10.28.08
Toward a Postdarwinian politics
There is a new so-called ‘blogbook’ series at eonic-effect.net on
The Politics of Evolution, Toward a Postdarwinian Politics
As we study the eonic effect, we discover its subtle relationship to the ‘evolution of freedom’, and a series of snapshots of the emergence of liberalism in the early modern.
One thing that is needed as culture proceeds toward a Postdarwinian culture is a new sense of universal history that is not entangled in the religious mythologies of the past. The eonic model foots the bill with ease.
One of the most insidious aspects of evolutionary theory, particularly in an age of Darwinism, lies in its concealed ideological character. The reason is that such theories, or any theory, if it is taken, whether openly or by an unconscious association, as a statement of a universal law, impinges on our present and future in a paradox of causality and freedom, a paradox well explored by critics of Marxist theory, such as Isaiah Berlin or Karl Popper. The issue finally insinuates itself into any attempt to produce a science of history, where the search for historical laws is frustrated by the obstinate demand for an idea of freedom. This fate tends to befall the theory of natural selection since it is considered a universally omnipresent process.
Modern liberal/left politics needs to be reconstructed without the Social Darwinist confusions generated from the legacy of Darwinian theory.
The eonic effect, and its attendant model, show us an ingenious, and ultimately simple way to resolve this paradox, with a new approach to theories, and a stylized application of the idea of freedom to descriptive historiography. The result shows us a way to construct a formal idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’ as a generalized matrix of historical action, harmonized with science by the introduction of a new concept of the meaning of evolution. The result unexpectedly uncovers the hidden dynamics behind the emergence of democracy across world history, and this precipitates a kind of ideological bravura behind the model itself, crossing the trip wire of legitimation tactics in the use, or abuse of theories. But in fact we can see that all of this is really quite appropriate, and that the perception of the inchoate emergence of liberalism in the early modern is not an ideological affirmation, but a statement of fact in a matrix of periodization, and we see that the subsequent explosion of democratic revolutions is bound up in the non-random evolution we detect in the eonic effect. This perception needs to be subjected to any number of caveats, and yet we can say easily that empirical evidence leads us to this result, and that democratic emergentism is, in a sense qualified by the eonic model, an evolutionary process, that is, a correlate in the ‘eonic evolution of civilization’.