Selections: Mysterious Drumbeat

Looking backward, world history since the invention of writing reveals the evidence, contradicting Darwinian assumptions, of non-random evolution, an image of nature climbing Mt. Improbable. We assume the flow of world history follows random logic, conditioned as we are by Darwinism . The rapid growth of archaeological knowledge since the nineteenth century has greatly expanded our views of the emergence of civilization and, significantly, crossed a threshold of five thousand years, the bare minimum interval, we are about to see, for grasping the logic of historical evolution. A non-random pattern on this scale shows us something missing in Darwinian thinking and falls into the category of ‘evolution’, ‘evolution of some kind’, with a question, ‘What is the meaning of evolution?’. This pattern can be seen from two perspectives:

1. The first is of the so-called Axial Age , the enigmatic synchronous emergence of cultural innovations and advances across Eurasia in the period of the Classical Greeks and early Romans, the Prophets of Israel, the era of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, and Confucius in

China

. This data shows us that an ‘evolutionary something’ stands behind the emergence of complex forms of culture, is global in scale, and operates over an interval of several centuries to redirect the course of civilization.

2. The second, related to the first, is of a drumbeat sequence of punctuations or transitions proceeding down a mainline of the diversity of civilizations. Looking at the Axial phenomenon we are forced to consider that it is part of a larger pattern, and is a step in a sequence. Moving backwards and forwards we suddenly discover the full pattern. These punctuation points are, remarkably, equally spaced, with an interval of about 2400 years, evidence of a cyclical phenomenon.

Punctuation 1: the rise of advanced civilization in Egypt,

Sumer

, ca. –3000
Punctuation 2: the sudden synchronous effect of the Axial Age, ca.–600
Punctuation 3: the rise of modernity, ca. 1800

This phenomenon will be called the eonic effect, or eonic sequence, as evidence of the eonic evolution of civilization . The term ‘eonic’ can be taken to mean ‘discrete’, or ‘stepping’, as opposed to ‘continuous’, in long-term units of time. ‘Eonic evolution’ might also be called ‘ratchet evolution’. This dynamic is non-genetic and acts directly on the self-consciousness of individuals.[i]

These dates point to intervals or transitions several centuries in length, and we will call them ‘turning points 1, 2, 3’, or TP1, TP2, TP3: as ‘punctuations’ they generate major turning points of global history, via localized sources, in a sort of ratchet effect. This mysterious drumbeat hides an unsuspected dynamism and answers directly to the enigma of the evolution of human civil existence in a series of discrete periods. We have used the term ‘punctuation’ for a reason: the phenomenon gives us an almost perfect representation of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, and shows us a genuine instance of some form of ‘macroevolution ’, if we can understand the relationship of history and evolution. In fact, ‘punctuated disequilibrization’ might also describe the phenomenon, since the effect is to rouse a steady state into a dynamic one. This usage of the term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ has little to do with prior definitions, so we could take the term as if coined from scratch. It shows what a real ‘punctuated equilibrium’ process is like in an actual instance seen at close range.

The first two of these three eras, if we exclude for a moment the modern due to its proximity in our biased perception and interaction, are seen to be the crucial generative eras of the development of civilization. The first era shows the rise of the state, the second the remarkable sources of the great religion s, the beginning of science, philosophy, the first democracy, and, generally, the foundations of the great traditions, East and West. As we puzzle over the difficulties in all ideas of evolution, we discover that we can find the answers very close to home, in the record of world history. Upon reflection, despite the initial strangeness, we see that the rise of modernity, understood properly, is the obvious next step in this sequence. These intervals are packed with innovations, or what we will call ‘eonic emergents’, and generate virtually all of the seminal cultural forms of world history.

TP1 The birth of the state, appearance of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations,…

TP2 The Axial Age, from

China

to Greece/Rome. Onset of two or more world religions in India and

Israel

, multiple sources of philosophy, birth of science, Greek democracy, …

TP3 Rise of modernity, onset of Reformation, secularism, English, French, American Revolutions, Enlightenment, another scientific revolution, another birth of democracy, Industrial Revolution,…

We fail to see the logic of this sequence because its action, as an intermittent or drumbeat series, generates relative transformations, i.e. sudden spurts of growth, in the prior stream of historical emergence. Any theory of evolution, we should note, is really about relative transformations, e.g. ‘man’ is a relative transformation of, or evolutionary ‘emergent’ from, a chimpanzee.

?TP1 The first turning point is unmistakable despite the rapid thinning of the data. It is just on the threshold of our new observational standard requiring centuries level data. In fact, the later transitions often show us data at the level of decades. But the overall form of the first transition is clear.

A closer look, in the arduous inquiries at deeper zoom levels, reveals the need to revise assumptions of historical continuity with a balanced conception of discontinuity. The latter is simply 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, and, like an apparition, the moment is gone.

Israel

sees its age of the Prophet s, the Exile, and the emergence of a new religious matrix. 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. The discontinuity is not a gap, far from it, it is a clustering of innovations, a packed field of sudden creative advances over a brief interval of history.

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. We will use the term ‘mideonic’ to refer to the intervals in full between our turning points.

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 no doubt 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 clear holistic interpretation of world history in the form of a non-random pattern behind us in the chronicle of known history. It is non-random in the way it demonstrates an intermittent clustering of creative action over long periods beyond the scope of individual will. It is a pattern that explicitly defies the logic of chance, as it generates a sense of coherence. We can even see ‘system return’ processes, like feedback, attempting to restore direction or elements that have died out.

The Eonic Effect Our thesis is engaged, we see a macrohistorical ‘evolution’ or ‘rolling out’, in the ‘macro’ variety, associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, suggesting long-range feedback or system return, morphing in direct and focalized fast transitions the large-scale event-space of cultural entities.

The mystery force—found! We have indicated some hidden intangible factor lies behind the apparent stream of historical or evolutionary sequences. In world history we can detect such a ‘force’ factor. The language of ‘forces’ will have to graduate to something different. But the point is clear: we find a massively complex evolutionary driver behind our eonic sequencing. In fact, we see clear signs of a field effect with this ‘force’. We cannot hybridize terms of physics, and they indicate a ‘principle of sufficient reason’, whose explanation requires new terminology.

Evolution? What is the meaning of evolution and how can we use the term for an historical process? In fact, nothing in our account requires the term at all, but as we examine the scale and significance of the eonic effect we realize that our emerging perspective on historical dynamics must collide with other attempts to define it (for human emergence), especially the Darwinian. We will construct a simple model to recalibrate the usage of the term ‘evolution’ (carefully qualified) so that it can coexist with the idea of history. We do this by defining ‘(eonic) evolution’ as macroevolution, or macro-action, and history as microevolution, or micro-action, the chronicle of historical action. The questions of freedom and causality must be carefully defined, resulting in a formal ‘evolution of freedom’ concept as a framework, or model for the eonic effect. In the final analysis noone has a monopoly on the use of the term ‘evolution’, and our usage is correct because that’s the way we define it, in distinction to the also clearly present genetic evolution, which we will clearly see is insufficient to account for the facts.

Universal Histories Our evolutionary model will connect with the classic themes of ‘universal history’, and we will explore the paradoxes that arise in any attempt at a science of history in the thinking of the philosopher Kant, with his ‘idea for a universal history ’. In fact, we will discover two, or multiple, universal histories, one corresponding to the macro-action visible in the eonic sequence, and the others consisting of the diversity of ‘cultural histories’ that make up the spectrum of world civilizations. We will also call this the ‘stream and sequence’ effect, the streams of culture intersecting with the eonic sequence.

Punctuated equilibrium This eonic data is virtually the defining instance of what should be called ‘punctuated equilibrium’. But we will use this beautiful terminology only in passing, due to the confusion with Darwinian usage. We can see that we have, however, found the real thing, and it has nothing to do with natural selection theories. This form of ‘evolution in history’ requires carefully detailed description, and is not genetic evolution.

The need for a model We are done: we have demonstrated a non-random pattern in world history. The rest of the book will simply expand on this bare perception of the eonic effect. In the process we can slightly extend our basic demonstration by creating a simple model to mirror this data: looking at the modern ‘punctuation’ we see a kind of transition, three centuries in length, closed by a divide effect. This model is an approximation that shows a high degree of correlation with the data. Our model will construct a cyclical sequence of three-century transitions in a matrix of periodization. This gives a fairly good match to the data, which is highly complex. Using the model we can deduce a number of hidden properties of the eonic pattern. The result is an empirical map of the ‘eonic, or ratchet, evolution’ of civilization. We will soon discover/suspect we are seeing on one half of sequence stretching backward into the Neolithic.

The model = The eonic effect? In fact, the eonic effect and the model are one and the same, save that our terms of description will always fall short of the full dataset, causing a divergence between model and data. The model will also graduate to an ‘idea for a universal history’ that can examine the nature of freedom in relation to a dynamic. Finally, any such model is likely to generate ideological affirmations which we must specify and mediate with some sort of dialectic.

Macro-action and micro-action The key to eonic effect is to distinguish system action and the free activity that makes it up, a situation we have discussed already. Thus our model, reflecting a process of macroevolution, will distinguish the macro-action of our eonic system and the free activity or micro-action inside it.

The Old Testament riddle A good example of this distinction lies in the Old Testament, an account of a people living through the Axial interval. Their detection of this struck them as theistic intervention in history. In terms of the eonic model, this expression is the micro-action. The macro-action is the dynamic of the Axial, or eonic, period behind this, clearly detected in the discontinuity of the core Old Testament history (the three centuries leading up to the Exile). All at once we have a magnificent new perspective on the Old Testament as an account, remarkably, of ‘eonic evolution’!

The modern transition!? To say that the rise of modernity is connected to a dynamic sequence solves at once one of the riddles of world history, but creates a theoretical dificulty, if we apply a question of historical dynamics to our present. We have already noted the way the so-called Oedipus Paradox haunts Darwinism, generating Social Darwinism (the misapplication of a theory of evolution to the observer’s present). Our new type of ‘eonic model’ will show us an ingenious way around this difficulty, and our emerging distinction of macro-action and micro-action will allow us to bring ‘evolution’ into our present in a proper manner. More specifically we must define the ‘modern transition’ and clearly distinguish this dynamic of generation from modernity itself, with its ideological content. This new perspective on modernity as combined macro-action and micro-action will help us unlock the mysterious riddle of the ‘modern’.

Hopscotch and a frontier effect One reason we adopt the idea of transitions is that our eonic sequence transcends the question of ‘evolving civilizations’, and produces transformations of several civilizations in tandem in time-slices of action. Thus the ‘civilization’ ceases to be the useful unit of analysis. In fact, as we go along we will see that our system can do lateral hopscotch or synchronous steps (as in the Axial Age), and jump to new regions. We will later see a ‘frontier effect’, the way our eonic sequence always jumps to restart in a new location at the frontier of its prior advancing front.

Self-consciousness In the eonic effect we see an evolutionary process that is non-genetic and that acts directly on the self-consciousness of individuals. It might be better to say that it ‘emerges through’ the self-consciousness of individuals. This distinction of self-consciousness and consciousness is unusual, and yet has many classic antecedents, and will help us to distinguish degrees of consciousness, or creativity. This creates the dilemma that downfield observers, immersed in one and the same system, may be unable to match the self-consciousness detected in the phases of macroaction.

Eonic observers For this reason we will introduce the idea of an eonic observer of the eonic effect, and we must study the observers as much as the effect itself. The redactors of the Old Testament were eonic observers, influenced by the emergent factors they wished to describe. A modern eonic observer is influenced by the moden transition. These observers may not be able to rise to the self-consciousness of those innovators inside the sequence.

Greek tragedy Consider the example of Greek tragedy, a classic eonic emergent of the Axial interval. As eonic observers of this phenomenon we are beset with our inability to quite define what a ‘tragic drama’ is (no definition has ever been conclusive). Associated with our sequence, poetic drama of the highest caliber appears, as a function of time, and wanes rapidly as the system passes beyond the Axial interval. This example can help to assess the Old Testament: the complexity of its realization appears in the context of a still primitive people, greatly complicating its correct interpretation.

This pattern gives itself away in the Axial phase, like the tip of an iceberg, but is at first so elusive that we barely see it, but we sense it, and it suddenly comes alive as we clock its strange timing, and adopt systematic periodization. It is made difficult by the need to examine relative changes, i.e. incremental change in a stream of prior continuity. And we must acquire the knack to distinguish the action of a system and the free activity that is mixed with it, like the difference between the motion of an ocean liner and the relative free action of the passengers in that context.

Two categories of motion are superimposed. This is what blinds us to historical dynamics. This pattern explains at a glance many of the contradictions we live with and that characterize our sense of history. The implication is of a process that can act globally, generate rapid change in whole cultures in short bursts, and proceed across millennia in coordinated fashion. Careful accounting of time periods shows this global system at work.

The key to its understanding is to see that its effect is short acting, or intermittent in series of punctuated transitions. This intermittency is seen in many categories. A remarkable instance, itself a clue, is the Greek Archaic period, and as one example of the on-off enigma, that of emergentist ‘democracy’, leapfrogging history, as if in a jumpstart process. This seems to hint at a deeper process. World history seems to be operating on two levels. This is the effect of an evolutionary driver alternating in peaks of intensity. We call this the ‘eonic’ or intermittent, frequency look-alike effect, and it is still an incomplete perception, yet one whose significance is obvious even in fragments, in the same way that a few pieces of a puzzle can cohere without any knowledge of the whole. The problem is that it doesn’t follow standard causal logic in its action. What we see is the ‘causality’ of Big History, so to speak. We see a strange intersection of cultural stream and a larger sequence. This shows us the need to look, not at whole cultural histories, but time-slices, or relative transformations of culture. The idea is so strange we would not consider it unless the facts demanded it. But once we realize this is how real evolution would have to be and that nature acts that way, the solution to the puzzle is swift.

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. The difficulty in our perception of this arises because we are talking about fields of free activity that show structure over a period of centuries, a seeming contradiction. As we puzzle over the difficulties in all ideas of evolution , we discover that we can find the answers very close to home, in the record of world history. We need to develop a method to distinguish the action of a system from the free activity that makes it up. For that we will need to construct a special type of model.

We have already always noticed isolated aspects of this eonic effect, often disguised as myth, or the generic periodizations we routinely apply to history without noticing they are clues to a larger pattern. We do not see the eonic effect, and yet we are always unconsciously ‘noting’ its presence. This must be so if we are immersed in the very evolution we are discovering. We had to have sensed it all along. The moment we use the term ‘modern’, the ‘middle ages’, the ‘birth of our traditions, or the ‘age of revelation’, we speaking disguised eonic language, i.e. the language of periodization, of intervals or epochs. Now for the first time we see the pattern as a whole, and the reason for our perceptions is clear.

Man’s history has always confronted him with an anomaly in the peculiar periodization of its dramatic incidents, in the sense that its sequence shows an unmistakable character of relative, rather than absolute, beginnings. If we watch the beginning of the second act of a play, arriving late at the last part of the first, the appearance of transition and relative onset conditions our perspective, as a given of incomplete information. This is not unlike our perception of world history filtered through the great traditions, but before the discovery of early Sumer and

Egypt

. The Old Testament is really describing such a relative beginning, in medias res. It is describing intermittency, a new era coming into existence, against the backdrop of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, which simply enter the tale as givens with unspecified origins. The Old Testament makes a point of dramatizing the relationship and disentanglement from these apparently sourceless worlds that were simply there as a new era comes into existence. Our traditions have this character of relative onset and seem to source in the middle of world history, with a hazy preamble, in the centuries clustered around the great era of the Classical Greeks, itself synchronous with the period at the core of the Old Testament.

We are thus left with the sense that this era of great beginnings is an entr’acte, and that we are in a tale of changing scenes. And this is a clue to modernity, this ‘new age’ effect at work, once again. And this phenomenon in antiquity is not confined to the West, for we see it in the Oriental civilizations as well, as they seem to echo the same rhythm. Chinese history is variously the legacy of the Shang emperors, or the richer world suddenly coming to life around the era of Confucius. The world of the Buddha and Mahavir visibly both start, and yet continue from, and against, their own antiquity. Here in splendid simplicity is a clue to the whole question of historical evolution. We see the action of a system in evolutionary parallelism operating in a discrete series of relative beginnings. Such a system smacks of a frequency interpretation, and shows a hypercomplex system at work, complete with its own built-in evolutionary clock.

This sudden double discovery of structure, moving backwards to the dawn of civilization, and moving in parallel through the intricacies of the great burst of advance stretching across Eurasia in the proximate period of the Archaic Greeks, and Hebrew prophets, presents us with a moment like that in the solution of a puzzle laid out at random when an entire sector is resolved in isolation from a still greater whole. This is not the total solution to the puzzle. Coherence is clearly inferable from one fragment of a puzzle as the pieces show an overall meaning. The great clue bestowed in the silence of millennia debriefs our myths of revelation with its clear demonstration of their meaning in a macro-historical functionality. But our tactics of study must be forensic, and not metaphysical.

Although the eonic pattern is a short sequence (like three beats from a whole symphony) and fails any inductive test for universal generalization or an adequate theory, it gives us a telling glimpse of a purely abstract ‘evolution in action’ and suggests indirectly how emergent sequencing and integration might have occurred in the descent of man. 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 intermittent sequence. 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.

And suddenly we are suspicious of current evolutionary accounts of the descent of man, and the so-called Great Explosion in the Paleolithic. This pattern shows the one thing Darwinists must dread most, overlay evolution in high-speed differential transformations, in concentrated regions, acting over a short range, mere centuries. Our ignorance of deep time will allow no such simple generalization as the Darwinian theory if we have even the slightest suspicion, here the strongest evidence, of such fast-acting processes. The stock of Darwinism plummets at once, and should be put on hold until we can zoom in on the incidents claimed in absentia as evidence of the theory.

[i] As a contraction of a term ‘aeonic’, its usage is taken from the Greek word ‘aionios’. The term ‘eonic’ is also a play on the term ‘eon’, and in addition the electronic term ‘eonic’, often referring to systems of digital signal processors with their discrete sampling of continuous processes.