6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY
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6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY |
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| 6.4.2 Econostream != Eonic Sequence | ||||
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Our model produces a strange result, at first sight: capitalism is not a stage of history. It is ironic we arrive at this Marxian echo via a critique of Marx, with none of the vexed issues that forever obscure the insights of this challenger of reigning ideology. Such an insight might as well be a tenet of liberalism, and we note that liberal culture struggled mightily to balance its limits in the hybrid social democratic experiments. In our model, we can spot the problem at once, because we can see that capitalism ceases to have macrodynamic status. We may indifferently say that capitalism, empirically but not theoretically, is a de facto stage of history (because it happened that way) or a cream puff overamped by the eonic sequence, which remorphs what it finds already in its direct path. Any other approach is tantamount to surrender to the egregious mechanized ‘alienation’ that, taken seriously, would rapidly undo the very economic system in question. These systems require intelligent choices at all points, and threaten to degenerate almost immediately into ideologically induced chaos. If the system goes out of control then intervention is required. Ecological disaster? The danger of ‘alienation’ inside an ideology of market laws is dangerous, and conceals a teleological delusion. The unrestricted play of humanly created market laws left on auto-pilot threatens all at once to consume a whole planet. At some point you have to step off the merry-go-round. A market ideologist should rightly claim something for the inherent economic efficacy of such a new economic formation, and produce a plug-in component for our incomplete account. But, to restate Marx’s point in our terms, economic evolution does not represent general evolution, and sooner or later its divergence from eonic sequence will produce distortion. Unfortunately such a statement only applies to millennia. It is thus not surprising that great tension arises at once in the unexpected outcome of classical liberalism. The idea of ‘market laws’ all sufficient to generate cultural evolution in all forms, or as the final arbiter of historical outcomes, has turned into a fetish of theory buttressed by mathematical fantasies. Capitalism rendered into social evolution via Darwinism and the economic interpretation of history is a theoretical mismatch that has completely misled all thinking. A post-Darwinian liberalism ought without delay to rethink its scripts, for an immense counterattack is already underway against all this taken as defining modernity. It is a complete botch of a subject. Why overstress this system designed to produce integration with cockeyed junk theories of evolution, with the egregious infection of Social Darwinism, theories clearly downshifting from the deeper content of the idea’s rebirth, just near our divide? Lamarck had it right the fist time, with a two level theory. As to economics, but not evolution, we have but to see the potential ideal, as freedom realization, in the classical liberalism of such as Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Immanuel Kant, which lasted only a generation, in its climax almost exactly at our divide, to remind ourselves of the difference between eonic determination and free action at work, as the system devolves almost instantly to the regime of economic hyenas denounced by Marx. The future of this system is not predicted by our model, but we can see that the failure of abolition at the founding climax of the American version of democracy proves the necessity of mideonic course corrections, a perilous voyage as the American Civil War makes clear. These botched initial conditions make the rise of the left comprehensible, and inevitable. In any case we are confused by the overlay of eonic sequence and econosequence. Our eonic system has a problem. It is like trying to
distribute a general good via an army of looters. The results are mixed at best!
Our European underdog springing from the fringes of These two levels give us an insight into the confusions of ‘revolution’ with evolutionary thinking. We can clearly see the revolutionary character in some sense of our transitions, but the phenomenon of the modern revolution is more restricted and arises with a particularity that is subordinate to the greater generality of the eonic sequence. We have but to see the emergentism of the first great States in the first to see that our transitions are unique phases of development, and creative incidents, its successors possibly reacting against the starting point. Great confusion arises here because the modern left confuses these two levels distinct in our thesis, and assumes that the ignition of change via a revolutionary transformation of regime will also produce the new culture of the future to go with it. We can see, however, that while our transitions are revolutionary, they are not the same as ‘revolutions’. But the many revolutions of this transition are suddenly seen, against the backdrop of long stabilizing centuries, as though breaking the flow of continuity whose sluggish ‘probable future’ is being preempted. We see why the analysis, by causal explanation, of ‘revolution’ is destined to fail, for the phenomenon is conditioned by eonic determination, yet must realize itself as free action, in the opportunity of Freedom. And yet the passage is made, and the convulsions timed to our transition and divide explode against the inertia of antiquity. It would be easy to take the achievement of freedom for granted and forget the brief launch window, closing if not closed, that we have seen as characteristic in the pattern of complex diffusion and renewal. The issue was resolved therefore by our implicit suspicion, our Freedom argument, that emerging freedom shows eonic determination in the evolutionary eonic sequence, a severe caution to easy assumptions about the efficacy of free action in the post transitional period. |
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