We have the striking pattern of data we call the eonic effect, seen the connection between history and evolution, seen the evolutionary aspect of the emergence of civilization, and, with the distinction of system action and free action, we have all the elements for our model, and we can see that it is really very simple: a periodization time-line whose structure produces an empirical map of the dynamic driving the eonic sequence. The point is that we can speak of historical dynamics without speaking about historical determinism, and the result falls into place as a useful outline where, on one level, we recount ordinary history as a chronicle of free acts, while on another the theory, or what’s left of it, structures this chronicle without interfering with its account. Our eonic 'time and motion' analysis is done, and the result is 'ordinary history', but with a failsafe. More specifically, we have all the elements of our eonic model in place, and the first thing we are going to do with it is to let it diffuse into the background.

Working historians tend to frown on theoretical history, but we can see that we can’t avoid it, and we have devised a way to answer this understandable objection (look at the Marxist fiasco).  The point of this model is to give us the equivalent of an historical dynamic without speculations about laws and forces. We proceed empirically, but with a particular periodization, and this is solidly based in a set of facts, the eonic effect, with its three turning points. This pattern is a set of facts about the past. The point of this model is to mediate our freedom to act in the future with the clear recognition of some eonic determination in the past. An alternating sequence beautifully resolves this contradiction of historical inevitability. The mechanics part can show a double character, the effect of the evolutionary driver, and the history of free activity that intersects with. As we come to the awareness of this dynamic, it has already switched off in our recent past, leaving free activity in its wake. And once we take this, at first, strange approach, a host of historical mysteries fall into place. The data really does reflect this kind of a system. And we must find a way to mediate ideology in our account. And this often takes the form of teleological claims on the future. Our model protects us from the dangers of such thinking. 

To be blunt: either history is teleological or it is not. If you say it is or isn't, and don't get it straight, you will end up like 'Lenin the day after'. You won't get it straight. We have offered no gimmick solution to this problem, throwing out dogma, but have produced a 'reasonable, empirically based' assessment, looking backward, to mediate this question. And the balance of the evidence shows that, confused by bad Darwinian theory, among other things, historians have gotten this question wrong: we have produced a clear 'deconstruction of flat history' resulting in the appearance of clear historical directionality, contrary to intuition. This is not a new dogmatic, paradigm shift, or hard science. Just a warning that, on the whole, working history has proven consistently wrong here. Now you may think that our series TP1, 2, 3 might be wrong, weird, ideological. Go right ahead, but at least be consistent. Don't claim one thing for evolution and another for history. Don't pay lip service to science, and then sneak in freedom into narrative history. Our all-around 'dialectical' approach reconciles this contradiction with a gesture to a science of history is more than that. We have produced at least one clear non-random pattern, make of what you will, except to claim that Darwinian random evolution is the key to history. Note that our broad conclusions emerge independently of any particular ideology, teleology, or claim on the future. Our model simply switches off in the present. Thus the status of our model is advisory. However artificial our method, it gets results, or at least tills the soil of fallow 'flat history' reasoning. We will even proceed to extend our model with something mentioned briefly: systematic disagreements with our reasoning, 'general TP4 exceptions'. But in fact our eonic sequence solves too many puzzles to be completely off. 

The practical result here is therefore standard narrative history, but with warning. Standard narrative history, however much working historians grumble about theory, will work fine in the short run, and fail as the scale of history expands. You cannot embark on the high seas without a compass and if you do you will get lost. We adopt systematic measures, e.g. our eonic periodization, because, in the end, we must, and this, however strange the rubric, gives a bench mark. We have devised a practical 'universal history', two in fact, that can attempt to clean out the last remnants of 'bad theory' these working historians use unconsciously (hidden theory) and replace that with systematic accounting of time-periods, this to mediate teleological issues. And also to create a buffer against misapplied evolutionary theories decreed to explain history. This approach makes no claim to escape ideology, but since it ends up doing such things wholesale we will have a reasonable balance.

We connected the two ideas of evolution and history, exposed the paradoxes of laws of history, and proceeded to substitute simple periodization, of a special kind,  which is easily adapted to a timeline history. 

Discrete-continuous models We will call this a discrete-continuous model because we see a discrete series of turning points overlaid on a continuous pattern of world history. We call the theorist an eonic observer, and he is usually involved in the 'action scripts' of the system. We have a model that carefully defines ‘theory’ in the present, and which blocks the Oedipus effect  by switching off after the close of our pattern, so that ‘theory’ applies only to the past, looking backwards. This also allows us to consider teleology as directionality, without the metaphysical presumptions that would otherwise arise. It allows us to separate two levels interleaved: if there is a high correlation of the data with the model, then we probably detect a hidden dynamic.

Our model simply takes our three turning points and turns them into discrete (three century) transitions in an eonic sequence overlaid on our second universal history:

Transition 1: birth of civilization

Transition 2: Axial interval

Transition 3: rise of the modern

Note the alternation of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’. Note that last transition switches off in our immediate past, and our current action may or may not express the aggregate directionality shown, which is highly complex in any case, comprising multiple parallel streams. Thus the teleology, if any, inferable from the continuation of TP3, may be quite different from that of the overall sequence.

In practice, this model, taken as a timeline using periodization can simply help us to visualize the eonic effect, and map out its structure.

 We have arrived at the idea of an ‘evolution of freedom’, in a remarkable synthesis of two opposite approaches. The connection arises via a contradiction! And this contradiction arises from the question, What causes freedom? Our data reconciles this contradiction. To summarize, our thinking the temporal sequence of our transitions can only be called 'evolution'. There is hardly another term that is appropriate, notwithstanding the seeming contradiction with the normal account via the basic vehicle of that 'evolution': free activity. Actually our eonic pattern solves this problem for us, and the factor of its intermittency allows us easily to create a construct that can reconcile the seeming contradiction. Thus there is a simple way to blend the two in a mixed 'causality/freedom' system of the type we have mentioned already.

Vehicle/passenger There are innumerable examples of such mixed systems. Think of an ocean liner and its passengers. The ocean liner is the system, the free action of the passengers operates within the constraints of that system. We can use the term 'evolution' for the system, and 'history' for the free action. Note the way the meanings of the basic terms shift: determinism/free will turns into 'system action' and 'free action', the latter not necessarily 'free will'. We don't need to posit free will to study such mixed systems (maybe we should anyway, but the minimum claim is all we need to proceed). 

System and free activity If we are going to make good on the idea of evolution in history we must carefully delineate the action of the 'system' we say is doing 'evolution' and the activity of individuals inside that system. In general this would be a contradictory situation since we consider 'history' to be free activity not influenced by anything else. But in an intermittent or eonic system this problem has an ingenious solution, which we will pursue as we go along: we can use both ideas braided together.
Eonic Observers It is not only legitimate but illuminating to bring the idea of evolution into our recent past, then our present, then even the future. Something strange happens to theories. We suffer a crisis of objectivity, in the way we ourselves as 'eonic observers' are carrying out as 'free activity' the output of the system. If religions, philosophies, or political action show determination in the phases of our eonic sequence, our continuations of that output in the middle intervals has a problematical status. But in fact there is no problem at all, this is an ingenious way to 'do evolution'. 
Evolution of evolution One consequence of this is that, as we have already seen, the idea of evolution, indeed science itself, is itself an eonic phenomenon. It is born among the Greeks (and Indians), dies out, and is reborn in the next step in the eonic sequence, with a timing down to the decades of eighteenth century that is almost spooky. We may legitimately ask if Darwinism didn't distort instantly the reborn idea, Lamarck having had the better idea. Darwin confused the idea with that other eonic innovation, the free market ideology of Adam Smith, or so we suspect. 
There is a problem here. We can't produce a theory using the output of the system in question. We would need a timeless 'meta-theory' that is 'beyond history'. We don't have such a thing. We use the output of the system, Science in this case, to do the 'science of evolution'. Let's hope it works, up to a point. But it is a temporal continuation of the eonic sequence itself. We can however proceed empirically with an 'evolutionary map', an historical description that uses periodization. We may not have a meta-theory, but we can count on our fingers, i.e using periodization analysis, to map out our 'evolution' into history. 

With these caveats we see that the eonic effect is best described as a relationship of evolution and history taken together. Evolution takes the 'system' designation, history the 'free action' response to the system. The eonic effect shows the characteristic ‘rolling out’ (Latin, e-volvere) connected to a developmental sequence that we associate with the abstract dictionary definition of the term. And yet at each stage it is simply people doing something in a particular place and time. 

Self-consciousness/creativity The paradox we have created is simply solved by considering that 'free activity' can change its character, its state of consciousness. These changes are the factor of 'self-consciousness', any form of heightened or altered awareness. In particular the 'creative consciousness' we see in the eonic pattern allows us to reconcile the system action with individual action. The system generates creative intervals. But it is the individuals who carry out the whole thing. 
We must be careful here not to let our system monopolize creative action. Creativity is potential at all times, so we are merely saying that, for some reason we don't know, there is a larger system that impinges on this potential. Whatever else is the case, we are learning that we have a potential, but that it is sluggish. We would want to 'evolve the freedom', or rather 'self-evolve the freedom' to create at any period, and not depend on the eonic jump-start sequence. 

Here is the interesting part: we are suddenly in a head-on collision with biological definitions of evolution. Since this new meaning for the term 'evolution' seems to violate Darwinian usage, we can agree to qualify the term ‘evolution’ as ‘eonic evolution’, as we go along. Eonic evolution is a stepping sequence of turning points. And we tend to separate ‘history’ and ‘evolution’ in our minds as two separate entities. But in fact we are confronted with the apparent contradiction that what we mean by history is also evolution, and what we mean by evolution, at least for man, is also history. This problem becomes acute with the eonic data, since the random flow of historical events is seen to be joined by a larger process operating on a stupendous global scale. We have stumbled on Big History, as macroevolution, with a vengeance. To repeat, we have solved this using a mixed 'causality/freedom' system model, one we are in the process of constructing. But we already have the gist. The next chapter will provide some details.

Of course, it makes no difference what we call our pattern, it is something to be reckoned with in and of itself. But we are suddenly suspicious that on the scale of five thousand years we are one tenth the way from the Great Explosion, and such a large scale process puts a question in our minds about what we actually mean by the 'descent of man'. Whatever we think the phenomenon of the eonic effect shows ‘developmental or evolutionary’ processes that can operate over the long range, act globally via localized transient effects, remember its tracks in a sequence stretching over millennia, involve itself in all issues of culture, from art to philosophy and religion, and this even includes the question of the cultural evolution of political systems. There is something confusing here still, that we will have to sort out. How is the free activity of individuals going to be evolution? Thus, this is not the same as saying that this process actually generates these effects in some determinate matter, and as we ponder the common denominator of all the different focal points of the eonic effect we are driven to a higher level of abstraction where the effect seems one of a kind of relative transformational process, or amplification, intensification. And in that process the free activity of individuals, without determinism, has to remain a relevant factor. As we will see, that's the beauty of the eonic effect, it solves this theoretical problem for us, as we will see. 

Self-evolution? Our 'evolution of some kind' produces quite naturally a successor: the idea of 'self-evolution' of man in the wake of the eonic sequence. This requires pulling yourself up by the bootstraps to actually carry out some evolutionary process induced by the system. We have in fact already invented this idea, and called it 'history' as free action looking for 'real freedom'. 
Micro/macro This self-evolution as history would in fact correspond to the 'micro' aspect of our 'macro' component. Note that microevolution in this case does NOT mean natural selection. It means replicating 'creative self-consciousness' at the highest level of quality attainable in the wake of the eonic sequence. 

Consider just how different this is from Darwinian thinking with its focus on survival of the fittest. Survival is an invariant requirement at all stages, we can jhardly deny that. But it is a gate-crasher that too often interrupts the chances of real development. It is a fact of life, but not the source of evolution. Our 'eonic religious processes' are moving instead to induce qualitative upgrades to 'free action and thence to integrate groups of individuals and cultures over large areas into ethical communities. Injecting selectionist thinking into this mix, well that's life, but it isn't evolution. We have found one source, or example, of the 'evolution #2' that we were looking for. 

 We can put the icing on the cake with two new ideas, that of an observer of our system, and of TP4 exceptions, the freedom of agents inside the system to contradict its action. We can see that in the mideonic periods agents too frequently embark on a wild goose chase. We will pursue this idea at the end.

Eonic observers We have stumbled on a very strange kind of system, one in which we, as 'eonic observers' are also 'eonic agents'. We are defining our very high-level system in terms of its 'action sequences', e.g. religions, political systems, scientific enquiries. But these are also system dependent. We are taking the emergence of religions, the creation of science, the development of political systems as evidence of our pattern. And yet these are open categories free to our modification. It seems to confuse two things. We propose our own action as evidence, yet we are the ones free to make that evidence as we please. This is no trivial issue. The evidence of TP3, modernity, could altered on the spot choosing to undo modernity, quite a real danger since we in fact see such initiatives in our current world culture. 
Eonic agents? In fact, we have defined our material in such a way as to prevent this paradox: we are only making statements about the past. Our transitions are finite intervals, and the most recent one is a fait accompli, and our eonic data is secure. We can regress to the stone age, wreck our eonic sequence, do what we please, but the eonic sequence so far is a fact. We are outside that sequence, in a new state of history, whatever that is.  In fact, as we will see, there is something solid in the eonic sequence. It can slump, deviate, or forget itself, but overall it sets an overwhelming trend in a certain pattern of directionality. Undoing TP3, the project of a host of postmodern conspirators, has shown how the momentum of modernity would be hard to undo. 
TP4 exceptions!? Let us introduce, and pursue in the next chapter, one way to formalize this seeming paradox by considering the possibility of a 'fourth turning point', one freely created by ourselves, designed to contradict the eonic pattern. A gang of irate postmodernists bands together to try and undo TP3. The point here is that nothing in this kind of system forbids this. It seems we should vigorously defend our eonic sequence from this possibility but the nature of a system evolving freedom has to be inherently dangerous. It has no final guarantees. It merely sets direction. The rest is up to us.

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