One of the most significant aspects of the modern transition is the appearance of the phenomenon of (political) revolution. The Reformation itself is a revolution. Behind the Reformation we see the German Revolution of 1625. The English Civil War essentially initiates modern politics, as its influence become clearly visible in the American and French Revolutions. And then our transition is complete and the era of the very different and disastrous Russian Revolution, which is strangely out of character with the revolutionary episodes of the early modern.

The character of these revolutions is clearly seen through his own lenses by Karl Marx, who codified them, rightly or not, as exemplars of ‘bourgeois revolution’, since the whole period is accompanied by an 'Industrial Revolution'. If ever there were a clear case of our distinction of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’ it is the contrast of the revolutions of the early modern which give birth to the world of liberal democracy and the superficially quite different and theoretically flawed revolutionary adventurism of the Russian revolution, whose net effect, however, with hindsight, is one and the same ‘bourgeois revolution’ that we find in the early modern. These theories of revolution did not correctly analyze the nature of the modern transformation. All in all, the insights of a figure such as Burke as strangely confirmed and discredited at one and the same time. The pre-modern world was not slowly evolving toward anything, thank you very much. But then, as if on schedule, the eonic sequence produces a new order of society in three centuries, and comes to a stop. Constructivist efforts to imitate this phenomenon of nature by taking it one stage further produced disastrous results. And the system, its agents understanding nothing, settles back into its peculiar stage of dynamism and stasis that we see already by the nineteenth century.

The question of revolution can be very confusing due to its later leftist interpretations, which attempt, as if in a partial eonic analysis, to see the essence of historical dynamics in revolutionary terms. In many ways we have resolved this issue and done it right. As we examine the eonic sequence we can see that, while its transitions are certainly revolutionary, they are not the same as revolutions in the political sense. The eonic sequence changes its character in successive phases, and the first phase that we see shows the establishment of states, not revolutions against them. A close look at the Old Testament and the class struggles of the Greek city-states in the Axial period shows already the gestation of the modern phenomenon of revolution. Once again the distinction of our two levels illuminates the question by its immediate generation of a distinction between 'revolution as system action, almost a metaphor for the process of a transition, and 'revolution as free action', the actual incidents of revolutionary episodes, whose outcomes are all too often failures.

Our model thus faithfully reflects the way in which the early modern revolutions succeeded in spite of themselves. The spectacular rebirth of democracy, almost an historical miracle in itself, just at the modern divide is the great enigma to which we have already pointed.  It is as if our eonic system goes just so far and stops, even as the reaction to its central outcome, the capitalist world of modernity, produces a demand for the ‘true democracy’ in the form of socialism/communism. In the light of our eonic analysis there is something completely transparent about all of this, and yet the actual history here has produced a thorough confusion. Part of the ambiguity is that we are immersed in a system whose outcome has not yet achieved a final state, and the terms of our analysis fall into ideological alternatives.

We have constructed our eonic model, we should note, on the classic critiques of revolutionary leftism seen in Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin: the confusions of historical inevitability. But then an illusion of the historical inevitability of capitalism arises in its wake, and this, later matched with Darwinian thinking, produces a misleading picture of what is going on. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of capitalism, even as it is clearly the first born of the modern transition. Part of the problem is that one can be over-exact about the nature of the eonic sequence. A prodigious upsurge of directed change has no precise outcome and frantic efforts to re-revolutionize the outcome in a better form appears in the general chaotification of the dynamic era, soon to become frozen in its new economic mode.

We note that our transitions succeed almost in spite of the revolutions they spawn. And yet over and over these failures are followed in successive generations by the at least partial realization of their aims. These transitions are a far broader integration of cultural renewal than the revolutionary gestures of radical groups. The confusion arises when we try to generalize these particular episodes as 'laws of history' in some sense. This confuses the different levels of our model, and the intractable nature of real social change became evident in the attempts to force the future via political action. This point is clear from the American Revolution whose appearance under frontier conditions at the fringe of our eonic core area allows a more benign version of revolution to actually achieve a result. By comparison the French Revolution collides with an immense inertia and miscomputes itself into chaos.

An additional confusion arises from the failure to distinguish economic processes from the more complex transition to a new culture that we see in the modern transformation. The Industrial Revolution is a creature of the modern transition, and not the other way around. Karl Marx, with his acute insights, almost got it right, and then produced a reductionist economic interpretation of history that proposed a new stage of history considered as socialism/communism. The problem is that we have no real basis for such a prediction. That is, the attempt to mimic the dynamics of the French Revolution to initiate a new stage of culture beyond the outcome of the modern transition itself results in an ill-conceived expectation of what constitutes historical dynamics. This is not a justification of capitalist ideology, which in any case gives only limited definition to what we call 'modernity', but an observation that a 'transition to socialism' would have to operate at the level of the 'eonic sequence' itself, an operation several centuries in length, able to seed philosophy, art, science, religious reformations, and, indeed, revolutions of freedom! And yet the leftist perspective that arose just at the modern divide does indeed express a sense that our modern transition terminated before its full potential was complete, as if it ran out of time to complete its operation. But that, as we have seen, is characteristic of every stage of our eonic history whose dynamics are at once a strange mixture of the exact and the crude. And we are indeed left to complete its action, and yet this requires correct understanding of what is required, a difficult task by any definition. The simple resolution of this is to see that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ arise almost in tandem with the definition of ‘democracy’ and express the nature of its potential, realized or not. The leftist efforts, beyond the ideologies of revolution, to defend the place of labor in the new economic systems were an indispensable contribution to their success.

As examine the modern transition we should consider the central correlation of abolitionism with the eonic sequence. Finally! one should think. Clearly this is no accident. We should keep vividly in the mind the sluggishness of historical development seen in world history, and the dangerous forms of social existence that arise and grow like a pathology of civilization. Only a system on two levels can obviate such dangers, and by the mysteries of emergent freedom in the eonic sequence a false evolutionary development is finally overcome. And there is no teleological innuendo in our eonic model that justifies the exploitations of slavery ‘on the way’ to higher development. All such teleologies disappear in a discrete-continuous analysis of the eonic type. Slavery could as well have been abolished in the age of the Pharaohs, and Gilgamesh. Instead a pathology slowly but surely grows on itself resulting in the terminal conditions of slave societies so visible in the Roman empire. There was no advance from that point. Everything simply collapsed, as if to wait on the passage to a new higher stage of civilization, waiting on abolition.  If it took so long, and occurred only in the wake of the eonic sequence, then we have a judgment of men left to their own devices, and a caution is sounded against those who will arise in the mideonic worlds to take history into their own hands and undo the effects of historical macroevolution. The early exploitations of emergent capitalism give a reminder of the way the system left to itself can realize itself in a manifold of outcomes, and the demands of leftist action arose instantly at the moment of potential false crystallization to preempt the usual dismal outcome of man’s chronic domination by the forms of state and economy.

 One of the most remarkable properties of our eonic model is the way that it allows us to clarify the question of economic in relation to cultural evolution. In fact, the concept of ‘cultural evolution’ is ambiguous, and we have replaced it with something more specific by creating the rubric of the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’, a very large-scale process indeed, without this obviating the consideration of other forms of ‘evolution’, speaking no doubt informally, in the proliferations of the term ‘evolution’.  This can be seen in our distinction of stream and sequence, which is conveniently flexible and demonstrates an overall ‘master sequence’ of macroevolution, inside of which we see many streams undergoing their own historical narratives or possibly even ‘evolutions’.  This idea of these streams can be taken in any number of ways. We spoke of the stream of Greek history, but we could isolate any set of factors as a stream: the science stream, the philosophy stream, the religion stream. The inherent power of our model can be seen in the way this distinguishes clearly the ‘stream of religious history’ from the ‘eonic evolution of religion’. It is very hard to distinguish the character of early proto-Judaism, i.e. Israelite history in the Axial Age or transition, from the mideonic appearances of other religions. But we see at once that our model does just this and makes the point clear.

Thus we can take the ‘stream of economic history’ or what we can call with a specialized term, the ‘econosequence’ (this is the term from the first edition, but ‘econostream’ might have been better), and study this in relation to the eonic sequence. We could do the same thing with the history of technology, the ‘technosequence’. We can then proceed to study the history of economic systems or technology, or anything else, independently or in relation to the eonic sequence. As we consider the eonic effect and the eonic sequence of transitions we notice that its prime character is cultural in the broadest sense, and only secondarily involved with the evolution of economies. The great and confusing exception is the place of capitalism in the modern transition. So to speak, the econosequence and the eonic sequence come into conjunction and with a thunderclap effect modern capitalism springs into existence, and what’s more just at the Great Divide. This tends to make us associate capitalism with modernity, which is misleading. It also makes us think that the tremendous momentum of this new economic formation can be generalized across history as a master dynamic. In fact, that confusion was in part our starting point as we examined the influence of economic ideology on the gestation of Darwinism.

In our approach we are clearly able to see the limits of the so-called economic interpretation of history. Here the historical systematics of Marx tends to foist an incorrect generalization on the diversity of world history in the midst of trying to get the matter straight. In light of the eonic effect it is hard to maintain the suggestion that it is the economic means of production that drives the whole process of social evolution. The Axial Age shows the many exceptions.  Religions are more than economic cover stories, quite obviously, and we see that the many innovations of our second transition take place in their great diversity against the backdrop of still, by modern standards, sluggishly indolent economies, unable to extricate themselves from slavery. We should be careful here, since, as a descriptive methodology, the economic interpretation is almost a tautology. In every case, a society will clearly reflect the context of the means of production. But that does not work as a master dynamic driving the whole.

Nevertheless, Marx makes a tremendous significant point, almost the same point we making, which is that social evolution is something greater than the question of its capitalist realization in modern times. Let us consider the point in terms of our model. The first issue is that modern capitalism doesn’t really (depending, of course, on how you define it) come into existence prior to the abolition of slavery. But how does this occur? Once again, amazingly, we see that abolitionism appears in our modern transition, indeed, starts its great initiative just at the divide! In fact, we can see that this is just another aspect of our discrete freedom sequence. It is obviously no coincidence that it works out this way. But consider then the question in terms of the ‘eonic sequence’ with its interior discrete freedom sequence.

This is a process of evolution at a higher level than that of the emergence of economic systems. And just at the point of the achievement of this new freedom capitalism of the modern type begins its existence. This, we should note, is how the early generation of emerging liberalism took the matter. Capitalism, to Kant, Thomas Paine, and Adam Smith, was a question of economic freedom. We see how the whole disposition to a new form of economic organization is a definite ‘eonic emergent’ in our sense of some cultural factor showing transformation in relation to the eonic sequence. The distance between Adam Smith and Karl Marx is not so great, and the dialectical reversal arises instantly in the fluidity of the potential of freedom. We see how the crystallization of freedom bifurcates into libertarian and collectivist versions. We need to stand back a bit to see the remarkable way in which the potentiality of freedom at the Great Divide begins to issue into its realizations in dialectically diverging ways. It is a fairly straightforward question of the differing combinations possible in what we define as ‘democracy’ and this in the context of the new capitalist means of production.

The point, in this vast discussion (and our model can adapt itself easily to the many discourses here), is that capitalism is a sub-process in the larger system of the eonic evolution of civilization, and produces a highly efficient form of economic organization, without having the potential to be the master dynamic of historical evolution. It took millennia for social systems to mature to the point where modern capitalism was possible. But the immediate question arises if this is the case: if economic evolution is not the driving force behind Big History, then what is the status of the capitalist system in relation to some future state. Thus neatly we have restated  Marx’s essential point, careful to keep it quite abstract, and short of the claims made about revolutionary socialism, the status of private property. There is a lot to say here, but for the moment this is enough. In a nutshell, we see that econosequence != eonic sequence. As to the future, the answer to our question is that we don’t yet have the answer, but we are left with a final question to conclude the creation of our model: have we reached the end of the eonic sequence?

One of the strongest tenets of proponents of Darwinian evolution is the denial of any form of evolutionary progress. But we can see clearly that the regime of theoretical natural selection has misled the analysis completely. Looking at the eonic sequence we can see that we would not have a difficult time putting the idea on a proper foundation.  We can also highlight the difficulties that arise from the idea. But it is obvious that within the scope of the eonic sequence, which may or may not tell us anything about earlier evolution, there is a clear expression of progress in history. At the bare minimum, we are able to see that there is a definite series of progression, and these are clearly timed by the eonic sequence. Darwinism blinds us to the fact that almost any form of evolution is going to show a progressive aspect, and this will be associated with any inherent depiction of development. The question of progress in biological evolution is, as we can now suspect, muddled by the overlay of different processes, and the difficulty of seeing processes closeup.

We can suggest what we suspect, but we can’t close the case with any ease. But the point is that a great of biological evolution is indeed relatively random or contingent. Here the suggestion of our eonic model is clear: any attempt to find directionality is going end up in speculations about teleology. We have completed our analysis of the eonic effect without such speculations because we had an evolutionary map allowing us to see directionality in the past, without extending this analysis to any teleological conclusion. Even our frequency hypothesis was left up in the air as our data falls out of range.  But in the case of biological evolution we are unable to close in on the specifics of ‘changes of direction’, if any, that might be present in the record we get from deep time. But all at once, confined to the short run of the eonic sequence, we clearly see the progressive aspect of a developmental sequence, mixed with the far larger intervals of the mideonic periods, where the evidence of progress is mixed with obvious cases of retrograde decline. This combination of short-term progression and mideonic sluggishness ought to warn us of the dangers of jumping to conclusion about evolutionary progress in the emergence of biological life.

We should be clear of the limits of our own approach to this question. Where does the idea of progress come from? It is another child of the eonic sequence, an eonic emergent! The literature of the idea of progress is very extensive, with suggestions about the birth of the idea in the Old Testament history, or else the thinking of Zarathustra, with statements that the Greeks had no idea of progress, or else statements that idea did indeed appear among the Greeks. Clearly the idea is gestating in the course of world history. But it is most ironically the appearance of the idea in the modern transition in the debate over the Ancients and the Moderns that it is born in its sturdy secular form. This debate arose as the achievements of modernity began to dispel the perennial sense of looking backward at the creative heights of antiquity. The sudden sense of surpassing this legacy gave birth to the idea of the progressive aspect of history, still without the clarity given by seeing its relationship to the eonic effect, where ‘eonic progression’ is not continuous but intermittent. The inability to account for this mideonic aspect of the potential of progress has continually thrown the idea into confusion. But we can see that at a bare minimum the eonic sequence sets a pace of overall progression, now for the first time visible in the larger picture of world history that archaeology has given us.

Notice how the fate of the idea of progress follows the contours of the modern transition. The idea is born, or reborn, in the core of the transition, turns into a philosophy of history, then suffers from ideological confusion in the wake of the transition, then suffers postmodern reversal in the sudden rejections of the idea. The match is exact, for the simple reason we can see that once the transition completes the nature of the future becomes an unknown once again. We cannot with total confidence say that the short term future and its longer range will coincide. Furthermore, as the modern system crystallizes the idea of progress turns from a revolutionary to an ideologically stabilizing idea. It can degenerate into propaganda, or become confused with the defense of an economic order.

It becomes obvious that while can clarify the evidence of progress in world history, we are nonetheless extracting an ‘eonic emergent’ to describe the whole system of history in a presumption of meta-knowledge. Thus the idea will retain its controversial dialectical character. But the point is clear in broad strokes: we can account for the evidence history shows, that of an immense progression from simple beginnings to a greater complexity in a fashion that is obviously evolution. Our model does more, because it distinguishes system action and the free action of the mideonic intervals. The driving motion of the eonic system must be matched by the resulting mideonic free action able to fulfill the potential established without retrogression, a task not always visible in the history we have!

Top