Eonix Papers

1.2.2 Decline and Fall

This brings us to the dynamical mystery of civilizations, their apparent rise and decline, and the misleading way in which a postmodern perspective has become a version of declinism. Modernity is barely underway, and yet a version of leftist or religious ideology has declared the ‘age of modernity’ to be finished. It is significant that the term ‘postmodern’ appears, before its appropriation by a cultic wing of the modern left, in the historian Toynbee. And next to Toynbee we have the figure of Spengler whose ‘postmodernism before the fact’ defines very clearly the genesis of the postmodern reaction to modernism. This in turn shows the clear influence of the philosopher Nietzsche whose attack on modern liberal civilization is one of the pivot points of the anti-modern reaction. The thinking of Toynbee and Spengler has proven strangely influential despite the many critical exposés of the limitations of their historical models.
The idea of the ‘civilization’ is central to the thinking of Toynbee and Spengler whose works constructed a kind of botanical classification of the various specimens of such, and the result has been a rigidification of the concept as some kind of dynamical entity, or even as an expression of the organismic. And this in turn leads to some notion of the lifespan of a civilization, resulting in the predictable onset of its decline. The great exemplar is the ‘decline and fall of the Roman Empire’, which becomes by analogy the misleading template for editorializing the fall of modernity. And this declinism has become the warning cry of many ‘spenglerians in spite of themselves’ who are nervous that the ‘modern civilization’ is about to enter the final stages of Rome’s later empire. There is something amiss in this reasoning. The modern world is a mere centuries from its dramatic initials incidents, such as the Enlightenment. It would seem a desperate shortening of a potential future for this to be already in decline. Between the onset of the Roman Republic and the final decline of its empire is an interval of a thousand years. [Read more →]

http://darwiniana.com/2010/07/28/the-eonic-effect-and-are-there-any-theories-of-evolution/

1.2.1 Decoding Modernity: In Search of Evolution

Against the backdrop of world history the rise of the modern must constitute one of the most explosive turning points since the beginning of higher civilization, or even the onset of the Neolithc. In the three centuries after 1500 beginning with the Protestant Reformation and the parallel Scientific Revolution an entirely new form of civilization has arisen, set to transform the entire planet via globalization. Such a massive transformation demands an explanation on the scale of evolution itself, and shows a remarkable discontinuity against the backdrop of medievalism. But this issue has been confused by debates over traditionalism or medievalism. It requires a larger context for a solution to the riddle. [Read more →]

At a time when theories of evolution are under renewed controversy, discussion is hampered by the remoteness of the phenomenon of evolution, and the use of indirect inference to speculate about deep time. Into the void flows the propaganda of Darwinism attempting to control the myth of human origins. The reign of Darwinism is a pretense of dumbed-down science, and one that cannot explain biological complexity, human consciousness, or the evolution of ethics, in a short list of confusions.
The result is a parody of the nature of human nature, and the evolutionary fiction of Darwinian pseudo-science imposing the oversimplification of natural selection onto unseen times and places. Darwinism persists as an ideology disguised as theory, with a Social Darwinist agenda concealed behind the facile claims of hard science. Darwin’s theory is thus suspiciously convenient as a neutralizer of ethical action and serves well as a justification for metaphysical reductionism, scientism, economic ideology, and ideological nihilism.
In a further confusion, Darwinism is under siege from the Intelligent Design movement, in a renewed collision of science and religion. The ancient and honorable design argument is now the agenda of conservative interest groups who are up in arms against Darwinian liberals and secular modernism itself. This perspective, which has co-opted the criticisms of many scientific critics of Darwinism, has paralyzed the potential for an orderly paradigm change on the issue of evolution, as the cult of Darwin closes ranks around their limited perspectives against the revolt of religionists. Darwinists have handed these opponents an entire package of valid criticisms. The evolution debate has degenerated into a metaphysical contest over the nature of secularism, and a cult of atheism as a surrogate of the Enlightenment battles fundamentalist theism in a contest fought on the field of evolutionary theories for postmodern sweepstakes.
This situation leaves us suspicious that deception here is deliberate, and that all we are offered on the evolution question is propaganda. Religious and scientific groups have done everything they can to hide the real meaning of evolution. Academic and scientific groups graduating from an educational system dominated by ideology are nonetheless true believers and are able to provide a front of sincerity to the cynicism of this bio-industrial complex in the era of Big Science. The Darwin narrative is entirely convenient to these denizens of the Iron Cage.
A new perspective is needed. And we are on our own, and must do the science ourselves where the cult of scientism refuses to play by its own rules. Scientific bodies and academic institutions are simply untrustworthy on the evolution question. The Darwin propaganda machine maintains itself through outright distortion and cannot be said to represent even the wish for science. The realm of professionals shows a successful reign of intimidation, making public commentary unbelievable.
A new perspective is needed, and is not hard to find. The critique of Darwinism has proceeded beyond public awareness almost from the time of Darwin himself and is a ready resource. If the problem is that we have not observed evolution, then the solution is to observe it, or declare our ignorance.
And an unexpected new perspective has emerged from the archaeological revolution that has uncovered an evolutionary dynamic in world history itself: world history, observed at close range, holds the clue if we can understand it. The discovery of the Axial Age is one aspect of this transformation of our knowledge. We see a global process at work in the emergence of civilization in a process of non-random evolution that is non-genetic and almost biospheric in its action. A little detective work can uncover the larger significance of this data, and help us to bring an empirical understanding to the questions of evolution for the first time.
In the light of such data, a devastating question haunts standard thinking on evolution: what if the real force of evolution acts intermittently at high-speed over a range of mere centuries? The vastness of deep time would swallow up such brief episodes and leave no trace whatever. As we examine world history precisely this possibility becomes confirmed, and it shows one of the most obvious solutions to the evolution mystery. We must learn to consider evolution as a chronicle of factual history, remaining wary of the reign of theories disguising the agendas of their proponents. Here world history seen at close range is the bottom line on the evolution question.
The myth of Darwinism, that is, the myth of natural selection, endures because it maintains media dominance, and need not answer to the realm of fact, substituting speculation, and educational indoctrination, for science. In the phrase of Karl Popper it is a metaphysical research program, and not a falsifiable theory. The antidote is a dose of empiricism that can show us the real meaning of evolution. And the irony is that world history itself holds the key to the riddle of evolution. It is right that this should be so. We must refrain from imposing speculations about deep time, which we cannot observe, on our historical chronicle, which we do observe. It is an upside down situation and one that cannot persist without throwing discredit on science itself.
We live in the first generations with enough historical data to detect a pattern of historical dynamics. We see the real evolution of man as the Great Transition, the human passage from evolution to history, in the chronicle of the once and future Origin of the Species, Man.

The Darwninian fantasy vs a dose of empiricism