2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.5 Stream And Sequence: Ratchet Evolution | ||||
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Let’s press the reset button, and start from scratch, using another way to look at the eonic series, in terms of the idea of ‘stream and sequence’, the same, in fact, as micro-action and macro-action . Examine again our timelines of the Greek or Israelite Axial intervals. A stream history leads up to the Axial interval and shows transformation. This transformation generates a higher level step in a greater eonic sequence. This is the ‘stream and sequence’ effect. We now have two levels to our account, the evolution of the stream of cultures, and the evolution of the high level sequence. And this allows us to give expression to ideas of evolutionary directionality and progress at the higher level. Or perhaps progression would be a better word. However, the idea of an eonic sequence allows us to proceed without committing ourselves on generalizations about progress which always end up confronted with various contradictions. Culture streams
We can think of the historical timeline
or streaming of cultures as their continuous chronicle in time, e.g the Greek
stream: the total history of Grecian culture from primordial Indo-European times
to the present. The intersection of this stream with the eonic series in the
Axial interval produces a distinctive burst of macro-history. We can consider
any subset, superset, or other cultural variable in the same way, the science
stream, the history of science, the poetry stream, the technostream
(technological history), the econostream,
the history of economic systems, etc,… Economic streams
Note that economic history is distinct
from the eonic sequence. Economic activity is continuous and globally
omnipresent, while the sequence is intermittent. We are coming to see the
problem with the ‘economic interpretation of history
’: it is a dependent process. Note that
the explosion of the Industrial Revolution occurs when an econostream intersects
with the eonic sequence. The eonic sequence Our non-random pattern is clear: we see a macrohistorical sequence associated with the emergence of civilization in a long frequency or directionality, analogous to (although not the same as) feedback, able to act on cultural streams in intervals of several centuries. We can reverse-engineer this data with a question, Does world history show evidence of any kind of sequence? The answer is yes, and we see very strong correlation with an intermittent sequence pattern that can only be called ‘evolution’. This sequence is intermittent and intersects with the various streams of culture it finds in its direct path. This sequence can show synchronous parallelism, and follows a frontier effect, as we will see, and works in a kind of leapfrog effect. Transitions and divides As we examine our ratchet effect, we can infer something extra, a kind of ‘divide’ arises after or near the end of the transition. We should ask if we can observe this phenomenon. Indeed, we can, in many cases. The most notable examples are the modern divide, to be discussed later, and the clear divide visible in the Old Testament, in the period near the Exile. The phase of the Israelite transition is over by ca. –600 and the character of the history changes to one of looking backward. This discovery is as remarkable as it is mysterious, and we are given a free gift of historical structure, something whose existence has always been denied, but whose existence suddenly becomes obvious as recorded history crosses a minimum threshold of 2400 times 2, i.e. three transitions and two middles, about five thousand years. Our use of the term ‘evolution’ requires further discussion, and all we know so far is that something is creating a derandomizing effect in fuzzy regions and time-periods, but in a fashion that is clearly coordinated over many millennia.
History and progress
An obstacle in the way of any claim of progress
in history is the obvious perception of
the immense sluggishness, and frequent retrograde decline, of the greater part
of that history. But once we realize that most of world history is taken up with
the mideonic intervals between a mere three short intervals of short acting
transformation the idea of progress revives at once in a different form.
Progress and ideology
One of the confusions of the idea of progress is that this idea is itself an ‘eonic
emergent’ of TP3, one that suffers ideological degradation from its initial
sense, which was none other than an attempt by men of the early modern to claim
modernity was an advance over antiquity. The application of this loaded term to
issues of evolution, in the confusions of Darwinism, has produced nothing but
muddle. Our emerging model can clarify the idea and retrieve its usage from
oblivion. Note that ‘progress’ will diverge in meaning: there can progress
associated with the eonic sequence, and that associated with the mideonic
intervals. Later we will distinguish ‘theories’ and ‘action scripts’, to make
clear that using an ‘eonic emergent’ for a theory to describe the overall system
is paradoxical.
Macro-action and micro-action
Our system operates on two levels, its ‘eonic determination’, and the
‘free activity’ that makes it up. It is like a ship and its passengers: we have
the ship’s action, and the action of the passengers inside. Carefully
distinguishing these two unlocks the confusions that attend attempts to analyze
history.
Old Testament confusion
This distinction arises in the confusion over the Old Testament. But we
can see that the ‘macro-action’ of the eonic sequence stands behind the
‘micro-action’ of the people involved, and their religious ideology. The stream
aspect of the Old Testament shows us a (semi-mythical) account of a Canaanite
people from Abraham to Moses, etc, while the core interval in the centuries just
before –600 show the intersection transformation in the greater eonic sequence.
Our system generates two kinds of histories, the
stream history, and the isolated ‘sequence’ intervals in those streams. Consider
the idea of ‘Greek history’, a stream of historical culture. This proceeds
throughout the course of world history, from the era of Indo-European
differentiation to modern times. It is in some fashion ‘Greek’. But, for some
reason, this stream shows a remarkable flowering in the period from –900 to
–400. There is no ‘causal antecedent’ or general explanation possible from
simple examination of ‘Greek culture’. We are left baffled, until we see that
this stream suddenly becomes a part of a larger, eonic, sequence. As the stream
and sequence intersect we see the ‘Greek Axial interval’, one of our
transitions. The eonic effect is really a macro-sequence made up of a series of transitions. We see three rapid threshold crossings or stepping progressions with ‘medieval’ periods in between of slower advance. Note how the Axial period rapidly falls off and in the Occidental zone we see the period of innovation yield to the long centuries of the Roman Empire, followed by an almost complete collapse of the advance in the Middle Ages. The term ‘mideonic’ would be better than ‘medieval’, which has a specialized meaning. But notice how we instinctively sense the ‘middleness’ of the Middle Ages: we can’t help but notice this eonic periodization. The larger pattern shows why. These transitions we can estimate at about three centuries, the first or generative part of a five-century interval at each step. Clearly the extra two centuries is really part of the mideonic interval and simply shows the slingshot takeoff after the transition, followed by a rapid damping out of the driving transition.
Transition 1: the relative
stage of advance in Egypt, Sumer, ca. –3300 to –3000 The three century interval seems quite artificial, and could be measured in various other ways, but once we study the modern case we will realize that it is probably close to exact, if only as a statistical region. Note that we are outside of the modern transition, but at the end of the full five-century interval of modernity in contemporary times, and the sense of sudden ‘postmodernity’ arises spontaneously (and quite incoherently: the object of the exercise is to maintain, not deviate, from ‘modernity’). This is not a universal global phenomenon, but one occurring in a complex mainline that leapfrogs between cultural zones. By defining the relationship of history and evolution, we can call this stepping stone progression an ‘evolution of some kind’, the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, with a question about the relationship of this to earlier stages of the descent of man. Such a clear case of a ‘macro’ process operating on the micro stream of history makes us suspicious of Darwinian thinking about man, at least. The periods stand out because of the rapid-fire innovations clustered in short intervals. Here is the barest summary: TP1 The birth of the state, appearance
of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations,… These are just a few of the effects. We can call these effects ‘eonic emergents’, i.e. intermittent bursts of suddenly emerging cultural constructs. Here’s the hard part: these changes are relative and don’t necessarily show absolute innovations (e.g. modern science is not an absolute innovation, and shows a complex earlier history, both medieval and eonic). So, these eonic emergents show sudden spurts of development, but the absolute origin of their history is another question. We take it this way instinctively. We speak of Christianity as one continuous history, tracing its absolute origin, but we also speak of the relative transformation we call the Reformation as interval inside that larger history, and we see, surprisingly that this is part of our larger pattern. Debates over continuity and discontinuity suffer endless confusion over abstraction. But here, armed with such a large-scale example, we see resolution of the paradox, and might do well to avoid such terminology, save to note that the pattern perfectly reconciles the two confusions. World history shows a continuous aspect, and a discontinuous one also. Both perspectives are correct, there is a discontinuous phenomenon overlaid on continuous history, a stream and sequence effect. As noted already this correctly applies as well to any concept of acceleration, a term we shall abandon from here on, since we are not dealing with a system of physical laws. Relative transforms, eonic emergents We are discovering a unique type of structure. The basic idea is simple: the stream histories of the various cultures in our eonic sequence show ‘relative transforms’, visible in their eonic emergents. This is like saying that if we turn a sunlamp on plants in a garden the ‘stream history’ of their normal growth is accelerated by the relative period of fast growth created by the sun lamp. This is why the Axial period, or modernity, can be confusing, because two processes are overlaid. The clustering of eonic emergents in our series is massive,
and at first inexplicable. Pick any cultural category, and the chances are that
it will show amplification in this pattern. Philosophy? The Pre-Socratics, TP2.
The birth of democracy? Axial Eonic vs mideonic One of the confusions of historical analysis becomes clear in our perception of the eonic effect: a great deal of cultural advance occurs in the eonic sequence, but not all. The fine arts show less correlation with the eonic sequence. Why? The reason is obvious. Artistic creativity is already a species character and occurs in every generation, every place and time. Thus relative transforms of the fine arts are less visible as a discontinuous effect in history as we know it. The eonic sequence shows the sudden appearance of culture forms that are still beyond the capacity of the free action of evolving populations. A good example is the genre of tragedy, which doesn’t appear on demand, but only in the eonic sequence (roughly speaking). We confronted with the fact that a cyclical interpretation
of the data is the right one, as long as we are careful about what we mean by
this, and steer clear of the traditional confusions of such thinking. The
pattern shows an odd resemblance to a continuous frequency sampled at regular
intervals, this being a metaphor only. The wavelength would be about 2400 years.
The Axial interval seems to ‘sample’ the cultural totality it finds in place and
amplify selected strains into a new form. Thus monotheism, in various inchoate
forms, is already present in the prior cultural zones, but in the Axial period,
with remarkable precision, these strains are blended into a focused religious
formation that will later blossom into a series of world religions, these
religions being outside the Axial interval. The Old Testament in fact makes this
point with its contrast of an Abrahamic era (whether or not Abraham existed) and
the era of the Prophets, faithfully reflecting our eonic analysis. The same is
true in |
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