4. IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY
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4. IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY |
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4.5 Intermezzo: Freedom
Evolves! Huxley’s Evolution #2 |
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We have discovered
Huxley
’s evolution #2, and we are in the strange
position of trying to disprove In fact, we have
produced an empirical counterexample to the claim that freedom in any sense
evolves through an adaptionist scenario.
Freedom evolves
The evidence of the discrete freedom
sequence, and, indeed, the whole pattern of eonic data, clearly demonstrates
that something larger is involved in anything we might call the ‘evolution of
freedom’. In the process we detect something remarkable: a macro component to
this ‘freedom evolution’. The factor of
macro-action
in
the emergence of freedom is discovered unexpectedly, and generates a paradox of
the Kantian type. And that a cautionary tale as we proceed to examine the
‘realizations of freedom’, the factor of micro-action. Our data gives us two
such moments, both at the point of the divide in successive transitions: post-Solonic
Huxley’s Evolution # 2
Problems arise with 1. Selectionist
theory claims that agency or even ‘free will’ in some sense arises in an
adaptive scenario. Yet we can see from the eonic data that there is a macro
component to the question of freedom. In general, we must demand to see
empirical data demonstrating the evolutionary process in action, on the scale of
our hurricane argument. 2. Darwinists often
speak of the ‘gene for religion’, and would have to claim that religion arises
as an adaptive formation. Yet we can see in historical times the way in which
religions arise. There is an explicit process of ‘distributed evolution’ that
proceeds beyond local adaptation toward a global result. 3. Sociobiologists
seem to claim that ‘human nature’ is a given from the selectionist evolution of
the Paleolithic. But this is pure speculation, and we see in history something
far more complex. We can barely define human nature at all, and can see that
historical evolution might be changing that human nature as it goes along. 4. Natural selection
is most certainly not the driving force of world history. Survivors often need
special help in the eonic sequence, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ produces
huge obstracles to a genuine advance, which often does an end run around the
‘survivors’. There are endless
other problems arising with this runaway usage of selectionist thinking.
Adaptation is not the issue. It is time to be finished with Darwinian fantasies.
Survival of the fittest, and competition, and economic action, are not the laws
of macroevolution. All of the advances we see come from high performance
intervals of seminal innovation. And these appear in a developmental sequence. One problem is that
we are so used to a different concept of evolution that it is hard to change our
semantic and verbal habits. And yet we should persist in our usage, leaving open
the option of a completely revised terminology. The reason is that Darwinists,
after denying that their theory applies to history, cleverly or unconsciously
apply it anyway, and in any case the work of sociobiologists now wishes to
Darwinize history. But we can already
sense the disastrous consequences of Darwinian thinking It puts a premium on
social conflict, competition, and misleads those who are confronted with the
ethical potential in all situations. Thus the problem is
the exact connection to man in the Paleolithic. In general, there are several
possibilities. Our eonic sequence is continuous all the way back, and involves
all stages of man’s evolution. Or else it is itself discontinuous and switches
on at crucial stages in man’s evolution (how would it do that?). We can take the
matter no further without more evidence. By showing that more data is required,
we must at once caution Darwinists against the abuse of their theory based on
theoretical hallucination, and the dangers of theoretical tragedy. But one thing we can
say is that the visible eonic effect gives us a snapshot of ‘evolution of some
kind’ and that we see this in history. There is no other possibility, granted
our way of defining the sliding scale (evolution to history). The process we see
has its finger in too many pies for any other type of evolutionary explanation
to work. We can only fit one elephant in a room this size. We would do well to forget We have an ingrained tendency to blame history for our own faults. We can see that the eonic sequence is operating on a minimum principle and is always benign, while the realizations in its wake rapidly turn into something else. If, for example, democracy is an eonic emergent, then anything less loses it status by comparison. As our emergent source areas proceed toward a new liberal civilization they also tend to imperialism in their exteriors, spoiling the outcome, one not benefited at all by wrong-headed theories of the Darwinists. It never occurs to anyone that ‘nature red in tooth and
claw’, as a depiction of nature, can be as anthropomorphic as anything from
religion. Even a cursory glance at the eonic sequence shows an organized and
benign process that is waiting on man to respond with something more than the
usual carnivorous logic. It creates a potential for political freedom, for
example, but man takes millennia to respond, and even then the realization is
inadequate. Best to be forgetting |
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