3.4 Time And Motion
Last modified 07/05/2008
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This approach to evolution and historical is a kind of 'time and motion'
study of the systematics of social change and the place of the free agent in
that context. We look at the relative motions of a larger system and the people
inside it, in the chronicle of an evolutionary dynamic that displaces to the
background in the wake of its own intermittent action, a contextual conditioner
that sets direction, but otherwise marshals the whole like a ticking clock.
Evolution enters from the past into our present and future, and yet is
segregated from current action as an abstraction in the background, in its
complementary aspect as a macro related to the micro. Thus we can depict
modernity as an evolutionary moment, and yet at one and the same time, its
execution occurs on the different level of human free action. This formulation
voids all the hopeless muddle of social and evolutionary theories that have
entered as a kind of noise into the social thought of the modern world, and
allow an upgraded perspective on universal history in the context of science
that was once provided by religious historicism, now beset with the erosion of
its mythological trappings.
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