2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.2 An Unexpected Challenge To Darwinism | ||||
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The eonic effect is
something we can see all at once, and at many levels. Like a fractal, we zoom in
on separate areas, and then zoom out to see the whole. Our model will help us
visualize this pattern. If we work up the data with some simple periodization
what we are seeing will stand out. But in one way we are done—a non-random
pattern is indicated. We can pause here,
anticipate our conclusions, and consider in a nutshell this still fuzzy
perception of the eonic effect, before zooming in on its details. It goes
immediately into an evolutionary category, ‘evolution of some kind’, and
‘macroevolution
’ to boot. And this just doesn’t square
with Darwinian
thinking, nor can we say that Darwinian
evolution led up to this ‘other evolution’, for reasons we will explore. We
cannot be making Darwinian claims on the descent of man, sight unseen, given
such data for visible world history. Thus, if we look
closely at this data, especially in the core Axial period, we see that this
‘evolution of some kind’ is global in its action, acting selectively on
different regions. Its effects are local, and yet match a pattern in a global
sequence. It seems to switch on and off and induce change on schedule over
distributed regions. It can change its focus and hopscotch between regions, and
leapfrog across centuries. It can act simultaneously on all variables in a total
culture, and remorph whole regions by seeding clusters of innovations. It acts
on parallel cultures, and parallel components of culture, simultaneously, and
directly on creative consciousness and is involved in the generation and
transformation of religions. But we cannot really say this process ‘acts’, for
it is clearly mechanical in one way. It does nothing, yet suddenly everything is
done. Its effects as circumstantial evidence show its hand. Rapid advances and
flowerings of philosophy, religion and science are correlated with its action. Objectivity is
difficult. The observer is sequentially dependent on its action since his
protocols of discourse, and scientific methodologies, show clear interaction
with the pattern. This non-random pattern shows a dynamic acting at long range,
signs of evolutionary progress, and ethical action built into this dynamic, as
an abstract ‘should’ (i.e. the system ‘should’ induce change on cue, the minimum
‘should’ of a feedback device), and an embedded rationality, as it were, that is
beyond easy description. And yet, paradoxically, we cannot safely violate any
principle of historical homogeneity, nor claim that these periods in question
are inherently any different from any
other period, and everything we see there ought to be something, more or less,
than is present to us in our time. That seems to make the question
incomprehensible. But the paradox is resolved if we think in terms of
creativity, or more generally, what we have called self-consciousness. Then it
is clear that while creative action is potential at all times, the eonic effect
shows it to have clustered evolutionary patterns. That’s a very remarkable fact,
but it doesn’t violate the principle of homogeneity. Here traditional accounts
are misleading, for the factor of self-consciousness often hides behind theistic
visionary experience. In the
best-documented case of the Greeks in their Archaic and Classical periods we see
the rapid remorphing of an entire culture in a brief time-slice, with the
seeding of a complex literature, political experiments resulting in the birth of
democracy
, and a crescendo of art. This process
operates in the large, yet manifests itself in the creative action of widely
separated individuals. It transcends the specifics of individual cultures and
civilizations, and we must carefully distinguish the action of a system from the
action of individuals. Finally, we can see that the Old Testament arises in this
context, and contains implicit observations of the eonic effect. We spot a mysterious system at work and it operates in parallel and (intermittent) sequence, therefore directionality and thence teleology become relevant. We cannot assess teleological issues if we are immersed still in the system in question. But we can, looking backwards, assess changes of direction. This effect is clearly staging a kind of globalization. The three clusters or turning points in a sequence also show geographical patterning that follows a basic rule we will discover. They are like transitions driving this evolution, with massive innovations at the key times and places. These ‘fast interrupt’ phases are about three centuries in
length, the so-called Axial Age being two things, a generative and first
flowering period. The pattern is associated with several new religions, and the
emergence of democracy is directly correlated in two steps of the sequence,
dying out after its first appearance. This will provide a clue to a hidden theme
of freedom and necessity. This sequence generates great art en passant.
The period of the emergence of the Old Testament as a literature, almost
parallel to that of the Iliad, is
directly correlated to the middle phase. It operates beyond the individual
civilization and performs a kind of phasing intersection on a given
‘civilization’. Civilizations in the right time and place tend to have a
temporary edge. But the full effect is clearly global and doesn’t pertain
absolutely to the area of transmission. Including the modern phase creates
problems with ideology, making caution necessary. We are inside this system
still, but after its last manifestation. We tend to be blinded to the full scope
of what we see, and what we conclude can easily lead to wrong results based on
the imbalance created. This system does not follow some ‘economic evolution of
history’. It is much deeper. Economic history is one isolated aspect of the
picture. Overall it is clearly
strategic, seems to start at a Eurasian center of gravity in the The only name for
what we are seeing is ‘evolution’ in the dictionary sense, a process of ‘rolling
out’ in a developmental fashion. Nothing in it contradicts the facts of
variation, genetic drift, or genetic mutation, save that these ought reasonably
to be taken as a side issue. We will not speculate as to whether processes that
can morph whole cultures could also treat genes as information switches. But
this is an immediate reality check on More intuitively,
instead of random evolution we see three waves of focalized advance in selected
regions that feed the whole via diffusion, an obvious way to evolve something,
plain vanilla evolution, but this Darwinian selectionism is not. Clearly, applying
Darwinian thinking in this situation could lead to disastrous
counter-evolutionary effects. Look closely at the middle periods, such as the
falloff in the post-Axial. The ‘fittest’ do indeed survive better, and the trend
toward decline and empire takes hold. A period of great innovation comes to an
end. And many of those innovations do not make it. The Ionian Enlightenment is
buried, democracy barely gets off the launch pad, emergent science fades away.
We suspect our ‘system’ has to prompt these innovations, and then restore them
after they fail a ‘fitness test’. We must take the result as is, historically
given and buffered from whatever other evolution in deep time our speculative
theories propose with limited evidence. Since this ‘evolution’ in history shows
clear directional aspects, and is able to change direction, we might suppose it
has changed direction from processes said to have occurred earlier in the
descent of man. We can see that the Darwinist is going to lose history, hence
also the Paleolithic descent of man. For we will see that ‘history’ in this
sense must overlap with earlier phases of the descent of man. The regime of natural
selection as theory makes no sense, never did make any sense. Now we suspect
what the real evolution must have been like. Culture, we should note looking at
the eonic effect, doesn’t arrive through and can degenerate under the pure
regime of natural selection, whether of individuals, cultures, empires. Advance
and innovation require an end run driver to bypass the sandbanked victors of the
survival regime. But there is still the consideration that Darwinists might
claim that their account produced the lead up to history via natural selection.
We can move to protect our subject by showing that they probably lose this lead
up also, by looking at the so-called Great Explosion. From there we can move to
the study of history on its own terms, without the red herring of Darwinism
lurking in the background to confuse thinking. Darwinism, by
claiming purely random evolution, always left the relation of causality and
chance ambiguous. Confronted with the eonic effect, we see precisely that extra
process, ‘cause’, or ‘force’, subject to its inexorable confusions, present to
‘drive’ evolution, it being granted that such language is purely formal, subject
to revised language, and that this system is something highly complex. As
remarkable as that is, it is nonetheless precisely what we might have expected,
and warns us that our easy assumptions about higher complexity arising by chance
were off the mark. |
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