2.4.2 The Myth Of The Continents

Table of Contents for
 
World History 
And The Eonic Effect
Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution
3rd. Edition
The Book
By  John Landon

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 2. THE EONIC EFFECT: CLIMBING MT. IMPROBABLE  
      2.1 MYSTERIOUS DRUMBEAT  
         2.1.1 Enigma Of The Axial Age  
         2.1.2 A Second Axial Age?  
      2.2 AN UNEXPECTED CHALLENGE TO DARWINISM  
         2.2.1 Climbing Mt. Improbable: Evolutionary Directionality  
         2.2.2 Evolution And Ethics—At Close Range  
      2.3 THE GREAT EXPLOSION  
         2.3.1 A Photo Finish Test  
      2.4 HISTORY AND EVOLUTION: AN EONIC MODEL  
         2.4.1 A Gaian Matrix: The Need For A Global Model  
         2.4.2 The Myth Of The Continents  
ENDNOTES  
      2.5 STREAM AND SEQUENCE: RATCHET EVOLUTION  
         2.5.1 The Axial Transition  
         2.5.2 Archaic Greece: The Clue  
         2.5.3 The Old Testament As Eonic Data  
         2.5.4 Transition And Oikoumene  
         2.5.5 The Case Of The Missing Centuries  
         2.5.6 Econostream, Technostream,…And Eonic Sequence  
         2.5.7 History And Evolution, Darwinian Or Eonic?  
      2.6 AXIAL AGES AND EONIC OBSERVERS  
         2.6.1 Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation  
         2.6.2 Non-genetic Evolution  
         2.6.3 Art, Evolution and The Tragic Genre  
         2.6.4 World Line Of The Eonic Observer  

All of our punctuation areas connect adjacent regions. And they do not honor any particular culture. We must distinguish two levels, what Big History is doing, and what individuals are doing. It needs to show structure in the whole, and yet not interfere with the present, by injecting teleology into this. In fact, we have already laid the groundwork. But we also need a model on the scale of many millennia, with a context that is global in the sense that all civilizations are members in the domain of theory. The so-called ‘rise of the West’ dominates our skewed perception of world history. Notice that five centuries since 1500 is actually a short interval relative the period since the Neolithic. We need some careful accounting to keep the different scales in perspective. In fact, the ‘West’ is not a relevant division.

The myth of the continents World history tends to be divided into geographical regions as ‘civilizations’ or ‘East’ and ‘West’, or the ‘rise of the West’, ‘western civilization’. Up to a point nothing is wrong with such terms, until we find that nothing is right with them. We can instead take our field as the surface of a globe divided into sectors, where ‘eonic evolution’ steps between zones of relative transformation inside the civilizations. Strange as that sounds, the Greek example in the Axial interval has no other explanation, and this gives us the clue to the modern case. Civilization is emerging via an ‘eonic sequence’ from many civilizations, as related to our ideas of two universal histories. The stream of culture intersects with the global sequence. We tend to speak of ‘western civilization’ because this sequence intersects with a ‘European’ subset after 1500. But this has little to do with the ‘west’. Beyond tribal obsession, there is no such thing as ‘western civilization’. It is a function of global evolution. It is misleading to divide the field into continents. There is one global mainline.[i]

Our transition shows a comprehensive character that no individual, so far, can match. Thus the rise of the modern stands in the direct line of a greater process of world historical evolution. This raises issues of Eurocentric focus. Eurocentrism is easily addressed by this approach, in principle, and our eonic model will help to put the issue in perspective. We think in terms of the ‘rise of the West’, or of Western Civilization. But this, as noted, misses the point of what we are about to discover, the global interconnection of all three of our great turning points. The issue will be recast in terms of a new ‘fundamental unit of analysis’. This will be a relationship of transition areas and their oikoumenes. In the modern case the swing toward a global system although both present from the beginning commences in the nineteenth century. Our subject is one global civilization, and the transition areas that advance the whole through the part, in each in a frontier boundary. Here we see the take-off after 1500 in areas at the fringe of the old Roman World. The issue of Europe, then, is a theoretical red herring. Needless to say the members of this ‘civilization’ don’t see it this way.

We are starting to see, beyond the ‘civilization’, the issue of what Toynbee called the ‘unit of analysis’, and to something global, as already suggested in our idea of eonic evolution. We cease to deal with civilizations, and instead use ‘time-slices’ of civilizations. Our turning points again, soon transitions. These can be taken as the unit of analysis. We use this idea instinctively, for we speak of ‘modernity’, which can happen anywhere. Our unit of analysis is this time-slice of the onset of modernity. One aspect of the data gives us a clue, the resemblance of one part of TP2, and TP3.

Modernity and the Greek Archaic One of the strangest facts of world history is resemblance of the Greek Archaic, leading to the Classical period, to the rise of the modern. This ‘turning point’ is one of the most remarkable history records. We find a Greek ‘reformation’, ‘enlightenment’, birth of science, birth of democracy, a tragic genre, and more. This echo effect makes us suspicious of a non-linear discrete recursion of some induction process operating at a deeper level. The resemblance, as if by remorphing, of the Greek to the Indian period here leads us very close to the common denominator.

These two eras resemble each other, and yet they are different civilizations. The unit of analysis needs to be something else. We need a new unit of study, broader than the particular culture.

A unit of analysis We can see already the dilemma of thinking in terms of ‘civilizations’, as the fundamental unit of analysis (to use a phrase of Toynbee). Our unit of analysis will be the transition itself.