Selections: In Search of History

Historical research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is an unexpected discovery: that of a process of universal history in the action of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern . We call this the eonic effect . Further, the scale of this process is such that we can only call it ‘evolution’. Thus, for the first time we can detect the unmistakable evidence of non-random evolution, and this in world history itself. This leaves us with the question, What is evolution? And this forces another, long overdue, What is the relationship between history and evolution? This could be recast as the paradoxical question, When did evolution stop and history begin?

A moment’s reflection will tell us that no instantaneous passage between the two is plausible and that our terms have been left ragged. We must, by this logic, be able to detect a Transition between evolution and history. Can we find evidence to match this deduction? Indeed, we can, our non-random pattern, the eonic effect. In fact we can say more: if we apply that same logic to our Transition we should expect it to take the form of a series of transitions in an alternation between evolution and history, as if overlayed, the one emerging from the other. The eonic effect shows just this property of transitions in a series. Have we reached the end of the Great Transition ? If not, then our evolution still constitutes our present and future. We should ask who man is, with such wisdom as would constitute achievement of the title, homo sapiens.

Our thinking is conditioned by Darwinism, which throws ‘evolution’ into the past, with a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. The result is an enforced incoherence. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of a science of history in the large, and/or any attempt using the philosophy of history to seek historical meaning. A further critique of the idea of universal history comes from the postmodern rejection of the Grand Narrative .

In this context the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper in his critique of historicism insisted, with his rejection of the idea that history has meaning. Yet as the labors of archaeological research proceed a falsification of this perspective emerges. Karl Popper was wrong: history has meaning, and we can discover large-scale coherence in its unfolding. It is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic.[i]

As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us an insight into the descent of man. We must move beyond the myth of purely genetic evolution, and the fixation on natural selection. We can recalibrate our definition of ‘evolution’ to include man’s past, present, and future, with a new kind of model that can carefully define the nature of our evolving freedom.

The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery. There is something almost mythological in the projection of Darwinian scenarios of natural selection onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids stretched over millions of years. Dogmatism in such a situation takes on an almost religious character in Darwinists. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of natural selection and adaptation. Such claims, pressed into service for metaphysical conclusions, are weak in their evidentiary basis. In contradiction to this, flagrantly out in the open, is the evidence of a Great Explosion in the period around 50,000 B.C. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage, if we can trust the data, call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution ’, as opposed to ‘microevolution’. Is not Darwin ’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a very detailed record of evolutionary sequences, and this invokes a crisis of correct observation.

We are ready to take a look at the evidence for non-random evolution in history itself, mindful of the distinctions we think we should or should not make between cultural and biological evolution. There is an irony to our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here, or that history itself shows the direct evidence of evolution.

In the Introduction, after a look at the Old Testament in the light of Biblical Criticism , we will examine the intractable Darwin debate , the problems with Darwinism, and the theory of natural selection. The rise of the Intelligent Design movement has further confused the issue, as the basic critique of of Darwinism is coopted by religious groups pursuing their own agenda. The metaphysics of design distracts thinking from the basic issues: the rightness of evolution and the limits of natural selection. This question is one of secular science, and is not resolved by the injection of stealth theism. Although our perspective is secular, our enquiry is a multi-dimensional search for answers, and not the imposition of a single perspective. We will simply bypass the sterile debate of theists and atheists.

There is something preposterous in the claims for universal explanation using the sole principle of natural selection. The inability of Darwin ’s theory to explain the emergence of consciousness, let alone the complexities of an ethical agent, has been noted since the first reviewers of Darwin . There is a suspicious resemblance to the ideology of classical liberalism in the whole claim. The basic problem is a failure to apply scientific standards at the limits of observation. Truly observing evolution is very difficult, and the hints of something called ‘punctuated equilibrium’ suggest the presence of a missing factor. These difficulties were acknowledged by the co-founder of selectionist theory, Alfred Wallace , who broke with Darwin on the issue of the descent of man. Indeed, an entire component of human evolutionary psychology, visible in the Buddha phenomenon, is never even addressed in the standard theory of Darwin .

We conclude the Introduction with a look at the classic critique of metaphysics by the philosopher Kant, whose warning that a dialectic of illusion in the discourses of divinity, soul, and free will precipitate the deadends of rationalism and empiricism, virtually sums up the Darwin debate at a glance. Kant’s place next to Newton in the emergence of science is often thought of as a conflict of science and philosophy, but Newtonian metaphysics was itself corrected with the Kantian deliberation on causality and freedom, as if to project the future of a science of freedom. And yet an amnesiac positivistic scientism has moved to hijack the Scientific Revolution in the promotion of a theory with an ominous component of Social Darwinism .

In Chapter Two we present the evidence for a non-random pattern in world history, the eonic effect, and then connect the ideas of history and evolution. It is strange that we assume the unseen vistas of deep time to be the domain of random evolution while world history, since the invention of writing, fails the randomness test. Two non-random patterns in one, parallel and sequential, the data of the Axial Age and the unmistakable progression of an intermittent macro dynamic or driver, the pattern of the eonic effect, can be seen as a series of discrete transitions and show an almost canonical instance of what we can only call ‘punctuated equilibrium’, if we can rescue the term from its current genetic definition. Darwinism was always at risk, as even the early, and true founder of evolutionism, Lamarck, realized, from its failure to distinguish microevolution and macroevolution. The clear presence of a macroevolutionary component to world history should give us a glimpse of how evolution really works. The result is an elegant portrait of ‘(eonic) evolution’ as the interplay of two levels, macro-action and micro-action.

With the discovery of the basic or core eonic effect we are in essence done, we have shown the existence of a form of non-random evolution. But the implications of what we have found require an expansion of the scale of observation applied to the emergence of civilization. The text proceeds to the construction of two general outlines of world history using periodization, in Chapter Three and Chapters Five and Six, concluding with the modern transition. On the way, Chapter Four examines the eonic model in light of the philosophy of history, showing the connection to a classic essay on history by Kant.

We can construct a simple model of the eonic data by first demonstrating the connection between history and evolution, and then showing how two levels are at work in the driving action of an ‘eonic sequence’. Although the eonic effect is the model , so to speak, as a descriptive device of periodization, the terms of description themselves are historically embedded, and we consider the notion of an eonic observer, many of whose observations are seen through the filter of the eonic effect itself. This paradox must haunt the scientist as he becomes himself an eonic observer, and agent, in the realization that science itself is the product of eonic evolution.

We then adjoin, on the sidelines, a falsifiable frequency hypothesis to both illuminate and possibly extend our eonic pattern into the Neolithic. Once we have our basic, descriptive, model we then recast it as an ‘idea for a universal history ’ and this to a rubric of the ‘evolution of freedom’. In the process the curious history of the birth of democracy, as an aspect of the so-called ‘discrete freedom sequence’, shows us something spectacular, a hidden structure to world history that we could not have suspected. As we proceed we discover first the clear pattern of historical directionality, as evidence of a teleological wild card lurking in our data.

To handle this unexpected realization we proceed both to an examination of Kantian thinking on the complexities of teleological thinking, and to a critique and correction of a basic confusion or ambiguity in Kant’s philosophy of history centering on the impostor he refers to as ‘asocial sociability’. Kant was righter than he knew, yet miscasts his historical thinking as a metaphysical theory of social conflict. We claim that Kant’s ambivalence here was a sign that he was not proposing a solution but asking a question, one that only the coming future of archaeological research could answer. Sure enough, as we pull away from the modern transition, and a picture of the emergence of civilization crystallizes, we inherit for the first time a unique data set, five thousand years in length, the first such evolutionary record at the level of centuries, and this must force us to revise our views of history. The early intuitions seen in the Old Testament, to which we now must turn, are thus suddenly seen in a new light, and can be recast as an anticipation of our eonic analysis, available to us only in the passage of a greater time, whose ampler chronicle detects the spectacle of an unseen universal history of man, the once and future evolution of man, past, present, and future.

[i] Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1991).