10.07.08
Reviewing ‘World History And The Eonic Effect’
A question comes up: reviewing World History And The Eonic Effect
The task is not simple, so here are a few things to keep in mind:
The prime objective is to describe a beautiful discovery: a non-random pattern in world history. This is called the ‘eonic effect’. The term ‘eonic’ is a pun on ‘eon’ and ‘eonic’ (as in digital sampling electronics, type ‘eonic in google’ and see all the DSP companies listed).
Even superficial inspection of world history has often suggested a ‘macrohistorical’ dynamic at work, witness the rising literature on the Axial Age, smoking gun evidence of something going on in terms of a dynamic. But the literature on the Axial Age has ended in confusion, because of distraction of the emergence of two world religions in the Axial Age. But this period shows that this aspect of the Axial interval is not the real issue: many other things occur in sync, among them the Axial interval of the Greek Archaic. Still more confusion has arisen from Karen Armstrong’s book The Great Transformation.
A careful method is required to sort out this confusion.
In fact, the eonic effect is discovered by a different route, with a question (or a set of them):
does world history show directionality? is the main one.
Is there a science of history?
How do with reconcile freedom and causality in a ‘science’ of history?
How do we reconcile evolution and history?
When did evolution stop and history begin? (?? this odd ‘sillly’ question has a useful contradiction)
The first question about directionality can be answered by constructing a very simple model, called a discrete-continuous model, and seeing by trial and error if the data corresponds, and at what frequency interval. This amounts to throwing a sine curve at world history, we just might get lucky.
This kind of model is really asking if something is oscillating, or doing some kind of alternation in a sequence.
With a hunch about the Axial Age as a beat in such a macrosequence, we get lucky and easily find, to our suprise, a clear alternating sequence in a rough frequency of 2400 years, and transition intervals of about three centuries: presto, an exact model of the Axial Age.
A three beat sequence is not enough to be conclusive so we leave the issue as an hypothesis, and restrict our study to the three beats we see, taken as transitions:
The onset of ‘higher civilization’ (wrong term!): centuries just before and up to -3000,
The Axial point, centuries just before and up to -600,
The modern transition, centuries just before and up to 1800
This very crude model, on closer examination, produces a virtual cornucopia of deep structure, and significant correlations. With this basis the descriptions in the text will be clear. The correlations of data are so strong that we can see that we are onto something deep, but what?
Note our other questions: The text proceeds to answer the ‘but what?’ question by showing that the ‘eonic drumbeat sequence’ is really an evolutionary sequence, and that this sequence can be seen as an answer to the ‘science of history’ question: the sequence reconciles the freedom/causality contradiction in a very ingenious way. The model turns out to be about ‘oscillations of degrees of freedom’ in an ‘evolution of freedom’.
There is a lot more here, and many other ways to approach/derive the eonic effect, but that is one way to get a sense of the strategy in the book.
[The DSP metaphor, not very important, arises because our transitions seem to 'sample' elements of culture the larger sequence encounters in its direct path]