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.

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.

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.