4.3 Man Makes Himself

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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  4. IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY  
    4.1 FISHER’S LAMENT  
       4.1.1 Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism    
       4.1.2 Causality, Freedom And Self-consciousness  
       4.1.3 Deconstructing Flat History  
    4.2 HUXLEY AND SOCIAL DARWINISM  
       4.2.1 Ideology And Theory: The Oedipus Paradox  
       4.2.2 Conflict Theories: Incredulity Toward ‘Infranarratives’  
    4.3 MAN MAKES HIMSELF  
       4.3.1 Macro-action And Micro-action  
       4.3.2 The Evolution Of Freedom  
       4.3.3 Theories, Dramas, And ‘Action Scripts’  
       4.3.4 The Economic Interpretation of History  
       4.3.5 A Certain Strangeness: Beyond Space And Time?  
   4.4 KANT’S CHALLENGE  
      4.4.1 The Challenge Resolved And A Kant Fix  
   4.5 INTERMEZZO: FREEDOM EVOLVES! HUXLEY’S EVOLUTION #2  
      4.5.1 Free Will, Action Scripts, And Self-consciousness  
ENDNOTES  
   4.6 CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL REASON  
      4.6.1 Kant’s Question, Teleology, And Asocial Sociability  
      4.6.2 Hegel, Marx, And The Legacy of Dialectic  

We need to pursue further our discussion of questions of freedom and necessity. It takes time to get the knack of distinguishing a system of macro-action and the free action that makes it up, microaction, especially if changes of consciousness are the only clue. And yet we make this distinction all the time. The eonic effect gives us such a massive wallop that we get a clue to structure we didn’t expect, but only over the long range, millennia. Yet we do this all the time with economies. We speak of free agents, then speak of the ‘behavior’ of an economic system.

The basic issue is very simple, and should be taken empirically by looking at world history with one simple (theoretical) question, Does man make himself? Thus we can restate the whole issue in intuitive form, using the title of a book by Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself. To say that ‘man makes himself’ implies that ‘freedom to do so has already evolved’. But questioning that was one of our starting points, and we can see already from superficial inspection of our turning points that emergent civilization has a hidden driver, and that otherwise it tends to sandbank, slow to a crawl, medievalize, drift from initial states of high advance, degenerate into empire, lose its initial advances. Man enslaves man, while we will see that our discrete freedom sequence (the double emergence of democracy) comes to the rescue twice in a row, and also includes the emergent ‘abolitionism’ by correlation in its ‘eonic effects’.

Notice that science and democracy are born in ancient Greece, then die out until our next turning point. The Roman Republic goes from bad to worse as libertas becomes imperium, and then everything seems to collapse in a Dark Age. There is even a tendency to think decline a form of advance. So the issue is complicated, and we see that while man is the only candidate to self-create his own freedom, make himself, and civilization, there is a helper-driver visible by looking backwards at the globally interconnected way in which advance seems to alternate intermittently. This is a limit on the idea of freedom, and we must be wary not to ‘alienate’ ourselves in a system of determinism in the name of evolving freedom. The answer is simple. Such a system must terminate, and leave man on his own, evolution must become history. That point must come as we begin to observe it, ready or not. And our model will automatically take care of that, in the short term. It switches off in the recent past, as theory goes out the window and is replaced by free action, free or not.

Reverse engineering the eonic effect The pattern we have discovered is one of three turning points taken empirically. It’s obvious, but does it make any sense? A close look shows us that we can try to produce a deduction for this after the fact. And that follows our question, does man make himself? Note that determinism could not produce freedom, while the absence of any ‘determination’ at all would leave only static doldrums among helplessly passive creatures. Thus we need a middle ground process that operates on different degrees of freedom, preferably one that alternates between higher and lower determination, completed by an ‘end of evolution’ turning into ‘history as freedom’. Thus, one way to do this would be intermittent action, switching between system determination at a higher degree of (induced) freedom (or self-consciousness) and simple free action without any interference at all. In some amazement we discover that this is almost exactly what the eonic pattern shows.

That’s a fair description of what we see in the eonic effect. And it produces a characteristic ‘eonic sequence’ as the mainline of emergent civilization.

Upon reflection, we realize that ‘evolution’ on the surface of a planet is not something simple, and that the eonic effect shows one of ways this can happen, one of the simplest and most plausible, however extraordinary. Darwinists just snap their fingers, things just happen. We see that a driver is needed, and a very delicate one that does not overdetermine or underdetermine what emerges. And at some point, like a jump-start process applied to car, that determination process has to yield to a completed or ‘free’ process, i.e. the cars starting, of our evolution turning into history. The gist of it is that the whole can efficiently evolve through the parts, which show intervals of ‘system action’ or eonic determination.