Looking backwards on the spectacle of world history now expanded in the findings of archaeology we discover an unexpected pattern of non-random historical emergence we call the eonic effect. The term ‘eonic’ can be taken to mean ‘intermittent’ and our pattern is easy to model as a discrete series overlapping a continuous field of civilizations. This pattern shows clear evidence of historical directionality, in the form of two historical intervals or ‘eonic eras’, and three transitions between them, visible as cycles of cultural and social innovation on a scale of millennia, roughly 2400 hundred years—emerging as a pattern in and of itself, and as the last visible aspect of an earlier structure undoubtedly originating in the Neolithic .

This pattern of transitions, each about three centuries in length, and including the so-called ‘Axial Age’, becomes visible with onset of the historical record set by the invention of writing in the time-period of the arising of Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations, ca. -3300 to -3000, surges again in an even more remarkable way ca. -900 to -600, then again in our own time-era, ca. 1500 to 1800. It is this enigmatic triple phasing of surging transition s, not the individual ‘civilizations’ that are its members, that constitutes the basic patterning structure of known world history.

If we consider the relationship of these transitions to the civilizations they visit we detect a frontier effect, and the generation of an eonic macro-sequence from the streams of individual cultures. This indicates global, and globalizing, character of our pattern, and the emergence of a dynamic of universal history transcending the legacies of individual civilizations. This frontier effect gives us the clue to our ‘European’ starting point, with a reminder that our third transition, the early modern onset of ‘modernity’, has nothing to do with European civilization, but instead expresses a transient local field of action in a global process swiftly proceeding toward a new stage of cultural integration.  

To describe the eonic effect, we need to create a set of labels for periods that are not philosophic stages.  These labels are the bottom line designation, but need not replace more intuitive terms, e.g. ‘modern age’, whose definitions are often ambiguous. These labels are essentially time-space coordinates, referring fuzzy regions and time intervals, e.g. ‘ET5,Greece ’,  which means the period of eonic transition ca. -900 to -600.  In examining the eonic effect, we suspect a frequency hypothesis, and begin by extending our terminology backwards to the onset of the Neolithic. The full series would then be:

‘ET1,…’ : ?????

‘ET2,…’ : ??-8100 to -7800

‘ET3,…’ : ?-5700 to -5400

‘ET4,….’ : -3300 to -3000

‘ET5,….’ : -900 to -600

‘ET6,….’ : 1500 to 1800

 The eonic effect consists of the last three transitions, and we need make no assumptions about either our frequency hypothesis or these earlier intervals. Our analysis using the eonic model can start anywhere in the relative beginnings expressed by the transitions. We will extend this terminology with ‘+’ signs indicating the point of the divide, i.e. the end of the transition, and then the onset of the new era in the wake of the transitional interval.

We are thus outside of the eonic sequence, two centuries downfield from the Great Divide, around 1800, armed with a clue to the world historical significance of this, the last generation of the Enlightenment, showing the birth of democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of a new liberal era of rapidly expanding modernity. It is no accident that our starting point is during a period of ‘postmodern’ chaotification and reactive anti-modernism. The eonic pattern will remind us that initiatives to recast a New Age of postmodern culture, if they negate the effect of the eonic sequence, will lack the dynamism of the overall eonic series.  

 ‘ET6++…: ca. 2000 A.D. We are immersed in the unfolding structure we are attempting to describe, as the structure of ‘modernity’, that is what we call ‘ET6,…’, that has sprung forth from eonic sequence. Our starting point is the current period of the onset of oikoumene creation, ‘ET6++,…’, in the wake of ‘ET6,…’, now proceeding globally in a fashion almost completely reminiscent of the first Sumerian, and later Hellenic, and other, oikoumenes. The great vehicle of the Enlightenment prefigured the needs of this new era in a breakthrough that still seems to confound the cultural tribalist for it prepared the first seeds of a universal global culture. The universalism of the Enlightenment now draws some fire, indeed, the criticism is that it can seem less than universalist. Postmodernism appears with an appropriate post-transitional perspective. The mismatch of European stream and eonic sequence created by the local entry to a global oikoumene generates all the multicultural difficulties of homogenized culture, and westernized semi-decadence during transitional fall-off. No decline is indicated as ‘law of history’, to the contrary, a great era of progress is possible as free action at tangents to eonic determination.

We are just emerging from…

 ‘ET6…’: 1500-1800

We see the unmistakable effect of relative beginning, notwithstanding small indications from the period of the late medieval, in the sixteenth century, as the parallel emergence of religious Reformation, Scientific Revolution, pre-capitalist economic transformation, overseas expansion, rising nationalism, and the proliferation of seminal literatures. The chord of ‘state formation’ in its sublimated form that will be immediately center stage in the next section on Sumer and Egypt shows its strange eonic recurrence in the rapid appearance of the early political philosophers such as the seminal Hobbes and Locke at the birth of Liberalism. The world is no longer pristine as the world of the first Pharaonic ‘state creation’ and the new generates state-formation as revolution, the breakdown of the ‘catholic integrator’ clearly the first step. The rise of the nation state shows a play and permutation on the greater scale possible created by the rise in communicative speed of the Greek and Sumerian city-state phenomenon, with one and the same dilemma of mutual conflict so evident in the failure of the Greek polis. It is important to distinguish this from ‘cultural evolution’, or the fates of the individual nations, for what we see in the transition is the focalization in a fuzzy zone and period, quickly becoming concentrated on a Northern European fringe area, stretching from Germany through Holland to England. Thus the process is a flow of information and development of a local ration of cultural patchwork in relation to a global area and the eonic jump diffusion of the eonic sequence.

 

 ‘ET6+…’: ca. 1800: The Great Divide The transition moves toward a characteristic second stage with the appearance of the English Revolution , the real rise of modern science, and the birth of the Enlightenment, really in this seventeenth century, rather than the eighteenth. This is period of the real cascade of modern effects that will drive the system into its climactic period and passage across a divide. The transition is a divide, and the divide, relatively arbitrary therefore, nonetheless shows a very marked near ‘scene changing’ effect in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The age of Democracy and Steam is attended by such a host of eonic emergents that it is difficult to sort them out. There is no consistent theme, universal name or stage label that we can give to this new age effect if we see the motion toward contradiction in the field of creativity. We see the Enlightenment, but we also see Rousseau, and Romanticism. We see the emergence of capitalism, but we also see the collision of liberalism and socialism. We see the remarkable appearance of the school of German Idealism , and yet the rise of scientific materialism is just getting under way. On a greater scale the transition as a whole shows the two stages, Reformation and secular Humanism arriving in parallel and often in confusing interactive effects. The example of the Industrial Revolution has strange implications, in the sense of macrohistorical boundary conditions. The great takeoff is not just a function of economic or other factors, but is also a function of long eonic frequency. This would seem to strange, but it is finally inevitable to conclude, that while this does not explain quite what did cause industrialization, its appearance needed the transitional amplifier to get over the top. It is significant as a further challenge to isolated factor thinking to consider that abolitionism is critical to the whole advance. The system, we must speculate, is poised to fall back into the morass of early failed takeoff in the ancient world, but manages to reach the higher plateau where the market order can come into existence for the first time.

It is from this vantage point therefore that we look backwards at the entire phenomenon of civilization, and thence to the Neolithic. The modern example is so complex that we can barely grasp what is happening, since we tend to be ship’s mate on one of its emergents. It is helpful to look at the earlier transitions as they throw up the early first signs of this greater complexity. We can also see the outcome of the earlier periods, and allow ourselves to block off the discontinuity with greater confidence. The trick to eonic history seems to be generation from small sources. The other trick is the evasion of intractability by the local small morphing of elements at the fringe of the previous use of the trick whose outcome seems to large-scale to modify as a whole.

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