and, thence, the Zoroastrian, schemes of
history, are found to lack a driver. The only workhorse mule for this task will be the
‘cyclical’, hopefully shorn of its dreadful implications of ‘eternal
return’. The cyclical impostor is seen to be the real manifestation of the dynamics
of evolution, as this applies to culture, or civilization. But this approach requires
great caution, for it demands one extension against reductionist shortfall in the
bootstrap of foundational notions arising from the hard sciences. No effort in this regard
has ever succeeded without positing ghost forces, extra laws, vitalist trappings,
‘cgfx’ forces, Casper the Ghost Force X. It is almost ironic that our subject
starts in analysis and ends in seeing that our eonic pattern includes this game of
‘cgfx-ing’ as downfield new-aging. Each of our great turning points will show
the same outbreak of ‘involutionary’ preoccupation.
The basic point Olson is making
highlights the further apparent contradiction between non-teleological science and its
social vehicle inherited from the Enlightenment animated by the idea of progress. The
grand force then becomes beholden to enlightened ‘rationality’ on which a sudden
increased burden is placed to be the mover of history. The most we can hope is that it is
on the way to becoming so as a developmental emergent, for it is unlikely that rationality
alone can explain the process of social evolution. We have but to look at the history of
science, draw a chart, and notice the rhythmic complexities of its emergence, and its
nearly jump-started surges of development. Thus the all-important rationality is also an
evolute, of the eonic variety. However, wary of the confusions of the idea of progress, we
can proceed to a more generalized idea of ‘eonic progression’ as a generalized
concept beyond that of progress. And this can resolve many of the idea’s
difficulties, for the idea of progress is a product of this progression, not a name for
its ‘law’. We need to admit to the change of meaning in the term
‘progress’ in our eonic sense, which simply does not correspond to its original
usage, as a concomitant of a linear view of time, or a view that history is continuous
incremental change. We are close to the arch-confusion, whereby the sense of ‘linear
directionality’ is born during a cyclical interrupt.13
Eonic Progression and the
Idea of Progress
We must distinguish eonic
progression, from the idea of progress, as this confuses the idea of a ‘law of
history’ with the potential of ‘free action’, as indeed these are entwined
during the period of acceleration. The idea of progress is a joyride emergentist free
action script caught in metonymy of part and whole. Further, the idea of progress is a
preeminent exemplar of what we call an eonic emergent, appearing, in direct correlation,
during the rise of the modern transformation. It was nearly born among the Greeks. The
modern idea swings in opposition to the cyclical as the linear, but we see that the
relationships are more complex, for the cyclical restores the linear, and drives the path.
Suddenly we see that the idea is suffering a level confusion, and might suffer it in our
account. Keeping straight the ironic meaning of ‘eonic evolution’ and one of its
emergents, if this is applied self-referentially to itself must require some unknown new
form of ‘escher-hand’ theory. And thus the issue of progress is indeterminate,
for we are ourselves are creating our progressive means, even as the process of history
moves through one of its great progressions. We can see progress without its idea. In
antiquity we see the idea arriving at the threshold of being born during the time of the
Greeks.
The Darwinian viewpoint, as if
intended to simplify all of this confusion, now creates its own confusion, especially in
the thinking of those in other fields who are to take it for granted, as evidence in favor
of anti-directional interpretations, or the rule of pure chance in the emergence of
historical entities whose temporal generation is so complex that we can barely see them in
action from our historical reconstructions. It is not our purpose here to review the
entire debate over selectionism. The view here proceeds with a radical suspicion about its
own brand of geographical selectionism, eonic jump diffusion. It is useful to invoke here
the considerable literature criticizing the Darwinist selectionism. However, if we
challenge selectionism, it does not follow that the challenge to directional thinking
might not arise from some other mechanical interpretation of organismic evolution.
The spectrum of possibilities is immense, and finds a strange new twist in the inherently
interesting world of the ‘genetic algorithm’. 14
It is easy to find an example in
the realm of the evolution of linguistic structures, where the basic disposition of
Darwinian selectionism confronts severe difficulties if not contradictory evidence
altogether. The many efforts beginning in the nineteenth century to reconstruct the
original vocabulary of an original Indo-European speech have less frequently addressed the
issue of the grammatical structure of this language. If we compare ‘Sanskrit’
and English, we see that the latter has virtually shed all but a minimum of inflectional
constructs. The decline in the grammatical complexity of Indo-European speech throughout
historical times raises the question, how did the original structure come into being? We
see the process of grammatical ‘decline’ occur independently in almost every
case, from Hittite to English to Hindi, Russian and Lithuanian, lagging, often in the same
way, down to the participle ‘have’ construct for past tenses, although at
different rates, and the a typical case of Russian or Lithuanian showing a slower rate of
change in this inflectional complexity. Between the Vedic, and Pali, Homeric, Classical
and demotic, Anglo-Saxon and English, we see the swift simplification during historic
times of the structural conjugation of verbs and nouns from its primordial labyrinthine
perfection of structure. In modern times we see many members of this family approach the
virtual loss of this inflectionality, English being the most advanced example.
This evidence shows that, left to
itself, such structures deteriorate, in proportion to time, and a very short time at that,
on the order of millennia. Whence then this rise to extraordinary complexification? It
is difficult to accept that eons of random ‘evolution’ produced this complex
grammar, only to see it decline as the Indo-Europeans drifted apart. This grammatical
peaking is especially interesting because it is clearly in the realm of natural process
that we would not attempt to ascribe to metaphysical explanation, and which shows
‘evolution’ not connected with the organismic. We cannot rule out, to be sure,
man-made creation, but as the case of Esperanto shows, this rarely succeeds. Indeed, in
the age of the computer, the new software of ‘grammar construction programming’
shows the existence of possible theoretical approaches to issues of linguistic mechanics,
and the automatic generation of grammars, the famous ‘lex and yacc’ of Unix. We
have used the term ‘Sanskrit’ in quotation marks as an emblem from the historic
language of that name for the earlier source language or languages from which the various
branches of Indo-European speech are derived. It is interesting that Sanskrit is in fact a
relatively artificial construct that shows perhaps an unconscious effort to recreate an
earlier stage of the language by the brilliant linguists of early India, the work of
Panini and others. Furthermore, this occurred in the classical period emerging from our
second turning point, whatever we are to conclude from that.
And the implication seems to be
that we could not therefore claim the slow rise in the complexity of such grammatical
systems, implying that it has a relative fast beginning point during which its
complexification proceeds at a more rapid rate. Further this period of its initialization
to a greater complexity must have been quite recent, within the last twenty-thousand odd
years, to grant the roughest outrageous maximum interval. Extend this backwards to an
absurd forty-thousand however, and the argument is the same. Why would linguistic
development left to itself and evolving very slowly produce a higher complexity, and then,
reaching this hump, commence a decline, left to itself? We become curious about our
turning point or transitional eras, and examine them for any clues. We see in fact that
simple proximity to the eonic sequential mechanism, during zone and period as we will call
it, transforms raw elements into classic literatures, although we do not see any
complexifying modification of the Indo-European or other grammars in historical times.
Although we do not see linguistic
creation in historical times (artificial Sanskrit comes close), we do see in the classical
phase the extraordinary appearance of multiple literatures in parallel, rising to a high
level not matched in the subsequent New Age. Again, in modern times the example of
Shakespeare, and the timing of modern literature, is extraordinary. A close look at this
brilliant poet shows the poet discovering, almost single-handedly, a self-sustaining
poetic ‘machine’ built from intimate knowledge of the forms of rhetoric, an
instrument that sustained him between the also endless flashes of brilliance. The
development of Shakespeare also shows a play on the ‘prose-poetry’ dichotomy as
the medium of blank verse evolves from a rigid form to a mixed one in a mystery of
language that passed over the heads of every subsequent poet, including Milton.
Shakespeare is important because we can see a man creating the effect can do alone, under
the right conditions, and this is not history, quite obviously, but apparently a case of
free action as eonic determination. We must therefore be left to wonder at the primordial
world of shamans.
Thus in general these effects
show clear eonic determination as the emergent sequences of pearl-stringers, the
appearance of the Iliad being an outstanding example. In general, looking at the far more
comprehensive medium of poetic meters in the early Greek literature forces one to wonder
that ‘evolution’ is ‘computing’ down to these details, in a fashion
that simply leaves us baffled.
One further reason for our
caution against selectionism is the danger of applying this to the phase of classical
parallelism, where we see any notion of survival of the fittest go into reverse gear. We
also see who the survivors are, so to speak, the Romans, after an entire era of advance
has vanished. Historical process in what we will call the classical phase appears
so obviously to be selecting upward against the most probable, and to be branching out
into multiple explorations. Survivalist selectionism is a reduction of potential, quite
different. These ancient parallels, followed by the modern advance, are not
cultural selection in action. The Buddhist world explicitly shows a movement to negate the
very basis of survival. The classical era itself shows why selectionism is misleading in
relation to cultural evolution. It ‘selected’ the Romans, as the whole period of
rapid advance was swallowed up in sausage. Selection is a reduction of potential. The
evolutionary dynamic must include a recovery of potential. The fact/value distinction
disappears in this potential. The parallel ‘throw and catch’ mechanism, in a
computer metaphor, of the downfield messianisms acted as a recovery vehicle. Cultural
mechanics simply isn’t selectionist. The inflexible paradigmatic force of the
selectionist, variational idees fixes make the Darwinian assumptions a given in
contexts where they mislead. The idea is that, since the Darwinian case is established
beyond a doubt, then this powerful evidence of evolutionary selectionism should weigh in
favor of similar hypotheses in other fields. The case for evolution as a temporal fact is
confused with the case for Natural Selection as an evolutionary mechanism, as the idea of
evolution takes on the dialectical logjam of debate over the idea of progress. But even
the proponents of selectionism often admit by the nature of their language, if you study
their formulations with care, that this process must be a ‘creative force’. Like
the formulations of circle squarers, something crucial is assumed or slips in unnoticed.
Thus the idea of progress returns
to square one in relation to evolutionary emergence, although it would be better to invent
a new term, and certainly take nothing for granted. The idea of progress is a cultural
artifact of modernity, tailored to the force of modernization. Over the scale of world
history, to say nothing of evolutionary deep time, we can minimalize our idea of progress
to ‘eonic progression’. Olsen’s criticism then could be reformulated (if
necessary here without the imputation of progress) on a minimal basis "there is a
blind force, either uncontaminated by historical contingency or riding on contingent
selectionism, dedicated to the continued organismic evolution if not improvement of man
[that] is the central affirmation of the notion of evolutionary development". This
muddle does not make clear whether the force is selection itself or some background driver
of selection. The question arises then, from where do you get this force? It cannot likely
be the effect of pure variation and selection. One can change the question, is there any
evidence however indirect of the needed force-impetus? The emergence of views of
punctuated equilibrium based on critical discrepancies and gaps in the fossil record
shows, right on schedule as it were, the resumption of search for ‘brand X
Force’ as ‘standard cyclical interrupt’.The evolutionary record
shows accelerative pace, with the passage to higher complexity in inverse proportion to
intervals of time, contradicting the implicit assumption of the steady rates of random
variation. This fact alone would appear to undermine the theory. One must suspect a clear
relation of our subject to evolution as seen from other theoretical viewpoints, such as
the theory of punctuated equilibrium, with its sudden changes, and intermediate stasis,
although here again we find similar difficulties between fact and explanation. Niles
Eldredge and Ian Tattersall begin to notice the data of cultural acceleration and stasis
that is of direct relevance to our study, "Greek civilization attained its zenith not
long after it appeared" 15
The confusions of the term
‘evolution’ in all of its various uses, from the cosmological to the cultural,
are not easily resolved by the indiscriminate use of the term in disparate fields. Our
usage implies clear distinctions of historical, cultural and genetic evolution, and
economic and technological sequences, if these are taken as historical determinants, and
therefore drivers of this evolution. The cosmologist Edward Harrison, in Masks of the
Universe, complains that the ‘seductive’ term ‘evolution’ is too
value-laden for correct biological use, and proposes that it be used only by astronomers
who ‘have retained its proper meaning’. But what is the proper meaning of
the term? This is like complaining hockey players get into fights. Of course they
shouldn’t. Our usage is qualified, ‘the eonic or discrete evolution of
civilization’, and could as well be ‘historical mumbledee peg’, but the use
of the term ‘evolution’ seems appropriate, in our discussion, because it is
value-laden. It is the inevitable fate of any historical subject. Here the inclusion of
the present enters the discussion, for ‘eonic evolution’ at least will avoid the
trap into which Darwinism falls by addressing the distinction of ‘law’ and
‘action’ and attempt to differentiate ‘laws of becoming’ from
‘free action scripts’.The most insidious ‘free action
script’ is the theory itself, which purports to state what is, and becomes, in its
claim as law on the future, an injunctive ‘should be’.16 With respect
to the issue of values, there are only a few possibilities. Either we abdicate the
evolution of values by a tacit concession to theologians and grant them supernatural
status or we posit, however complex, the unity of facts and values in a unified domain of
discourse, granting only their ‘square root of minus one’ status as
‘peculiar but proceed’ in relation to measurement, evaluation or substance.
Thus while acknowledging
Harrison’s point without necessarily agreeing, and considering the need for, and
possibly more appropriate use of, a generalized evolutionary category, we will adapt our
own terms, for we must reckon empirically with the ‘evolution’ of
‘civilization’ in some fashion, connected with periodization, and the emergence
of values. And certainly this is value-laden, but it is comprehensive, dialectically
complex, and therefore with its own principle of indifference, thus, for example,
examining the ideological spectrum of ideological values spread around the explosion of
modernity. If it is not science, so be it. But one must deny the status to other
sociological pretensions. Unfortunately, we have only the barest minimum in order to
proceed with this approach, but it is more than what biology can show from ‘deep
time’. But that is enough to see how misleading the issues of biological evolution
can become.
Our historical system is in
crisis. Perhaps, the very idea of a crisis is a system idea, and a theoretical crisis of
equivocation between social mechanics and systems of value. Our sense of historical scale,
looking backward over the millennia of civilization, induces the hope of ‘third
person science’ in the spectacle of millennia, but suffers a shrinking interval of
objectivity to become its own script of action in the dramatics of the
‘first-person’.17 In TheChoice, Evolution or Extinction?
Ervin Laszlo brings home the sense of contemporary crisis, using the language of General
Systems, the ghostly Caspers of cybernetic theory, and identifies a Grand Transition, with
a usage quite different but not totally incompatible with the one to be herein shown, in
the passage from the first stage of industriality to a new global socio-economic system.
He sees a Fifth Wave, after Communism, Fascism, Decolonization, and Glasnost,in
the problems of "population, poverty, militarization, waste and environmental
degradation, climate change, and food and energy shortages. He attempts to apply these
ideas of the systems sciences in their new incarnation as the study of Chaos and
Complexity to the transitional shocks confronting the planetary context. Cascades of
change generate the onset of chaos, leading in turn to the onset of new bifurcations in an
evolutionary trajectory.
It is fascinating that in the
blend of ideas characteristic of Laszlo’s organicist systems thinking, his title
poses the question, and isolates both the value and limitation of systems thinking, what
is the relation of choice to the unfolding of the system’s dynamic, force, or
law? In the age of the computer mouse, this is no longer a woolly question. The question
remains, are we free to respond in such a system, and challenge the inevitable in these
turning points, or are we corpses or shades holding discourse with Charon? Lazslo’s
challenge contains therefore the seeds of its own equivocation, and the net equivalent of
a first distinction for our study of ‘free action’, and ‘eonic
determination ’.
Laszlo’s theory raises the
question of the correct application, if any, of ideas of ‘self-organizing’
systems to historical sequences, and beyond these to evolutionary development. Although
our developing distinction of ‘historical determination’ and ‘free
action’ puts an immediate block in front of any one dimensional system theory that
cannot take into account ‘first-person’ interaction, the resemblance of the
eonic data, our turning points, to patterns considered in theories of self-organizing
systems is so close that one is drawn into an immediate inspection of their content. We
can move toward an hypothesis that our eonic effect is related, extraordinarily, to the
phenomenon of ‘limit cycles’ that arise in the study of non-linear systems, one
of whose applications is to the non-linear business cycle models of economics. The
stupendous onset of ‘long sloshing’ waviness in the period –900 to
–600 in classical antiquity is more than suggested by the facts. The problem is that
the response of our ‘system’ to a mysterious attractor is to change gears and go
into high-octane periods of social valuation. The most drastic case of this centers on our
use of the term ‘freedom’, which cannot be reconciled with the differential
equation, and yet must express or represent its dynamism. Like a man constructing a robot,
the system must ‘do free action’, with an ambiguous relation to Freedom.
Further, we increasingly suspect the anvil of action lies in the domain of consciousness,
and its transformations. Thus we are between two domains of discourse, taken as the
distinction in the idea of Tolstoy’s locomotive between a social system evolution and
individual action thereto.
Heat Engines and Computer
Mice
One of the strangest
self-correlations of the rise of modernism is the passage from timeless Newtonian
mechanics in the era of the early Enlightenment to the ‘time theories’, implicit
or explicit, in the rise of Thermodynamics just as the modern system crosses its divide
and opens into its new era. The first theories of information are implicitly born here, as
the world of the computer to come will spawn the interaction of user and instrument as a de
facto ‘theory’ of free action and mechanical determination, on the level of
software. The new sciences of Artificial Life, perhaps the real legacy of Darwinist
selectionism, and Simulated Evolution arrive at Conway’s Game of Life, and the
software/hardware interaction. The matching of mechanics and interactivity is not a
metaphysical speculation but a fait accompli of computer hackers. Who can say what
future blends of ‘law’ and ‘individuality’ (systems and selves) will
spring from this early suggestion that ‘laws’ and ‘programs’ share, or
overlap, similar domains. Something like the functionality of a computer mouse must be
involved in any genuine statement of historical law in the sense that one system idles
while another acts, and must match coordinates, on the computer screen, with events to
receive input ‘geographically’. It is interesting that the programming tactic
for a computer mouse is a ‘do…while’, or ‘wait until input’
statement that does not execute except in relation to free activity. The computer mouse is
clearly evident in the macroeconomists study of the economic cycle, as data form
‘just before’ is recycled into ‘free action’ modification of a system
in motion. 18
Although the term
‘system’ is reductionist, and demands mercy for something more exciting such as
‘organismic’, it is the proper starting point, in one direction. The
‘system’ referred to is the ‘V-cone or eonic sequence of phases’, to
be described, and looks too mechanical to be called ‘organismic’ (this is a
defense against the Toynbean misuse of this term). The ‘system’ formulation in
this new mode sets the pitch for one insight into theoretical history as the last known
good jumping off point in the context of Natural Philosophy beyond the formulations of
Thermodynamics, and beyond that the mechanical systems of which the Newtonian is the
premiere source, and whose metaphors as ‘law’ we have already examined. As the
thermodynamic scientist Ilya Prignone observes, "The research program of classical
science was focused on a description in terms of deterministic, time-reversible laws.
Actually this program was never completed, as, in addition to laws, we need also events,
which introduce an arrow of time."19 The correct application of such ideas
to historical process would more than likely prove impossibly difficult, although there is
a direct connection between the distinction between ‘macro-states’ and
‘microstates’ the moment one posits discrete sequencing on the scale of whole
civilizations. Quantum Mechanics must be a clue to our subject, for the element of
‘system’ and ‘interaction with the system’ is given an extraordinary
treatment, for the first time in the history of science. A dynamical system is measured,
and the theory changes from deterministic time-evolution to probabilistic patterns.
We have summoned up the cyclical,
and the distinction of ‘discrete-continuous’, the favorite of so many books of
electronics. These are not really the same. The cyclical is the ‘last chance for
brute force’, a sort of mechanical pendulum. But these ‘cycles’ show clear
internal structure, and overall ‘geofocalization’. We can only speculate (and it
is mere speculation indeed) that in a fashion reminiscent of Quantum Mechanics, we must
distinguish two categories, the waves of electronic this and that, and the interaction
with measurement, thus our ‘waving’ is ‘measured’, and
‘localizes’ against the disparate and sprawling whole, in a fashion so obviously
defeating the static equilibrium to preempt the ‘static future’. This will
hardly do as explanation, leastwise if ‘measurement’ must stand in for periodic
value-emergentism, but the distinction of time-evolution of a deterministic system and the
experimenter’s interruption and consequent modification of the system observed is a
clear case of the partition of ‘system’ and ‘free action’(the
observer’s decision to messier. This is quite outlandish pilfering from physics and
does not explain what system we are dealing with in general, but it is difficult to avoid
the suspicion, gazing at world history as a whole, beyond the purely phenomenological
description given, of a global system at work.
The ‘bootstrap’ effect
of scientific ‘re-emergence’ in modern times, as if to recast knowledge with a
common set of axioms, often has an unsettling effect on the balance of knowledge. Much
thinking is caught in a reductionist shortfall, even as the foundations of physics are
passing beyond the earlier Newtonian foundations, toward the possibly real
‘bootstrap’ or bedrock of quantum systems. A kind of positivist
discarded-hypothesis syndrome litters the field of nineteenth century theories, in the
diffusion of secularization. The Romantic Reaction was immediate, as were the protests,
e.g. from the wilder corner of Theosophy, against Darwinism and other thought-systems,
‘bootstrap didn’t reach me’. Western knowledge is more balanced than one
might think, for the works of Kant, for example, are precisely this larger perspective in
the home-ground version. The point is that the progress of knowledge is not
‘linear’, and shows a relation both to the discrete structure of the eonic
sequence, and the parallelism of antiquity, whose effects must resurface. The value of
basic ‘reductionism’ could be lost, for it is a crucial episode of world history
to coordinate the obvious confusions of just this religious history that is threatening a
‘Dodds effect’, of multicultural implosion. The progress of science like a
regimental advance simply proceeds, as ‘hypotheses’ drop, and the movement
proceeds in bootstrap that seems in some fashion more primitive than what came before.
20
Endnotes
1. The philosopher, and critic of
historicism, Karl Popper offered this quote as a challenge to Toynbee. H.L. Fisher, History
of Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), vol. I, p. vii. Fisher continues,
"This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written
plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature." It is
the basis for Popper’s discussion of ‘historicism’, cf. Karl Popper, The
Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton, 1971), Vol. II, pp.269-80, Sidney
Hook, The Hero in History (NY: John Day, 1943), p. 141, Chapter VIII, titled after
Fischer’s "The Contingent and the Unforeseen". Hook also notes the
distinctions of rhythm, plot, and the ‘finality of a predetermined pattern’. The
historian Arnold Toynbee quotes this passage twice. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of
History (NY: Oxford, 19576), abridged by D. Somervell, Vol. I, p. 445, Vol. II, p.266.
Popper upbraids Toynbee for not answering to Fisher. E.H. Carr, What is History?
(NY: Knopf, 1962), pp. 43, 100. Krishan Kumar, Prophecy and Progress (NY: Penguin,
1978), p.178. Mark Van Doren, The Idea of Progress (NY: Praeger, 1967), p. 215 also
notes the frequency of this quote.
2. For a study of Tolstoy’s
view of history as seen in War and Peace, cf. Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog
and Fox (1966). The hedgehog knows ‘one big thing’, where the fox knows
‘many little things’, the distinction to strike a chord similar to our comments
concerning the project of Universal History. Tolstoy notes, "And so for history the
insoluble mystery presented by the compatibility of free will and necessity does not exist
as it does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History examines a presentation of
man’s life in which the union of these two incompatibles has already taken
place."
3. The most thorough reference
source is Mortimer Adler’s, The Idea of Freedom (NY: Doubleday, 1958)
4. The pattern invokes but
transcends the idea of a so-called ‘covering law’ sought for in the stream of
what others call Universal History. This little known debate, evident in the writings of
Karl Popper, revolves around the ‘twin historicisms’, basically a debate over
‘laws of history’ versus ‘historical uniqueness’. It is hard to think
of a more confusing subject than that using the term ‘historicism’, in its twin
meanings, one three quarters the opposite of the other, more or less. For the basic issues
of historiography, the covering law model, and philosophic, and empirical history, cf.
Hans Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time (NY: Doubleday, 1959),
Other works on the issues of the philosophy of history, and the difficulties of a science
of history include "Historical Inevitability", in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays
on Liberty (1969), William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (NY: Oxford,
1957), W. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History (1951), Patrick Gardiner
(ed), The Philosophy of History (1974), Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in
History (NY: Holmes and Meier, 1991), R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
(1956), Mathew Nitecki et al. History and Evolution (Albany: State Univ. of NY,
1992), Trygve Tholfsen, Ideology and Revolution in Modern Europe (NY: Columbia,
1984). From an economic angle, cf. Mark Blaug, The Methodology of Economics (NY:
Cambridge, 1980). The transcendence theme is examined by John Marcus, Heaven, Hell, and
History (NY: MacMillan, 1967).
Covering LawsAlthough
the debate over the covering law model [Cf. Ronald Nash (ed.), Idea of History (NY:
Dutton, 1969), Carl G. Hempel, "Explanation in Science and History", p.79,
William Draw, Laws and Explanation in History (NY: Oxford, 1957) ], is more than we
need at first for our discussion and might precipitate confusions better bypassed, the
eonic pattern shows a suggestive similarity to its terms, and converges on a
generalization of its structure, caught however between the
‘uniqueness-determination’ dichotomy. We can take our own version of the idea as
the application of the idea of a differential equation to phenomenological laws of
history. The ‘covering law’ becomes a relation of time periods in the relative
balance of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’, yet looks like
simple ‘waving’. In fact, the abstract discussion of covering laws runs parallel
to a virtually complete experiment in practice in the realm of macroeconomics.
Looking at the eonic pattern
summons up the related idea of an economic cycle, and the study of its
‘directionality’, deterministic or stochastic nature, etc,… The idea of an
economic cycle in fact expresses the distinction of ‘determination’ and
‘free action’ very well.
5. George O’Brien, Hegel
on Reason and History (Chicago: Chicago, 1975). Robert Solomon’s In the Spirit
of Hegel (NY: Oxford, 1983) is an bio-philosophy of Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit. Burleigh Taylor Williams, in Hegel’s Philosophy of History
(Ithaca, NY.: Cornell, 1974) connects Hegelian issues with the covering law model, and
with Popper. Cf. Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx, Howard Kainz, Paradox,
Dialectic, and System (University Park: Penn State, 1988), Howard Williams, Hegel,
Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), Norman
Levine, Dialogue Within the Dialectic (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984). Another
great source of dialectic is in the Indian Samkhya, where a distinction reaches so
far as the delineation of a triadic structure of ‘three gunas’. The dialectic is
perhaps the intuition of the triad, and the psychological triad of body, emotion, and
thought-will is the object of understanding in traditions of the Samkhya lineage. This
triad is the one incontestible triad that man can experience, and is different from the
Cartesian duality. The relations of action, ‘I’, and emotion, taken in any
combination, are a system ‘triad’, and the reason man is always confused, for
creature is not a stop-go machine. The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness
is immediate, observing this triad in action is not the same as the emotive realization of
it as behavioural response. Cf. Gerald Larsen, Classical Samkhya (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1979)
6. Karl Popper, The Poverty of
Historicism (1961), p. 109. Another definition of ‘historicism’ springs from
the philosophic historian Herder in the romantic revolt against the rationalism of the
Enlightenment attempting to emphasize the uniqueness of historical happenstance, and of
the expression of our understanding of terms ‘consciousness’ and
‘self’. Historicism preserves a challenge to any notion of the historical system
that attempts to render over to numerical unity the expressive interiority of the
‘actual historical creature’ called Man, a thoroughly stubborn carnivorous
pirate shambling out of the Paleolithic. Popper’s redefinition of the term is
confusing. Cf. Historicism and Knowledge (NY: Routledge, 1989), Robert
D’Amico, for the confusion over the term ‘historicism’, Chapter 2,
"Situational Logic", Graham MacDonald, "The Grounds for
Anti-Historicism", in Karl Popper: Philosophy and Problems (Cambridge:
Cambridge, 1995)
7. Popper, and Berlin’s
views on philosophies of history willy-nilly become a conservative ideological debate. Cf.
Ernst Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book (Chicago: Chicago, 1988), Chapter 1, A.
Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1984),
Chapter 3, for the conservative shadow behind this topical shells lobbed against
Communism.
8. Cf. Bernard Grebanier, Playwriting
(NY: Barnes & Noble, 1961), for an analysis of the subtle structure of plots that
‘work’ because they are built around the so-called ‘Proposition of the
Play’, a three part relationship of ‘basic idea’ and the three parts of a
drama, beginning, middle, and end. Although he points out that plays succeed because they
differ from history, the issue of dramatic structure in a more generalized form is evident
in the very nature of the ‘turning point’.
9. J.B. Bury, The Idea of
Progress (London: MacMillan, 1920), Chapter II, "Universal History", p. 37.
The literature of progress is itself so vast that it is difficult, if not impossible, to
make a statement about it that has not already been contradicted by a complex argument.
The idea of progress is so vexed by its own contradictions that its champions have ended
up on the defensive, which is unnecessary, and a gift to those social forces that wish to
undermine the structure of modernity. Defining ‘progress’ is tantamount to
knowledge of the future, it is a risk, an adventure, a search. Defining it once and for
all would be suicidal. As an idea it is an accessory, its espousal cannot lead to the
solution of real problems, unless these were issues of theoretical understanding, almost
as a thermodynamic inquiry into order and progression as such. Like the steam whistle of
the first locomotives, it is only a token that the train is underway. Progress and the
idea are not the same. Belief in progress conveys no automatic guarantee of development.
Development has frequently occurred without such a belief. Eonic evolution and eonic
progress, as concepts, will allow us to see that ‘progress’ is an eonic emergent
of the modern period of eonic progression, that springs from the modern period, whatever
its intimations in earlier ideas. Two good reviews of the ideas of progress are Good
Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse (Bloomington: Indiana, 1972),
by W. Warren Wagar, and Progress: Critical Thinking about Historical Change
(Westport: Conn., 1993), by Raymond Duncan Gastil. For the relation to the battle of the
Ancients and Moderns, cf. Kenneth Bock, "Theories of Progress, Development and
Evolution" in R. Nisbet & T. Bottomore (eds.), A History of Sociological
Analysis (NY: Basic Books, 1978). For surveys and bibliographies, cf. The Idea of
Progress (1968), by Sidney Pollard, and The Idea of Progress (NY: Basic Books,
1967), by Charles Van Doren, John Bernstein, Progress and the Quest for Meaning (Rutherford,
NJ: Farleigh Dickinson, 1993). For the constructions of the idea in the nineteenth
century, cf. Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For
indications of the early emergence of the idea of progress in the Ancient world, cf.
Ludwig Edelstein’s The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore:
John Hopkins, 1967), Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge:
Harvard, 1990), and with an Augustinian viewpoint, John Baillie’s The Belief in
Progress (1950). For an attack on the idea of Progress, based on Popper’s
critique of historicism, but with a very close reading of the ancient sources that most
regurgitations of the views of progress never get straight, cf. The Great Year
(Penguin, 1994), by Nicolas Campion. In an interesting but flawed study attempting to
revise Bury, Robert Nisbet, in History of the Idea of Progress (NY: Basic Books,
1979) attempts to fend for the idea of progress against a tide of resistance to note that
"while the twentieth century is far from barren of faith in progress, there is
nevertheless good ground for supposing that when the identity of our century is eventually
fixed by historians, not faith but abandonment of faith in the idea of progress will be
one of the major attributes." At the end of a valuable study attempting to find the
roots of the idea in the ancient world, he ends with its capture by a conservative
definition whose emphasis is on tradition. His redefinition is very dubious, as it
suggests a false relationship, of conservative intent, between religion and progress,
whose relations are highly complex, and change from one era to the next. Part of the
confusion, in fairness to Nisbet, is his shrewd realization that in an era of scientific
reductionism, there is nothing to drive Progress except a crypto-providential force, a
point noted and used as a criticism of the idea of progress by Theodore Olson, in Millennialism,
Utopianism, and Progress, ( p. 9) .
10. Cf. Herbert Butterfield, The
Origins of Modern Science (1957), Chapter 12, "Ideas of Progress and Ideas of
Evolution"
11. We should hardly wonder that
the idea has all the difficulties pointed to in our free action script ‘laws’
whose implied executive principle undermines them at once. The example of slavery is both
the nemesis and hint of the solution. Is a law of history purely materialist and
value-neutral? As we move toward an idea of sequential dependency in relation to
ecumenization, we notice that there is a ‘core and periphery’ difference in the
distribution of slavery in modern times. That is just enough to warn us against purely
material comprises in our thinking. The appearance of the idea of tragedy, as will
suggest, should give second thoughts to any theorist, that because history shows dangerous
execution the cynical version of its law is anything more than false realization of
potential. History has outsmarted most theorists. As we move to put an executive principle
in our Folder 4, we should move in relation to a ‘super-goodfellow’ solution in
relation endless cyclical restarts at higher potential. The point is so obvious in the
‘progress’ of the Roman Republic. The realization of ‘primitive
liberalism’ was so mediocre, everything came to a stop. This is impractical,
politicians to protest, but Folder 4 would require timeless observations, or all time. Why
decide? The materialist theory of economic history, and Hegel’s World Spirit are
booted out the door.
As David Brion Davis has pointed
out, in Slavery and Human Progress, the onset of modern progress in its earliest
phase saw a period of the expansion of slavery. Davis calls his work a study of the
momentous shift from ‘progressive slavery’ to ‘progressive
emancipation’ in the late eighteenth century. David Brion Davis, Slavery and
Heuman Progress (1984), p. xvii, and Chapter 1, " How ‘Progress Led to the
Europeans’ Enslavement of Africans". Cf. also David Brion Davis, The Problem
of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Carwell, 1966). Cf. also, John Nef, War
and Human Progress (Cambridge: Harvard, 1952),
12. Theodore Olson, in Millennialism,
Utopianism, and Progress (1982), p. 265.
13. Cf. Kenneth Bock, Human
Nature and History (NY: Columbia, 1980), p.40. This book contains an important series
of observations on the non-uniformity of historical rates of change, along with a critique
of the misuse of the developmental idea of progress in a theory. The confusion becomes
almost absurd, if not Chaplinesque. We banish progress from evolution, and then evidently
should deprive ourselves of contemporaneous forward movement ideology. Bock’s
criticism of the theoretical concept of progress is nonetheless a valid statement
about passivity in relation to a fictitious social force that would relieve us of active
efforts of social concepts of improvement. The difficulty will disappear in our
distinction of ‘free action’ and ‘eonic determination’.
14. Cf. D. Depew et al. Darwinism
Evolving (Cambridge, MIT, 1995), Richard Dawkins, TheBlind Watchmaker (NY:
Norton, 1987), Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (NY: Simon &
Schuster, 1995), Ernst Mayer, Evolution and the Diversity of Life
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1976), M. Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (NY: Viking,
1966), Peter Bowler, Evolution: History of an Idea (Berkeley: Univ. of Ca., 1983),
Robert Reid, Evolutionary Theory, The Unfinished Synthesis (NY: Cornell, 1985),
Michael Denton, Evolution:A Theory in Crisis (NY: Adler & Adler, 1985),
Stephen Gould & Niles Eldredge, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian
Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.", Proceedings of the Royal
Society London (B) 205 (1979) 581-98, Mae-Wan Ho & Peter Saunders, Beyond
Neo-Darwinism (NY: Academic Press, 1984), M. Nitecki, History and Evolution
(Albany: State Univ. of NY, 1992), Gordon Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (NY:
Harper & Row, 1982), Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism, Refutation of a Myth (1994),
Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT, 1992), Philip Johnson, Darwin
on Trial (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1991), Stephen Gould, Wonderful Life
(1989), Roger Lewin, Complexity (NY: MacMillan, 1992), Michael Waldrop, Complexity
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992), B. Weber et al., Entropy, Information, and Evolution
(Cambridge: MIT, 1988), N. Eldredge, The Myths of Human Evolution (NY: Columbia,
1982), Kevin Kelley, Out of Control (NY: Addison-Wesley, 1995), S. Sanderson, Social
Evolutionism(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (NY:
Viking, 1983), William Fix, The Bone Peddlers (NY: MacMillan, 1984), Arnold
Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement (1980), Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Freud
(Boston: Little, Brown,1941), Arne Wyller, The Planetary Mind (1996), Mae-Won Ho, Genetic
Engineering: Dream or Nightmare (Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1997).
15. N. Eldredge. al., The
Myths of Human Evolution (NY: Columbia, 1982)
16. Edward Harrison, Masks of
the Universe (NY: MacMillan, 1985), p. 116. He defines ‘evolution’ as
‘unrolling’, or the ‘appearance in orderly succession of a long train of
events’. The suspicious term ‘orderly’ could be taken as a value term, in
the appearance in orderly succession of a long train of historical religious events, whose
‘ordering’ properties show eonic mechanization in a way that belies the
separation of evolutionary facts and values. Harrison’s study is itself crypto-eonic
in its analytical sequence of the Magic, Mythic, Geometric, Medieval and Mechanistic
universe. But the stages of our eonic sequence will not be allowed labels, for each phase
discover, search for, or recombine new and old phases. We must proceed cautiously in a
virtual wilderness of four usages of the term, Darwinian, cultural,
‘eonic’, and a possible, but unknown, ‘biospheric’ evolution, a recipe
for trouble.
The distinction of facts and
values is itself gestating with historical correlated self-reference in Kant and Hume. Our
system parts ways in two directions as the Humeans and the Idealists construct parallel
versions of modernism. In general the spectacular rise of the modern philosophic
continuation, less clear-cut than the rise of science, plays kingmaker to the birth of
rival ideologies, a point quietly understood by Hegel (who we are not endorsing) whose
quiet skullduggery made haste to construct a dialectical monopoly, whose sudden reversal
and tumbling becomes the source of the challenge to the liberal backbone of modernism.
17. Heinz Pagels, in Perfect
Symmetry (NY: Bantam, 1985), defines the distinction of ‘third person
science’, essentially the study of the material world, and ‘first person
science’, involving the subjective consciousness of the scientist himself. Cf. Robert
Proctor, Value-Free Science (Cambridge; Harvard, 1991), Homa Katouzian, Ideology
and Method in Economics (1980), Philip Kain, Marx and Ethics (1988), R. Peffer,
Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton, 1990), John Greene, Science,
Ideology, and World View (1981). For Leo Strauss on Natural Right, and the fact/value
distinction in Weber, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago, 1953), Kenneth
Deutsch et al. (eds.), The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (A1bany: State Univ. of NY,
1987) , Mark Smith, Science in the Crucible (Durham: Duke Univ., 1994)
18. Stephen Levy, Artificial
Life (NY: Vintage, 1992), Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton,
1994). Cf. also the emerging field of quantum computation, Gerard Milburn, The Feynmann
Processor (Reading, Mass: Perseus, 1998)
19. From the Foreword by
Ilya Prignone to The Arrow of Time (1990), p.15, P. Coveney et al.
20. Cf. F. Mandl, Statistical
Physics (1971), Appendix B, discussing the relation of the ‘statistical weight of
a macrostate" in relation to entropy, notes " We can always force the energy
levels of a system to be a discrete set rather than a continuum by putting the system in a
box ." Introducing discrete states to accomplish the counting of states resolves
itself into a problem identical to that of the normal modes on a vibrating string. In Hierarchy
Theory (NY: Columbia, 1996) , V. Alt et. al, p. 184, suggest that there is a
"contradiction to description by rules as opposed to laws’. The solution is to
see that the two are complementary to a full account of phenomena. They then suggest that
these contradictions are implicit in the wave-particle duality of physics, where the wave
corresponds to the ‘dynamical law’ aspect, the particle the
‘rule-based’ aspect, and this corresponding to the difference of observer and
observed.
Cf. Barrow and Tipler, op. cit.,
p. 138, for a discussion of Ayala’s categories of reductionism, ontological,
methodological, and epistemological, in the Introduction to Studies in the Philosophy
of Biology, F.J. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (1974), and the relation to the ideas of
teleology in living systems, the computational intractability in complex systems, and the
‘mechanical equivalent of thought’ in the new concepts of information theory.
The play of archetypes cannot defeat by thought alone the complexity of ‘laws’
as these graduate from the unchanging laws of physics to the times and motions of
self-organizing creatures. The best example is Teilhard de Chardin who felt forced to
summon into existence a ‘radial’ force or energy in contradistinction to a
‘tangential’ one. We can produce these by sleight of hand, but they are too
cheap to pass as real money. These efforts, always some involution to the idea of
evolution, have never so far succeeded, for they require systematic and organized science,
although the compulsion to do so must itself be understood, and their heuristic value
entirely granted as long as they are not confused with final explanations. We have a way
out, tread water as to ‘forces of history’ in the vicinity of some outpost of
known physics, and look empirically at the structure claimed as macrohistorical in nature.
Nature must show its hand, sooner or later, for ‘long times’ must, for a bundle
of laws and legal notions, intersect with short times, if these are long enough, and man
has any record of them. Precisely in the era of antiquity, the sasquatch starts to show
its hand. But it is up to us to define what we mean by ‘seeing’.
Ervin Laszlo, The Choice:
Evolution or Extinction?(NY: Putnam, 1994). Cf. Chapter 4, ‘Acquiring
Evolutionary Literacy’, for a discussion of ‘cascades of bifurcations’ in
relation to the crises of contemporary history. For discussions of the new field of
self-organizing systems, cf. The Arrow of Time (NY: Ballantine, 1990), by Peter
Coveney and Roger Highfield, Ilya Prignone et al., Order Out of Chaos (NY: Bantam,
1984), Paul Davies The Cosmic Blueprint (1988), Stephen Kellert, In the Wake of
Chaos (1993), Jonathan Roughgarden, Theory of Population Genetics and Evolutionary
Ecology (Prentice Hall, 1996), Sunny Auyang, Foundations of Complex-System Theories
(NY: Cambridge, 1998), David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis (1976) is a critical
mathematical review of these theories applied to biological systems. Robert Rosen, Anticipatory
Systems (1985), discusses the relation of system and model, with a resemblance to the
‘virtual anticipation’ lurking in the idea of transition. James Bailey in After
Thought (NY: Harpers1995) suggests a new ‘non-equational’ approach to
complex systems. These systems sciences have now brought us to what some might consider a
third great Revolution in our understanding, after the breakthroughs of Quantum Mechanics
and Relativity, the new understandings of nonlinear chaos, the laws of complexity, and
self-organization. It is interesting that the ‘first simulation’, with the
‘first’ computer, was a nonlinear dynamical computation of wave motion by the
physicist Fermi, cf.Thomas Weissert, The Genesis of Simulation in Dynamics (NY:
Sringer, 1997). The first simulations were those of the Greek Tragedians.
