A closer look, in the arduous inquiries at deeper zoom levels, reveals the need to revise the assumptions of historical continuity with a balanced conception of discontinuity. The latter is unmistakable in the world of antiquity, ca. –600, in the extraordinary synchronous emergence of the classical traditions. Suddenly, in China, India, the Middle East and Greece, the forms of culture undergo a cultural acceleration in a synchronous parallelism that is quite mysterious. Everything seems done in a flash. The world of Classical Greece flowers. Israel sees its age of the Prophets, the Exile, and the emergence of a new religious form. In India and China, we find the same, in a period that produces the seminal foundations for a whole era. For centuries to come men look back at this era. The monuments of the earlier age of Egypt and Mesopotamia fall into oblivion and disappear in sand.

This synchronism began to be observed in the nineteenth century, but has failed to become well known, for the nature of its dynamic is difficult to pinpoint. This is not surprising, since we are talking about fields of free activity that show structure over a period of centuries, a seeming contradiction. This synchronism implies the temporal phase is the crucial determinant, independently of any continuous runway leading to the sudden flowerings of individual areas. It is hard to reconstruct, let alone visualize, the correct sequence of emergence. We see the peaks stand out, great religious founders, art, philosophers, new political forms, then a distinct fall-off. But the overall picture is clear. Its implications indicate that cultural evolution is, so to speak, hyper-cultural in a generalized system of evolutionary emergence, an extraordinary fact, and the one great clue to evolution in action.

It has often been noticed, as in this instance, that the record of human history shows a strange patchwork of fast advances, and slower periods that are relatively static. This fact alone should alert us to the existence of historical dynamism. Our use of the term ‘medieval’ is quite revealing in this regard. We call the period from the fall of the Roman Empire until modern times a ‘middle age’. This ‘middleness’ is a clue to how we in fact take our own history, not quite sure why, although we can see that the source of this earlier world lies in the onset of the classical age, many centuries before. This era rose to a height that was never matched until after 1500. The same relationship is now visible in the era prior to this, at the birth of complex civilization. The obvious suggestion is that discrete and continuous processes are blended in the context of a macrohistorical system, if we can define it.

The rise of civilization from the Neolithic takes place quickly around the end of the fourth millennium, in Egypt and Sumer. This is followed by the long eras that characterize these distinct forms of culture, more or less set in their pattern. Then, in the centuries just before –600 we find civilization on the move again, this time, as noted, in a broad field of rapid parallel advance. Another period of take-off this time in widely separated areas suddenly transforms the whole basis of civilization. Then finally the rise of the modern shows its hand as the next descendant in this suddenly obvious series. But the spottiness of the pattern is not at first amenable to any simple explanation, in part because we have no prior grounds of explanation at all.

The worlds of Archaic Greece, the Hebrew Prophets, the Upanishadic era of India, and the centuries before Confucius in China suddenly emerge simultaneously. From this we can infer the presence of a larger system doing cross-sections, one on a scale greater than its manifestations as individual civilizations. It is hard to imagine how this could be until suddenly we notice the coordination of this system over millennia. It defies all odds of being random, and finds its oddities from the inherent nature of large scale culture evolving on the surface of a planet. A system in a long frequency, we suspect, performing the tricks of ‘systems’ as we know them, something like ‘feedback return’. We can even spot the probable wavelength, ca. 2400 years, although this is conjectural. The rest of the pieces begin to fall into place at once. All the disconnected areas are ‘hotspots’ fretting implosion by a tactic of minimizing evolutionary interaction.

We are confronted with a strange pattern, obviously incomplete, and sourcing in the Neolithic, whose real symptoms are clearest at the sources of our traditions. Thus, if we consider this classical era in detail, it becomes evident that it represents a phase in a greater sequence. The birth of civilization, and the rise of the modern world, for three centuries after the Reformation, show the same absolute high speed emergentist structure in phase, and are clearly related in an overall dynamic of such transitional phases. These three periods, and only these, show this ‘order of magnitude’ explosion, although the genesis of Islam comes close. This does not include the period after 1800, or license any ideological conclusion some might derive from our purely theoretical argument. Beside this parallelism, then, the long sequence of civilization begins to reveal as a whole this overall hyper-cultural generative structure. Thus we can see, in addition, the inner coherence of all of these periods as a unified system whose realizations we call ‘civilizations’.

Suddenly, we have a non-random pattern behind us in the chronicle of known history.

Our thesis is engaged, we see a macrohistorical ‘evolution’ associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, suggesting transeonic feedback, morphing in direct and focalized fast interrupts the large scale event-space of cultural entities. We are confronted by the apparent conundrum that a force of evolutionary or historical action, fragmentary but in plain sight, shows no visible relation to the fact of free activity, except the pattern of correlation achieved by the extremely long view.

Although the eonic pattern is a short sequence (like three beats from a whole symphony) and fails any inductive test for universal generalization, it gives us a telling glimpse of a purely abstract ‘evolution in action’ and suggests indirectly how emergent sequencing and integration might have occurred. We live in the first generations of human history with records of any kind stretching across the five thousand year minimum we will find necessary to establish the minimum three beats of historical rhythm in a 2400 year wavelength. After this interval since the invention of writing we seem finally able to document an evolutionary sequence. The rest is a blank, leaving us one clue to the nature of evolution, it shows fast system return in three century bursts, and can do ‘cross sections’ in parallel on fuzzy regions. Thus, for the first time we see modernism as a unit, and can adjoin also the early starting point of Sumer and Egypt, to the isolated classical era, which we had thought, if we thought about it at all, as some sort of mysterious absolute source. We must consider the relations of these eras to what occurs in between, surprisingly simple to do. For we can see that the object of historical selection is to embrace the whole. Thus, we are given a direct insight into the sequencing embedded in world history, and precipitous new grounds, however inconclusive, for macrohistorical considerations.

 

History and Evolution

The historical emerges from the unknown, the primeval scenes of evolution, and the emergence of the hominid creature with a runaway brain from the Paleolithic, the ‘primordial minus infinity’ from which man arrives to commence the arts of agriculture, and the creation of civilization. Our tale is one of relative beginnings and must pass on from the still clouded threshold moment when modern man passed, or by-passed, the Neanderthal in an explosion of cultural and artistic creativity. As we look back at the lost world of man’s cultural existence in the later Paleolithic, we must wonder if the historical, then still so far in the future, was not prefigured in that passage. Does the explosion of creativity that suddenly appears with the beginning of earliest man show any relation to what we see later? Is the historical the evolutionary? That is, how is the historical related to its greater source, the descent of Man? This is one of the most difficult questions, for it evokes at once the search for historical causality, the mechanisms of evolution, both genetic and cultural, in the context of physical laws and in the headwind of all ‘arguments by design’, teleological philosophies, and the nature of purpose in relation to both organism and its environment.

Here Darwin’s, also Wallace’s, theory of evolution enters with the claim to be the reigning viewpoint in the refrain that chance, and chance alone, in the form of Natural Selection favoring random genetic innovations, is the source of biological, and therefore cultural, order. Severe, almost certainly fatal, mathematical challenges now appear to stand in the way of this selectionist assumption, leaving the precise status of Darwinism in a somewhat ambiguous state. Nevertheless, the broad scope of evolutionary transformation is well established, and offers an empirical groundwork for cataloguing the emergence of biological species. But we must remember that the temporal and spatial scope of evolutionary process is tremendous, and that we never see and cannot easily visualize evolution, and are prone to misconceptions. If we apply the term ‘evolution’ to world history we see at once the difficulty of correct observation with respect to five thousand years of civilization, let alone theoretical generalization. Since the time-scale of evolution surpasses the life-span of a human observer, the question arises as to what is meant by the concept ‘observing evolution’.[i]

The perception of the eonic effect, in the evidence of the eonic evolution of civilization, seen in the strange hints of periodic motion in its emergence, must by its nature propose to challenge current notions of evolution and to reopen the issues, well-known to students of historiography, of macrohistorical structure and sequence, “laws of history”, in the debate that has attended the rise of modern historical research, beginning in the early nineteenth century. This research has tended to skirt these very issues as intractably difficult, or undecidable, in the first priority of accurate historical fact-finding. Indeed, a healthy skepticism is generally brought by the specialist narrative historian to the legacy of Universal History as it emerges in the movement, for example, of German Idealism, and to attempts to find laws, forces, or regularities of the kind studied in the more fundamental branches of science. In the latter category must be placed the Darwinian theory of evolution, and in the middle, the Marxist theory of historical materialism, this a significant inversion of an idealist program. To these can be added the eclectic world of the macroeconomic model, seldom explicitly offered as a tool of historical evolution, but very much so taken in practice in the various ‘economic interpretations of history’.

One of the most interesting challenges to the attempt to find historical ‘laws’ is the work of Isaiah Berlin in his Historical Inevitability. [ii] The basic difficulty raised by this and other critiques is the factor of spontaneous human action, whether or not we ascribe to this as an element of will, in the difficulties of all theories of will. It would seem that the case against laws of history, laws of evolution strangely exempted, is so overwhelming that we should abandon their consideration, unless we had strong evidence of historical regularity compatible with the facts of free action, not the same as ‘free will’. The ironic result of seeing the eonic effect is precisely to find strong, conclusive, evidence of historical regularity that courts rather than preempts the element of ‘free action’, driving one to reopen this search for a will o’ wisp of ‘law’, and yet in a fashion compatible with free action. Our three turning points show us nothing but free activity, and yet this is demonstrably different as a function of time and place. More, we see the idea of freedom born in this very context of historical determination, e.g. emergent democracy shows historical conditioning. We are left with a double negative, and a paradox. The result then is to find something that will not so much contradict as interdict the element of free spontaneity. We are forced into a distinction of what we will call ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’. The latter, ‘free action’, stands in a spectrum of determinism, that is quite different from freedom or direct causality. For it should rise to greater freedom at higher determination. Another piece falls into place, although in a fashion that is quite mysterious, if not contradictory. One way to distinguish history and evolution might lie just here, by considering the transition from passive to active organism, from behavior to free (ambient or locomotive) action, in the ambiguity of the term ‘free’. Perhaps if man is free then evolution ends and history begins, if this is our choice of definition. Or, if he is not free, his evolution continues, and the term ‘history’ is so far another term for this process. We might ask ourselves an artificially tricky question, when, if at all, did evolution cross from process to freedom?

The Darwinist theory of evolution as Natural Selection is seldom considered as an historical theory in the full sense, or critiqued on this basis. And yet it must be so taken if it posits as explained the emergence of civilization, or claims the full scope of organismic and cultural emergence, at all times. So taken, it is likely to be false. Not so taken, we have no basis to assume anything, and must consider evidence of evolution, if any, at all different times. There are only a few possibilities, there is a law of evolution true at all times, there is no law of evolution true at all times, or, in a spectrum of middle alternatives, there are different ‘laws’ of evolution at different times, these separated by a discontinuity, the term ‘law’ revealing its inappropriate heritage of physics in a biological context.

It is T.H. Huxley himself who first raised the issue of this discontinuity in his work, Evolution and Ethics, and in the process unwittingly exposed the paradox in the theory he had so long defended. His perception was that there must be something else beside the ‘law of evolution’, survival of the fittest, at work, for man was condemned to oppose its effects in practice, on ethical grounds. Whence, if we accept this dualism, comes this evolution No. 2? It would seem, at first, to correspond to the difference of organismic and cultural evolution. In any theory of evolution, you ought (note the valuation) to answer to Huxley’s objection, or abandon claims to a theory at all. For the effect on belief in evolution No. 1 will move to eliminate evolution No 2 in practice, since one had thought it true at all times. Perhaps No. 1 is a No. 2 in disguise. This ‘ought’ is peculiar and shows that our theories of the past confuse the ‘must’ of determinism and the injunction ‘should’ arising from evolutionary consciousness, as civilization and the ‘dolmenization’, or codification, of laws, ethics and religions. We assume that evolution must be a process beyond the domain of values, yet this must be false, for these are real and force us to question evolution in practice. Here the notion of eonic evolution can help, for it hints at the existence, and dynamism, of this ‘other’ evolution. Right in the center of our pattern, we see the eonic emergence or reemergence of the great religions during our second period of acceleration. [iii]

The effects of Darwin’s theory here were ideological, and misleading, if not disastrous. It is not adequate to point out that Darwin was himself at pains to distance himself from the misinterpretation of his own theory, in the confusion with the views of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer. Like software with a glitch, the consequences were immediate. This refers to the controversies of so-called Social Darwinism in this ambiguity of ‘evolutions’. [iv] Here ‘theory’ confronts the implications of what we will call a ‘free action script’, or pseudo-theory, in the effect of the theory itself on history, after it enters this history. For the first unconscious ‘free action script’ suggestion, in this case, is that unlimited social competition in the immediate present will improve genetic structure in the far future, a gross misunderstanding of a theory taken to be true at all times. The philosopher Karl Popper gave a name to this confusion, calling it the Oedipus effect. [v]

This ‘survival of the fittest’ aspect is, in any case, demonstrably false of man’s social experience, as the mechanism of cultural evolution. For extreme competition is met by the response of law in the evolution of civilization, if not economy. Survival of the fittest business firm is simply another process, as is the tonic of Olympiad sports competition. The issue of evolutionary causality in the study of the evolution of civilization has been so confused by assumptions of material causative motive, as in the imputation of economic determinism, that the real evolution of social cooperation seems to have been forgotten. Shall we cooperate or compete? Who or what process decides? Our free action, evolutionary laws, or laws of civil or religious infrastructure? In general, theories of evolution must themselves interact with the near future of all free action, preempting their truth about ‘all times’, in a confusion of external observer, and temporal participant, ‘acting out theory’. Amoebas had never read Darwin, but after the publication of his book cultural evolution underwent clear changes. We see the danger of factoring the fact-value distinction out of the statement of evolutionary ‘laws’. The record of civilization shows something very different and reveals clear evidence of centuries of ‘idle time’, dark Assyrian centuries, between interrupts as the ‘winners’ of social competition gain control. In any case, Darwin and Spencer both thought social cooperation to be a part of evolution, and are not entirely at one with the distortions of their views.

The gateway to renewed ideas of macrohistorical dynamism is found in a simple argument, however crude. Probability against time, since the emergence of life, in relation to random emergence, fails as explanation. If this is true, if selectionist probabilism fails, if there is not enough time, counting even in billions, to achieve ordered structure at random, then it follows at once, presumably, that we should, or might, find evidence of gaps, discontinuities, or sequence-foreshortening, by any logic, law, or dynamism of evolution No. 1, 2,... And this we do find. Over the long term, greater complexity occurs in shorter intervals of time. With respect to human history, we should ask if there is any evidence of this suspected ‘acceleration’. The pattern of the eonic effect shows us at once just such evidence, whether for this reason or not, and whatever we wish to call it. Our three turning points. This, to be sure, is ‘evolution as free action’, not as far as we know with any connection to organismic evolution. It remains to clarify the use of the term ‘evolution’ in this context, more, to confront the real difficulties behind the free-fall usage of this word as it passed from implications of ‘rapid discontinuity’ to ‘slow continuity’.

Further, these issues invoke the field of original meanings of the term ‘evolutionism’ as they were born from ideas of progress and passed into the radicalism of the period of revolutionary modernism and thence into the conservatizing theme of social competition, and survival of the fittest, in the rise of a new form of economy. Darwinist literature is misleading and suggests indirectly just what we might be lead to expect, discontinuity in the evolutionary record. Darwinism has always been in a crossfire of ideological issues, because of the associations of ‘discontinuity’. We are left suspicious the radical ‘shoulds’ of social justice passed into the ‘musts’ of ‘scientific’ counsel as determinism in a reversed conservative vein, although the later socialists of the nineteenth century, by and large, were adherents to the Darwinian theory.

And we are left wondering why a theory with so little evidence has persisted against repeated criticisms. The findings of molecular biology should have finished the matter a generation ago, and yet we have seen the rise of sociobiology in the interim in an aggressive attempt to inject a new form of reductionism into the social sciences. The structure and functionality of DNA is so complex that the notion of random chance in its arising simply cannot stand. It is interesting that these molecules show complete programs in action, including most remarkably, ‘stop-go’ instructions, something very hard to account for indeed by random emergence. We will consider this ‘stop-go’ aspect of evolutionary entities in our own argument, under a different context. [vi]

Current Darwinism is a theory with a most suspicious weakness, seen in the so-called ‘neo-Darwinian’ version, applied to population genetics. For this requires small changes at random to survive the passage into large-scale population fields, under conditions of free movement by the population group. Whatever we think, this is likely to be a tall tale. This extraordinary claim has never been justified by any reasonable evidence or model applied to complex populations at later stages of evolution. These models wish to describe complex changes in biochemical structures occurring over millions of years, in a connected line of coherent development in randomly moving populations. It is not easy to even imagine a solution to such a dynamic, unless we saw an example. If part of the difficulty is that evolution has never been observed, this generating assumptions that are not reliably connected with any evidence, we might look at the only long term evidence we have of ‘evolution’ in any form, world history, and the archaeological record, and ask what this tells us.

Darwinism studies a very thin sample taken over hundreds of millions of years, in a process whose infinite flexibility suggests even its mechanism may be evolving. The danger of jumping to conclusions about poorly sampled data is that your first step, here the positing of natural selection, will be wrong, and all further inferences off by a mile. Study of what we will call the ‘eonic effect’ suggests (most naturally) that close sampling on the order of centuries is essential even for an account of millennia, this due to the onset and brevity of high-speed change. If we suspect this at all, we should fold our hand, so to speak, and make no hard claims about evolutionary subjects drawn from indirect inferences about deep time.

It is true that the term ‘evolution’ wishes to claim the domain of ‘speciation’ (something we couldn’t claim for the short burst of eonic evolution), but a close look suggests this concept is less definite than it seems (Darwin’s famous finches would not seem now to be distinct species), for the ‘absolute beginning’ (the genesis of life) is not logically placed in the same rubric. But what then is the correct rubric? We should hear from the cosmologist first in some ulterior account of the life era. Yet life’s history is different, self-organizing in a rising tide that leaves the impress of the unique, and the onset of the historical, the narrative. Putting one’s finger on the difference is difficult, yet in the perception of the eonic effect, we see perhaps the interplay of the ‘laws of life’ pressing on infinite detail in the self-creation of new laws and initial conditions. We can leave the issue of speciation open, careful to qualify our usage as the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, as if, in the hint of frequency, to find a windowing condensation tearing at infinite continuity.

By and large, evolution means, given this, then that. What we see are ‘relative new beginnings or continuations’ of already existing wholes, given the nose, thence the elephant’s trunk. Thus ‘evolution’ is a ‘through-put’ concept—in practice. This point confuses historical study, for we chase the absolute sequence. The sequence would seem to break up in pieces. These pieces taken reassembled easily resolve the apparent contradiction between the rise of the state, or the emergence of religion (as normally considered). On these grounds we can look at the ‘relative evolution of civilization’ against the backdrop of Paleolithic man, as if to consider a unity in the grand transition from ‘locomotion to free activity, to free action, to freedom’. This hybrid philosophic-evolutionary construct seeks the ‘relative new beginning’ called the ‘evolution of civilization’, and in the process breaks down once again into three somesuch phases. A further caution on the use of the term ‘evolution’ is its aspect of ‘realization’ (expenditure, rather than creation, of prior potential), with consciousness as a property of man taken as a given undergoing transformation. The emergence of civilization and the transformation of consciousness proceed by an entwined unity, and at a rate that would seem to have no connection with the issues of genetics, in the ‘evolution in the abstract’ of system dynamics.

The issues of genetics and behavior, and the associated debates over nature and nurture, are, without doubt, complex, and the call for a ‘biologization of ethics’ by sociobiological thinking is one that is entirely open in principle, a sort of ‘sociobiology done right’. The hominid arriving from the Paleolithic may indeed show a genetics conditioned by harsh evolution. But one must remain suspicious that this harshness simply eliminates many advances, delaying real progression. And without the foundation, selectionism proven, none of these arguments, often too obviously matched with a conservative view of society and economics, have any real binding or deductive status. No complexity of molecular hardware is likely to resolve, as far as we know, the philosophic conundra of ‘software’, the potential of human action. The fact is, we simply don’t know how evolution happens. It is a point in the end faced by Alfred Wallace, who saw, for example, that the evolution of the brain seems to anticipate, rather than follow, its realizations in human emergence. Here the issue of ‘theory’ wishes to be a decision procedure to replace the ethics of one kind with another, generally the virtues of selfishness. For the only decision procedure is the evidence of man’s behavior in civilization itself. Darwinism is strong medicine with severe side effects. We are required, we are told, to take this medicine on the basis of evidence and theory. But the evidence is not there, and the theory contradictory.

Those who take these positions must be on absolutely sure evidentiary footing, and show cause and answer to the chorus of protest that greeted such views. Instead we see only a hard control of public information, peans to Darwin, occasional shouting matches, and an embittered underground literature seldom referred to by anyone in the social sciences. This state of affairs can only delay the crash, and leave many wondering why the obviously vexed views of creationists (certainly not endorsed here) lead the way in smelling a rat. They can see that no one is under the slightest obligation to take Darwinism as established, beyond the browbeating that attends its promotion. Society is being disserved by these theories, as is the ambivalent Darwin himself, for the idea is laid forth that social moralities should be adapted to genetics, or that religion is a form of evolutionary adaptation.

Much evolutionary literature is complacent to the point of not even studying the history of religion in anything more than pronouncement mode. And these pronouncements are almost without exception projections of misunderstood reductionist principles. The eugenic wild goose chase, and selection for ‘intelligence’ as class division, none of them evolutionary generators, creep behind public relations efforts to ‘soften the blow’ of this ‘scientific’ wisdom. Everyone ends up secretly convinced certain people must be socially marginalized so that the remainder achieve rocket ship destiny as coneheads. These notions simply don’t stand up. If people don’t behave according to the rules of sociobiology, it is a violation of the logic of theory to preach to them that they should. Finally we suspect the motivational background to all of this, in the notion that the ideology of free-market economics requires or receives the justification of evolutionary thinking. The idea that the function of economic competition is directly connected to genetical evolution should have been laughed out of consideration long ago, yet lingers in the public consciousness with little challenge. If anything the reverse is the case. We see that the associations of eonic evolution are in the realm of value emergence.

Whatever our ideological viewpoints, we confront issues that must be aired in any review of evolutionary theories. It is a very suspicious history, suspiciously little known (apart from a brief stop at the library), although clearly described in the various histories of Social Darwinism. The idea of ‘evolution’ needs to reclaim, if only to put the change of meaning in context, a part of its heritage as the ‘cultural evolution and emergence of liberty and justice’, in a fashion having nothing to do with science or theory. [vii] But this is precisely the reason conservatizing thought closes ranks around erroneous evolutionary thinking.

The rise of technological civilization has created a new confusion, theories applied to self-realization. At the very least, it is appropriate to see that ideas of evolution, apart from their early appearance among the ancient Greeks, were first born or reborn in the realm of cultural evolution, as an honest use of the ‘free action script’ without the impostor claims of value-free science with a hidden agenda. All this said, the issue of organic selectionism is not quite our business here, except to see that the issues of evolution are indeed rightly involved in the context of social values. In the final analysis, theories of evolution must invoke, not this or that principle of ethical behavior, but the full potential of all of them.

Some will find it disconcerting to hear a dissenting view with respect to the hypothesis of Natural Selection put forward by Darwin and Wallace. The burden of proof remains entirely on its proponents. We have no reasonable grounds whatever to take it as established, and far more to reject it, and that ends the matter. [viii] The selectionist paradigm has a puzzling monopoly on modern secular thought, notwithstanding the difficulties that have been advanced against it. It is a theory, if it is one about macro-evolution and speciation, entirely without sufficient evidence or the proper conceptual foundation. Sometimes ‘macro-’ and ‘micro-’ evolution are distinguished, selectionism denied the former, conceded to the latter. Even here we should be wary. For the distinction violates the compression argument suggested. The timescales of greater evolution suddenly zoom in on world history, a mere moment by comparison. The issue of ‘micro-evolution’ would want to claim the field at this time-scale, a dangerous confusion and mixture of modes, as it impinges directly on the ‘shoulds’ of free action.

Darwinism is not our subject here, as such, except in the deliberate use of the term ‘evolution’ in the ambiguity of ‘law true at all times’. ‘Not true at all times’ is all we need, as a fast getaway from selectionist issues, to ask what is true in historical times, and if there is not a better use of the term ‘evolution’. But its influence in fields other than the biological is incongruous. Its implications enter in disguise into accounts of history that are forbidden implicitly all hypotheses except random emergence. Like two hobos with a flea blanket, we mean a semantic ‘tug of war’ between rival meanings as ‘free action scripts’, evolution No. 2 jamming No. 1, in the local future of all such theories. As to Darwinism, we will simply assume some of the literature of its many critics, and proceed on that basis. Many of the first reviewers of Darwin’s book proposed objections that have never been answered, including those of the fossil record whose interpretation does not, to this day, truly confirm the basic claims made by variational and selectionist interpretations. In any case, the frequent assertion that Darwin’s theory is proof against directionality in historical phenomena, whatever this means, is simply false, and needs to be cleared away.

Enigmas of Design

Part of the difficulty in the persistent confusion over evolution arises due to the so-called argument by design, if this is used as a Trojan horse for cultural biases, and whose distractions are not truly relevant to the issues at hand. Adherents of these tactics will find no sustenance here. In fairness to Darwinian thinking, it must be said that it was crippled at the start by the social context of secularization and traditionalism, and the inability of human thought to find plausible understandings of complexity in fields rendered over dogmatically to the transcendental. Darwin’s theory served, ironically, as an aspect of evolution No. 2, secularization in the evolution of culture, at a point of historical discontinuity, our third turning point. One iota of evidence for the non-random and many religious beliefs secularists dislike or thought displaced are taken as newly established. Whatever one’s views, it is an unsettling situation. To be sure, the argument by design is a powerful one, and we see its revival in current debates over ‘irreducible complexity’, but this line of the debate tends to exploit semantic confusion over the meaning of design. However, we can wonder indeed that while mathematics can do as well with electronics as physics, the transition from a physical law to an ‘on-off’ switch, if naturally seen, tokens a mystery to our knowledge.

The use of the term ‘secular’ is ambiguous, changing its meaning over the course of modern history. It refers finally to a pure change of civilization, as the outcome of the Thirty Years War, not the incidents of philosophy, or viewpoint. That finally is all it means, what came after the Thirty Years War. By and large, religion as theocracy was discredited. This ambiguity of political, institutional, or theistic views in the definition of religion and modernism is too constricting to do justice to the culture we actually live in, which is, for very good reasons, pluralistic. If the idea of the secular refers to the use of value-free social theories used to justify value-free behavior as established by ‘science’, the usage is most dubious, if not fraudulent, and deserves counter. But this is precisely what happened as a result of the near triumph of Darwinism. The secularization that is associated with the Enlightenment was something very different from what we take it to mean today, at the point where the Reformation was consolidated as a new form of ‘secular’, i.e. non-theocratic, society. Darwin and Wallace spoke to a generation that saw the fixity of species as a dogmatic given. In their intimate contact with biological diversity in the Galapagos, and the Malay Archipelago, they could see that the facts of evolutionary speciation stood in direct contradiction. But they moved in direct haste from evolutionary facts, to evolutionary theory, and there is a severe difference in the two. It is interesting that Huxley, an aggressive defender of evolution, on occasion expressed doubts, with demurral, about selectionism. This shows that our mindset has changed, and that the early appearance of evolutionism was a seachange in non-theoretical perceptions of evolutionary facts.

Western thought, even if secular, tends to assume that, in the ambiguity of the term ‘design’, the non-random is evidence of a ‘designer’, in the concealed anthropomorphism of divinized projections of the ‘human will’. But there can be no such assumption of anything, for the term ‘will’ is another creature betwixt the one and the two. The argument by design is in reality an ancient version of the same ‘law of history or evolution’ nexus. It is also one whose context, and primordial beauty, has been lost, because its impulse is that of wonder and its real form that of a question, now turned into a hidden assumption, that the nouns of divinity are already defined. In fact they swiftly became historical dogmas bound in dangerous social or political contexts, and mean desperately different things to different people using rival nouns, all assumed to share a common denominator. The question is, if there is evidence of natural or historical design, what does it mean? If we specify a notion of divinity to answer this question, we must demand the same constructivist demonstration as that asked of any other historical generalization. Therefore, once we see that these early conceptions were themselves proto-evolutionary theories, we are free of them at once, for they are a variant of eonic evolutionary conceptualizing. [ix]

The terms ‘God, soul, mind, life, will, design, consciousness, sacred, spiritual, transcendence’ prowl like semantic wild beasts near any discussion of history. The term ‘secular’ might soon join them! The dichotomy of ‘matter and spirit’, and the application of psychological concepts of consciousness or will to sources of design, are but two of the culprits summoned up by poorly defined terms. Terms of divinity create a great confusion in the study of history and evolution, because they are never defined, and are close matches by verbal association for a spectrum of unconscious archetypes and thematics. They invoke, and cascade, secondary meanings of teleology or ethical valuation in a manner that resembles not the invocation of the sacred but semantic fifty-two pickup. They also subtly invoke their own negation, and make challenge impossible.

The same can be said for an atheistic conception, if this simply negates a previous confusion. We cannot arbitrarily exclude arguments by design, but we can demand new terminology, and precise definitions. We will make this our one inviolable rule. Thus, it is almost impossible to use the term ‘god’ without prejudice in relation to differing religions and our study will completely disallow it in any (theoretical) context. This does allow fresh terms and definitions, if that is to anyone’s dialectical interest. And you cannot translate what is said here back into an antiquated language. We should recall the original, most stringent bans and restrictions on the use of terms of divinity by those at the source of the Western religious tradition. The reason for our equal stringency is the dead-center correlation of the Old Testament period with one of our fast interrupts, a beautiful fact to which theology cannot do justice.

We can invent an historical term of reference for the sequence of ‘god’ names, the nth-god name sequence, as a token of the fact that most god-language never specifies which part of this historical sequence is being referred to. The local evolution of the nth-god name sequence in ancient Israel between -900 and -600 is very remarkable, but highly difficult to reconstruct, as it proceeded from the Ugaritic Baal, and the early Yahwistic movement toward the blending with Zoroastrian ideas. It is forgotten that this sequence was often abjured in the reference to the Tetragrammaton. In any case, it is not true that a modern term ‘god’ refers to, or shows a relation of identical meaning with, this early, almost unknown, usage as it emerged from the Phoenician/Canaanite world of polytheism. This period is notable as an exemplar of our eonic ‘on-off’ effect. [x]

In general, the demonstration of periodized patterns in the data emerging from the development of historical knowledge presumes the access and vivid presentation of accurate, up-to-date, non-mythistorical, information in a large number of fields, a difficult requirement requiring new ways to organize historical knowledge and awareness. The terms of discussion must be ‘historical cash’, facts. On these terms the immense complexities of Biblical Criticism block our easy understanding of the historicity of the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and are a warning that no inference of cosmological design can be transferred to an historical one.[xi] And yet, ironically the era of the Prophets is of great interest in terms of our historical structure, and takes on new life in its naturalistic eonic context. We will see that this era fits better into quite a different sort of eonic design! But the first difficulty here is once again, what are the facts?

If we suspect a macrohistorical functionality in cultural evolution, then we suspect at once the perceptions of religion confused with perceptions of evolution by primitive men. This fact goes a long way toward explaining the religious conflicts surrounding evolutionary thinking. The first principles of religion were, perhaps, the tenets of the jungle theologian, as a response to auditory input in the silence of a great forest, ‘If it moves, it’s alive, whether creature, wind or spirit’. The rest follows from the differentiations of ‘winds’ and ‘spirits’, abutting in the reductions of science, as the mass and the force, beside the philosopher, with his first Idea. The forest philosopher, the wild man of India, is the bridge of this past and future, alert in the jungle of thought to No Idea.

Visions of a Ghostseer

The labyrinth of modern thought is a difficult one in which the unforgiving complexities of parallel movement, seen in the divergence of idealism and materialism, can leave understanding stranded in the restricted movement of divorced specializations, and paradigms. Issues of ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ can vitiate thought, and deserve to be relegated to the sidelines, so that a practical study can get underway. The antithesis of materialism and idealism is very ancient, and ceases to serve contemporary thought where the ideas of physical force-fields, computer software, infinitesimals, and of information, move to bridge the ancient distinction, although these forms of explanation tend to factor out the issue of facts and values.

Materialism, if not distinguished from positivism, tends to flagship the secular skepticism that exposes the exploitation of idealist thought as the pillar of hierocratic authority. But a closer looks shows parallel kinship, not the sequential development, of idealism and materialism. Skepticism can work in different directions, and is a two-edged sword. It is often forgotten that the philosopher Kant, issues of his idealism apart, with Newton at his fingertips, pronounced skeptical judgement over assumptions, material or otherwise, arbitrarily made about the ‘Big Three’, divinity, soul, and free will. [xii] We might consider them, semantic quagmires one, two, and three, Q1, 2, 3. We should take the warning to heart without transcendental presumptions, and be wary of any fixed assumptions in these three areas, even at the price of a fuzzy or incomplete theory. The point is that the implied negative affirmations on these issues are often taken as established, when they can be no more than disguised metaphysical assumptions. We might disagree with Kant in theory, but in practice, theories that make hard assumptions in each of these areas frequently founder sooner or later.

The issue of ‘consciousness’, near quagmires 2 and 3, is one crux of difficulty, as many adherents of Eastern religion have noted, in some puzzlement at Darwinism. Not one, but four shades of ‘consciousness’, must be taken in evidence as the evolution of man’s psychology, in the disposition of these views, rendered over to the most ancient Sutras. The full relation of these is rarely experienced by man, and yet are a functional potential of organism. For example, awareness in deep sleep without dreaming is repeatedly attested to as early the Upanishadic era. The difficulty of replicating these facts, let alone explaining them as evolution, is a severe caution against jumping to conclusions of any kind. A product of evolution, consciousness, must also serve as its instrument of understanding. This might be a contradiction, or demand a ‘state’ not included in, and transcending, the process of evolution itself. And something that transcends evolution might or might not be transcendental, especially since the latter is, again, undefined. Anyone with an ear to Kant’s warning would move warily here, without the Darwinist’s confidence. Such issues, as noted, always end in return to equivocation over these ‘soul’ principles, granting the tangled confusions surrounding the term ‘soul’. The term ‘soul’ is hopeless, and needs a new perspective, the ‘full dimensionality of organism’, or the immersion of ‘consciousness’ in evolutionary process. It is not our purpose here to enter very far into the philosophies of this issue, except to note that secular thought, once again, is driven backwards into a materialist ‘foxhole’ beside the claims of religion and the spirit, so often the worst offenders of the Kantian challenge. But the result is that the evolution of consciousness, material or otherwise, is factored out of discussion.

Now, sure enough, with the arising of the distinction of matter and information, or software and hardware, the equivocation returns as science moves to find its own way in a new dimension of inquiry. We have forgotten our own history, and do not recall that Kant, in the first generation after Newton, tackled with a fine sense of contradiction, the very issues that must now resurface a century after Darwinism. This is not at all a recommendation for the strange world of metaphysical idealism, that was really a passing phase of the late Enlightenment. Darwinism is taken as the badge of honor of modernism, when it is in reality a mere episode of research in a much greater context. It is only a reminder that the principles of physical reductionism have issued no more than a promissory note on future explanation, a fact that is then used to discredit other viewpoints. In the end the house of cards must fall. The danger is that we will fill in the blanks, as it were, with imaginary extensions we will presume to be scientific. You cannot have it both ways. If you factor out the antinomies of freedom, you forbid the use of such terms both in theory and in practice.

It is good to remember that many critics, and many that we have forgotten that had no transcendental agenda, rushed to point out these issues at just the point Huxley and Wilberforce, in their celebrated debate, transferred very difficult questions into the realm of the joust. In any case, we cannot make the assumption, except as explicit hypothesis, that organism, consciousness, and ‘birth-death’ sequence are coextensive, as unfortunate as that may be for any theory of evolution. More simply put, we cannot be sure the ‘evolution of consciousness’ produces an instrument that can transcend itself with a theory of its own emergence. Indian philosophers have thus always insisted not only on the distinctions, for example, of consciousness and self-consciousness, but on the existence of a realm ‘beyond consciousness’, beyond the limited mechanical awareness we claim for our normal experience, and their ranks have consistently produced another round of critics of theories of evolution. It is here that we find the weak spot in the argument by design. We cannot assume divinity to have manifest consciousness or a will to design, without being at a lesser state than the highest potential of man himself.

It is important to raise these issues, at least in passing, for in a rapidly globalizing world the encounter of evolutionary theories is not only with traditional monotheism, but the full compass of traditions inherited from antiquity, albeit cluttered in New Age or Theosophical confusion. It is interesting, since our subject is historical and cannot ignore its history, that the classic Indian sequence, so brilliant in this domain, freezes the equivocation over ‘soul’ into two runways approaching the same subject, the Upanishadic quest for the ‘atman’ principle, and the Buddhist quest for the ‘no atman’ principle. They found the term ‘soul’ to have material import, in a sense different from that of modern thought. It is interesting to consider the codification of the ancient Indian sutras as what is called Samkhya, whose implications were materialist. The persistent confusion of ‘self-consciousness’ as ‘spirit’ is as present in scientific negation as in the superficial traditions of religious ideology. Modern thought, in the controversies of mind, tends to assume ‘consciousness’ might have transcendental import if it can’t be reduced to physical principles, when it only seems to show ‘virtuality’. This ancient view simply assumed ‘mind’ was phenomenal, whether or not material, and that the transcendental was beyond mind, a view ironically closer, at least in principle, to the reductionist views of computer and AI theorists. Thus mind and ‘spirit’ are entirely different. And the term ‘spirit’ was never used or analyzed, and only pointed to as ‘cessation of consciousness’, a ‘fourth state’ beyond all. This goes idealism one better, although the world of Kant remains to be reckoned with. In any case, the student of history does not have the luxury of crossing the street against questions of consciousness discarded as ‘mysticism’ by most students of evolution. These are a part of the evolution of culture, whose study tends to misjudge the complexities of basic questions, because of the partisanships for and against secularism. It is furthermore no accident the Indian example springs forth at the second stage of our pattern, once again a subject sourcing in the period –900 to -600. Human culture almost branches in two directions, as if to reserve a parallel universe to explore these questions.

We can therefore be drawn into a consideration, very briefly, of current New Age movements, and world religion in general, as the great themes, not of religious ‘tradition’, but of their sources, enter into our subject. These New Age groups have often clamored against the claims of the Darwinians, and seeded virtual catacombs against modernist thought, preferring a vaster confusion brought from antiquity to false positivist certainties. We witness a slow derailment of the focus of progressive notions. However, the issues of consciousness have provoked a greater confusion than anything in theories of evolution, and do not do justice to ancient views of consciousness. We can in fact take the distinction of ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’, however initially obscure, as a useful starting point to construct our own pocket-size ‘eonic sutra’, in a question to ourselves about the elusiveness of ‘evolutionary consciousness’. The issue of the distinction has been made frightfully obscure by ‘esoteric’ mystifications, but amounts only, as a beginning, to the difference of mechanical ‘consciousness’ and a higher octane version of the same, or to the distinction of ‘blank stares’ and ‘attention’. This relationship of two kinds of consciousness enters into the core of history, and confounds the phantom of ‘historical laws’ with the mechanical nature of unevolving consciousness and the ‘law of evolution’ as evolving self-consciousness.  The great advantage of this approach is that we can ‘reduce’ self-consciousness to consciousness, and consciousness to evolution without having to either construct or renounce a theory of ‘will’, or ‘free will’, leaving the latter to future evolutionary potential. Talk of ‘free will’ is mostly talk, but important evolutionary talk. The obvious echoes of these sutra-cliches in German Idealism should remind us of the intramural ‘dialectic’ of  idealism and materialism claiming the title ‘modern’, as they rose in parallel inconsistency. These opposites look out for each other. Modern thought proceeds by the moonlight of Kantian wisdom to a mysterious failsafe as its theories are forced to reckon with the antinomies that he pointed to.

Facts, Values and Reductionist Shortfall

Modern science, now encountering its own issues of consciousness, is an attempt to derive the unity of nature in the context of fundamental laws, working upward in a kind of ‘bootstrap’ that is itself reminiscent of the evolutionary. [xiii] This attitude is as essential as it is misleading. From Newton to Quantum Mechanics, theoretical bootstrap proceeds on the majestic subtleties of the differential equation, and then, at the threshold of life, squawks like a radio moving between stations. Explanation and the means of explanation are both evolving in parallel. The deficit between the latest upgrade to the definition of reductionism, and out of date explanations, is already a force to be reckoned with in the consideration of any kind of theory at all. Timeless laws and timely evolutions evoke the first strains of melody in the stirrings of thermodynamic self-organizations. The issues of bootstrap reductionism are a reminder of the need to find the true requirements of explanation, and the source of potential downfall into mechanistic fallacies that may have no place in a rising scale of complexity. The contrary impulse is a virtual flora of involutionary, vitalist and metaphysical ‘theories’ reaching new heights of super-from-substition so evident in the New Age movement.

It is important to remember the history of this reductionism in physics, where, for example, the phenomena of electro-magnetism were ‘reduced’ only after they were first discovered as independent empirical realities. Therefore, our first search is in the field of phenomena. Further, each ‘small’ step sees a tailor-made addition of mathematical methods, with an exotic change of character in the fundamentals as the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics is discovered, at a deeper level of ‘reduction’, voiding the previous set. The issue of reduction is then quite unclear, and does not preempt the nature of phenomena very ‘distant’ from these sources. Finally, one should wonder if the new world of mathematical logic discovered by Kurt Gödel, with its issues of consistency and incompleteness, does not impinge directly on the issues of evolution as it ‘stretches’ to encompass the vast domain of separate things.

Although the attitude of modern ‘bootstrap reductionism’ in the best sense of seeking the unity of nature on the bedrock of physical laws should be our starting point, or at least a reference point, in practice, issues of evolution are doomed to be empirical mapmaking before they can aspire to being theoretical derivations of first principles. It is often assumed that the application of the causal determinism implied by the use of differential equation in such fields as population genetics or the macro-economic model are ‘scientific’ whilst all other approaches are subjective. The truth is probably very far, if not the reverse, from this.

In any case, our pattern gives us a way out, and prompts us to its own methods of study, by staging a collision of opposites. The first is that of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’, our double negative. Another is the clear evolutionary emergence of theory itself. This leaves us with a Cheshire Cat, are we outside evolution reducing the past to theory, or inside evolution evolving theories, even if these were theoretical eschatologies? Here, the eonic effect enforces the discipline of taking this into account, since theories themselves are evolutionary evidence, and is itself the broadest guide to its own study. It enforces a  balance in this field of contradiction, almost like a keel haul divergence, of consistency in reciprocity with completeness. We see this in the parallel emergence of the strikingly contrasted Hellenic, Judaic, and Indian transitional worlds, one again blended in the Chinese, each at one, yet different in a search for variety. This is in part our caution on the closure of axioms, that vitiates so many treatises of history. In any case, we see that our ‘evolution’ forces us to consider issues of religion and consciousness because these are correlated with our dynamic. This is a reminder of how unlikely it is that ‘religion’ can be derived from issues of natural selection, as sociobiologists would like us to believe.

We see facts of direction only if we see a transformation, hence implied mechanism, of values. Hence we see nothing, except a desert of flat history, if we search only for value-free laws. This distinction of facts and values returns to haunt all theories of evolution, as does the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’, whereby the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ are to endure mutual quarantine. The charge of metaphysics is laid against the claims of all violators of these protocols. But then no theory is possible, for the elimination of values fails to account for the phenomena observed, here the association of religious evolution and periodicity, and the parallel exploration of a spectrum of values.

All this seems to add up to variants of our ‘freedom when?’ question, and we have a pattern still incomplete, not yet ‘free’ to create its theory. We can be finished quickly with our business of describing the eonic effect without rendering a final answer to the apparent contradiction of facts and values, just as we can attend a concert without knowing how the values of music emerge from the facts of violins, tubas, and the administered tempo of parallel productions. But we will abide here with the rule that we will renounce theory for the purely descriptive before we renounce this distinction, and give no license to an evolutionary theory as science that can’t account for the ‘songs in a songbird’. And not the least reason is that we see this antinomy frozen in history, as ‘valuation’ in periodic motion, an example being the ‘timed’ emergence of the great religions and the idea of freedom itself, a strong hint nature does not honor the so-called naturalistic fallacy. In fact, it is just here that the idea of freedom, along with the distinctions of consciousness, as self-consciousness, offer the bridge.

Sacred and Secular

Those who, in diverse walks of life, take Darwinism as established to render judgement on social issues of great import are under a heavy obligation to get straight whence the sources of their beliefs, and, if necessary, conduct their own enquiry. The excellence of empirical biological research blinds thinking to the complications of the theoretical requirements of explanation. Theories of Darwinian evolution come armed and dangerous and wish to legislate the future predicted in bogus theory, Karl Popper’s Oedipus effect. Beside the latter lies Popper’s increasing suspicion, registered in his works, that evolutionary theories suffer difficulties of ‘falsifiability’, and are really ‘metaphysical’ statements rather than theories. [xiv] As the perception of the eonic effect suggests, you are taking a chance to claim mechanism for the unobserved. In any case, there are no certified experts in this field, and every man is responsible for the effects of the theory he is proposing. Ignorance by want of specialization is no excuse.

Many who drink solely at the well of the biological textbook are unaware, apparently, of the underground literature of this subject, although in the age of the Internet that is likely to change very quickly. It is embarrassing to watch defenders of evolution in schools cut to pieces by well-coached fundamentalists. In Darwin’s Metaphor, Robert Young notes, “Natural Selection is still scrutinizing, but the scientist and his mentors and employers are directly selecting, controlling and selling natural selection.” [xv] The tide is rising toward new paradigms, although the next ‘paradigm’ won’t just appear with Kuhnian greased wheels. A taking stock is needed, for we are not dealing with a problem in physics, but categories of thinking that themselves counsel historical action and change the realization of the future. And the whole subject is riddled with ideology. A recent, very strident, philosophic critique of Darwinism by the philosopher David Stowe, in Darwinian Fairytales, is a forewarning and cries ‘enough’ to theories of evolution, a disconcerting ‘who cares’, and points out the most obvious fact:

 

If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species. [xvi]

 

This is the most evident contradiction in Darwinism. Nothing in archaeology, the search for fossils, or DNA, is required to see it, or able to contradict it. The author targets the confusion generated by Darwinism in the sociobiological attempt to derive altruism from survivalist scenarios. These theories are simply misleading, although there is nothing gainsaid here as to empirical considerations of the genetic basis of ethical behavior. The obvious answer is that altruism is counterevidence to theory. For a probably simple reason suggested in our logic, you must first show, by selectionism or not, how the genome constructs a ‘free machine’, free action, whether disposed to Freedom or not. Unless you can construct (or correctly dismiss) such a machine on paper, in advance, it is hard to accept claims that biology resolves the issues of ethics. Such issues reach a stalemate analogous to ‘mathematical Platonism’, of which the great mathematician Gödel would seem to have been a proponent. The constructivist steps can’t be omitted in the presumption that a harsh view of human nature, itself a dubious concept, has already been established. None of this can gainsay different approaches to genetic ‘sociobiology’. The structure of the genome tokens the rich complexity required to really resolve the issues that founder in the metaphysical conundra reductionists seem to find a mere nuisance.

The clear strategy of misuse of the non-implications of behavioral genetics persists in certain conservative ideologies, in complete contradiction to their promotion of traditional values, to use the preconceived selectionist assumptions as a mostly unstated excuse for arguments of political inequality. [xvii] Science will finally take discredit for allowing this to happen, again, after being warned over and over by its friends. The idea is that man’s nature is genetically such and such and needs an antiquated social system, if any change is utopian. The nature of man is itself the clear object of evolutionary transformations of consciousness. It is not a fixed entity. Darwinists haven’t even begun to address the complexities of consciousness known millennia ago. This naivete threatens to discredit science. From ‘dog eat dog’, we arrive to, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature?’

Surprising as it may seem, this is not a rejection of sociobiology as such. Certainly not of the genetic implications of human behavior, to which evolutionists, however, have no monopolistic claim. But genetics and evolutionary theory are two different subjects. The genetics of man may indeed show some harsh realities. But how in fact did man evolve? The suspicion lurks that natural selection moves against a directed evolution, that requires a system with feedback to restore its emergentist realization. Here’s the first hint of a ‘should’, feedback. Hardly a rigorous argument, except to find grounds for the opposite of A, given A, in relation to unilinear ‘evolution’ partitioned into discrete versus continuous effects. Natural Selection must get the bullet to the bull’s eye far away, so to speak. It needs a straightener. In any case, we should engage the strongest reminder of a Gresham’s law of evolutionary theories, and an implicit reminder to beware of all of them, along with their religious substitutes. (Including, many will hasten to point out, the author’s, not a theory at all, but a correlation of world historical data.) Later modern thought, it could be claimed, is selecting away from the promise of the high potential of the Enlightenment. It is a poor record for such a body of research as Darwinism and a mark against the legacy of the scientific revolution a postmodernist world will not forget in the manner of the team members of short memory, and hankering for the next paradigm. After such confusion, there is no next paradigm shift. People will take their business elsewhere.

One of the current assaults on Darwinism is that of the Fundamentalist movement with its neo-creationist challenge to the rising perception of difficulties in evolutionary theory. Associated with this is a recent critique, Darwin on Trial, by the lawyer Philip Johnson, not a Fundamentalist, in a reasonable effort to look closely at the difficulties that have surfaced in evolutionary research. We seem almost back in the world of Mivart, one of the first religious critics of Darwin. Reviews of Darwinism by lawyers seem a new genre, beginning with Norman Macbeth’s Darwin Retried. Johnson’s arguments are as cogent as any, and reflect the right of any group confronted with implied non-existence in the name of modernism to hire themselves a good lawyer!

Although it is entirely understandable for such groups to feel indignant that the evolutionary theory that is also their nemesis is flawed, as if they are to be secularized out of existence, it is also true that religious opposition is as much a part of the problem of the current ‘stuck paradigm’. Any scientist must be concerned that difficulties in evolutionary explanation should be taken as grounds for religious demonstration, or that arguments by design associated with historical religions seem to have scientific backing. The argument by design, in any historical form, should be claimed by ‘eonic evolution’, there to dwell behind recessed glass, for this sense of design is itself an evolutionary consciousness. Our pattern shows a most bizarre design, but it doesn’t validate theistic (or atheistic) interpretations, which in the Judaic forms are clearly proto-eonic, i.e. correlated with our pattern as ‘evolutionary emergentist outcomes’.

In a subsequent book, Reason in the Balance, Johnson engages the lists for a near campaign against modernism itself, with Darwin placed beside Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the triad of culprits for the evils of secularism. [xviii] The themes of postmodernist fashions are now the grounds for a comeback of the sacred against the domination of the secular. But the dilemma is false. Modernism will remain quite secure after these thinkers are out of fashion, indeed, it is outrageous to hold up the views of Nietzsche in this way, if he was himself the arch-opponent of the modern world itself. Marx, however, whatever his theories, had a better sense of the effect of ideology on social thought. In general, this raises the question of what we mean by ‘modernism’ at all. And if we oppose Marx as modern, what of Adam Smith? To say nothing of Kant, indeed Martin Luther. Is Luther modern?

Johnson launches, in addition, a campaign against scientific naturalism. As with ‘modernism’, this is the wrong target. The much heralded ‘naturalistic explanation’ remains almost an impostor, if we do not understand how nature works. This issue is almost unresolvable given complexities of this ‘nature’, another problem term, the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenacity of claims of the sacred against the secular. But the naturalistic explanation is all we have. It is certainly true that the ‘naturalist explanation’ is often misleading, and can produce its own myths, but the result is likely replacement by still another such explanation. A good example is the realm of Old Testament study itself, that has almost entirely revised the picture we receive from tradition, and yet left the subject almost as mysterious as before. It is doubtful if the original religionists, such as the Prophets themselves, would understand our distinction of sacred and secular. They would have thought their interpretation of history the only natural explanation! In any case, and here eonic correlation is of help, we see that the distinction of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ is almost meaningless, as we see the parallel emergence of religion and science together. As to the Old Testament, it contains a stubborn riddle, and has so far not yielded to the obvious naturalistic explanations desired for it.

In general the anti-modernist argument fails, because Darwinism is not necessarily one of its defining philosophies. It’s that simple. The rich structure of the Enlightenment died like a candle in the one-dimensional implications of Darwinism. [xix] The confusion of periodization and content as ideology is insidious and needs an eonic clarification. Is Luther secular? It is interesting to consider that the first stage of modernism, before the Enlightenment, was the Reformation, and that Fundamentalism is a modern invention of this century. And it was the issue of evidence and the rise of Biblical Criticism that moved modernism into its ‘secular’ mode, even as evidentiary confusions pull thinking into new evolutionary considerations. In general, it seems as if one tremor in the notion of randomness is sufficient grounds for the abrogation of the secular. [xx]

The great irony of Darwinism, in tandem with Spencerism, is its serendipity as a de facto episode in the ongoing religious ‘re-formation’ of modernism. After much criticism of the Darwinian viewpoint we can restore its historical place as a classic instance of dialectical negation, rendered to the implications of assumed teleology. But this is historical effect, secularization, not necessarily scientific finality. The fate of negation is further negation, like overshoot-undershoot in a tiller. The term itself, ‘secular’, comes from ‘seculum’, age period, its meaning thus ‘eonic’. The issue is quite ironic, for the core beliefs of the ‘sacred’ revolve around the issues of the ‘transcendental’ which are in origin eonic mythology based on downfield perceptions of what in our terminology will become ‘ET5, Israel’. It is true, but only in the original sense arising after the Thirty Years War, that what we call modernism is a form of secularization.

It is testimony to the incomprehension of their own subject by Christians that Darwinism lasted five minutes in the context of religious objections. And it is remarkable that while most Protestant churches got their arm twisted for the new dispensation, the Fundamentalists stood their ground. This violates the secularist’s normal sense of progress, but there is no contradiction, if we see that the real context of philosophic evolution in mid-snafu created the reintegration of linear and parallel evolutions. Thus a recent defense of modernism by the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, Consilience, attempts to buttress the Enlightenment tradition, with an engaging appeal to the early Ionian vision of the oneness of nature. [xxi] And this is accompanied by a complaint against the social sciences, and a call for the application of science, perhaps sociobiology, to ‘finally do the job’, and clear up their confusions. This Ionian vision was not the brand of nineteenth century materialism seen as a kind of final answer by reduction, but a spectrum of thought that includes the same collision, or ‘dialectic’, of materialism and idealism that we see recurring in modern times. While this focus on the Enlightenment is an entirely apt invocation of historical perspective, it fails to consider that the Ionian vision predates the rising of the great religions, and appeared in parallel with the Old Testament prophets! How do the proponents of scientific progress explain this?

The reason is plain, if we look at the era of Classical Greece as it passed into the Hellenistic Age; the birth of science proved stillborn in a field of rising religion. Our ‘eonic evolution’ shows the reason for this, and also history to be so complex, that any fuzzy combination of archetypes might on the average do better than the unilinear failed hypothesis sequence generated by scientific reductionism, an excessively harsh or partial view, perhaps, of the long waning of ancient science. Christianity and its Mayflower churches survived the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and could survive Darwinism with ease, as they took their ancestry in the Hellenistic age, where the issues of chance and fortune saw a first dialectic, and resolution precisely in eonic evolutionary terms, however mythical. These religions have seen it all before. The proposal to replace the entire history of struggle over religious questions, and their direct interest in issues of altruism, with an evolutionary confusion of incorrect theory, simply catches an historical tripwire and leads to religious conservatism modernist thinking finds so puzzling. Again, part of the reason lies in the ambiguity of the term ‘secular’. If this refers to a change of period ca. 1500, or after the Thirty Years War (when religion ceased to be a public issue), that it one thing. But if it refers to some concoction of Nietzschean nihilism in a wasteland of civilization without values, then the wheel will turn again toward religion.

Darwin’s achievement is clear, and it is easy to be unfair to him. But he is more or less on record as assuming that survivalism is at work in the destruction of primitive races and that the achievements of the Greek classical period are the result of differential natural selection, a most doubtful viewpoint. What about the Hittites? These were essentially the same tribal and linguistic stock. Yet they echo Mesopotamia, and shew very little creative culture. What about the Romans? They are almost a variant tribe, yet already look backwards to an established tradition. One is just before, the other just after. In parallel we find the post-Vedic mimic in concert the Greeks in music of a different key. This has to be a problem of periodization. The foundations of the Greek classical achievement appeared at almost record speed from -900 to -600 for reasons, we can strongly suggest, that were conditioned by zone and period. This remarkable interval, echoed in the raw structure of the Old Testament, has no other account than as a ‘fast interrupt’. Even if we thought they had special talents or intelligence as a culture, this other explanation would hold good. For we will move to see the full counter-experiments in all combinations, the comparable Hittites, and (Greek) Mycenaeans before, the Romans just after. In general, evolutionary theory assumes that selection for intelligence is a foregone conclusion in the evolution of the brain. Even the small snapshot we have of human history shows the ‘survivors’ too often to be a very restricted range of men. Uphill selection requires unique conditions for success.

We must especially note the falloff of the effect in this parallel case of the Romans, for they almost seem to be there to rescue something from the onset of post-transitional chaos. In general, selection can decrease potential. Our transitional periods seem to increase it. And all the great advances of civilization show eonic period conditioning at their source, temporally and geographically. Selectionism could hardly be the mechanism of this evolution for we see the same population streams switched on and off, although it would be of great interest to know the genetic preliminaries and consequences of these waves of advancing civilization. The danger is that realization from high potential will select away from its innovations, the abortive classical birth of science being an example. For it is possible to consider that outstanding abilities or cultural assets enable particular groups to respond to the eonic effect more readily.

Civilization simply does not arise through the survival of the fittest, and frequently shows signs of logjam as the ‘fittest’ induce stasis in the persistence of sterile themes of domination, power, and militarism. One can only wonder at the ‘genetic cost’ of civilization itself, and the effect of centuries of warfare, political submission, and hangman judges. Nor is the runaway suggestion of the nature of social competition in public thinking a helpful contribution to an already stressed environment of colliding parties whose first need is mutual cooperation. The game of the survival of the fittest makes no sense in a context where we see religions emerge in periodic rhythm, along with science and philosophy.

One of the most remarkable aspects of antiquity is the uphill selection against inertia, indeed, the focal selection of advancing areas. Against the restriction of potential in selection we see separate worlds mapped out in parallel. The entire spectrum of human consciousness is explored during a particular show of emergent culture. The system anticipates its own transitional outcome, as whole literatures appear to service a coming oikoumene. The system seems to focus on the operational instruments of its evolutes in their highest potential, as heights of thought are reached with almost instantaneous bursts of advance, the example of emergent Greek tragedy being one of the most remarkable examples.

Outline and Summary

At a time of renewed controversies over theories of evolution, the pattern of the eonic effect can be of great help as the only real evidence, however tenuous, that humanity has of an ‘evolution in action’. Our thesis is simple, world history has a suggestive patterning that we should call ‘evolution’. Our purpose is achieved by showing that the record of civilization shows a non-random pattern, and that the usual evolutionary thinking is grossly inappropriate for understanding civilization. To this data we will offer our so-called frequency hypothesis, in a macrohistorical challenge to historical continuity. But we offer no rival theory as such, for reasons already clear. We have put Q1, 2, 3 on hold, demanded of ‘theory’ a reconciliation of factual and value domains. What theory is possible then?

We are left with an empirical mapping of an ‘eonic evolution’, detailing the floor plan of a large museum, with a subsection, the historical evolution of evolutionary theories! But it is hard to avoid the suggestion of macrohistorical drumbeat in the evidence starting to emerge from archaeological fixer. Beyond a considerable number of complications deliberately thrown the reader’s way (as a reminder that ‘what has to be explained’ is exceedingly vast), our frequency hypothesis is very simple, perhaps too simple, the sequence of accelerations, early Sumer-Egypt ca. –3000, the classical phase ca. -600, and, if we stand back from its ideological confusions, the rise of the modern, 1500 to 1800, show a most suggestive overall structure of coordinated ‘self-organization’, a system operating in a long frequency. The exercise of ‘walking through’ the data to consider, verify, or refute, is itself instructive, as is the simple tactic of seeking out the ‘discontinuity’ factor.

 

 A frequency hypothesis Although it is not essential to seeing the eonic pattern, the suggestion of a system operating in frequency is almost impossible to resist, even if the result is incomplete. The Neolithic and the ambiguous New World civilizations simply don’t yield enough data for inclusion, as yet, although it is clear how they fit in. But we catch a majestic glimpse of one part of an unknown systematic process in the Old World sequence. We see that 5000 years is a mere moment to such a system, and we can catch only one middle beat, barely make out the earlier rhythm, and are left with the ambiguity of the most recent as the factors of ‘force and freedom’ collide as an interplay of ‘determination and free action’. This is a strange result, but a decisive one for understanding as we the emergence of civilization as one whole.

Our use of the term ‘evolution’ could, with a current word processor’s ‘search and replace’ become ‘historical mumbledeepeg’. We can pay our dues to Humpty Dumpty with a new and different usage of the term, ‘evolution’, applied to our data. So which is the correct one? Our usage is probably better. More we cannot say. The different senses go into a kind of ‘divide and conquer’, with ‘evolution’ returned to its equivocation over values, stripped of pretensions of science. But eonic evolution is not a true opposite of Darwinian, and the concordance of the word ‘evolution’ is likely to seem confusing. The pattern may or may not tell us anything about Cambrian evolutes, but in a continuum from dinosaur bones to the world of the Pharaohs, great religions, and modern revolutions, it is entirely appropriate to challenge a selectionist extension to human society with a different sense of the term ‘evolution’. We can also decide to beware of evolutionary theories and take our evidence almost as a detergent for such.

This is not to renounce the clear indications of theory in this approach. Quite the contrary, the interplay of continuous and discontinuous seems practically out of a book of electronics, and probably drives our subject over the edge in a new form of ‘naturalistic’ Universal History. This recursive iteration with suggestions of ‘feedback’ makes many difficulties disappear, or assume a new light. But this analysis confirms one’s suspicion that even in the presence of evolution, we could not quite say how it works. Scrounge the pattern near –600, to attempt to grasp what is happening. It will defeat easy analysis. Our purpose is achieved by showing that human history shows macro-historical directionality, by a suggestive preponderance of evidence arrived at by the qualitative analysis of cultural structures and of values. As to directionality, we see direction, but this is not the same as teleological history, please note.

Specialized research is the lifeblood of this inquiry and it might seem therefore that its great scale, against the grain of specialized research, constitutes grounds for the impossibility of this analysis. In general, the working historian, the contemporary Rankean Herodotus, frowns on any suggestion of Universal History, theoretical or philosophic history in the large. This attitude may be understandable. But it doesn’t follow that specialized research will solve the problem of historical dynamism or causality in the small, with narrative disguised as explanation. One must beware the trap of local causes. The classical period shows five variants of the same periodic tempo. Their sources are therefore not the ‘causes’ of what happened. The number of efforts to derive the birth of civilization from weather conditions grows tiresome.

If you renounce universal history, you have probably renounced attempts to explain the rise of the modern world, for the same criticisms apply at the hotspots all across the board. Those who reject universal histories see nothing paradoxical in attempting to explain the rise of the early modern in economic terms. Our method is, at first, confusing. We are approaching the great Forbidden, macrohistorical ‘laws’, regularities or systems, by first invoking the arch-critics of such, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, against the Darwinian viewpoint. Then we can attempt to show the existence of historical structure, in a fashion that avoids the objections they raised. The basis of their thinking is that ‘free action’, full human potential, is alone responsible for the creation of human history. We should be forced to show then that there are historical forces generating history. But we will consider the issue a hybrid, as the dilemma of ‘force’ and ‘free action’ resolved to a dynamic duet of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’. Especially in the classical era is this evident. In a space of centuries (relative to millennia) the distribution of creative individuals is extraordinary. Why? We take this as the factor of eonic determination, which explains nothing, but merely restates correlation. Here ‘eonic determination’ tends, or seems, to mean ‘creative free action’, although such simplifications might confuse the analysis.

Our thesis crosses a multitude of paradigm boundaries, Darwinism, theories of civilization, issues of religion, cyclical and linear philosophies of time, modern leftist ideology, the economic interpretation of history, even cultural diffusionism in the New World. Any paradigm not tied down is at risk. And we step directly into the domain of metanarratives, so-called, now under scrutiny from many quarters. We can cheerfully pass through the crossfire of all such issues, for our treatment is really a toolkit for ‘theory construction’, as the process goes wholesale in the shadowy half-light of ideology. If we deal with the modern period, we must accept its controversies and can begin by kicking up the ideological dust of the leftist evolutionism filtered from discussion, for we see its direct connection to the idea of historical discontinuity, here the rapid acceleration of social change in the modern era, 1500 to 1800. It is not even radical to take this approach. Hothead evolutionism with designs of revolution is a fact of history and the mirror-image of conservative sociobiological ideology. This will prove the coup de grace for some. Conservatives tend to start from their socks in terror at the Bolshevik Red Tide at the mere mention of ‘discontinuity’. The author can’t change the fact that men fought for their freedom, and did so in correlation with our historic pattern. In any case, the use of the term ‘discontinuity’ here means ‘rapid change in several centuries’ on a scale of millennia, and has no intrinsic connection with ‘revolution’ as such. The canard of continuous evolution with an emphasis on tradition deserves to be challenged in any case. Look at historical fact. Our fast interrupts correlate with a high predominance of man’s creative advances. At all other times, ‘evolution’ is meandering, if not retrograde. By continuous evolution, we would still be ruled by a Tiglath Pileser the XCIXth. Here, as it happened, we got a ‘fast interrupt’, as the Israelite Jerry emerged from cracks against the Assyrian Tom, for a new direction.

The pattern of the eonic effect points to the vastness of world history, even as our treatment is forced to be short. Our description is designed to expand at each point, like an accordion. Each section is amplified by a slight expansion in the appendices. But we must assume a great deal of data on the part of the reader. Since we can’t assume this, we will only reach the bare threshold of our own subject, as a matrix of periodization. In fact, this brevity can be appropriate: we wish to point to one pattern of facts, in relation to our first question. Is there any historical evidence of historical foreshortening, and therefore dynamical action, in the long and short of ‘evolution’ taken in any sense? We can adopt a ‘look, the Rockies’ approach that is empirical, short of any presumption of a full account, to answer in the affirmative. We can proceed because Nature shows us how, and yet even as we see it we still don’t know how. The issues look difficult, but they are not. By the end of the second chapter, the basic question is clear.

We will begin, after a consideration of the historical turning point we call modernism, to look at our pattern in terms of three such historical turning points. Behind this lurks a much deeper structure. The first chapter will look at the era of modernism as it rushes out of the storm of change after the period of revolutions in the nineteenth century. As we move backwards from this point toward what is called the ‘early modern’ we will begin to see the era from the Reformation to the Enlightenment as an overall unity of rapid cultural acceleration, and begin to raise the issue of why this process occurred in the West. Theories trying to derive modernism from medievalism are left in the lurch, with our perspective the period 1500 to 1800.

Beside the issue of Darwinism, which suddenly becomes secondary, many other issues, each passed through quickly, impinge on our subject, which is really a near encyclopedia of mysteries, from cyclical theories of civilization to Zoroastrianism and the riddle of Indian religion. One of the most confusing aspects of our pattern is the way the ideas of Zoroastrianism pass along its stream like a bobbing cork to the point where we can confuse them with the generation of the pattern itself. Our first chapter will take evasive action, so to speak, even as the clear influence of the ‘eschatological’ idea is shown to be a distorted evolutionary myth, in the sense of cyclical and countercyclical views of progressive ages, and the potential futurism of ‘endstates’ in a system of cycles. Study of Zoroastrianism is important in its own right, as research highlights its influence on Christianity. The Zoroastrian idea is a wide traveler, and resurfaces in different forms. The secular ideologist is often accused of disguised ‘eschatology’, but the idea in its Christian form is itself disguised Zoroastrianism. The root is neither sacred, nor secular, nor even ‘Zoroastrian’, but, ironically, a perspective near the core of the ‘cyclical nexus’ or archetype. In general every stray dog of historical explanation and myth must be taken in by this approach.

From there, we broach the issues of modernism, the Enlightenment, its New Age, and the aftermath of its earthquakes, in the Hegelian idea of the ‘end of history’, and the resurfacing of the ‘Zoroastrian’ theme, in Communist, and now liberal versions. A short look at the New Age movement, quite a different New Age altogether, can introduce us to the postmodernist effects, the legacies of antiquity, and the issues of evolutionary consciousness. It is interesting that the period of the Enlightenment is now under attack from various sources. We can briefly attempt to defend its seminal status, even as we move to see that the modern transformation is more comprehensive than the philosophic concert of the Enlightenment. But the clear leftist trend, in the sense of declaring the idea of freedom against the past, enters the core discussion of social evolution, and requires no apology. Nonetheless, we are in the midst of the mixed ‘periodization’ and ‘valuation’ that makes our ‘evolution’ seem less than ‘value-free social science’.

It is possible to bypass these issues and begin in Chapter 2 with the emphasis on antiquity, and the bare perception of historical turning points, followed in Chapter 3 by a look at cyclical theories of civilization, and the definitions of new terms. Our use of the term ‘modernism’ comprises the era from 1500 onward. But it is the period from 1500 to 1800 that is decisive. We are thus not ‘post-modernist’ but ‘post-transitional’. The devastating impact of this long ‘turning point’, as we pull out of its momentum, bids to include it with the only other periods of its type, the onset of Islam being the only real exception, but one whose character is quite different. The sense of being in a turning point is continuous since the time of the Reformation, but became especially strong around the time of the French Revolution. Are these contingent facts? Did world history just stumble along until it suddenly decided it was time to become modern?

And we should wonder why we must turn to the age of Athens and the Hebrew Prophets, Buddha, Lao Tse, to find another so intense, and brief. And then again after an equal interval of time, a fact that must surprise us, but which archaeology is beginning to confirm, to the age just before the Egyptian and Sumerian foundries of civilization. Is there one great turning point in a series? And does the series, so evident from the time of historical visibility, allow an extension to the full post-Paleolithic period? This is the first form of our question. This involves no prejudice against other periods of history, for the issue is the one of generation and sequence. History records the difference almost precisely as myth in the relation of early proto-Judaism to its later progeny.

This idea of a ‘turning point’ is useful, but has limitations and will then be replaced by the idea of ‘eonic cycles and transitions’. The battle of Midway was a decisive one-day turning point, but so was the era of the classical Greeks, a three centuries turn in the momentum of world history, one that needs its own terminology. This chapter begins a challenge to the economic view of history, along with the technological, by separating the progression of civilization into three sequences, eonic, economic, and technological. The economic processes so evident in the rise of the industrial economies of modernism are results, not causes. The sequence of technology takes care of itself as a function of human inventiveness, not of historical evolution, as such. The stream of economic activity seen rising in antiquity cannot account for the phenomena of civilization, religion, and art, which show unmistakable eonic periodization. The modern market order is a highly sophisticated eonic correlate, quite different from its ancestry in the omnipresent ‘primitive capitalism’ of Phoenician traders. Proof of this is seen in the near invention of ‘capitalism’ during our second turning point, followed instead by the degeneration and amplification of slavery. Our argument exploits the parallel emergence of economy, and abolitionism. Here we will suggest that the discrete model is the only way out of such dilemmas, that the continuous slow evolution of capitalism simply sandbanked and came to a stop.

It is worth remembering that Marx’s theories of economic history came matched with a ‘utopian’ endstate, in a ‘viconian’ or developmental stage sequence, in which one stage is succeeded by another, by some ‘law of history’. And this grew in the soil of the Hegelian dialectic, which attempts to conjoin mutual interaction of opposites, whatever this may mean. These theories of Marx, with the dialectic plus extras removed and the ‘Zarathustra’ taken out, are taken to prefigure the economic basis of historical causation by non-Marxist writers lavishing praise on the ‘early groundwork’ of Marx, his viewpoint turned into the ‘continuous growth model’ of a putative ‘macroeconomic history’, which simply denatures the whole subject.

We will hold no brief for the obscure, and much debunked, ‘dialectic’ (although the term will appear in its original, more casual, usage), but the assumption social entities are resolved with a book of differential equations is almost as controversial. The point of the ‘dialectic’ was to consider that historical outcomes might be multivalent, and then conflict. And this is true. The doubtful (although extremely interesting) usage of the differential equation is especially evident in macroeconomics. Marx has been refuted many times, while macroeconomic modeling, allied with a fictitious Hobbesian economic man, reigns unchallenged. This does not gainsay the intrinsic interest of such, but mathematical systems are only as good as the basic model, stated without the math. And here the titanic labors of a Marx, nose-diving on the first attempt, produced a most engaging ‘viconian’ system. Marx was clearly struggling rightly to justify the element of discontinuity in historical continuity, and did so with the sequences of economic stages. It doesn’t work, because it is not possible to show that history matches the needed passage from ‘feudalism’ to ‘capitalism’ to socialism. It looks like the early modern is passing from feudalism to capitalism, but a close look shows it doesn’t work.

Our different continuous-discontinuous sequence does better because the ‘stages’ have no content, and are simply ‘system phases’. Passage out of ‘feudalism’ has happened more than once, and seems less a stage of history than the relapses of Conan the Barbarian. Thus the passage to capitalism as a stage of history also disappears and is replaced by the entire ‘discontinuity’ of modernism in which capitalism is an ‘eonic emergent’, as we call it, a viewpoint that does better justice to Karl Marx and Adam Smith both. That said, we are under no obligation as historians to take the myths of capitalism as a new historical inevitability. The misunderstandings on this point (in theory, whatever the advantages of capitalism in practice) are cut from the same cloth as Darwinism. Leave it to statistics, it’s a miracle. The reckoning must also come to this type of thinking.

We pass, in Chapter 3, from the idea of a turning point to that of a cyclical theory of civilization, and then on to a sequence of phases, or ‘transitions’. Here the reader should do a double take, “Not another cyclical theory!” In fact we can show one that works. Here Toynbee and Spengler enter with their views of the rise and fall of civilization. We can easily revise the confusions of these two, by showing how the historical dynamic is no organism of civilization, with its decline and fall. Instead, the civilization, like music to instrument, is a construct of ‘free action’, fretted within the ‘eonic sequence of phases’, as we will call it. Toynbee pinpoints the difficulty in his attempt, quite reasonable at first, to call ‘civilization’ the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’. This means that there is a ‘something’ called a ‘civilization’, that is an intelligible unit of dynamism, with its own laws of beginning and ending, or any process of analyzable structure. The problem here is that it is untrue that ‘civilization’ is such a fundamental unit. We take a different approach.

The answer is in front of us, in the form of our three turning points! If we move in for a closer look, we find in each case a period of time and a source area, in which a rapid advance occurs, and from which flows a high degree or rate of diffusing influences. We note that these come in phases of sequential and/or parallel zones. The period of the ‘classical phase’ gives us the complete picture. A three hundred year phase in separate, but synchronous, eruptions generate an entire new era and five new ‘fields of diffusion’ or oikoumenes, or ‘civilizations’. If we look backward, suspicious of this process, sure enough, we see that 2400 hundred years before, ca. –3300 to –3000, both Egypt and the field of Sumerian city-states move in parallel through an era of intense and rapid change, creating two great fields of diffusing influence. Our picture is still incomplete, but we have the solution.

One more distinction is needed to make sense of all of this, indeed it brings back the factor of continuity. This is the distinction is between ‘t-stream’ and ‘e-sequence’, the temporal stream, or streams, of culture, and the sequence of phases itself. If we look at the history of a tribe, culture, or civilization, it is a continuous stream, whether or not this really ‘evolves’, or simply transforms. We see that our eonic sequence cuts across these continuous streams in a cross section. The classic case is the Hellenic, where the ‘phase’ begins, or switches on, after –900, picks up speed, and creates the spectacular flowering of Classical Greece, after –600. By –400, the phase period is clearly coming to a close. This relationship of streams and successive phases is seen to be an ingenious solution to nature’s problem of dispersal, as the course of world history moves toward integration in a series of differing cultures, never the same. The final instance of this, then, would be the t-stream and phase cross section that we find behind the rise of the modern. Seen in this way the modern transformation falls into place.

Suddenly, then, as noted, we see that the modern world is triggering a new era of these previous types, and that, other things being equal, the modern ‘transition’ is a close relative to the Greek. We can almost go backward one more step, to an era that is to the Sumerians as the Greeks were to our time, ca. –5500 in Northern Iraq, then again one more time to the period of Jericho ca. –8000, but the data is inconclusive. But we notice that there is a clear pattern of what we call ‘eonic jump diffusion’ in a long sequence of 2400 year intervals. This jump diffusion means that each new area of advance acorns in the exterior of previous areas, often just to the outside of earlier core zones. These staggered layers of diffusion exhibit the strange ratchet effect of advancing civilization. We see not the evolution of civilizations but a sequence of related ‘hot spots’. Thus we see that it is not ‘civilization’ that is evolving, but a relation of tempo, phases, and the passage of information as diffusion.

In Chapter 4, we look in detail at the spectacular parallel emergence of the classical civilizations and religions in the time of the Isaiah, Solon, Buddha, and Confucius, a pattern inside a pattern. It is a phenomenon that, in the classical case, was noted from early in the nineteenth century, and may be familiar to some in the idea of the ‘Axial Age’ proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers whose interpretation we will critique, and replace with another. Jaspers was just on the verge of seeing our ‘eonic effect’ and became distracted by the issue of metaphysical Augustinian history. Jaspers was attempting to rescue the uniqueness of one line of emergence, even as he brilliantly exposed his thesis to the obvious fact that five lines were emerging in parallel. The problem is that the classical period makes no sense in isolation, and we cannot, further, play favorites with the clear ‘evolutionary’ experiment we see in the parallel emergence of different worlds.

The basic thesis is longwinded, but not hard. Simply look at the sequence of civilizations to judge their character, as random or not. Reach the end before ‘giving up in the middle’. The basic thesis (stated in the first paragraphs) should be clear in one reading, or less. The whole pattern is simply restated over and over, and is outlined in the Appendix, as a project of considerable study. Some might find this capsule outline more useful. It is important not to get bogged down. There is no law against grabbing a set of coffee table picture books, Neolithic through to the Bastille, and performing the historiographical equivalent of neural net software, the reader’s brain, closing on a pattern, Crunch 0, 1, 2,… Our first paragraph is crunch 0, chapter two, crunch 1, etc,…In the Appendix, we can start over with both a quick summary and a more comprehensive groundwork for a broader Crunch expedition. Once you see pattern in history, its study is immensely simplified, and helps one to wish for more data, not less.

Throughout our double negative will be enforced by a distinction of ‘historical process’ and ‘free action’. This might seem confusing. There’s nothing to it, and implies no esoteric metaphysics. The paradox is perhaps more apparent than real, for experience shows us the interaction, for example, of wave motion, boats, and their navigators, in hybrids of force and action. In general, one resolution of the difficulty lies in the cyclical alternation of determinism and freedom, in a variable determination of law and free action. And we are suddenly surprised to see this to be nature’s answer. Our account, as will become clear, will let the contradiction of determinism and freedom pass into a contextual distinction of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘relative free action’, as a descriptive measure leaving Freedom ambiguously in the middle. But the distinction, cycle and action, is essential, and it is not a metaphysical conundrum. A youth riding a wave on a surf board is the simplest, too simple, analogistic example of this distinction of historical ‘determination’ and ‘free action’. Another, is the relation of system and choice in the configuration of a computer system and its mouse. Even without sure answers, our eonic system calls us from the false koans of meta-physics to an infra-physics of ‘free’ action to realize freedom, however spasmodic, in relation to a macro-historical pattern that has a cyclical interpretation, to be rendered linear in a project of adamant advances.

We are confronted with a strange and difficult structure, that is a clear fragment, a blurred evolutionary snapshot, and which we will call the eonic sequence, or ‘e-sequence of the eonic shard’, like a snatch of music, or a surfer glancing at a few waves nearby. If we were lucky to get Beethoven’s Fifth, we have the whole thing in four beats, otherwise... It is the interior evidence that is convincing. Even a few minutes of symphony is enough to show its existence as a meaningful unit. In fact, the pattern is more remarkable than we think. Our first surprise is to see that such a phenomenon is visible at all, as the mechanics, or dynamic evolution, of the system of world history, even if the brevity of the sequence, and a host of theoretical difficulties, makes this an inconclusive enterprise. In the midst of a considerable simplification of our historical understanding we are left with a number of mysteries, not the least, how can a mechanical system induce the impulse of freedom or stage a recurrence of values in a strange sinusoidal drama of facts? The question may be ill-posed in the use of the term ‘mechanical system’, but in the end the contradiction is perhaps one of our own thinking.

Our argument of progressive cyclicity might seem to be a confusion of two views of time, the one circular, the other unilinear, and threaten to suggest old disputes over the cycles of ages, and that allergy to progressive notions its champions are at such pains to combat. It is hard to know anymore what anyone means by this distinction, but the eonic pattern puts the issue in its right context, and by another change of terminology makes a fast getaway from this issue. The difficulty over historical cycles, and linear time, is illusory, and mostly one of semantics. But it is important to see the ‘cyclical’ challenge of modernism to the ‘linear Augustinian’ persistence of tradition, as an insight into the challenges of the future.

The existence of a process of such hypercomplexity, whose expression shows a detailed eonic rhythm, prompts us urgently to move beyond archaic notions of divinity to which they were long braided to an understanding of cosmological processes whose energies show integration on a scale that makes our knowledge seem at the stage of the discovery of the lodestone. Consideration of the ‘forces’ engaging phenomena perceived as ‘macrohistorical’ is said to violate the project of bootstrap ‘materialism’, that wishes to allow only random constructions in the frontiers of reductionist shortfall. We are given the basic forces of physics, and a strong indication we shall find no more. Yet we clearly see evidence that reveals large-scale dynamism beyond the scale of known action, in the transformations of consciousness, and the periodization of value-fact intersections, and evolution of songbirds, and their songs. Our approach is purely ‘phenomenological’ and closes without mention of Gaian themes. For Hamlet, the rest is silence.

Our position resembles that of ancient mariners attempting to grasp why a needle point is attracted in a northerly direction. At least the phenomenon is useful, and upon reflection, not an act of god. And finally it is discovered, perhaps, to be evidence of one of the forces of nature. Unfortunately, such are the phenomena of physics, and we have little evidence in our current knowledge of any forces beyond the fundamental ones given in, for example, the Standard Model of current physics, and good indications that none will be found, unless they pass through the slow constructions of Thermodynamic constructions against the rule of disorder. We are condemned to no theories at all in the No Idea of ghost forces, against which the great Newton struggled to a great victory. It is therefore absolutely essential to proceed with ‘causal parsimony’ in relation to explanation, and merely indicate ‘small theory’ near the contours of evolutionary fact. It is not yet possible to explain phenomena beyond the threshold of a certain level of complexity in a manner that is scientifically relevant. Attempts to defy this fact always produce a limited series of concepts, always suspicious similar, vitalist, crypto-metaphysical or religious.

The sudden perception that world history reveals the effects of a mysterious rhythm or driver operating in a long term multi-millennial frequency linked by transient periods of developmental acceleration is strange, but once perceived, however, causes many of the confusions of historical understanding to fall into place, simply disappear, and accounts for many facts of our view of past, that we take for granted, or wish to forget, but are actually somewhat mysterious. Why is so much historical advance compressed into isolated areas and periods? Why is the advance of civilization intermittent? Why do the great religions suddenly consolidate around or after –600? Why is the history of ‘small scale’ entities, the case of Israel preeminent, so often more enduring than the sterile record of Universal Empire? Why is the period around –600 so fertile in advances of all kinds simply as a function of time? Why do China, India, and the Occident undergo distinct medieval sluggishness, if not collapse, midway between –600 and 1500? Why does civilization proceed outward like a brushfire always restarting at its fringes? Why does the classical period show synchronous multitasking parallelism? How account for the sudden rise of the West after 1500? Why do many of the most difficult art forms show eonic correlation? Why is democracy correlated with the pattern? Why did we invent the term modern? Why is there a polarization of Left and Right?

The interior evidence of this system adds up to brimming, but finally leaves us confounded. But the number of paradoxes the eonic map clarifies, without fully explaining, is so great that we know we are on the right track, notwithstanding the brevity of our eonic sequence, the ‘eonic shard’. We can see best what is happening during the classical period of Greece, the emergence of ‘monotheism’ and a resolution of the ‘Old Testament’ paradoxes, why Pericles degenerates into Caesar and Augustus, the long ‘mideonic’ (our substitute for medieval) reactions in relation to the emergence, for example, of Hinduism, the problem with the Christian Calendar, the rarity of democracy, trends toward equalization in the predominance of hierarchical systems, the limitations of macroeconomic explanation, the emergence of tragic drama, the rare brevity of great arts and literatures, the relations of statism and ‘integrator islams’. The problem is that we end up with a complete ‘naturalistic explanation’ that still leaves ‘nature’ to be explained. What is going on? We are in search of an extension of phenomenological ‘laws’ in a category of evolution in the wild frontier beyond reductionist shortfall. There is no harm whatever in such a search, as long as we do not turn hypotheses into new myths. There are no substitute religious explanations, the more so as we see that the idea of the ‘supernatural’ (in a historical sense) is simply primitive eonic mythology! The Hebrew Prophets were getting suspicious!

Historical theories of cycles have an antique lineage of much nonsense. And they are the object of much scorn from the champions of progress. And yet the contradiction is the real problem. There should be no contradiction. The charge of dismal cycles is never laid against the students of the economic cycle, although it is said to be a dismal science, and should not be laid against what is said here. We can consider a cyclicity that is progressive, if we can explain how we will act in relation to its momentum. In fact the confusion is in the separation of the two notions, as if the locomotive’s thermodynamic cycle of work should gainsay the progression along a straight track. The espousal of the ‘linear view of time’ is often an argument for persisting in the wrong direction, and is in any case as practical as seafaring by the ‘straight’ with no instruments. The facts of history permit us this cyclical approach, but remain for that reason data in an empirical series, preempting general conclusions about theoretical time. We arrive at the end right back at a renewed version of ‘linear time’ in relation to the cyclical. We will come to define the isolated fragment of what historical data shows us as the progression of human eonic evolution: civilization, the e-sequence of the eonic shard.

Notes

Kant’s Challenge

Although we might be wary of all purely metaphysical approaches to the study of history, the pattern of what we will find from the periodization of civilizations must almost by definition pertain directly to the ideas of so-called Universal History. But why should we beware? The critiques of Karl Lowith in Meaning in History, or Frank Manuel in Shapes of Philosophic History, do not see the basic issue. This idea is, in any case, equally a modern one beside the positivist stream, becoming visible as early as the sixteenth century in writers such as Jean Bodin (the timing of the whole nexus is significant) and finds its classic realization in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his essay Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View :

 

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment. [xxii]

 

This hope is confirmed by the pattern we can exhibit, but the terms of this Kantian discussion are likely to confuse our argument if we accept the idealist scaffolding that history has created here. We can simply take this one passage as is. It is interesting that Kant refused his own challenge. And it is interesting that he considered the mechanism sought must answer to what he called man’s ‘asocial sociability’, then again Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, in the forms of motives most unruly pressed into service as villainy for a sacrifice on the altar of the future. He must have sensed, as one so immersed in ethical issues, this contradicted the whole trend of his thought. But looking at history from a new angle, we can suggest that this is what prevents history from realization, not its true driver. The ethics of action prevents all correct generalization, by the apparent universality of dismal motives taken in evidence as noble savagery. The question has forever confused the issue. But we can discover the ingenious resolution of the paradox in the perception of historical potentiality. Even Kant is still hostage to the paradox of evolution by ethical indirection. The basic point is, how can gangster history evolve toward anything? Every politician, economist, and evolutionist is pressed to justify the higher wisdom of skullduggery. One answer in the end is that it can’t, because it is not really evolving at all. History has never really started, because it is still evolving through recurrent potential toward the realization of freedom.

The reason for indirection here is the implicit linear teleological formulation of the question, which will remain in a limbo if we give it an answer without an ending. We were about our different business, and stumble on the solution to his challenge, with an answer to a different question. As to teleology, it is probably Kant who is right here, but we are asking a different more limited question, about directionality, short of teleology. Ambition here will soon reach all three of our quagmires, Q1, 2, and 3. With this caveat, we should accept our own version of Kant’s challenge. Our study is of a phenomenon we will call the eonic effect, a temporal subset, due to the nature of the evidence, or lack of it, of any pattern of universal history. But this subset shows the emergence of Universal Histories as evolutionary determinations in self-referential correlation to their own pattern. Who is analyzing whom? We might like Odysseus make it our first priority to reach Ithaca. If we succumb to the siren call of teleology we may wash ashore in lands far from home. Yet, by the same token, if we refuse the challenge of historical understanding, we might betray a night’s watch at the tiller to drift on high seas.

We can say that the eonic pattern satisfies, to a fuzzy first approximation of historical Dr. Magoo, the Universal Historian, a different but related question to that which Kant posed, as we see in broadest scope that the solution is the cyclical driver of an evolutionary emergentism, whose ‘politics’ is the late descendant of the evolutionary social or herd structures the population geneticist of Neo-Darwinian uses to account for the species beyond the organism. Note Kant’s wording. It is very similar to our distinction of historical determination and free action, before, during, or after the posing of the ‘freedom when?’ question. Our answer is to find that political emergence, in relation to free action, shows ‘eonic determination’, cyclical phasing, in three stages, of which the last is the all-too-obvious tension in the emergence of Freedom.

The pattern of the eonic effect is not a philosophic solution to a problem, but an archaeological finding, partial in the sense that a shard of some lost whole is discovered empirically. We are in no position to debunk idealism with our own ‘sloppy materialism’, that targets our three turning points in the manner of neural net software, crunch, crunch, crunch, in the wild gyrations of its first approximations. On the grounds that our subject is the eonic effect, the empirical study of emergent civilization, we must disavow a connection then with the project of Universal History as still ‘evolution no. X’, even as it goes into our evidence locker as eonic data, since failure to comply will tempt one to include a teleological completion, even if we know that our pattern for all intents and purposes answers the quest initiated by Kant. Again, whether our pattern truly answers to Kant, is not the issue, for we must be on our own way, free of the idealist cast of his ideas, yet cognizant of the subtle wording of his remarkable formulation, itself correlated with the pattern, that we should attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, to discern a regular movement in it.

Universal History as Eonic Evolution

Although we should be cautious in moving from ideas of Universal History to those of evolution, the unmistakable appearance, in the broadest sense, of self-organizing processes in relation to our turning points asks a new term ‘evolution X’ drawn from the pool of meanings to render its account. Our sequence suggests a frequency interpretation in an outline that gives us a perspective of an architecture of eonic periods or cycles, as intervals of historic time, that illuminate the ‘eonic context’ in which we find ourselves, and show a process of evolution on a surprising scale, one that seems periodic. These intervals are fretted by a series of transitions, such as that beginning in Archaic Greece whose creative character establishes the foundations for an entire era. These transitions highlight the fact that the development of civilization shows a very spotty series of eras of cultural acceleration in a strange pattern. This fact has frequently been noticed, but never been accounted for. One might, incidentally, take our account as ‘punctuated equilibrium’ done right, if this did not summon up a term already defined differently for organismic evolution. We will not use this term, except to point out that such punctuated equilibria are really invoking directional evolution and, in any case, only describe data without explaining it. Our cyclical interpretation is quite minimal and is really a question applied to our three turning points, why the suggestive pattern of frequency?

We can hardly answer such a question, apart from the indirect suspicion a system of evolutionary process needs precisely this, a ‘something’ in the realm of force, impetus, even feedback, to defeat the one obstacle the puzzled Darwinist finds so efficacious, the purely random. Look closely at history. Initiatives relative to millennia are always short-term and rarely if ever achieve long term goals, and stabilize, deviate, or transform. And yet we can easily discover history is going somewhere over the long term. We see that history ‘returns’ on its freedom theme in two separate geographical and temporal regions. This is where our foreshortening comes in. We see the compression expected from our original consideration that purely random advance is improbable, ‘takes too long’, and would likely show, by whatever means, acceleration. What is remarkable is that we see the way in which the domains of facts and values intersect precisely in relation to our periodic interpretation of civilization. It does not follow that this is teleological. Our argument restricts discussion to ‘relative changes of direction’, many of them contradictory. The result shows a suspicious resemblance to mechanical recursion or iteration. We are then forced to consider two ‘evolutions’ as it were, an intermittent impetus, and the temporal or ongoing constructions in sequence.

We can motivate (with an argument placed on the sidelines, our treatment is phenomenological description) the strangeness of our argument about the eonic pattern by simple reasoning in a generalized evolution. Thus, if we consider the evolution of the eye, or the elephant’s trunk, we must consider its evolution random or not random, then intermittent. If not random, then the eye’s emergence must show direction, and either appear fully made in one continuous stroke, or else evolve in a broken sequence that must then distinguish a system or ‘evolver’ and ‘evolving units’, and most likely show ‘system return’, as a system with memory, and, quite apart from anything else, solve the problem of drifting populations. What does the term ‘evolution’ mean here? How do we distinguish the ‘system evolving’ from the ‘population evolving’? What happens if the herd moves? Unless nature can read barcodes, evolution of anything would seem to require full control of speciating event space, in toto over tens of millennia, and this is probably impossible even for divinity. The computation required on such a scale would appear tremendous, intractable. We must suspect geographical focalization, whatever that means, to defeat this complication. These together suggest,

 

1. frequency,

2.        patchy geo-focal zones of evolution that simply,

3.        start, stop in sequential or disconnected yet parallel geographical locations,

Optionally but most likely, some sort of ratchet progression, if not progress, connected to this frequency that can build on previous system returns. Progression might seek parallel and/or sequential stages. Pure guesswork, but the evolution of the eye would seem to need to keep an eye on itself. 

And this is a stripped down Model T, no extras. It says nothing plus or minus about plan, agent, goal, or even the ‘how’. The eye and the elephant’s trunk are not our subject and are only placeholders for an abstract ‘evolution’. Our subject is ‘free action’, at first too abstract for an evolution. But it flows continuously from the issues of ‘locomotion’ and the organismic motions thereto. Design or no design, Man in the moon or glorified genetic algorithm (which this resembles), our argument combines geo-focalized periodization, a stepping stone sequence, as we will see. It is almost beyond imagination to conceive ‘how’, unless we saw an example.

But we must consider the relation of the observer to such a phenomenon. Should we assume he is outside this process, later, looking backward? If so then we should be concerned by the cutoff point. After this cutoff point, he looks back, free of its mechanism, to observe it, otherwise,… In any case, this means, for an immersed observer, that large scale events on the level of populations will simply start changing in parallel and separated zones, for no clear antecedent cause. Change simply happens, for no clear antecedent cause. Indeed, our pattern shows us just this, a solution to this type of difficulty, keeping in mind the world of possible difference between organismic evolution, and the evolution of ‘free action’ as the cultural evolution of civilization. This ‘free action’ however is not essentially distinct, in a continuum of ‘locomotive evolution’, the emergence of the means to ‘locomote’, arms and legs—and eyes… Through this minefield of possible fallacies we must proceed blind. One problem we have is the nature of this ‘free action’ and its relation to the cutoff point. Isn’t free action itself evolving? Is ‘free’ action free after the cutoff point? Etc,… We might be forced to conclude evolutionary theories are an absurd pastime.

The relevance of this to the evolution of the eye, if not the elephant’s trunk, is dubious, arbitrary, unknown, or an incorrect application of our own idea as if it were an evolution No. N also true at all times. But we do see this process in world history! We see the tick, tick, tick in our frequency ratchet moving in parallel and sequence. If we look at the sequence of civilizations, beginning with Egypt and Sumer in their early periods just before –3000, followed by the classical phase of parallel civilizations, we suddenly see that there is an overall system at work. The sudden acceleration of the classical phase between –900 and –600+ in five parallel areas gives us the first hint and strong suggestions of a frequency phasing, in fact, system return on the first stage of civilization. This is a slingshot. We hear a huge Gong effect, a great Tick. Curious, we move backwards, and we see the resemblance suddenly of the early Sumerian and Egyptian early Dynastic. These are not true beginnings, however. All we see is the same rapid reach of a new plateau, that we misleadingly call the ‘rise of civilization’. What is going on?

This is none other than the earlier Tick. Note that it is regionalized, yet double (with possible interaction), and relatively brief. We have picked up the sequence in the middle (relative to the Neolithic). We realize that it is not the civilizations that are fundamental, but the tick, tick. Two ticks is desperate for an inductive sequence, although even with this much we can virtually reconstruct the whole, even if the result is uncertain. Move backwards, and forwards. Mirabile dictu, 2400 years after the ‘tick two’ we see the modern takeoff, but very displaced. A similar period before –3000 lands us back in unknown waters, so this is a dead end (not really, but the evidence is insufficient). At least, however, we can see that the rise of civilization is really an intensification building on the Neolithic already established in the Fertile Crescent. We can adopt the same now obvious strategy as this system, clock relative beginnings inside the field of ratcheting. We are left in a preposterous situation. We have our law of history, in fact, nothing of the kind, an emergentist waving process operating on a stupendous scale, of which we see only a fragmentary snapshot, but which encompasses the whole of civilization.

We end in a strange position, we could hardly construct a consistent theory of this evolution. And yet looking backward, we see that one must exist. We need to construct a terminology of concepts to properly describe the phenomenon suspected. The really hard part is the clear indication of ‘large scale event regions’ with a fuzzy stop-go, fuzzy focalization, and yet clear interior self-organization. We need to consider the difference between our ‘system’ and the population dynamic. This will evolve into this distinction of ‘e-sequence’ and ‘t-stream’, along with ‘eonic jump diffusion’. And most of all we need to distinguish ‘system (or eonic) determination’ and ‘free action’. People are free to wander about, do as they please. Why should they bother with a law of civilization? Look carefully, our system, to a long view, defeats this objection (as long as you are not aware of it). This is simply the ‘ratchet’ process. It is resolved as ‘plateaus of complexity’ and diffusion. Our system doesn’t evolve everything, but only stages a height around which a field of diffusion takes place. We only need to account for the ‘mainline sequence’. The rest is a spreading field of civilizations. We see that the contingent, what a man does at any given moment, is random, more or less, in the sense of not controlling the long future short of living longer than he can live, or getting into conflicts with someone with a similar desire. Our system derandomizes this confusion, or at least tries to, in its long return against free action.

We are quite a ways from the evolution of organism. For we are in a realm where the issue is the nature of civilization as this arises, and the nature of the individuals inside them. It is easy, as pure logic, to show the connection in both cases between systems and selves, organisms and population dynamics. But whether this is truly appropriate is simply an open question. We take the term to our own meaning. Our evolution, to be qualified as the eonic evolution of civilization, shows however a clear macro-temporal return, and has been pointed to without even mentioning genetics. We are inside this process, and hard put to say what it is and how it works. And it leaves us with a conundrum. What is our position in this system? We can see that the issue, at least, expresses itself as the evolution of free action. And that is precisely what our system shows, in the emergence of relations of politics, religion and ethical dolmenization, and dialectics of Freedom. Our system is a mystery, and we are always just to the fore of its last interrupt, generating its emergentism as the issues and activities of free men.

Our relation to its future is unknown, but we see that we are likely to be exiting from its slingshot action. It should be dissolving as we observe it. This might explain why our theories turn inconsistent. We wish to reduce a system to its dynamics, but this doesn’t work because its dynamic is both hardware and software evolution. We see the resolution of history to a tremendous process of mechanization, but there is a catch to the explanation. It might show mechanics, but it must also show the unrealized potential carried from past to future unrealized! Thus free action generates philosophies of will, but these are still potential, in a system that is anticipating its future, while still mechanical. Reductionism, on the verge of triumph, stumbles and is seen as an inverted emergentist variant of this future potential. This is a mystery, but we can see that evolution is turning into history, determination into free action, and are likely to find this to be another reason why our theories are never true at all times, as the recurrent motions of this cycling evolutionary progression return on the ‘freedom when?’ question.

Finally, having summoned up the views of the philosopher Kant, we might note the strange resemblance of our thinking to his famous antinomies, the world is finite…the world is infinite, it has a beginning in time…it has no beginning in time, everything happens in accordance with causal necessity…there is freedom at the beginning of the causal chain of necessity.23 The last two, especially, enter into our cutoff and frequency clues, for we see relative beginnings, and a relation of, not one, but two ‘evolutions’, two braided ‘causal’ chains. As to the first, we can see (perhaps) that ‘evolution’ is ‘cosmological space’ and that a new ‘causal chain’ must be associated with life itself, and that we are far, far away from faraway, deep inside a finite ‘evolutionary space’, many ticks later in the finite ‘global infinite space’ of a species on the surface of a planet. One of the strangest facts of our pattern is the appearance of Kant himself with his antinomies at the ‘slingshot maximum’ of the third fast interrupt.