5. SYMPHONY OF EMERGENCE
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| 5.1 The Eonic Evolution Of Civilization | ||||
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Our model is complete, giving us a warning about the confusions of causality and freedom, and can dissolve into the background as our framework turns into a Table of Contents for a narrative account, indeed a metanarrative, more, one of freedom, that entity frowned on by postmodernists. Our emerging ‘Grand Narrative’ eludes these deconstructionists, for they condemn us to flat history, but we should do well to consider such critiques further. Our ‘evolution of freedom’ is so elemental as to be a property of our terminology. In its purely formal aspect as an inference about the relation of evolution to history our ‘evolution of freedom’ springs to life almost by definition of our terms and can put our exploration of detail in perspective alert to the confusions of ideology, our postmodern critic answered, but only up to the point that our ‘evolving freedom’ turns into its ideological temporalization. This purely abstract gesture was amply rewarded by the unexpected discovery of the discrete freedom sequence, a striking confirmation of our procedure. This evidence of historical directionality puts us in the macro history business whether we like it or not. But our distinction of macro and micro-action enforces a new and quite different approach to universal history, and this both embraces and transcends ideology. Our Grand Narrative is not a prophecy of the future, and stops brutally ca. 1848, leaving the rest to micro-action. We need to reset our perception of the eonic effect by moving from the past toward the present. We first started with the modern period, moved backwards, and need to turn around and move forward again, keeping the outline brief, but open to extensions at each point, now armed with a sense of the coherence of world history. Visualizing the eonic seqeuence We need to construct a (meta) ‘narrative’ outline that is as short as possible in order to visualize world history in one sweep generated by new sense of coherence created by our perception of the eonic effect. We will touch a series of eonic emergents and move on at once. This outline is recast as a database in the Appendix and can expand to any length. We begin to realize that because of the immensity of the data involved it would be impossible to prove any theory of history. What we can do however is falsify the ‘flat history’ assumption, and provide a coherent general outline. If flat history fails then a discrete alternation model is the next likely candidate, and here we see an extraordinary correlation. Further, those ignorant of our model are already using it, e.g. in references to ‘modernity’, or the ‘middle ages’, and ‘age of revelation;, the ‘Greek miracle’, the ‘age of the Upanishads’, the ‘birth of civilization’, etc,… Such terms need to be melted down and resmelted in an abstract periodization matrix. Our minimal model devolving to periodization is more than enough to create a robust narrative of Universal History. As we pass through the eonic sequence we detect an overall coordination in world history. Things are acting together. The spontaneous metaphor of a symphony with a conductor has occurred to a number of people. Thus Koestler, referring to our Axial period, notes, The sixth century scene evokes the image of an orchestra expectantly tuning up, each player absorbed in his own instrument only, deaf to the caterwaulings of the others. Then there is a dramatic silence, the conductor enters the stage, raps three times with his baton, and harmony emerges from chaos…[i] That symphony is still larger than we suspected, and the
Axial Age is but one moment in a larger concert originating in the Neolithic, or
before. Our subject is the eonic observer, his object eonic data as a
series of eonic observations, and here Koestler is such an observer. The rise of
modern archaeology is itself an eonic emergent, and the great moment is the
discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s scientists. Within the next century
human historical knowledge will be transformed, especially by the discovery of
the rise of We can focus on our prime objective, demonstrating a non-random pattern, and this without ‘telling the story’ in much detail, just on the verge of narrative description. Perhaps we should stay ‘on the verge’, and generate potential histories wholesale to prevent contraction of vision, a Table of Contents, plus. This will help us avoid packaged sausage accounts, requiring premature interpretations of a host of eonic productions, from the Tao Te Ching to Greek Tragedy, entities requiring an independently expanded scale. We must be wary of superficial interpretations. But, in fact, a generic history will suit our purpose, as long as we constantly zoom in and revise our accounts. But, within limits, all such accounts will share the same coherent holistic structure. Thus we need to find a practical strategy to use our eonic data. The model provides it, at least in principle. Instead of telling that story, we should use our framework to garland a spectrum of different interpretations from several sources. In any case we need to get a feel for the beautiful and elegant way in which our eonic system ‘does evolution’ on the surface of a planet. It ‘does’ nothing, yet everything is done, via the streams of micro-action. If the model seems too abstract, simply follow the eonic periodization. Our model is designed to not get in the way of ‘current action’: no theory with an Oedipus paradox needs to be computed in the present. With no foundation in science, a teleological wild card enters like a serpent into the garden of our discrete directionality. But our model has a fail-safe for teleological presumption and, with its own modest ‘fanaticism’, puts all ‘prophets of the end times’ on Kantian bread and water. The same can be said for the abuse of teleology to justify current action. We have no grounds, for example, for saying that ‘slavery was an inevitable means to an end for early civilization’. We never see the eonic determination of slavery. We do see the eonic determination of freedom and democracy. In general we see that our system over and over injects benign potential and then idles, waiting. Is most of history sawdust micro-action? Our system waits, but perhaps not forever. The Last Judgment is built and requires no theologians. This should not be misunderstood. We have new grounds, suddenly obvious, for reopening the question of teleology in history, and no doubt in biology as well, but our only approach to this is indirectly via directionality over a short range of five thousand years. Teleology is ‘thing in itself’, directionality its representation as a discrete oscillator. The distinction of transitional ‘macro-action’ followed by mideonic ‘micro free action’ forecloses at once on simplistic teleological ideologies. Floating fourth turning points arise in the mideonic eras and try their luck against the far future, the instances of Christianity (and Mahayana Buddhism, in disguise) and Islam being notable examples. Our system is something different from a mechanical device and is about people left to their devices between intervals of a mysterious macro-action. A Kantian antinomy of teleological judgment warns us that a principle of mechanism might fail, but then again so might a teleological antithesis. Our discrete-continuous model neatly slips the noose and does both and neither at once. The form this takes is the alternation of macro-action and micro-action, like children in a school class then released into a playground, tightly focused intervals and relaxation into fields of free activity. These fields, our mideonic periods, tend to spawn systems armed with teleogical ideologies trying to overtake the whole system, e.g. the great religions, and these notably come up short as they collide with modernity. The unexpected appearance of a rediscovered ‘transcendental idealism’, or a crude variant, in our model constructed for an entirely different purpose does not bode well for any closed theory to complete the constructs of periodization. It is not our good fortune to be able to defend this point with a ‘(transcendental) deduction’, and we can take this as a relevant observation about why theories of evolution are intractable. Our discussion of Kant’s Third Antinomy shows the classic back door entrance to transcendental idealism, but this without the formal apparatus that attempts to provide a foundation. Instead of a transcendental deduction we have a sort of ‘freedom hunch’: the data makes no sense from the perspective of ordinary realism. We have a hunch, observing the eonic sequence, and especially the mysterious discrete freedom sequence, of a connection with classic transcendental idealism. Since this is an empirical discovery we can’t enforce this as some dogma or theorem, but if you are proceeding to derive freedom emergence from Darwinian natural selection you would do well to take due notice of the probable waste of effort and the injection of ‘theory trash with an Oedipus Paradox’ into the stream of already spastic history. As we can see the sources of the eonic sequence are never observed, leaving any statement about the mechanism of evolution stranded in metaphysical overreach. The model automatically recreates something resembling, the noumenon/phenomenon distinction, and this makes no statement about the material versus the spiritual, a distinction we will avoid. We can’t hope to replace this distinction of common usage, but its status should be demoted to ‘pidgin English’, at best. Our model distinguishes the eonic determination of freedom, as macro-action, from its historical realization, and echoes Kant’s thematic of ‘transcendental freedom’, about which we can say nothing, and the seeming contradictions of his classic moral theory where the status of the ‘free will’ to act is ambiguous. Although we might embrace the Kantian perspective, our formulation is more general, and claims only that the ‘incident of self-consciousness’ will play donkey to the ‘act of will’, be that a metaphysical phantom or not. That matches our behavior very closely as we struggle in time, unsure of the degree of our ‘will’. Let us at least examine the history of the will, and muddle through with the limited gifts of nature granted in the evolution of consciousness. Nonetheless, since we have distinguished theories from action scripts we might well, acting strategically over and above our model which doesn’t require this, and since we are immersed in this ‘evolution of freedom’, adopt a Kantian affirmation of free will as our own temporal course of action, in the future of evolution. That is a practical question, distinct from theory. |
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