7. CONCLUSION
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7. CONCLUSION |
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| 7.4 Ends and Beginnings: Out Of Revolution | ||||
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We reach the end of the broad indication of the historical eonic pattern, called the eonic effect, whose structure gives us a strange, and incomplete, glimpse of an evolutionary process that transcends the incidents of civilization, and yet is the source of its generation. Better than 1806 and Napoleon at Jena, the year 1848 can be set as a marker to see if our system, having evolved toward freedom, deviates away from it, as we see looking backward at Roman libertas proceeding to Roman imperium. It would seem nature will not waste further energy on a third attempt millennia from now. What has been shown, as a partial snapshot of such evidence as we have of ‘evolution in action’, speaks for itself, and represents a complete tool for a simplifying study of the evolution of civilization, the rest by conclusion should leave the author’s signature as a leftist perspective, not quite the conservative false wisdom that is likely to inherit the labors of so many to midwife the second broad trend toward equalization visible in world history and recreate aristocracy under the name of ‘freedom’. But what is the left, unless it be the ‘eonic left’ which must include Luther, and such figures as Adam Smith, Tom Paine, Kant, whose classical liberalism so swiftly became the object of Hegelian-style negations for the progeny of Babeuf? In fact, current society has no left, and yet its primordial meaning echoes in Kant’s Challenge, the perfect civil constitution. We are left, not with the phantasms of revolution, but the more general question of creating social change outside of the mainline of the eonic sequence. This is a moment worthy of the comment of Engels, stripped of its capitalist versus socialist trappings: The objective, external forces which have hitherto dominated history will then pass under control of men themselves. It is only from this point that men, with full consciousness, will fashion their own history; it is only at this point that the social causes set in motion by men will have, predominantly and in constantly increasing measure, the effects willed by men. It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. That’s a tall order, but the issue, despite conservative complaints, and the obvious failures of revolution, remains. Such a gesture is not easy to define and precipitous or ill-conceived negation would result in rapid contraction into mideonic slump. And yet we can see that this sentiment expresses correctly our historical dilemma. Our revolution into history will require, to start, leaving aside the creation of a socialist society as a mere exercise, a new aesthetic project, and the ability to generate art movements over millennia, ‘tragic theatres’ on demand, a new Blank Verse Guillotine, perhaps. Weberian rationalization applied to a new aesthetic state? Thence full control of economies, post-Machiavellian politics. It is easy to say this would be utopian. But anything less will, to a high probability, degenerate into mechanized equilibrium. We can see the enigma of the Great Transition, and the inherent inertia of our evolutionary passivity. We are left in the wake of the discrete freedom sequence, at the beginning of our discovery of this freedom. Our large-scale model, closing on the present, tends to skid between the creeping, crawling ur-liberalism of the seventeenth century in the wake of the Thirty Years War and the far left of the nineteenth century, which is just as well, and leaves the reader either in a large library or on the barricades. But a leftist of our own times must ask himself why the initiatives of the nineteenth century far left were unreasonably off the mark and ended in such catastrophe. As against this the great successes of the many labor movements must be added to the account. The reckoning here should long and detailed, and has a huge literature, but we can see right away that an ‘eonic interpretation’, although no explanation at all, suggests on the basis of perspective alone how all the effort in our transition works toward one result, basic liberalism, while the effort, post-transition, to modify this outcome is too thin a soup to start from scratch after the main event, and doomed to jackknife against the momentum of renewal created. We should also note how the implicit prediction of this lurks in Kant’s Challenge, as an ‘antinomy of teleological judgment’ haunts the false sense of an end state. It’s not the end of history but the dawn of a New Age, and if the starting point has a problem we should be ready for ‘mideonic course corrections’. We have consistently critiqued Marx’s theories, but he keeps sneaking back into the picture. It can’t be otherwise, because basic contradictions lurk in the capitalist assembly of atomized individuals seeking to maximize utility. All the refutations of Marx forget a simple fact: atomized individuals at the wrong end of the market game may seek to maximize utility via class struggle and revolution. The classical
liberals turned conservatives inherit a New Age they did not truly create and
will soon destroy, and represent the all those who wish all the benefits of the
new economy and technology while blocking in the name of tradition the forms of
the new society needed, and the freedoms of the many, in the void of the global
system and the limitations of the nation state. Within one generation, this type
adapts quickly to the to the opportunity denounced by Marx, take over of the
state, and begins to press its own case for modernism in the hybrid form
appearing during the Restoration, and so characteristic of the nineteenth
century. An immense incident of
general global development is by probability likely to fall into the hands of
these disciples of Burke, denouncing the Rousseaus, and it is relevant to
consider such men granted so much new power, their times, and, caution against
these disciples, who will be Eurocentric, traditionally religious enough to
repent after business hours, economically self-justified, pseudo-democrats, and
making large profits anywhere the system of laws they so admire are
transnationally not in effect, and are deadly persons armed with a public
relations team proving their championship of Freedom. They can be spotted at
once, attempting to control the definition of ‘liberty’, around their
evasiveness as to equality. They
will create ideologies to justify themselves as the vanguard of evolution,
invent ways to control your thought, and should have done so by now, and can
afford to buy off science. In fact, they will be seen to concoct a very
convenient piece of trashy science propaganda in It is an ironic
commentary on man’s inability to make himself that virtually the entire social
elite was thus blind and resisting to what is happening throughout the entire
genesis of modernism, in the attempt to maintain social hierarchies. It is also
important to remember the driving motion will subside, and leave the chance to
‘free action’, and the danger of reverting to type, at the mercies of these
hierarchies enforcing general economic pressgang with a coterie of Weberian
sociologists, robots with a college education.
The wheel turns as
the idea of Progress is born, but as a script of free action, not historical
inevitability. Within a generation, we see a shift in the character of
modernism, the real object of postmodernist attack, not the Enlightenment.
Darwinism, Nietzsche, imperialism, souring nationalism, marginalist economics,
the rise of the modern style corporation, and the final conflagration of World
War I, fascism, and the Russian Revolution. It is good to be wary. The hard
lesson of history is the regression to inequality. The conservative
effort to stop history in the name of tradition fails to see that five thousand
years of human civilization, despite its extraordinary interest to our eonic
observer, is almost worthless as a guide to the future, which is not the same as
saying that revolution can start from scratch and solve the classic logjam we
see. Far from it, the Bolshevik revolution more than confirms the views of those
who fear simplistic monstrosities in the name of a New Age.
Since by the
structure of the argument we have invoked Kant and given classic liberalism a
one-lap advantage this is hardly bias, but a recommendation to embrace the
entire spectrum of dialectic from Luther to Marx in the year 1848. This year
also sees Schopenhauer offering his opera glasses to a soldier in the
revolutionary broils. Despite his ahistorical Buddhist strain, he stumbled
backwards into another resolution of universal histories. There also we find
Wagner, a cultural derelict of this period, about to proceed from the left to
his reactionary views chasing the phantom of the aesthetic state., an idea
destined to shipwreck at the hands of Hitler. By this point the classic German
philosophy has bifurcated into separate streams as the chaotification of
ideologies proceeds. And the concealed Platonic authoritarianism, Kant only
exempt, and often charged against the metaphysical tradition pitted against the
Lockes, resurfaces with a vengeance to befuddle the left. The situation is not
complex. Our system is injecting a trend toward equalization, Solon, now
Rousseau, both perfectly timed in the mechanization of equalization, and
undergoes a convulsion. Our divide era has passed yet even the abolition of
slavery is incomplete. What are the rights of one class against another in the
woes of world history? It is worth reading Hegel at this point. The credentials
of a conservative noting in some alarm the incomplete and contradictory result
of the liberal systems is unsettling. It is no use speaking of the glories of
the market if King Leopold destroys ten million Africans and there exists no
system to challenge that on a global basis. We see the resulting anger of Lenin
at a critical moment and the even worse futility of the attempted correction.
Marx’s theories are poorly constructed, but his basic insight has proven all too
prophetic. We need not agree with Marx to see the cogency of his critique of
Hegel on ‘Right’, the starting point of his and Engels’ strange career.
But Stalin’s reading of this should remind us that nature in its wisdom shows an
emergentism of renewed natural law theory in our core transition, the tool to
get the job done, prior to philosophical tinkering. But we seem to lost this
option. Nature is waiting for man to produce a system of free and equal men. Five thousand years is enough. But the question of class struggle, so overly tensed, has been rendered an unusable concept, yet it is desperately simple, and the formulations of Marxists themselves seem mystifying: societies show equality or they don’t. If they don’t, and it is easy to check, then class division, if not class struggle, is a fact, to a chorus of massive denials. Class struggle is rare and only really surfaces in the modern period, where, for the first time, organized labor movements show emergentist strength. The climax of the modern transformation falls into place around this dilemma of equality. Suddenly, in the wake of revolution freedom no longer meant freedom, and the books of liberty were found to refashion a plastic subject in multiple meanings. The era of revolution makes manifest the spectrum of liberty and equality in a direct fashion, latent in the earlier periods, but growing stronger in the modern case, visible in the sudden collision of parallel emerging liberal, socialist, and communist systems. The crux is equality. Twice we see this world historical trend ignited at our divide era. And this is something dramatically different from what we are told from the usual theories of evolution. The system is moving to embrace its full population dynamic. And we see the motion against the false average that history shows as society divided, and also as society initiated in the issuance of the primordial State as a partition of powers in the boundaries from law and the liberties of individuals constrained in historical press-gang. We end therefore in the year 1848, whose ambiguities of incomplete transformation beggar easy hopes of the ‘end of history’ conception, and should serve as a reminder of the principle liability warned of by these seminal times, the manufacture of social identity as ideology in the emergence of a new economic order. Our system is not ending, but new-aging. Humanity cannot afford again after two promptings of nature to slide back into a baboonery of lords and ladies.
No ‘end of history’, in the sense of
the phantom Hegel now current (a bit unfair if our model produces a real
interpretation of that phrase), is granted automatically at the onset of a New
Age, and that this is really a play on the idea of the year 1848, as the
ambiguities of eonic turbulence and revolution gave way to the hopes, still
unrealized, of evolutionary realization of a new form of culture in the boundary
of phase and ecumenization and the flowering of technology, economy within this
new cone of diffusion rushing to the world’s furthest shores. We can restate
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