Let us restate the issue of a science of history, and explore the way in which we can proceed using the data of the eonic effect as a resolution of this question. Note something odd. We speak of a science of evolution, but seldom of a science of history, save as some potential project for the future. The reason is uncomfortably obvious. The facts of history won't allow us to indulge in guessing games. We have all the data before us (or just behind us) and we get a reality check if we try to produce mechanical schemata with a scientific flavor. In fact, we have discovered the long lost key to such a science, but it is not a standard type of science, it must be what philosophers of history wished to call a 'science of freedom'. 

What's more, if we see the overlap of history and evolution, the question of a science of evolution is going to have to accept a question mark too. A science of evolution? The question of a science of history has remained the elusive goal of those hoping to complete the project of reductionism and bring the totality of the phenomena of nature under one comprehensive explanation. The legacy of physics, as in its elegant Newtonian formulation, forgetting for a moment such later subjects as Quantum Mechanics, suggests that we search for laws of history. The classic problem that arises with this project has always been the contradiction involved in the denial of freedom, and historians, without putting it in these terms, generally operate under the assumption that freedom to create history is a given. We are confronted with a stark contradiction. Either we apply the standard of reductionism to find causal laws and lose on the question of freedom, or we acknowledge the failure of reductionism, renounce the search for laws, and allow a place for the idea of freedom. This involves saying that science is incomplete, and that it can’t explain the whole of reality, history being a peculiar exception. But that’s a very big exception.  We should not renounce a science of history so easily. The eonic effect shows the beautifully simple solution to the dilemma. 

There are two well-known treatments of this question, one from Isaiah Berlin in his essay on ‘historical inevitability’, and another from the philosopher of science Karl Popper, who expresses the issue in terms of the idea of ‘historicism’.

I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history.[Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (New York: Routledge, 1991)]

It is interesting that while there is no term for a science of history, there is a term for the lack of one, the famous term, 'historicism', a term with a complex semantic history, one meaning of which, a la Popper, expresses a critique of any such science. Popper is affirming the freedom pole of the apparent contradiction between freedom and necessity. We are in a strange position, we wouldn't want to associate ourselves with something so disreputable as historicism. But we are about to embrace Popper's objection, and then sail right by it. We will accept the dire warning as to what Popper calls ‘historicism’, but we are not in search of historical laws that would preempt the freedom factor. We don't have to search for anything, we already have the answer, as a pattern of data, if we can understand it. Note the difference. Everyone is looking to extend scientific principles to new phenomena. We are taking some empirical data and attempt to make sense of it, hopefully in a scientific manner. A problem with Popper's statement lies in the way it lumps together 'laws', trends, and rhythms. These are not the same. The eonic effect, we can see, is not a claim for laws of history, but it does seem to show a set of trends, and a definite rhythm. The point is that the latter two don't have to be deterministic. Population trends are semi-deterministic in this sense. They follow exponential laws, but if you announce on the radio that an exponential trend might end badly, then the exponential trend might change. The factor of free action again! Humans could interact with demographic law. 

Actually if you examine the issues carefully you will realize that the term 'evolution' will be in danger of historicism also. The problem is that Darwinists have coined its usage incorrectly, in the process making it a deterministic process of microevolution based on genetics. For history, that won't work. The way we have set up our question rules this out, because the distinction we have made between ‘history’ and ‘evolution’ simply does not suggest that the deterministic approach. One reason, looking at the eonic effect, lies in the stream and sequence interplay. The streams bog down, while the sequence leapfrogs times and zones of space to 'free itself up' to advance. We are fortunate, because the eonic effect warns us that there is such a 'macro' process that is over and above the genetic. A high-level ‘macro’ process works as ‘eonic evolution’, and out of this emerges the ‘self-evolution’, i.e. the ‘history’ of individuals. This is what we have called history. To be sure, there could be some higher determinism behind the facts of the case, which show a contrast of a system and free action. But that would be a strange case. Our distinction holds one way or the other. 

On the other hand, as noted, we do seem to be indulging in historicism in the sense of finding patterns, trends, and rhythms. In fact, there is no real contradiction. We have discovered the ‘eonic effect’, a non-random pattern, but this pattern is not evidence of an historical law. In the first place it is intermittent, on and then off, on again, off again. It couldn’t be deterministic. Second, it shows parallel effects in synchronous diversity, not causality at all.  However, in some sense, there is something that does ‘cause’ the eonic effect.  There must be some ‘explanation’ for it, but it may not be standard causality. We should drop the physics language, ‘cause’, and retreat to ‘generalized explanation’ of some kind.  The result is not a set of laws, but an 'evolution freedom'.  

Another problem Popper has is that of prediction, the consequence of having laws. In fact, in the data we have, the fallacy of prediction is not open to us. We are attempting, looking backward, to understand history. We assume can change the future now and in the present, so, since laws weren't our concern, the red herring of prediction doesn't apply. Note that our intermittent process has come to a stop in our recent past, and left our self-evolution in its wake. So we can only say that in the past some process generated a non-random pattern.  And then it stopped acting. We are left in its wake to self-evolve, i.e. do history. This beautiful properties of an intermittent, eonic, system allow us to bypass the contradictions that beset a science of history. 

 It takes a moment's thought to grasp the distinction between a system and the free action that comprises it in terms of our ordinary experience, where we deal with such systems all the time. Like centipedes we know what we are doing until we go to explain it. The eonic effect shows what seems to be a paradox: it is the continuous record of human free activity creating civilization. Yet once we check the record we discover via some careful accounting of time periods that a hidden helper is at work. And this allows us to distinguish what we call 'system action' and the outwardly visible 'free action'. 

We have already noted the problems with building a theory that assumes free will without a proof that such a thing exists, but we found that, for our purposes, we could adopt a more general requirement, especially if we use it for empirical demonstration, a 'theory of the evidence' (of eonic evolution). The idea of a system, from systems analysis, is usually, but not by any means always, taken as a causal machine of some kind. Operations research, invented in the Second World War to organize projects, made systems of components of men, industries, and organizations, a clear instance of 'free action' entering the picture to displace pure causal reasoning. 

Our first example was the tandem system of a computer and a user armed with a mouse. This hybrid system, really two systems in one, is made up of deterministic machine, and a user who makes choices, conveying these to the machine via the mouse. So the machine starts up, and then goes into idle, then the user inputs a choice, and the machine starts up with a response. This natural alternation of modes very naturally produces just the kind of intermittent short term action we see in the eonic sequence. Clearly our eonic series shows this 'switch off' or idling characteristic of the computer/user tandem system. We have derived a rationale for the eonic effect on the spot, from a very simple example. 

Self-consciousness 

One way to reconcile the contradiction between causality and freedom is via the concept of self-consciousness. This is like the difference between consciousness and the state of attention. Our use of the term is deliberate in the sense that it is evocative of an immense set of traditions for its usage. It is classic, witness the sutras of Buddhism, and yet it tends to disappear from common parlance, and indeed from scientific psychology, which has so much trouble with consciousness that the inclusion of 'self-consciousness' seems egregious. The reason is that self-consciousness is a fragile commodity, it is generally marginalized by the immense inertia of mechanized consciousness. For our purposes, this amounts to saying that is not consciousness, but a change of consciousness, that is the key to innovative action. Men everywhere have always said so, using their own language. Our usage, for deliberate reasons, is designed to be minimal and a little like musical 'two-fingers' instead of a full symphony. The term has immense potential for elaboration. But the gist is always the distinction between mere 'seeing' and 'noticing'. No matter how mechanized consciousness becomes, the bare minimum available to human action, noticing beyond just seeing, is always there. So this is part of our human software. 

The usage here is pressed into service for our eonic model. The resolution of the paradox of historicism is empirically given by the eonic data, and lies before us in something like the electronic ‘on-off’ switch, to match our intermittent or ‘eonic’ data. That’s crude thinking, but sufficient for our large-scale periodization sequence. We have a mixed situation, free agent, and (causal) mechanism. Choice and mechanism operate in tandem. We see our mysterious drumbeat switches on over a brief time scale of centuries relative to millennia in non-contingent evolutionary event-regions. Instead of an on-off switch we see something like ‘switched on’ periods with relative degrees of freedom in the appearance of less conditioned periods able to innovate rapidly. How to proceed with such a strange set of facts? But there is a simple explanation here: change can occur in the agent’s self-consciousness, in the middle ground between determinism and freedom. Look at the eonic effect. Higher degrees of freedom show both deterministic and free influence overlaid. We call that ‘creative action’, in most cases. Note that creativity creates a sense of freedom, but isn’t controlled by its agent. Thus, confusing the question is the fact that ‘free agency’ and ‘freedom’ are not the same necessarily. ‘Choice’ is an observational given, however we explain it. We need not decide about free will to recount the history of ‘choices’, branches of potential outcomes becoming realized. We have the clue to proceed.

Further, as we will see as this logic unfolds, the ‘causal agency’ is trying to ‘cause freedom’. The eonic effect is itself like an ‘evolution of freedom’. This crosses the tripwire into a classic ‘contradiction’ as our subject transforms into something else, that something being somewhere in the vicinity of the philosophy of history. We will see that the eonic effect straddles the twin domains of the deterministic and the emergence of man as a ‘free agent’ with potential freedom. The problem of historicism disappears if we renounce causal laws and predictions of the future, and look only toward patterns of creative action, in the past, taking care to define the transition from this past to the open present. We don’t need a proof of man’s free will, or some scheme of historical laws, and will complete our eonic model  without deciding these issues. But we do need a model that shows some kind of ‘determination’ in our pattern, and yet switches off in the present, for the evolution of freedom must have a free future. Such seemingly bizarre properties are in fact everyday occurrences, and will form the basis of a model. That’s very strange, and only an example will help, make it transparent. The eonic effect is such an example.

The nice thing about this is that it corresponds to the way we do things. Instead of glorious acts of Free Will, we muddle through, push and pull ourselves and our motives in various directions, often against our own desires. This also is 'self-consciousness', a perception or change of consciousness that redirects action, like the act of attention. If we 'notice' something, our consciousness changes and we initiate new course of action. This is how we behave, irregardless of whether we call that 'free will'. The issue of self-consciousness  

 One of the strange consequences of trying to produce, or use, theories in the domain of history lies in the way in which we interact with their implications. They should be predicting what a phenomenon does, but in the case of history they will end by predicting what we should do. Something's wrong. The sudden appearance of a 'should' (according to the theory) indicates there is a possibility of something else happening. And history doesn't work that way. History branches according to circumstance, instead of following some fixed deterministic law. We are back in something like our 'system action/free action' situation, now applied to theories themselves. Below we will bring in the idea of 'action scripts' to distinguish theories from 'scripts of practical action'.

Theories are historical variables, codependent on historical evolution, unable to extricate themselves from time and ideology.  The question must be posed, what do we mean by theory? We take that as a set of causal assertions about how things behave, and the laws that express this are taken to apply to a whole temporal domain, that is as universal generalizations that are 'always true'. This works well with the law of gravity, but not social theory. We are back trying to imitate Newton with social theories. We have already seen this as the problem of historicism. We wish to consider the special case of the historicist paradox when some theory collides with an agent's present. This is not a trivial question since Marxism, if not Marx,  most unfortunately gave us some spectacular examples of predictive theories colliding with their present. In fact the whole question of Popper's historicism, as a matter of cultural history, arose in the context of early Communist/Bolshevik attempts to construct a new form of social economy. 

The basic issue is that any social theory requires, strictly speaking, an exterior observer able to assess the full history of the phenomenon under investigation. But with history he would have to be some timeless ghost, able to see across an immense interval of time, if not all time. And he would have to be spaceless too. Instead, with respect to social theories, we are immersed in the phenomenon under investigation, far short of its endstate, as far as we know, and condemned to create further extensions, links in the chain, of the very phenomenon we are trying to explicate. 

Thus we are confronted the problem of theories: causal theories cannot be made into universal generalizations if they collide with our future. There are always partial exceptions. As we saw, demographic change has an exponential character, and yet, up to a point, the immersion of individuals in this 'inevitability' shows the continuous modification of the law due to human feedback. Some 'inevitabilities' can swamp the potential of free action. But this doesn't really refute our point. This, of course, is not true of theories of physics. The law of gravity will condition our tomorrows and be a given for any future action. But a predictive social theory will not be so fortunate. We can be stubborn, and set out to contradict their predictions. Popper gave a name to one aspect of this in what he called the Oedipus paradox:

The idea that a prediction may have influence upon the predicted event is a very old one. Oedipus, in the legend, killed his father whom he had never seen before; and this was the direct result of the prophecy, which had caused his father to abandon him. This is why I suggest the name ‘Oedipus effect’ for the influence of the prediction upon the predicted event.

This idea would apply to any system that uses the idea of historical laws. We must modify our definition of theory to deal with this. As we have already seen, we are not dealing with historical laws, and, furthermore, all of our data on the eonic effect is a description of things that happened in the past. Our objective was to consider this data in the context of 'evolution' applied to history. In an of itself this is a valid procedure, since merely stated that certain things happened prior to our present. We defined a category of eonic observer, as a special case of the historical observer, and made him describe a series of transitions, the last of which is connected with modernity. But we were careful, in fact, to distinguish the transition to modernity (whatever that is??), from the age period itself, and to make the completion point of the transition to this age period a definite moment in the past. As it happens, it was the data itself that drove us to do this, so we are given grounds to consider that the eonic effect conforms to a system that avoids the Oedipus Effect. It does this very simply, and we can bring in our idea of 'system action/free action' to describe our transitions. The transitions generate a kind of system action, the intervals in between them being free action, and, most conveniently, the last episode of the system action being in our past. Our system seems to switch off leaving free action in its wake. Thus the past shows elements of a system, but the present switches to the free action category! Very ingenious! Any theory we construct will apply to the past, and our future will be 'free action'. No predictions are made by the theory! Problem solved.  

 Predicted socialism/communism The question of Marxism is quite complex, often influenced not by scientific as much by Hegelian, e.g. dialectical philosophies, and doesn't really correspond to Popper's slight oversimplification, except in the positivistic form of the Second Internationale. But in that form the dramatic paradoxes of prediction theories stood out: the historical inevitability, as predicted, of some new socialist society as the next stage of history left its agents with the undecidable question clearly debated by such as Kautsky and Lenin: should we wait for the 'causal' sequence to take place automatically, or should we be actively at work to bring this about? This tragic equivocation completely scrambled the whole Marxist project and the brains of the revolutionaries. 
An eonic type of model distinguishing (purported) 'system action' (the transition between stages, if any, Marx's stages) and 'free action' (the action of individuals working toward social change in their present as 'free action' after the last know stage transition seen looking backward), would not suffer these problems. But such a model would be unable to predict a future stage, since this is now 'free action', not 'system action' and would require construction according to some plan of action, stated in advance and cash on the barrel as to details, an immensely difficult and intricate task, on the order of the eonic sequence itself, one that confronted Lenin the day after he seized power. This is not in turn, please note, an ideological justification for the 'inevitability' of capitalism. Maybe after the Bolshevik fiasco we have learned the lesson about historical inevitability! Or maybe not.

To base our model on a classic ideological battle of ideas would seem to make it hopelessly ideological in turn. Not quite the case.. None of this is any endorsement of a particular social economy, and we have seen that the 'sequence of economic systems' is a subsequence quite different from, and often redirected by, the eonic sequence. However, our TP3 is strongly correlated with the emergence of modern capitalism, the original reason Marx began to think in terms of a sequence of stages of economic societies. But his reductionist economism misanalyzed the question of stages. 

Natural Selection and The Oedipus Effect Although natural selection is not often stated as a 'law of biology' it is for all intents and purposes taken that way. Thus it immediately generates an Oedipus Effect, which is what we call Social Darwinism. Natural selection is not a predictive theory, but our beliefs about natural selection contain a subtle prediction about what will happen if we ‘act out the theory’. The reason is that we claim it happened that way in the past. If we assume that natural selection is ‘how things are’, the source of all higher complexity, we put a premium on its ‘mechanism’, e.g. competition, and the ‘acting out’ of selectionist presumption as a curiously inverted ethic. We should be wary that something is missing in our understanding! Clearly the generalization about selection must be false, somewhere. We can see from the eonic effect that 'eonic evolution' doesn't operate by natural selection. Quite the contrary. If the rules of the game were survival of the fittest the long term result is mideonic sluggishness with the deviations in direction and the action of the strong going unchecked. 

We can see how the same dynamics of 'evolution seen looking backwards' is misapplied into a generalization about the future, with Social Darwinist thinking coming to the fore. Clearly the confusion lies in the assumption we have a 'law of evolution' driven by natural selection. Getting people to compete in the present to produce bigger brains, since that produced once produced bigger brains, is simply a hopeless muddle, yet such thinking lurks beneath the surface in current Darwinian biology misapplied to social history, the present of free action. A failure to take into account a different and broader definition of evolution results in the collapse of theory into selectionist oversimplification. 

 The Paradox of Theory

Before finalizing our model we need to make clear the way in which it differs from standard thinking about what such models are. We are not computing causal sequences, but making qualitative judgments about the degree of consciousness or creativity in ‘sequences of action’. Thus we encounter still another problem with our attempts to do theories. The problem is that theories are themselves output of our system. Science itself is a stream inside the eonic sequence, showing the pattern of system action. As we look backward at the Axial Age it is clear that the outcomes of our eonic transformations are sequences of action. Some of those sequences of action are people producing theories!

Action scripts We are going to replace 'theories' with 'action scripts'. Look at the Axial Age: the outcome, or to use somewhat outlandish systems language, the output of  the system is a series of 'action sequences', people doing things with a new ideological complex. Look at the Old Testament. It is a procedure of action, or the potential for a series of such, that emerges from our transitions. Consider the same for emergent Buddhism, or Greek democracy. In the modern period we have the striking drama of freedom, emergent liberalism.

Another classic case is the emergence of liberalism, or better the 'liberal spectrum' (we can include its leftist descendants in the varieties) in the modern transition: this is a series of philosophies of action connected to the idea of freedom, etc...  Note that these philosophers are fully adapted to practical action and are predigested and left in viable by our eonic system. It is only later that the idea of 'social theories' arises as a red herring orphaned by positivism to confuse the issue of 'how we should act' in the social sphere. Below we look into the case of Marxist mistakes in this vein. 
Note that our eonic sequence spawns two categories in parallel, the scientific theoretical line and the religious/social/political. The attempt to reduce the second to the first is one of the first confusions arising in the wake of modern transition. 

Note that the output/outcome of our transitions are people doing new forms of activity. The output is action, according to some dramatic theme, or script. That is, these actions express values. It is no accident that modernity gives birth to philosophies of freedom in parallel to the scientific revolution. Kant is very clear on this, and on the way to mediate the two. 

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