2.5.4 Transition And Oikoumene

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

Home

 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  

We have essentially completed our introduction to the basic eonic effect, but need one last restatement, this time focusing on the complement to our transitions, the oikoumenes they create. And this leads us naturally into the question of the ‘mideonic periods’, where the center of gravity of history lies. We will attempt below to rewrite our eonic system as an ‘evolution of freedom’. But note that in a system ‘evolving freedom’ the system must finally switch off to allow freedom to develop outside the field of system action. We can see that the initial results in the mideonic periods are mixed at best.

How evolve civilization(s)? The eonic sequence shows an ingenious way to ‘evolve’ civilization(s). The whole is too large, work on a series of localized regions. These in turn generate a set of oikoumenes or diffusion fields. The Axial religions begin to spawn universal trans-cultural diffusion  fields, armed with literatures able to apply across cultural boundaries, although as we can see, the Old Testament is a curiously sluggish mixture of particularized culture elements pressed into service for ecumenical purposes.

Related to the idea of a ‘transition’, is the mirror image, an oikoumene. The eonic effect is not about civilizations, but the way they are generated, or regenerated. As we studied our sequence we found a definite series of properties that unlock its riddle. The first, as we have seen, is that of sequence and its transitions, and then of parallelism. Another we will come to is the frontier effect. Finally we can consider what we can call ‘sequential dependency’, which is related to diffusion, and to the way the transitions create a high level of culture that tends to create ‘sequential dependency’ in its descendants creating oikoumenes. The question of these transitions can be restated in terms of transitions and oikoumenes, and the sequential dependency of the mideonic period. It is very difficult to transcend this factor of sequential dependency since any attempt to do so might backfire and degrade the eonic sequence from its peak potential. We should hardly wish to do so. We are sequentially dependent on the eonic history of science. We should therefore wish to do science, not react against our sequential dependency to its system generated momentum. In general, each of our transitions creates, if not a new civilization, then a field of diffusion, or oikoumene.

Transition and oikoumene We can begin to see what our system is up to. Instead of evolving civilizations, we see a series of transitions like time-slices of particular civilizations generating new oikoumenes in their wake.

 Fields of diffusion Each stage of our sequence creates a plateau from which diffusion occurs. The cultures in these fields show a kind of sequential dependency. In many ways the breakthrough to higher civilization at TP1 is unique, to the best of our knowledge, and all subsequent civilizations show a ‘sequential dependency’ due to diffusion from these sources. This does not preempt other independent cultural evolution, but this is likely to be sluggish. This pertains to large-scale civilizational constructs, viz. the onset of State formations. It does not follow that smaller scale anticipations of the future as high culture did not exist very early in other places. But we never hear of them! Our eonic sequence is really about global integration, and pumped diffusion. Our system garlands many long lost cultural innovations. A good example is Buddhism. The ‘Hindu stream’ was an unknown until it regenerates as Buddhism in the Axial interval and then starts its course of globalization.

Another property is the acorn, or frontier, effect: our sequence never steps twice in the same place, but always in an adjacent area just at the fringes of its previous expansion. Notice the way that Egypt and the Mesopotamian fields don’t enter the Axial Age list of areas of transition. A tiny corner of Canaan in between the two takes off and produces a new tradition of religious culture. The Greeks are just at the fringes of the core area of higher civilization. Another spectacular case of the frontier effect is the rise of modernity at the boundary of the Roman Empire. In each case the transitional eras generate oikoumenes, and at the next stage, just at the fringes, the sequence resumes its action. We think this a ‘European’ phenomenon, but that is misleading. We can see already that it is misleading to speak of ‘Western Civilization’.

The frontier effect A key property of our eonic pattern is the ‘acorn or frontier effect’. Note that something global is occurring starting in a series of local areas. But the sequence restarts in a new place each time, like an acorn, just at the frontier of its predecessor. The world of Canaan, spawning ‘Israel’, does not look like a frontier now, but in the era of the mythical Abraham it certainly was, and we even have a ‘pioneer’ story about his leaving the city of Ur in a prime diffusion source, the world of prior Sumer. Greece and Rome in the Axial period were definitely still frontier areas, relative to the by then ancient world of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Each of our transitions creates a hotspot, then expands to create a new civilization, better, oikoumene. Cultural acorns sprout in this field, and then at the next cycle one of them becomes a new transition. Note how our sequence is generating ‘evolution in the large’ via local hotspots, ‘short term evolution in the small’. We must study the diffusion fields of our turning points.

This property makes complete sense. If we restart over too far away, the sequence can’t continue. But if we are too close, the momentum of the earlier stage will overwhelm advance or make novelty abortive.

As we pursue our eonic riddle we see that its effects transcend the particulars of individual civilizations. We need to consider a new fundamental unit of analysis, beyond the idea of civilization, in a challenge to Toynbee and Spengler. We see that the key to the whole pattern is the way that our transitions create a series of oikoumenes, perhaps overlapping. Basically the perception of transitions is paired with the formations they generate: a series of cultural diffusion zones that spread out from the source. This reflects the reality better because it reflects what we always actually see, a series of cultural layers superimposed, overlapping, or mixing elements from different sources. And a civilization is a territorial entity, perhaps well-defined thus, but the development overall of the whole system proceeds by the flow of information which is not so geographically bound. This point is essential, since the Axial Age, as with the case of the account of Israel, produces its effect with a series of geographical displacements, the result being a literary document, well able to travel beyond cultural boundaries. The same is true of Buddhism, which almost seems to extract the essence of Hinduism, and create a universal transcultural vehicle.

The unit of analysis We notice something strange. Development is occurring over a long interval, longer than the individual civilization. Thus, we have a problem with the use of the term ‘civilization’ in the first case, the ‘birth of civilization’. The eonic effect is transparent, and follows the contours of the mainline of development in the emergence of civilization, and at the same time demonstrates the relationships of all civilizations to each other. It is therefore at a higher level than the ‘evolution of civilization’ (whatever that is). Note the singular and plural usage of the term ‘civilization’. We might be better to speak of one World Civilization. World historians, such as Toynbee, tend to think in terms of civilizations as self-contained dynamic units, while anthropologists in terms of cultures evolving in linear fashion. Toynbee posits some very dubious structure for these civilizations. The cultures of the anthropologists are temporal streams proceeding more or less as static kaleidoscopes from the Paleolithic. The only points of evolution are precisely where they cross the eonic effect. We are not really looking at the evolution of civilizations, but of the stepping stone intervals when the eonic sequence finds a civilization in its mainline.

We have a complicated interrelationship of synchronous parallelism visible in the Axial period and the successive transitions of the eonic sequence. We have seen both a sequence in time and a process of parallel emergence in synchronous times. Thus, we notice that our sequence splits in a mysterious synchrony, showing a truly global system at work as our turning points perform a spectrum distribution into parallel streams, as seen already in the Axial Age. How this works we don’t know, but the result is clear, and all of a sudden we see why the Axial Age puzzles us. Our sequence now looks like this, with eight hotspots:

The rise of civilization: Sumer, Egypt
The ‘Axial’ phase: Greece/Rome, Middle East (? Canaan), India, China
The rise of the modern: time-slice sector of Europe

Note, however, that the modern transition fails to show this synchronous aspect. There is an obvious reason for this: as our system globalizes, several transitions in parallel would produce collisions, and the creation of a global oikoumene, for the first time, proceeds better from a single source, if that can universalize beyond its boundaries as soon as possible. A closer look will show a miniature synchronous effect as several different realizations of modernity appear in parallel. Compare France, Germany, Netherlands, England, North America. Our system spawns a whole series of trials, almost like a fail-safe (compare the French and American Revolutions!).

We see that the synchronous parallelism of the Axial period shows us what is happening in Egypt and Sumer: Note the way they show transitions in parallel, just as with the Axial Age. It is not easy to reconcile these two properties of synchrony and sequence until we study the effects of diffusion. If we look at the effect of TP1 we see the way that diffusion proceeds across Eurasia and a whole series of ‘civilizations’ appear in its wake, in times proportional to distance, from the European field to China. In every case we find that the Sumerian/Egyptian diffusion fields is the key influence. This should not neglect the prior cases of just this principle, and the exact application of this to the Eurasian cultures prior to TP1 is lost to us, as yet. It is very hard to visualize TP1, and yet it is almost completely analogous to the Axial case, save that, for reasons related to the inherent logic of development, there is no full Eurasian synchronous effect possible at this early stage. Its first synchronous effect, Sumer and Egypt, is still limited in scope.

TP1: We need to proceed with caution at the beginning of our incomplete sequence. There may be data that is missing. Why aren’t India and China part of this transformation, as in the Axial Age? We can easily see the probable reason why: as our sequence develops its synchronous aspect also expands reaching a full Eurasian compass only later. Thus Egypt is the first synchronous, frontier effect case in our series. At this stage India and China are apparently not ready and don’t respond. However, these statements apply only to the higher development of organized state infrastructure, on the way toward larger and larger, finally global, integrations. It is certainly possible that very advanced cultural elements exist outside this rising eonic sequence, a confusing point at first. Something like proto-Buddhism/Hinduism probably existed very early and outside the later eonic sequence. There is no contradiction, although this would seem odd at first. The answer is that we can’t complete the argument without more detailed data starting at the beginning of the Neolithic. Then we would see more clearly what we already suspect, a very advanced kind of Neolithic religious/pre-state culture with its own transitions and oikoumenes. We should note that Lao Tse in effect protests the effect of the invention of writing ! Very strong verbal traditions not based on writing clearly existed from very early times. Unfortunately the data we have clearly shows the passing away of such traditions as the new technology of writing starts to sweep the field. We have obviously lost a great deal of data from the Neolithic on this score.
Finally, we should note that there are two levels to our pattern, and that civilizations can arise in the diffusion fields of our sequence that have little or no relation to the eonic sequence.

 TP3: We don’t see the synchronous effect in the modern case (except as interior synchrony!). Why? This is a very smart sequence! The reason is obvious: the effect repeated would be disastrous, due to the increased facility of communication. It would produce hopeless confusion and collision. The modern transition stages itself on the fringes of Eurasia, and then moves rapidly toward globalization with the universalist transculturalism generated in the Enlightenment.

A thousand details begin to animate the eonic effect, but can also distract from its basis simplicity. A combination of high-level and ordinary chronicle history can begin to show us the invisible evolution going on behind the scenes of world history.