But it is important to consider the ambiguity at the heart of evolutionary theory itself, where this pursues the timeless ‘laws of nature’ onto nature’s stage of life where time is of the essence, and the timely arrival of an abundance of creatures finds no reckoning in the orbits of mass and force. As if by a new law, the era of life finds refuge in a global moment, hideaway to beasts of a small planet, making engines of machines to consume mass and force. At last we find man whose claim is to cut history from evolution, graduate from all laws into a domain of freedom, as a law unto himself, in the dolmenization of small kingdoms and the self-realization of his individuality. In this ambiguity of chance and necessity we might search for the deeper meaning behind our use of the term ‘evolution’.

In parallel with the nineteenth century emergence of evolutionary research, the rise of archaeology has wrought a similar transformation of man’s record of his past. This chronicle has often seemed a disparate sequence of cultures and civilizations without overall meaning or coherence. And the enigma of this history has always been the misplaced origin, in classical times, of so much that we see as the content of man’s higher culture. This middle clustering of several civilizations in parallel is an entire mystery in itself, and it is no accident the heritage of the western field preserves its riddle in the haunting echoes of the Hebraic epic. One of the consequences of the archaeological revolution has been to suggest why this intermediate phasing is the case, for we had missed a similar generative period in the earlier interval. It is a phenomenon in sequence.

Now Gilgamesh speaks to us from the land of Ur and the chieftains of Upper and Lower Egypt are seen before their crowns are made one as the first Pharaohs. An age in itself has come and gone, glimpsed at its passing by the Prophets of Israel, witnesses to the vanishing Assyrians. A significant piece of a greater puzzle is joined to the form of perceived history, and the indirect signs of macrohistorical context suddenly show their presence. The elegant, yet fearsome, evolutionary unfolding of higher civilization in a cycling cone of ratchet progression all at once comes into view. As this veil is drawn, we get a glimpse, only that, of ‘evolution in action’, as if seen for the first time. Unexpectedly, and most remarkably, as the drama of modernism passes beyond itself in a postmodernist age, to become a unit of transformation, we are posed with a new riddle. For we can now look backward at its explosive early modern beginning, with hints that it might show us the full spectacle of historical dynamism, now seen close at hand, the ordinary and extraordinary fused, and rendered transparent by the subtraction of the miraculous.

At a time when theories of evolution are undergoing renewed controversy in the din of scientific and religious dialectic, and of the appearance of any number of books critical of Darwinism, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about something that has never been observed. In the face of much criticism from religious Creationists, adherents of Darwinism often defend textbook versions of the theory that have, in any case, often been held in question. The assumption that evolution occurs, and must occur, at random is the crux of the dispute, and one unreasonably confused with issues of religion and secularization. The rise of molecular biology shows a complexity of structure that cannot easily survive statistical challenges to claims of random emergence.

Now much secular thought from historiography to politics and sociology is caught off guard to find itself on theoretical quicksand, and is harried between teleology, or the argument by design, and misapplied models of physical reductionism, waving the wand of the differential equation, as the talisman of universal explanation. Issues of philosophic history, the ideological tangle of nineteenth century evolutionism, and the struggle for scientific objectivity as value neutrality, move to becloud even further all hopes of resolving the ambiguity of evolutionary theories. The crux of the difficulty lies in the confusion over conceptions of physical, natural, or biological law, in the search for universally valid generalizations.

This study of the so-called Eonic Effect, the hint of frequency in the emergence of civilization, can usefully break the deadlock by looking at world history in the light of ‘evolution’, taken in our extended sense, as the term goes into free fall. The means to do this is very simple, look where the previous paradigm looks the other way, for the evidence of discontinuity, acceleration, or evidence of any kind of the ‘fast against slow’ generating interruption of flat history. We find it at once, and world history fretted in a series of evolutionary event regions. It is easy to demonstrate that history shows discontinuity with respect to certain eras of generation. Creating our own theory of this is not so simple, but we can ‘freeze frame’ theory-formation itself, and create a nearly wholesale ‘theory construction’ domain of discourse, from which we can proceed incrementally toward renewed enquiry on a sounder footing. These theories are then ambiguous, yet our tactic can embrace them all. Of these our so-called frequency hypothesis moves to the fore as a novel hybrid of Universal History, and the perspective of recent ideas of ‘complex systems’. This view of cyclical directionality, or eonic progression, is a partial fence-sitter between the teleological and the random, that strangely unifies the structure of historical data. Beyond the issue of theories, we can point to the interior significance and quite unexpected logic clearly animating our eonic pattern.

The term ‘random’ is very ambiguous, but seems to imply the absence of any long-range structure, or else the pure successiveness of emergence. In some sense, Darwinism was always right to embrace the random, as the forms of life ceased to correspond to the full determinism of physics. But a silent note of occasional speculation, asking for a ‘law of life’, usually foundering in vitalist confusions, has always sounded in the ambitions of extended physics. Beyond that, the escape from the metaphysical has been caught in fast passage by the wish to abscond thence with the idea of freedom, which is an orphan in complex systems descended from physical reductionism. In our eonic history, the term ‘random’ tends to indicate the deviation of local action in relation to the whole, i.e. in relation to long term directionality. Since this definition is our own ‘free activity’ and might deviate from this ‘directionality’ itself, our disposition is highly uncertain, but we can look at the simple contrast of two processes, with respect to the past, the issues of the future remaining open.

We can at least take as our prime objective to show that this claim of randomness is not true of human history, that there exists a long-range ‘pattern of universal history’ as a non-random emergentist system transcending the stratagems and potential of human free activity, which is itself a considerable ‘derandomizer’, but one, we can argue, that is insufficient to account for the rise of civilization. This pattern must answer both to the emergent derandomizing of ‘real evolution’ yet at the same time avoid the trap of universal generalization taken as surrogate universal law. Our pattern indeed suggests just this. This generates both the consideration of complex systems, and the displaced ideas of freedom, seen in primal genesis as organismic locomotion.

 

This work will attempt to

1.   uncover the extraordinary evidence of ‘evolution in action’ in world history, the eonic effect, seen in the basic sequence of civilizations. We can see for the first time the evidence of historical directionality, and this must cause us to revise our views of evolution. This is a pattern of evidence, about which we can construct a ‘frequency hypothesis’. We catch a glimpse of the real complexities of emergent processes both in sequence and parallel.     

2.   look at some of the difficulties in the Darwin paradigm, and the contradictions in its basic reasoning.   We can accept the context of evolution, but move to consider various perspectives on its deeper meaning.  Not only can we accept the context of evolution, we can adapt themes of Universal History to its rubric, if we are careful to have an exit strategy. The possibilities of naturalistic explanation are not exhausted by current theories. We can take the visible intermittency of both the fossil record and human history as a basis of consideration.

3.   examine the bridge between ideas of history and evolution in the context of older ideas of philosophic history and newer ones of complex systems, taking up the classic ‘Kant’s Challenge’, to find the pattern of Universal History. We must consider the place of the observer in this evolution, resolved in a potential cutoff relative to the ‘most recent evolutionary action’. In the process, issues of Biblical Criticism and the history, or evolution, of religion enter naturally into discussion and are seen in a revealing new light. The Zoroastrian thematic is uncovered as an archetype of cycle and convergence which an evolutionist sequence of pure endless cycles must take under consideration. Study of the eonic effect is especially illuminating in the context of debates over evolution as these impinge on both science and religion. The Old Testament falls into place as an eonic observer’s testimony to eonic transition. Not evolution, but the contrast of evolutions 1, 2, 3…becomes our subject. We can consider that it is ‘free action’ that is evolving, and find eonic evolution in the transition between ‘evolution’ and ‘history’ as the emergent character of freedom in relation to free action and the structures of population that accompany the rise of civilization.

4.   construct a theory of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’ based on a study of historical turning points, using a new terminology based on a novel ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’. This can impinge briefly on cyclical theories of civilization such as those of Spengler and Toynbee. Beside these we find the string of observations of historical parallelism, as seen in the work of such as Karl Jaspers and others dating back to the nineteenth century. We can construct a new fundamental unit based on the idea of ‘eonic transition’ in relation to an eonic sequence, encompassing ‘parallel interactive emergence’. We must distinguish the ‘tribal stream’ and its intersection with this sequence, the ‘t-stream and e-sequence’. Here much light is thrown on the emergence of art. We can examine ‘eonic jump diffusion’, the clear way in which historical action resumes at the fringes of a previous advance. This gives us, not just the random accumulation of advances, but the polka-dot evolution of adjacent regions moving as jump diffusion to embrace the whole in a fretting of local regions. The keynote is diffusion from achieved sources of complexity, and the effect of ‘sequential dependency’ leading to medievalism that we find so concentrated in our pattern.

5.   challenge the various economic interpretations of history, and the difficulties of value-free historical ‘laws’, along with the relationship of ideology to claims of science in the proposals of historical generalization. In addition, we can extricate historical periodization from the chronology of Metal Ages by showing that the ‘eonic sequence’ is independent from the ‘econosequence’ and ‘technosequence’. The ambiguous status of the New World civilizations must also come under examination.

6.   conduct and elaborate an enquiry, as suggested in point 3, into the interplay of determinism and free activity visible in our ‘eonic pattern’ using a distinction of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’ as a dynamic alternation throwing light on the idea of freedom. This distinction is required or embedded in Kant’s challenge, whose question asks for the relation of historical force, and the idea of freedom, something different from currently known dynamics of mechanical entities. We will see that any theory of evolution is conditioned by the well-known paradoxes of cosmological source initiative, self-consciousness and the nature of ‘soul’, and the temporal equivocations of free will, cousins of the antinomies pointed to by Kant. Any theory of evolution must wait on these, indeed, the equivocations of freedom must converge to close on a theory of evolution. We must pass through the crossfire of ideological modernism near issues of revolutionary transformation and economism to find theory in a proper relationship to present free action. All this would be quite hard to accomplish, yet we see that nature gives us an example, if we can understand it.

 

The work presented straddles the bare sketch and the encyclopedia and is basically empirical, with a pocket size theory of its own, a frequency hypothesis. In strict terms, this is not a (predictive) theory at all, but an empirical map. Some may be sceptical or tired of theories, and the viewpoint of Universal History isn’t the current fashion, but it is useful as a foundation, and in any case an evolutionary theory matched to it is more productive to focus on one as a means to understanding. It is also possible to dispense with theory on the grounds that ‘current action’ is richer than any model, and take the pattern of history, the eonic effect, as a grainy picture of the strange terrain of man’s recorded history. It is something you ‘already’ know, but… Thus, you can also bail out from this different approach around the Table of Contents method outlined in the background. We make explicit the relation of theory as an evolutionary product itself influencing action, possibly in the wrong direction. We can whisk theory away into a guarded domain to prevent this collision of theory and spontaneous activity.

A basic point is made that evolution applied to history cannot deduce its principles from prior evolution,  although we might gladly accept its insights into man as a natural creature, and must attempt to chase the truly vast subject matter first, something not easily achieved, leaving the question, what are we producing a theory about? Everything since the Neolithic in all possible aspects! Beware of simplifiers.   Absolutely no quantitative model (including our own, not quantitative, except as periodization) in any form known can even begin to reduce such a phenomenon to a closed model. Therefore, all claims for a ‘science of man’ (to say nothing of religious historicism) are likely to conceal truncating limitations or an agenda somewhere. A good example is the failure to consider the issues of ‘consciousness’ as seen in history. They simply disappear from the Darwinian account. We need a broader approach. And we can produce our own rough model of world history.  Our account is both very simple and very difficult, and finds a mysterious simplicity in the midst of complexity. This complexity rises in each pass on our pattern, and then simply goes ‘off the meter’ into the infinite echoes of history as it is. But the eonic effect gives us a slight edge, perhaps because it is in the form itself of a tangential approximator. The account reveals two books in one, a short inside a long. If the treatment seems overwhelming, in fact, the reader can quite quickly see the point. Results are proportional to effort. There are no one-line summaries or one-line dismissals of this pattern. Since many will conclude what they please from assertions about directionality, the presentation is in part for the author’s protection. Use at your own risk if you are determined to use the material in a way not indicated by the presentation. The overall result is both exciting and useful.

 

The approach indicated might be found useful as a means of bailing out into the recognizable terrain of world history and the evolution of culture, from the hopeless muddle of evolutionary theories now current, which bask in a borrowed limelight as seeming science near the technological wonders that put man on the moon. One should wonder if the current hold of Darwinism on secular thought is that of a theory or a regime, and remain puzzled at the tenacity of the derelicts of nineteenth century positivism in the traffic of social theories. The debate over evolution, starting in the nineteenth century, is a confusing one, and the usual account is misleading. Darwin’s theory, so well promoted and championed by Huxley and others, carried the day, but did not really win the argument on theory, and has always been the object of repeated criticisms by secular critics. Many of the greatest scientists have expressed reservations here. The basic fact of evolution was so striking and fruitful as a broadening of man’s perspective on himself that the difficulties of theory seemed secondary. But these issues have never been successfully resolved. In fact, we can start with the difficulties both Darwin and Huxley had with their own views. 

Debates over evolution are endless, mostly unproductive, and fudge important issues. Defenders of Darwinism repeatedly confuse the broad context of evolutionary data in the fossil record with statements of the mechanism of this process. But to affirm that we see or infer evolution is not sufficient grounds to infer that this occurred by natural selection. The first, in a challenge from the Creationist, would seem a safe inference, while the second is quite otherwise, for it must pass a far more stringent test and examination. The issues of selectionism have always suffered under the suspicion of violating a basic philosophic test. We should be wary of any statement of mechanism that claims to solve the issues of metaphysics in the contrast of facts and values, the more so if the ‘decisive’ evidence is found to be an inference about unsampled data in deep evolutionary time. Part of the problem is that any mechanism of evolution more complex than natural selection or showing any evidence of directionality is taken as evidence of the supernatural, a false presupposition. The only thing approaching this kind of sampling is history itself, and the eonic effect shows a beguiling resemblance itself to just this sampling.

To be done with this issue, it is not true, false, that contemporary evolutionary science has demonstrated conclusively the mechanism of evolution, as speciation, to be random natural selection (and variation, etc,…). Nor should we simply infer its likelihood, and proceed. For it is unlikely, and reveals both serious flaws, and unintended consequences we should think false, as in the descent of man. Nor should we conclude ‘it’s part of the answer, maybe there is something else too’. Those who make claims for natural selection may always, on equally scientific grounds, be confronted with demands for hard proof, in the form of close sampling over tens of millennia at the level of generations for a speciating episode in the later stages of evolution, obviously impossible. There is no such proof. It is here that the second fatal weakness of evolutionary theory appears in the consideration, not just of natural selection, but of populations. The time-flow of evolving populations, seldom considered in an exercise of visualization, constitutes a complexity that current theory takes for granted with severe oversimplifications dressed up in mathematical models a layman might find impressive. These are controversial questions, but, at least, no theorist of human society is under any obligation to take Darwinian theory as established. Far better to keep several irons in the fire in the enquiry into general evolution. Aggressive efforts to rewrite the entire account of man in Darwinian terms based on challenged assumptions is exercise in long term reversal under protest of the whole project of social science. Nor is the issue exclusively one of purely naturalistic versus transcendental explanation. The current debates over ‘design’ (such as T. Behe’s remarkable recent The Black Box, not considered in time) are most provocative, and worthy of consideration, their agendas apart, but are confounded, perhaps, by an intermediate condition of ‘design’ in history, so evident in the eonic effect, indeed in ‘sacred history’ itself. This issue is of critical importance in assessing the descent of man and confronting any implication that Malthusian struggle or organismic survivalism is the direct generator of the complexity of the human brain. Our approach tends toward the ‘secular’, an unfortunate term, but makes no reductionist assumptions about the subtleties of religion. It also bypasses the characteristic Western obsession with ‘theism versus atheism’ which tends to break all theories in the onslaught of quibbles. The only safe approach to the descent of man is to assume nothing, and adopt a tactic of relative transformation, as of the close sampling created by the invention of writing.

 Beyond that, the issues of Darwinism are not directly involved with our study, and should not constitute a barrier to our consideration. We can step on the tail of the Darwin dragon and make a fast getaway into the study of the transition between evolution and history, made the explicit object of theory. In fact, Darwinism is not really our subject at all, unless it claims precisely that universal generalization wished for as universal law (masquerading as random emergence), and is applied at all times. Indeed, we could simply forget the check list of debating points that keeps selectionism tabled, and forget that Darwin ever existed. But a look at the eonic effect might bring home the true difficulties of evolutionary theories and induce something more realistic than what is currently offered. In any case, natural selection is inappropriate in the study of civilization whose emphasis is on the unity and oneness of man. It is important to be clear at the beginning that if the mechanism claimed by Darwinists for natural evolution is not established, then its derivatives, such as claims about historical directionality, also collapse at once. 

The debate over evolution has a cousin in that over Universal History, where the search for historical generalization as a law of history is confounded by the particularity of each age and period, and finally the transition itself from ‘evolution’ into ‘history’, and the historical conditioning of the very instruments of philosophy required for the task. This heritage of philosophy has often suffered confusions of its own, especially as to teleology, the metaphysical, and the relation to physical law, and has been generally stranded by the onset of positivism. And yet an obstinate ‘grand narrative’ remains unaccounted for in the plainest perception of our record of civilization. The findings of archaeology are beginning to both confirm and extend this curious patterning, and this is an interesting subject in its own right.

We can be critical of Darwinism, but we can accept its foundations as ‘evolution raw’. Our dialectical attitude veils its own desire to get the evolutionary ‘foot in the door’ in a different fashion, without the preposterous claims to be invading the social sciences we hear in certain quarters. And yet we could examine this very ambition in a new light, with the same ambition in reverse, rewrite evolution in our fashion, to see why it fails. We should chase the universal generalization to embrace or refute it, to connect as one, to disconnect, evolution and history. We suspect we can neither embrace nor refute the ‘full law’, for it breaks into discrete intervals, by a play on continuity. We find in any case a hint of discrete systematics in the phenomenon of civilization as a whole. Thus our subject is not evolution from absolute origins, but ‘relative free action’ as evolution against the past in a context of incomplete knowledge.

Many biologists, sociobiologists exempted, are themselves nervous on this point of the universal application of evolution, for as their subject comes home, to man, the discrepancy of his complexity simply highlights Darwinian implausibility. Chance must suffice not only the origins of species, but the origins of virtue. And chance must finish its constructions that freedom can be born in a manner deferred to later times and days, and free from the apparatus of construction. We can suggest that chance could not generate freedom from man’s organismic free action even by the evidence of rising civilization. This would require chance as a background to free activity, yet a force to defeat chance, in the onset of Freedom. This is strange. But our history shows just this, derandomizing as emergent freedom, to find freedom free of this process itself. Darwinism wishes to claim the random construction of complex things, whose function is itself unknown to its proponent. This sounds like ‘dog ate the proof’ for a circle-squaring argument. The failure to produce a constructivist argument simply makes the evolutionary claims open to question.

In general, the indirect influence of Darwinian thinking on historical research is very great, and leaves all forms of theorizing with the implied assumption that purely random emergence is established because natural selection is established. Thus, many studies of history skulk past the issue of evolution with little more than laudatory mention, for a tacit contradiction or incompleteness seems concealed in the attempts at historical theory, given only pawns of random advance, to explain man’s emergence as incremental successiveness. Aware of the contradiction, sociobiologists start quite naturally to give chase, in the attempt to resolve the inconsistency. But the results are immediately unsatisfying at the point that we learn that religion is a form of adaptation, which it is certainly not. The birth of civilization becomes entangled in the coevolution of genes and culture, since the point of contact between organism must be direct and emergence must never encounter an abstract or intermittent evolution. Yet the subtle creature man in full self-consciousness is alive and well on the stage of history, an evolutionary fait accompli. This man must be our starting point, even if we can derive him little from the fundamental sequence, granting the perception that we have found him to be a ‘natural creature’. As we move to embrace the whole, the discrepancy becomes obvious, and a mysterious ‘cutoff and transition’ becomes implied by the vacuum of explanation. We should make the case that the whole process requires embedding in a general system of some kind, capable of ‘system return’, as feedback, in any manner, on its previous states, as a direction switch, this as a bare minimum. With history, we can do this phenomenologically without stating the nature of this system. We can consider the evidence would show its hand as a contrast of continuous and discontinuous streams and interruptions. This we see.

In the final analysis it is impossible to really affirm or refute the proposition of Natural Selection. And this enquiry stands on its own in the category of theoretical history, and has no necessary connection, as such, with theories of evolution normally considered, unless these claim the ground of civilization in the future of culture-creation urged on as natural selection turned into an injunction of ideology. This ambiguous use of the term ‘evolution’ might lead to discussion at cross-purposes, for the connection between the two is unclear. The dilemma, however, exists already, as can be seen in the passé partout usage of the term ‘progress’, looking for an extension in the past of evolution from its home in ideological modernism. The field of sociobiology, for example, proceeds to reduce social evolution, quite logically one might think, on the basis of selectionism  universally generalized, with assumptions about the place of evolution in the study of culture that are simply unwarranted, though quite consistent with the general tenor of Darwinism.

In fact, such claims are likely flawed, for they are based on assertions about the relation of culture and genetics through natural selection as adaptation, claims never substantiated by any real evidence in the evolutionary record, indeed contradicted by the historical record, as in the case of religion. Although we might extend by speculation the term ‘religion’ backwards to consider the shaman or the figurines of Venus now found from the Paleolithic, this term has its own derivation in historical times, and this shows the organization of belief to induce selective ethical behavior in a fashion not necessarily involved in survival. In general, the claims of evolution are first about patterns of historical data, then theories about that data. To press them into service as ethical instruments confuses the issue entirely of what occurred in the well-known debates of science and religion in the nineteenth century, which were arguments about religious history, and the causations, disguised as theology, of that history.

What indeed, then, do we mean by the use of the term ‘evolution’? The term, surprisingly, has no clearly based derivation from known physical or cosmological forms of understanding, beyond the level of judicious hunch in the search for compatibility with known physical laws. The derivatives of the science of Thermodynamics begin, however, to suggest a rough category of ‘self-organization’ at the threshold of life, whatever we are to conclude from this, as more than metaphor. Whatever the relation to physical laws, we obtain the exit papers from universal generalization in the appearance of the ‘event’, as any entity unique yet structured, if not ‘lawful’, in its own time and place. The rise of civilization shows clear evidence of self-organization. We can accept this, therefore, with fingers crossed, as the right ‘in box’ and proceed to look at the ‘self-organization of civilization’, reserving the right to slip the ‘self’ into and out of the ‘organization’ appearing in strange rhythms across universal history.

There is no biological monopoly on the term ‘evolution’. We can adapt the concept to nothing more than the sequence, Egypt-Sumer, and the classical era, at their onsets as the evidence of ‘eonic evolution’, the parallel yet directional ‘long waving’ of cultural transition to civilization in a rising flow of self-organization. The strange similarity of the rise of the modern to this small group is the obvious extension to this, however controversial. This is a ‘relative beginning’ that must take man as he is, in all his complexity, and one that can also account for its own selectivity, and prove a gateway to precisely those other areas of history that it neglects. Thus we have, what history shows, the transition of Paleolithic man at the boundary of rising civilization. The complex subtlety of this emergentism, and our immersion in it, is an order of magnitude beyond what we might at first have expected. We can orient ourselves to its proper business, without the confusing distraction of recycled natural selection, fetched from a jungle of wildness, to advise the quite different evolution of our cultural values. Although this perception cannot tell us anything as such about earlier forms of evolution, it is in retrospect the one factor we might have suspected as missing in current evolutionary accounts. A final question remains, could we detect evolution if it was directly in front of us?

Our subject is in many ways very simple, and exploits two basic ideas: world history shows three great turning points, and second, the era of early classical antiquity, shows an extraordinary phasing parallelism.   That’s all there is to it, and we have a counterexample to pure random emergence, if the reader can both stand back from and embrace the details. The birth of civilization, the massive advance at the source of classical antiquity, and the suggestive similarity of the explosive rise of the (early) modern, hint that they fall in a sequence, our frequency hypothesis. Why do these eras stand out, and what is their relation to the times and places in between? This lands us in confusing territory, proceeding from the fat to the fire of modernist ideology. At first this seems improper because it is ideological, then seems proper because it is indeed, a question of how ‘evolution’ is to be taken, in relation to present freedom.

In addition to the ‘turning point’ sequence, we find a phenomenon of parallelism, as seen in the ‘middle’ Classical era. This decisive step in world history is the crucial evidentiary core of our subject. We can catch a glimpse of an evolutionary driving motion in two massive surges spreading outward from the period of early Sumer. It is the simplest of patterns, yet it remains an enigma, and if we begin to zoom in on it, it disappears. We must suspect an earlier continuation, but we lose the trail in the period before, although its origin is clearly gestating in the Neolithic. Note that we have freed ourselves of the demand of absolute continuity, and begin in medias res.

Although our context is taken as that of ‘evolution’, our subject matter is seen to be really about civilization and individual in double evolutions, Tolstoy’s locomotive as we call it, beside the various theories thereof, among them those of Toynbee and Spengler, whose cyclical themes attempt to find a dynamic in an entity called the ‘civilization’. The views of Toynbee and Spengler cannot successfully grapple with their subject, civilization, for, ironically, they have no context of evolution, and no means to disconnect from it, by a disruption of relative beginnings. We must connect to disconnect. The evolution of culture and the cyclical rise and fall of civilization fall into place more simply if we see the ‘cycles of self-organization’ pursue a line of rising complexity as a kind of ratchet progression. The issue is to find the ‘fundamental unit of historical analysis’, which is not the ‘civilization’. The fatal objection to theories of civilization is that the dynamic is really ‘how to information’. Anyone can found a civilization in his backyard. These might not make it onto Toynbee’s list of civilizations, but they refute his theory. What creates the civilization, the ‘system’ or the individual? What we see instead is, not a sequence of civilizations, but a sequence of ‘firsts’ passing into ‘how to diffusion’. This sequence should be random. But, strangely, we see that it is not. This issue of the ‘fundamental unit’ shows a way to highlight the difficulties of interactive evolution, euphemistically ‘current politics’, and the ideologies confused with theories in the closing overlap of evolution, and history in action.

Our enquiry is one that, beginning with dinosaur bones, ends suspiciously in the realm of ideology and the ‘politics of becoming’ matched with the ‘metanarratives’ of cultural discourse. But this ideological factor will at least cease to seem suspicious, for the use of term ‘evolution’ is perhaps value-laden from the start. We will make the evolution of ideology explicit, and attempt to show that our account has a meaningful position in this evolution, from Pharaoh to the parting of the Red Sea. Certain sociobiologists, suspiciously, reveal at unguarded moments their wish to use the credentials of Darwinism as conservative inuendo. We can wonder at the excess of firepower expended on such delicate subjects, and pleasantly counter by an equal rigor with an explicit evolution of ideology, to find the liberal strain in world history as emergentist evolution, in the issues of palace, revolution, and parliament. As theory closes on ‘current activity’, we lose our position as ‘historical metaobservers’ (if we ever had it) and find theory becoming a script of action. But we can formalize this nonetheless as ‘relative free action’ with respect to an evolutionary incident in our past.

You may say that history is too value-laden to be evolution (and you would have a point), but then you must state at which point value-free evolution stops, and history begins, and whether the evolution of the song-bird is value-free, before or after this cutoff. In general, the timing of this ‘cutoff’ is the critical issue, otherwise we deprived of the objectivity to produce a theory at all. But we see why the ‘eonic effect’ is appropriate, for it grants us this sequencing in the middle of continuity. Thus ‘history’ and ‘evolution’ are, are not, one and the same, and we are confronting a phenomenon of relative beginnings, at the point of ‘connect-disconnect’. We can look at the overlap between a theory of evolution and a script of evolution as it closes on the present in these relative beginnings. We need a model where we can take into account a script that wishes to explicitly contradict a theory’s prediction, if this is potential to our free action. We cannot eliminate potential, ‘in theory’.

The challenge to transcend ideology has often resulted in critiques of any efforts at macrohistorical generalization, but the issue is broader and impinges on the nature of man’s self-consciousness in relation to the double movement of rising civilization and individual self-realization. The philosopher Karl Popper, for example, developed a general attack on the various forms of historicism, so-called, with particular emphasis on Marxism. The reader can follow the trail of considered argument for and against his views. Also, schools of ‘deconstructionist postmodernism’ attempt to isolate the basic ‘metanarrative’ as a strategy of historiography. Although we can certainly accept the challenge, even wave a red flag for this almost welcomed contradiction, the fact of the matter is that these views show the very influence of Darwinism at its most indirect. There is no inherent reason to exclude macrohistorical structure from historical or evolutionary accounts, as Popper implies. Nor is there any inherent reason to take the ‘narrative’ out of history. The narrative simply resembles the nature of evolutionary activity. We can attempt, in a side discussion of the ‘evolution of tragedy’, to show that our eonic pattern is indeed a ‘meta’-narrative, for it stands beyond the generation of such arts.

The works of Toynbee fill immense volumes. And ask of the student belief in a highly unintuitive model of the dynamics of a civilization. The approach here is simpler. Theories must exploit the obvious, and explain why ‘that which the reader already knows’ can be seen as ‘evolution’. This, remarkably, we can do with our eonic outline. We already know that Classical Greece shows a great flowering, and that the Old Testament seems preoccupied with the three centuries, -900 to –600. Why is this so? Isn’t it extraordinary? And what is our preoccupation with the Old Testament? In any case, the only place to find a theory of the evolution of civilization is in the Table of Contents of a work of world history.

We will take a well-known work of this type and use this approach, in Chapter 3. A ‘Table of Contents’ is not much, but you can reconstruct our argument around it without much difficulty. Our end is our beginning, and we will start with nothing more than the most obvious such elements to construct our ‘frequency hypothesis’. The ‘tick tick tick’ of a massive self-organizing system can be heard behind the outward mien of civilization, leaving us with a considerable enigma, and a paradox of eonic determination and freedom. 

We are left with a picture of three successive accelerations or recursions animating the greater scale of world history. The jumbled blur of our historical images created by the blindness to overall structure makes the record of five thousand years of civilization seem eternal, a tale of endurance wishing a quick ending. But from our perspective, we see a jumpstart mechanism that has so far failed to get history underway at all. A close inspection of our logic shows that we have summoned up ‘evolution’ to pass beyond it, to wonder if nature does not stretch a chord between infinities to pass into the middle cycles of prodigious things struggling to be born. To these new shores the long waves of crunching evolution might leave us shipwrecked in sluggish civilizations, yet with a hope that man becoming first man could look backward at the play of nature as distant thunder to grasp his own evolution, at the birth of history.