My point here was simply to alert teachers of world history to a new way to approach all that with a unique blend of theory that doubles as practical periodization. Far away from religious and creationist critics of evolution. We also look at the Axial Age and its implications.
Actually, the method is to set theory to the background and proceed with a study outline of world history based on an empirical pattern visible since the invention of writing. The result is a useful historical chronicle, with, mirabile dictu, the theme of ‘evolution’ in a new sense lurking in the background.

The issue of Darwinism is simple in this case: we haven’t observed Darwinian evolution at close range (the level of centuries) while world history allows us to do just that. The result is a warning that whatever the case with deep time, history isn’t Darwinian, and, in any case, we don’t know yet how early man evolved, so why assume anything.
Biologists glibly assert how certain things happened in deep time, statements about intervals millions of years in length. I am not required by science to be certain such statements are scientific! Especially when history shows us things happening so fast, in mere centuries, as dynamics, that skepticism rises at once at biological speculation.
And world history shows few signs of natural selection producing advances. To the contrary, we must suspect that ‘survival of the fittest’ too often erases advances, and brings thugs to the fore. We should be entirely suspicious of demands to impose Darwin on history.

So let us see if world history can show us hints about the dynamics of evolution. In fact world history is rich in hidden structure.
The issues are more along the lines of the historicism critique of Karl Popper, the issue of ‘historical inevitability’ raised also by Isaiah Berlin. This is the old staple of historical theory, and the point was that historical chronicles can’t play at science, they must show the ‘chronicle’ to be one of free agents, or at least relatively free agents. The framework adopted is that of the philosophy of history in a Kantian sense (Kant was the original source of Popper’s critique, so to speak), where the issue of freedom and causality is handled with that useful adjunct to reductionist science called ‘transcendental idealism’ (i.e. Newtonianism plus free will in Kant’s formulation).
This framework is perfect for reconciling the classic historiography of ‘freedom’, free agents, and historical mechanics. As is visible from Kant’s stodgy classic essay on history.
The result I hope is useful as an organized and coherent outline of world history, with a postdarwinian flavor.
I hope in a final edition to make the book more accessible to ordinary readers of world history texts, as the theory work proceeds to the background.
Note: the question of punctuated equilibrium is confusing in the book. My point is that, Stephen Gould apart, the phrase he invented was so apt and useful as a metaphor of punctuations plus equilibrium that we might redefine it for other uses! Actually Gould spoiled his phrase by grafting it onto traditional Darwinism. But the idea endures as a key concept for other approaches to evolution.
The phrase is quite accessory to my account.

John Landon

In a message dated 10/27/2010 2:36:04 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, kalivas@COMCAST.NET writes:
From: Haines Brown
CCSU, Emeritus
brownh@historicalMaterialism.info

I am momentarily transitioning between computers and so don’t have access to
my databases with their notes on Professor Landon’s book. However, this
forum or thread is not the place for a critical response to the book in any
case.

However, the book launches a critique of Darwinism and its uncritical
embrace by historians. Since this was brought up in Prof. Landon’s message,
perhaps I might be allowed to reflect on that particular point.

Much has been written about the philosophical implications of Darwinism, but
much of it seems not to dig very deeply (for example, Vittorio Hösle and
Christian Illies, Darwinism & Philosophy, 2005). I have the feeling that the
appeal of Darwinism is that on the surface it appears to unite randomness
(genetic mutation) and determinism (selection). It could be attractive to
historians because the historical process is clearly also simultaneously
creative and determinant.

However, there is a deep philosophical problem here: randomness, if it is
taken to be real and absolute, implies an ontological dualism that today we
know to avoid. I won’t introduce the argument in support of this point, but
in the philosophy of science, the notion of randomness is generally
understood as meaningless. For example, the student of computer programming
soon finds out that a true random number generator is impossible, for a
determinate system can’t produce what is indeterminate. Instead of admitting
the dualism, less objectionable are concepts such as unpredictability (as
long as there is no reification of this epistemological artifact) or a high
degree of improbability.

The Darwinist who strikes me as initially having addressed this issue to
some degree is Conrad Waddington in his “canalization” theory of genetic
determination. One can find a good discussion of this in Eva Jablonka and
Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005), although they too don’t
seem fully to grasp the ontological implications. Nevertheless, any
historian inclined to see if Darwinism has any useful implications for human
history would do well to read this fascinating book.

Because I’ve gone there myself, I know it is tempting to import into
historiography a bundle of theory that is drawn from some other field such
as Darwinian evolution, general systems theory, chaos theory,
far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics or complexity theory. It is tempting
because domains of knowledge are often formally analogous, and rather than
look deeply into the reason for this analogy, people sometimes just import
the specific insights of one domain into another. A good example is Claude
Shannon’s unification of info theory and thermodynamic entropy because both
share the same mathematical formalism. And yet, information theory and
thermodynamics are not the same thing, and each has its own properties.

Human history might seem to have punctuated equilibria, an alternation of
evolution and revolution, but I fear there are dangers, as Prof. Landon
suggests, in simply importing the neo-Darwinian synthesis directly into
human history as speciation events. But that is equally true of
thermodynamics. I believe the natural sciences have to be studied closely,
not because they have direct application in the study of human history, but
because it encourages a deeper look at what is going on behind the surface.

Deconstructing Flat History

We have rediscovered something postmodernists dislike, the so-called metanarrative. The so-called ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ should be replaced with an ‘incredulity toward infranarratives’. The critique is based on a rejection of teleology and ideology combined. But there is no avoiding the issue of macrohistory, it exists whatever our views, as we can now see. We can easily accept a critique of grandiose histories, and yet we can’t avoid the fact that random evolution fails, as far as world history is concerned. It is remarkable that the eonic effect as data answers to a critique of teleology, and reconciles its contradictions with a ingenious resolution: our eonic sequence is directional, and reflects, but does not correspond to its own ‘teleology’, if any. Teleological thinking is a dangerous subject: it refers to a future we have not yet reached! But we can, looking backward, see that ancient history shows, unexpectedly, a form of directionality. The intersection with our own free options about the future makes the conventional idea of teleology false. It was not our purpose to propose teleological thinking. Directionality, however, is clear as we look backward.
Note that a postmodern critique could just as well be about ‘deconstructing flat history’, and the ideology associated with the idea of random evolution, usually a conflict theory of some kind. To say that history has no direction, and that the future is determined by economic and/or evolutionary survival of the fittest, or some variant, is the typical theoretical outcome of seeing only flat history.
We need to be wary of teleology, and a way to distinguish ‘teleologies’ as historical productions of men, and ‘real’ teleology, which is beyond history, as a property of an inferred system in which we are immersed. Directionality, at least, is visible as we move to connect the rise of the modern to a greater system. That is empirical and makes no statement about the future. Note that teleological philosophies are attacked by postmodernists, and rightly so, because they tend to be constructs emerging inside history. And they are unsuitable as ‘meta’ descriptions because they degenerate into ideology. Note how the emergence of teleological history in the Old Testament split into rival versions, claiming the future.
Thus postmodern thought quite understandably tries to deconstruct macrohistory and its metanarratives. The problem is that the direction set by a transition is not the same as the direction set by the overall pattern of turning points. Our ‘metanarrative’ is fairly simple, in any case: a three act play, three scene changes, with the middle mostly dumb show and noise. No ending is given, and the ‘plot’ is quite hard to describe. The Axial spectrum sets five massive ‘directionalities’, and the world religions set two opposing demeanors, historical and anti-historical, as with Buddhism and Augustinian and/or Islamic teleology. The Christian tries to take over the directionality set by the Roman Empire. With extraordinary and unexpected redirection, the small strain of the Ionian Enlightenment is reselected in modern times. The same dilemma arises all over again.
The direction set by the rise of the modern is multivalent, history-bound and has no claim on the far future that we know of. Although, and this is significant, the game starts all over again, with the various new ‘teleologies’ of the future of modernism, Hegel’s being one, and the Marxist response to Hegel being another. It is not safe to predict anything in this pattern. And in any case, a new point arises as we begin to assess all of this in a new present of world history, as ‘eonic determination’ switches into ‘free action’. Perhaps for good. It is hard to see how this sequence could continue once we become aware of it. We might be at the end of the ‘eonic sequence’. At any rate, be humble about teleological questions. The great religions are not humble here, and are adventurism pure and simple, schemes of global ecumenization turned into empires of domination with teleological scripts.
Thus the very significant critique of metanarratives works both ways. The implied teleology in Darwinist non-teleology, random flat history, is even worse than an explicit metanarrative. It says, with tacit innuendo, that the future belongs to the forces of conflict, and that after great violence the fittest will claim the future. Ethics is superfluous, vestigial religiosity. That is dangerous, and it is not so, as proven by the facts looking toward the past. The Israelites appeared in our second turning point, survived the fittest of them all, the Assyrians, and outlasted them, with no ability to fight back. Many other cases could be found.
We can easily bypass the problems of metanarratives if we restrict ourselves to statements about the past, and do not extend our model into the future, in the sense of causal prediction. In the process, our model then generates a strange sort of ‘macro-dramatic’ history, if not ‘metanarrative’, but the narrative stops in the present, where we act by our own choices, not according to some pattern. The question is simple. We see the modern is part of a pattern of three such turning points, and that this series sets a direction with respect to the past (directionality), but not necessarily the far future (teleology).

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.
Toynbee seems to wish for a new manifestation of traditionalism, Spengler a renewed barbarism in the aesthetics of Nietzsche. There is something confused about this legacy of Toynbee and Spengler, and it becomes important to try and come to an understanding of the limits of their analyses of world history, with their concealed cyclical perspective. The rise and fall of civilizations is not a difficult concept to document, up to a point, in the chronicle of civilization, but something is awry in the methodology of these two thinkers. We can see the problem perhaps in the way Spengler concocts a ‘Faustian civilization’ for the West, beginning in the year 1000, and now reaching its final stages. Can this be right? The arbitrary start at the moment of the first millennium, the depiction of the rise of the modern period and the Enlightenment as somehow the approaching decline, and the final ‘decline of the West’ trumpeted at the beginning of the twentieth century leaves one to ask if the concept of ‘civilization’ is really the right one for the study of the historical dynamics of the modern ‘west’. The civilization, as a rubric is directly intuitive as a descriptive device, but the moment we begin to make assumptions about its ‘evolution’ in some fashion, we seem to be on less certain grounds. There is a much simpler pattern of civilizations than that of their rise and fall. We see a progression of eras beginning with the rise of higher civilization in a system that transcends civilizations and seems to generate Civilization, in a process of localization and globalization.
The gloom of Spengler is in one way understandable, composing the elements of his immense tome against the backdrop of the First World War whose unexpected savagery left the idea of progress shattered in the minds of a whole generation. It seemed as if the hopes and expectations of modernity had been betrayed by a regression. And there was worse to come. The unimaginable, like a cusp in history, was soon to emerge in the convulsion of Nazism and the Holocaust. It was, and is, hard for many to even consider the idea of progress again after such an unprecedented outbreak of the demonic. And yet the very tone of Spengler’s perspective, with its implicit Nietzschean embrace of wars to come and to be unparalelled in their virulence, is itself the self-destructive omen, the curious prophecy of the psychosis that seemed to overtake the ‘West’.
And yet the intervening years did not really show the decline of the West. Perhaps it has demonstrated globalization beyond the vehicles of the early modern, or the limits of imperialism in these incipients champions of the modern. But this might be progress, not decline. From the First to the even more cataclysmic Second World War and beyond the fate of this ‘west’ was one of triumph and recovery, and a second act of the realization of modernity. And the very notion of the ‘West’ began to yield to the globalization of its idea, and the creation of a new and larger oikoumene. For the idea of the modern competes with the idea of the civilization, as a term of periodization, and has no geographical or cultural bounds. We become suspicious that the idea of some ‘western civilization’, with its inherent Eurocentrism, has missed the point. There is a flaw therefore in the idea of the ‘civilization’ as the basic unit of analysis, in some organismic metaphor of its life. For the larger direction of history has shown the supposed civilization of the ‘west’ to be an appropriate stepping stone toward a larger sphere of modernity, which is more than a civilization.
The American Empire? The theme of leftist critique of American imperialism has recently seen a revival of the declinist genre applied to the United States of America. In Nemesis, for example, the author sees the analog of the lost of the Roman Republic in the American democratic system. This is a somewhat more relevant comparison than to the fall of the Roman Empire, but the very nature of this periodization could be misleading. In any case, the challenge to imperialism is not the same as the decline and fall of a civilization.
The study of history would seem to require a larger concept than that of the civilization. The issue appears to be not the lifetime of a culture, but the interval of transition to a new era, and the spread by diffusion of its idea, in the creation of an oikoumene. Once we adopt this altered perspective, many examples come to light. The lifespan of Greek civilization is very long, stretching from almost the Neolithic to modernity, and undergoes many changes in the form of its culture. But this is not necessarily the right concept of its history. Rather we see that this stream of historical culture has given birth to a whole series of significant moments, of lesser duration. The great classical era of Greece, which produced a turning point in world history, was merely an interval of short duration, several centuries, in a mysterious flowering of culture, one that, just as with modernity, produced by diffusion a new and larger oikoumene in a process of incipient globalization.
The brief era of the flowering of Classical Greece is one of the most remarkable in world history, and behind a disguise closely resembles the rise of the modern. It is in fact the birthplace, however inchoate, of the secular. The remarkable thing about this was the speed, and brevity, of the transformation. Between the eighth and fourth century BCE the entire spectacle of the Classical Greeks opens and closes, leaving behind an achievement whose immensity remains with us to this day as one of the foundational moments of Western, we should say, world civilization. We cast about for some means to explain this apparition in world history, but are left with an absence of clues of the sociological variety. We assign causes to antecedents, but if we examine early Greece emerging from its Dark Age we are left empty-handed as to causal explanation. What sociological factors could we list that might explicate this spectacular phenomenon? Probably none. We need a new perspective altogether.
In our search for the causes of the Greek achievement, sometimes called the ‘Greek Miracle’, we are left with the impression of something uncaused in its suddenness of emergence, and also with the unsettling data of synchronous phenomena in several places at the same time. Even as the Greeks in a strange spontaneity emerged from their Archaic period to a moment of greatness, nearby, and in a strange simultaneity, the drama of the Israelites was playing itself out, as the epic of a Canaanite people, again almost a frontier culture, who inexplicably entered the world stage with the creation of a new monotheistic conception of religion, and a great literature, parallel to the Greek, documenting the stages of the emergence of this challenge to polytheism, and the religious heritage of civilization, outstanding since the Neolithic. We are coming to one of the most significant discoveries of modern historiography, that of the Axial Age.

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.
The sudden explosion of modernity is an empirical given of world history. And yet a sense of crisis now haunts the idea of the modern. Indeed, a renewed challenge to the meaning of secularism in a resurgence of religious traditionalism seems to threaten the legacy of the Enlightenment. There is even the invention of a spurious ‘postmodern’ age to replace the modern. These gestures might betray the agenda of reactionaries, but demand a reckoning of modernity in terms of world history as a whole. There can be no replacement of modernity with an ad hoc postmodern concoction. The result would be decline, not advance. The sudden explosion of the modern might well show ‘action and reaction’, with a waning of the original impulse. Yet defenders of modernity seem ill-equipped for the task of defending its significance against its critics, or meeting the crisis that threatens its realization and future. What is the source of this sudden chaotification?
The question confronts us, What is the significance of modernity, and how can we understand its sudden transformation of world history?
What is modernity? We are left with the ambiguity of what we call the modern, next to the equal confusion over the meaning of secularism.
Is there a postmodern age? One of the most radical attacks on modernity is the gesture to posit a ‘postmodern’ age. But this idea suffers a curious contradiction, and expresses an agenda that is ambiguously reactionary. Postmodernists have wished to ‘deconstruct’ grand narratives, but we might as well wish to deconstruct the flat histories that are the result.
In one sense, the crisis is real enough. Environmental catastrophe looms, as the Age of Oil seems destined to a swift conclusion. As if to summon the spectre of Marx all over again, the Industrial Revolution itself seems under siege as a Faustian gamble, the automatic dynamism of modern capitalism looms as a monster out of control. A postmodern gloom seems to have settled on the prospects of the new age spawned in the centuries from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. But the modern is far larger than its economic contradictions, which have no pre-modern solutions. We seem to confuse economic dynamics with the fact of modernity as an already irreversible stage of history.
Ecological Reductionism One source of our environmental crisis lies in confusion of universal history with economic history and/or Darwinian evolution. This results in an ecological reductionism that makes wrong assumptions about environmental dynamics. In a period of mass extinctions the domination of Darwinian thinking makes us think speciation is purely an effect of survival of the fittest. But ecological environments show a Gaian aspect, and a balance upset by reductionist assumptions.
Our situation is not helped by the incoherence in our views of history. Here the influence of evolutionary thinking next to the economic interpretation of history has blinded us to any sense of universal history. The result is a kind of Darwinian economic fundamentalism resulting in a reductionist inability to grasp even the significance of secularism, or to see the complexity of innovations to which we cannot do justice beyond the questions of technology and the Industrial Revolution. The rise of the modern is a puzzle in itself, an almost evolutionary break in the continuity of world history. Exploding in the sixteenth century with the Reformation and the incipient rebirth of the Scientific Revolution, the early modern ignited a transition to a new phase of human culture, and by the eighteenth century the foundations of an entire new era in world history had been laid, graduating in the climactic moment of the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, and the onset of the Industrial era. And this is the historical transformation that has produced so-called secularism, and its collision with religious traditionalism.
There is an irony here: this phenomenon of sudden discontinuity is not unique and resembles the seminal moment of the foundation of our traditions. We can see clearly that a moment of great discontinuity, the onset of classical antiquity, was the source of the great religions as we know them now. But also, ironically, of the very secularism that now seems to challenge these traditions. It is altogether strange, and yet surely significant, that the age of the Upanishads, and that of the Israelites in the period of the Prophets, should occur in rough simultaneity, and gestate from the Indic direction the great religion of Buddhism, while in the case of Israel a reaction to polytheism should generate a new type of monotheism destined to characterize three subsequent religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We must pursue the investigation to the end, to find in the parallel age of Greece the seeds of modernity itself.
It is an odd pairing of opposites to see the parallel emergence of two world religions, of such different character. It is obvious that what we consider to be a secular age is a reaction to this legacy of the religions inherited from antiquity. But it is a reaction to their medieval construction. The period of their birth was something quite different. And these religious formations in turn were a reaction to the religions of their time. We should note that the rise of the secular is not so much a reaction against religion, as its transformation, visible in the Protestant Reformation. The distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ is misleading. We seem to detect a cyclical phenomenon. And, the enlarging scope of our historical vista is starting to show us eras of religion far earlier than what we take as religious tradition. Beyond even the world of Egypt and Sumer we can observe the archaeological remains of temples already ancient by the time of the first Sumerian cities. We can begin to see that organized religion was already ancient by the time of the first Pharaohs, and that temple complexes were already in existence in the millennia before the rise of the first great technological civilizations of Sumer and Egypt.
It is more than whimsical to cite a cyclical metaphor in a progression of epochs, for it will challenge us to consider the history of the many mythologies of cyclical history, and this in counterpoint to some reckoning of the idea of progress, the clue in fact to its reality. The trick is to reconcile so-called linear and cyclical views of history into a higher unity. The idea of progress has fallen on hard times, and in a postmodern period it is almost an idea in exile, and yet its significance for the rise of modernity is crucial, and its emergence in the early modern was as a challenge to the dominance of antiquity in the minds of those who began to see that what they called the ‘modern’ period was starting to outstrip the achievements of Greece and Rome. The ideological character of the idea of progress, and its degeneration into a form of economic propaganda, is a later development. The idea of progress was a great challenge to the myths of cyclical history, but there is an irony here, that the cyclical and progressive views of history might be reconciled in a fashion that actually demonstrates the progressive character of world history. Already as a first impression we have seen a series of discontinuities express the timing of a series of advances or reborn eras in world history, among them the rise of modernity. The riddle of linear progress is ironically resolved by seeing its cyclical aspect, an idea to confound cyclical myth-mongers.
The idea of progress is rejected by biologists in the discussion of evolution, and this has become one of the central dogmas of Darwinism, but at the very least the idea serves an essential function in our understanding of history, whatever the case with biology. Can we really look at the spectacle of emerging civilizations as a stasis of undeveloping entities? Clearly the notion that things are somehow in a process of development and complexification is indispensable in the attempt to chronicle man’s historical emergence from the Paleolithic. We need a new way to look at the idea of progress, to see at once its ideological abuses, and its essential rightness or inevitability in any understanding of evolution. Part of the confusion lies in the obvious way in which what might be seen as periods of advance, are in clear contrast to the longer intervals, all too visible in history, of what might almost seem retrograde motion.
In fact, prior to the archaeological revolution of the nineteenth century, the Western view of world history consisted of the tale of classical civilizations beginning with the Classical Greeks, and the saga of the Old Testament, followed by the story of Roman turning into an empire, which endured for many centuries and then declined into a medievalism whose total historical interval outstripped all else, and dominated the historical portrait until the quite recent rise of the modern. This overall perspective was not conducive to clarifying the demonstration of progress in history. As we move backwards, a strange perception arises. The same constellation of advance, then a ‘medieval’ stasis, is visible in an earlier cycle, beginning with the surge of higer civilization at the end of the fourth millennium, in Sumer and Egypt, followed by the less seminal centuries enclosed by its beginning, that finally fades away into the decline preceeding the rise of a new era at the time of the classical Greeks.

The debate over evolution has continued since the time of Darwin without resolution, in part because it is a metaphysical contest that is conducted beyond the limits of observation. The claims for natural selection have turned into an ideology short of real science, a kind of metaphysical reductionism. The result has thrown the study of history into confusion, and handed an ideological pseudo-science to many with Social Darwinist agendas. History should instead be the antidote to this kind of speculative excess, for it enforces the discipline of observation at short range, a century or less, something entirely absent in the study of deep time where generalizations about immense intervals of time are taken for granted without direct empirical observation.
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. The question of the so-called Axial Age arises in this context with an ominous warning that we can get the question of evolution completely wrong, as a myth of ‘scientism’. The data for this Axial phenomenon shows a direct example of high-speed cultural macroevolution at the level of centuries. We are prone to hallucinate evolution with substitutes, using oversimplifications such as natural selection. And history simply won’t conform to the assumptions of Darwinism and reductionist scientism. We might do better to follow the facts of evolutionary sequences empirically, mindful of the dangers of naïve theories.
The Eonic Effect: A dose of empiricism The revolution in our knowledge of world history has uncovered a challenge to the Darwinian assumptions about random evolution and natural selection. As we extend our view of history to a scale of five thousand or more years, the empirical given of the historical development of civilization in a remarkable portrait of spontaneous self-organization shows us something that Darwinism cannot explain, and, further, the result looks like a complex hybrid of history and evolution. Instead of botched theories that distort our thinking we can follow the empirical outlines of episodes of evolution using periodization and descriptive analysis.
The bottom line on evolution The eonic effect gives us in many ways the bottom line on evolution: it presents a complete portrait of all the pieces of the puzzle and demands that we solve them all at once. Some of issues that make the theory question intractable (there are many others):
A theory of evolution must resolve the fact/value duality. But if it does so, can it be science? That’s the great catch-22 on theories. The harder scientists try to do good science the more ‘evolution’ becomes invisible to their perspective.
Theories of evolution have severe problems of observability. We never directly observe the causal sequence of natural selection. We suspect we can only observe evolution at the level of correctly documented sequences in real time at the level of centuries.
As Lamarck notes, evolution operates on two levels, a drive for complexity and a process of adaptation (Darwinism only deals with the second). That is, we see something driving evolution. But that may be beyond easy observation, inducing a false reliance on the second process
Evolution is not necessarily genetic. What are the correct boundaries of genetic evolution? We will explore non-genetic ‘historical evolution’ which is not genetic, and then discover that this is probably the key to earlier human evolution (and perhaps evolution as a whole)
Current theories of evolution automatically discard the free will question, and void the possibility of morality. The evolution of consciousness and morality is a problem for such evolutionary biology. In fact, as with the Kantian discourse on ethics, a kind of noumenal veil or boundary conceals the dynamics of evolution. We never truly observe evolution, only its phenomenal aspect.
There are many other issues of this type and we need to be wary of simplistic theories. The obsessive demand for ‘science’ (reductionism) can make our theoretical understanding false at the first step. A theory of evolution is a big thing, we must beware of handing violent men a false oversimplification that becomes a legitimization of conflict idologies.
We cannot speculate about deep time and project ‘answers’ as abstractions. History shows the way: establish chronicles in real time over long intervals. Then we can detect ‘evolution’ by examining the clusters of directional change in a pattern of developmental emergence. World history gives us a range of five thousand years for this exercise and the result is illuminating, and, further, makes us suspicious similar processes and chronicles are lost to us in the earlier stages of human evolution.
Evolution in history? It is not clear at first how we can bring the idea of evolution into history itself. In fact, this approach is long overdue next to the incoherence of current thinking. Any process of developmental emergence is ‘evolution’, and the question is rather what relation this has to the earlier descent of man. The answer is that the relationship is most probably direct, and that world history can therefore suggest something to us about man’s emergence.
System Action, Free Action Current theories cannot resolve the distinction between the action of a system, e.g. a process of evolution, and the free activity of the agents that make it up. Human (macro) evolution is incomprehensible without something like this distinction. Consider the relationship of an ocean liner and its passengers: the obvious distinction between the ‘system action’ of the ship and the ‘free action’ of the passengers in relative motion on the vessel is all we need to proceed with a new perspective on evolution and history.
The moment we examine world history as an evolutionary and developmental process we see immediately that something much more complex than natural selection is at work. The great champion of Darwin, T. H. Huxley, ended by saying as much as he realized that something was missing in the Darwinian account. It struck him that there must be something more than natural selection at work since we always act as if to oppose it. The complex evolution of ethics in the descent of man is something that the Darwinian framework simply cannot explain. In fact, it is little appreciated, because always soft-pedalled, that reductionist science cannot explain an ethical agent at all. This embarrassing limitation of scientism is seldom made clear to the public as it is induced to accept the Darwinian perspective as some kind of ultimate explanation. The obsession with Darwinism is ideological, and too often connected, whether consciously or not, with economic assumptions.
Another approach is needed, and the study of world history provides it: we must acknowledge that there are limits to our our ability to observe evolution in deep time, and to our ability to produce universal theories that are valid in all situations. We can make hard claims only about what we can observe at close range, and world history is about all that is so observed, this to a far greater degree than evolution in deep time. If we honestly acknowledge this limitation, a surprise is in store for us. We can observe the transition from evolution to history, and there achieve some understanding of what earlier evolution must have been like. The result is an unexpected insight into the evolutionary descent of man. In general, history might show us evolutionary episodes of short duration. Such episodes are never observed in deep time, whose units of observation are very large. This braiding of history and evolution feels right, and gives us a sense of the lameness of Darwinian explanations. We need to stop imposing simplistic theories on history. And yet we cannot either leave the question of a science of history unanswered, in the style of much narrative chronicle, the staple of historiography. A contradiction lurks, waiting to be resolved. Universal causality must rule, and yet history makes no sense without the reality of freedom.
One solution to the question of theories is to explore outlines and periodization to highlight historical dynamism as a set of facts, instead of a theory created to satisfy some preconceived agenda. The outline, or periodization, is then the only candidate left to resolve the mystery of dynamics. With the so-called eonic effect it is just this approach that bears spectacular fruit. We can look at world history, on two levels, as evolution, and yet also as the free action of agents creating its chronicle. The combination is illuminating. In fact, world history shows a remarkable rhythm of development, and falls into a simple outline of successive epochs or chapters in a clear narrative of emergent civilizations. This ‘narrative’ is far more conducive to historical understanding, and the question of evolution, than the counterintuitive imposition of reductionist analysis because it respects the complexity of what history in fact shows. Further, the perennial question of freedom in relation to causality demands a larger framework of explanation than that of reductionism. Scientists are often too embarrassed to inform us that freedom is disallowed in their analyses. We need to produce a new ‘science of freedom’, at least in principle, to reconcile science and the stubborn facts of historical free activity.
History is too complex for a simplistic evolutionary schema based on the genetics of natural selection. We should therefore restrict ourselves to what we can detect in world history itself, where this fallacy is obviously inadequate. The resolution lies therefore in looking at history itself, where the significance of man and culture alone can be found. Ironically, if we restrict our vision to the emergence of civilization we unravel the riddle of evolution that might answer to our perplexity over the descent of man.

We are ready, to take a look at world history. Archaeological research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is the unexpected discovery of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern we call the ‘eonic effect’. In fact, the scale of this process is such that we can only call it ‘evolution’. Thus, for the first time we can detect the unmistakable evidence of non-random evolution, and this in world history itself. This leaves us with the question, What is evolution? And this forces another, long overdue, What is the relationship between history and evolution? This could be recast as the paradoxical question, When did evolution stop and history begin?
A moment’s reflection will tell us that no instantaneous passage between the two is plausible and that our terms have been left ragged. We must, by this logic, be able to detect a Transition between evolution and history. Can we find evidence to match this deduction? Indeed, we can, our non-random pattern, the eonic effect. In fact we can say more: if we apply that same logic to our Transition we should expect it to take the form of a series of transitions in an alternation between evolution and history, as if overlayed, the one emerging from the other. The eonic effect shows just this property of transitions in a series. Have we reached the end of this Great Transition? If not, then our evolution still constitutes our present and future. We should ask who man is, with such wisdom as would constitute achievement of the title, homo sapiens.
The Meaning of Evolution We are so accustomed to Darwinian or reductionist definitions of genetic evolution that we forget the meaning of the term: evidence of developmental emergence by any process or dynamic. By that definition history shows a clear pattern of non-random evolution in the development of civilization (and the parallel development of human individuality).
Limits of Observation Biologists often distinguish the ‘fact’ of evolution from the ‘theory’. The difference is crucial, for it is relatively easy to see from the fossil record that evolution occurs as a succession/progression of animal forms, but to confirm that this occurs by a process of natural selection is far more speculative, and probably false. Truly observing evolution is difficult, and we cannot easily infer the mechanism from generalizations about immense vistas of time. What if evolution is an active or intermittent process that occurs at high speed in short intervals that we never observe?
History and Evolution A paradox confronts the distinction of evolution and history: when did evolution stop and history begin? This odd question is the clue to seeing that history and evolution must show an interconnection. Further this braiding together is likely to show a series of transitions between the two. With this clue we can rapidly find the evidence for just this, which we call the ‘eonic effect’.
Theory Failsafe: Do no harm We are beset by the simplistic speculative theory of natural selection with its violent Social Darwinist substrate, the fact/value distinction eliminated, the evolution of ethics turned into a mechanical abstraction that actually negates the ethical domain. This confusion of theories deserves our protest. Simply tracking an evolutionary sequence over time is a useful discipline and a reminder of the real complexity of evolution.
An Evolution Formalism Darwinism is an oversimplication of what should be a standard formalism or model of evolution: this involves a kind of macro/micro distinction, and in the case of man takes the form of the idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’ as the passage from passive evolution to active free history through a macroevolutionary process or Transition (in this case a series of transitions) matched with a microevolutionary history of man’s self-realization of his emerging freedom. This overall framework (which is not a theory but a generalized descriptive device) fits human history perfectly, and the remarkable data of the eonic effect finds a useful clarification in terms of the evolution formalism. Students of evolution have already seen a distorted example of such an evolution formalism in theories of punctuated equilibrium, where the partition into macro and micro arises spontaneously. Unfortunately the influence of Darwinism made this insight stillborn. The point here is that ‘evolution’ is about some ‘force or process’ that drives development.
Our thinking is conditioned by Darwinism, which throws ‘evolution’ into the past, with a tacit set of assumptions about random evolution. The result is an enforced incoherence. This is often matched with a prejudice against any consideration of a science of history in the large, and/or any attempt using the philosophy of history to seek historical meaning. A further critique of the idea of universal history comes from the postmodern rejection of the Grand Narrative.
In this context the status of a science of history is ambiguous, as the philosopher Karl Popper in his critique of historicism insisted, with his rejection of the idea that history has meaning. Yet as the labors of archaeological research proceed a falsification of this perspective emerges. Karl Popper was wrong: history has meaning, and we can discover large-scale coherence in its unfolding. It is hard to break the habit of thinking universal histories have all been discredited. Suddenly we see the existence of a world system, but this requires looking beyond individual civilizations to the whole phenomenon of Civilization since the Neolithic.
As we proceed in search of history we will discover an irony, which is that we will find evolution in history, and then history in evolution, and this will give us an insight into the descent of man. We must move beyond the myth of purely genetic evolution, and the fixation on natural selection. We can recalibrate our definition of ‘evolution’ to include man’s past, present, and future, with a new kind of model that can carefully define the nature of our evolving freedom.
Confusing ‘god’ and ‘evolution’ Once we detect ‘evolution’ in action we are likely to be stunned by its forcefulness, complexity, and the sense of design unfolding, perhaps even that of a designer. Further, we collide directly with the mythology of the Old Testament which, however, detected the phenomenon we call the ‘eonic effect’, that is an evolutionary sequence. As we examine the phenomenon we begin to see that theistic explanations fail completely and that ‘evolution’ is the only applicable term, and crude ‘systems analysis’ the only method to study it. ‘Evolution’ is the cover term for an immensely subtle creative energy operating across time and space in a global process of spectacular force. Our approach will thus be neither theistic nor atheistic, and we will disallow the terms of divinity in our argument. A Kantian sense of the noumenal and the phenomenal pervades the enquiry into evolution, and we should be wary of producing a new mythology. Our method can disciple us to what we can observe. What is beyond the limits of observation is unknown to us.
In the remainder of this chapter we will look at the history behind the Old Testament, and then at the mysterious structure behind world history. In Chapter Two we will examine the legacy of Darwinism, and the basis for a critique of the theory of natural selection. In Chapter Three we will show the relationship of our discovery to the question of evolution, and develop a simple model to assist us in producing a short world history. This model is really a peridodization matrix and will be connected to a classic essay on history by Kant. This model highlights the developmental sequence we see in history. The existence of this pattern of developmental ‘macroevolution’ in world history itself will allow us to resolve the misapplication of Darwinism to historical emergence. Our model will use an ‘evolution formalism’, which is not a theory, but a series of concepts that can help us to describe what we are seeing. The remainder of the book will construct an outline of world history based on our findings of its hidden structure, and ‘idea for a universal history’. We can do this in the context of so-called ‘Big History’. The genre of Big History has been an attempt to rediscover universal history in a reductionist context, but this will not quite work.
Big Histories, Universal Histories: One of the most significant approaches to world history in recent times has been that of the genre so-called ‘Big History’, history since the Big Bang. This perspective, easily adapted to our own, deserves its own critique and revision in light of our renewed consideration of ‘universal history’. There should really be two meanings to the term ‘big history’: the horizontal meaning of history seen in the context of cosmology and the emergence of life, and a vertical meaning in terms not unlike the distinction of microevolution and ‘macro’ or ‘big’ evolution in biology. We will explore both meanings and then invoke the context of Big History before beginning at the conclusion of this chapter. Universal histories are histories that give credence to the reality of freedom.
Deconstructing Flat History Postmodern critics of the philosophy of history wish to deconstruct the ‘grand narrative’ on the basis of its ideological presumption or teleological illusionism. But the need to deconstruct ‘flat history’ is almost more significant given the way reductionist historicism has deprived history of any meaning.
Conflict Theories The legacy of Darwinian natural selection is that of conflict theories, which arise spontaneously in the desert of flat history as attempts to provide a substitute for a mechanism to drive history (or evolution). Thus, Darwinian natural selection is really saying that nothing, no evolutionary force, drives evolution. Instead, the struggle or competition of organisms does this, a clear case of a conflict theory rushing to fill a void. In fact, as we explore the eonic effect the limits of this perspective rapidly become obvious.
Economic Logic Related to this is the confusion of economic and evolutionary categories. The two are not the same. Evolutionary thinking goes in search of its ‘macro’ process, fails to find it, and defaults to a conflict theory, sometimes with economic overtones. We must carefully distinguish economies, and evolutionary sequences.
Kant’s Challenge: In search of Universal History Although the idea of Big History creates a fertile framework for the study of history, it is a subtle evasion, or retranslation, of the ideas of the philosophy of history. Arising in a association with the rise of modernity, and ultimately the grandchild of Old Testament history, the ‘idea for a universal history’ spoken of by the philosopher Kant highlights the central paradox of historical theory: the antinomy of freedom and causality, and highlights a basic question, How do we construct a science of history? We can accept the challenge of the philosopher Kant in a famous essay (which also contains a classic pre-Darwinian conflict theory) to answer this question.
The evolution of man is, and remains, a complete mystery, although world history can give us important clues. There is something almost mythological in the projection of Darwinian scenarios of natural selection onto the Paleolithic. Such evidence as we have is mostly that of skeletal remains, highly incomplete, of a series of hominids stretched over millions of years. Dogmatism in such a situation takes on an almost religious character in Darwinists. In the midst of this void of hard information we are to believe that all the complex functions of the human advance are to be ascribed to processes of natural selection and adaptation. Such claims, pressed into service for metaphysical conclusions, are weak in their evidentiary basis. In contradiction to this, flagrantly out in the open, is the evidence of a Great Explosion in the period up to ca. 50,000 BC, when modern man is suddenly in evidence. As if crossing a threshold homo sapiens suddenly begins to leave traces of all the forms of higher culture that are characteristic of man as we find him in history. The suddenness and depth of this rapid passage, if we can trust the data, call out for explanation beyond the standard and very vague claims of mysterious mutations. This is really a question of what we mean by ‘macroevolution’, as opposed to ‘microevolution’. Is not Darwin’s theory really one of microevolution? The problem is that observing anything that resembles macroevolution demands a very detailed record of evolutionary sequences, and this invokes a crisis of correct observation. There is an irony to our views of evolution. We look to deep time to find the answers to our quest to understand evolution, and yet we have very little data to conclude anything. We then apply that thinking to history, and yet here we have what is really a far more detailed record, seen at close range. We fail to suspect the fallacy here, or that history itself shows the direct evidence of evolution.

1.1 A Glimpse of Evolution
The legacy of modern historical research is an ambiguous one: the conductor’s baton of the Universal Historian taps the podium, in a concert of art, science and philosophy, the theme of evolution rising aggressively to the fore, soon becoming the basis of all further secular generalization about human origins. Although evolutionary research has proved a success as a project of empirical discovery, beside its cousin, the archaeological uncovering of man’s entry into civilization, the claims of evolutionary theory are much less certain than we might expect. Critics of Darwinism often point to the fossil record, upon which Darwin issued a claim of evidence to come, in favor of his thesis. This evidence would now seem less than clear.
But it is important to consider the ambiguity at the heart of evolutionary theory itself, where this pursues the timeless ‘laws of nature’ onto nature’s stage of life where time is of the essence, and the timely arrival of an abundance of creatures finds no reckoning in the orbits of mass and force. As if by a new law, the era of life finds refuge in a global moment, hideaway to beasts of a small planet, making engines of machines to consume mass and force. At last we find man whose claim is to cut history from evolution, graduate from all laws into a domain of freedom, as a law unto himself, in the court of small kingdoms and the self-realization of his individuality. In this ambiguity of chance and necessity we might search for the deeper meaning behind our use of the term ‘evolution’.
In parallel with the nineteenth century emergence of evolutionary research, the rise of archaeology has wrought a similar transformation of man’s record of his past. This chronicle has often seemed a disparate sequence of cultures and civilizations without overall meaning or coherence. And the enigma of this history has always been the misplaced origin, in classical times, of so much that we see as the content of man’s higher culture. This middle clustering of several civilizations in parallel is an entire mystery in itself, and it is no accident the heritage of the western field preserves its riddle in the haunting echoes of the Hebraic epic. One of the consequences of the archaeological revolution has been to suggest why this intermediate phasing is the case, for we had missed a similar generative period in the earlier interval. It is a phenomenon in sequence.
Now Gilgamesh speaks to us from the land of Ur and the chieftains of Upper and Lower Egypt are seen before their crowns are made one as the first Pharaohs. An age in itself has come and gone, glimpsed at its passing by the Prophets of Israel, witnesses to the vanishing Assyrians. A significant piece of a greater puzzle is joined to the form of perceived history, and the indirect signs of macrohistorical context suddenly show their presence. The elegant, yet fearsome, evolutionary unfolding of higher civilization in a cycling cone of ratchet progression all at once comes into view. As this veil is drawn, we get a glimpse, only that, of ‘evolution in action’, as if seen for the first time.
1.1 A Glimpse of Evolution

The legacy of modern historical research is an ambiguous one: the conductor’s baton of the Universal Historian taps the podium, in a concert of art, science and philosophy, the theme of evolution rising aggressively to the fore, soon becoming the basis of all further secular generalization about human origins. Although evolutionary research has proved a success as a project of empirical discovery, beside its cousin, the archaeological uncovering of man’s entry into civilization, the claims of evolutionary theory are much less certain than we might expect. Critics of Darwinism often point to the fossil record, upon which Darwin issued a claim of evidence to come, in favor of his thesis. This evidence would now seem less than clear.
But it is important to consider the ambiguity at the heart of evolutionary theory itself, where this pursues the timeless ‘laws of nature’ onto nature’s stage of life where time is of the essence, and the timely arrival of an abundance of creatures finds no reckoning in the orbits of mass and force. As if by a new law, the era of life finds refuge in a global moment, hideaway to beasts of a small planet, making engines of machines to consume mass and force. At last we find man whose claim is to cut history from evolution, graduate from all laws into a domain of freedom, as a law unto himself, in the court of small kingdoms and the self-realization of his individuality. In this ambiguity of chance and necessity we might search for the deeper meaning behind our use of the term ‘evolution’.
In parallel with the nineteenth century emergence of evolutionary research, the rise of archaeology has wrought a similar transformation of man’s record of his past. This chronicle has often seemed a disparate sequence of cultures and civilizations without overall meaning or coherence. And the enigma of this history has always been the misplaced origin, in classical times, of so much that we see as the content of man’s higher culture. This middle clustering of several civilizations in parallel is an entire mystery in itself, and it is no accident the heritage of the western field preserves its riddle in the haunting echoes of the Hebraic epic. One of the consequences of the archaeological revolution has been to suggest why this intermediate phasing is the case, for we had missed a similar generative period in the earlier interval. It is a phenomenon in sequence.
Now Gilgamesh speaks to us from the land of Ur and the chieftains of Upper and Lower Egypt are seen before their crowns are made one as the first Pharaohs. An age in itself has come and gone, glimpsed at its passing by the Prophets of Israel, witnesses to the vanishing Assyrians. A significant piece of a greater puzzle is joined to the form of perceived history, and the indirect signs of macrohistorical context suddenly show their presence. The elegant, yet fearsome, evolutionary unfolding of higher civilization in a cycling cone of ratchet progression all at once comes into view. As this veil is drawn, we get a glimpse, only that, of ‘evolution in action’, as if seen for the first time.