1.5 Descent of Man Revisited
Last modified 05/26/2008
|
Before zooming in to take a closer look at the Axial Age, and the eonic
effect behind it, we need to zoom out and consider the implications of what we
are discovering: a dynamical process of some kind showing a long-range action
over the surface of a planet, involved in all of the structures and variables of
culture, and operating in what seems to be a directed fashion. The sheer scale
of this dynamic must raise some questions in our minds about the category to
which we must assign such a phenomenon.
What we see in the eonic effect is nothing less than a non-random pattern. That is, instead of the purely random happenstance of world history, we begin to detect the action of a larger system, one whose existence was not suspected and whose implications are thorough revision in the way we take history. Not only that, the five thousand years in the range of this perception of structure begins to sit uncomfortably with our outstanding views of the evolution of man. The reason is that anything on this scale begins to become a competitor for our notions about the meaning of evolution. Look at the Axial Age. A relatively sudden set of transformations, with an elusive common denominator, operates over an entire spectrum of cultural regions. These transformations completely reset the flow of cultural evolution in the areas where they occur, and very soon in the adjacent areas into which they diffuse. We cannot simply speak of the cultural evolution of particular civilizations: we see something larger than that, able to work on a larger scale and over a greater length of time. The few centuries of the Axial Age, seen at close range, without any speculative projections, and relatively good data, shows us at once that there is something missing in our standard views of evolution. Entire civilizations undergo rapid change in what by comparison with ordinary scales of evolutionary change are mere moments. A suspicion is beginning to arise, two in fact. First, that what we are seeing deserves the name 'evolution', and secondly that our outstanding data on what we call the 'descent of man' is given a different instance exhibiting the type of process that might have been involved in that. In fact, something is awry in the Darwinian accounts of human evolution. Attempts to posit a 'Great Explosion' based on the anomaly of man's sudden passage to his current species-state have been left stranded in a Darwinian framework. We needed a closer look. Our suspicion is developing then that the Axial Age and its larger framework, the eonic effect, give us just that closer look. We can see that it is fact to claim that over a period of five thousand years a directed kind of 'macro' process is at work in the emergence of global civilization. We need to ask ourselves at this point the meaning of evolution, and to begin to develop a way of looking at the development of civilization in an evolutionary context, even as we start to have considerable doubts about the Darwinian account.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||