07.25.10
The question of freedom (and causality) in history…
The question of freedom (and causality) in history, thence in ethics, is raised in the first paragraph of Kant’s classic essay on history:
06.18.10
History, theory, Popper, and evolution
A post sent to the History & Theory listserve, in a discussion about historical theory.
Subject: RE: Postkantian history (the history that theory can explain)
Before pursuing postkantian history, it might be well to ask, what was Kantian history? We cited one paragraph, the first, from Kant’s famous essay on history which was essentially a question about finding an historical dynamics that is also an expression of the issue of free will. But, for sure, if you can manage to not sink in postkantian quicksand there are any number of approaches to history in German Classical Philosophy.
That ‘challenge’ from Kant was a question in search of an answer. But that is a very hard question. Read the rest of this entry »
04.17.10
The meaning of evolution
If you ever frustrated with the canned ‘science’ of Darwinism (and/or the ID group) check out a new perspective that can demonstrate, instead of theories which are always limited by human dullness, a real ‘glimpse of evolution’ in action, stupendous process that operates globally over tens of millennia in a coordinated process. Mysterious Drumbeat
Dumbed down Darwinism almost an embarrassing joke without a clue to the real thing.
We cannot properly observe deep time, and therefore never really observe evolution.
04.10.10
Laws of history and Kantian antinomies
Post at History & Theory listserve on the ‘laws of history’ debate, and Kantian antinomies:
The antinomies here are actually a staged debate, so I am delighted in your excellent response, and welcome the vigorous effort to sense the original meaning of Kant’s essay, and to really consider the implications of the Third Antinomy (which the paragraph from Kant’s essay resembles).
Read the rest of this entry »
04.07.10
The drive toward complexity: world history
The previous post makes sense only once you grasp an example. World history provides one! And we can certainly see a ‘drive toward complexity’ in world history if we carefully catalog its outline using careful periodization.
03.30.10
Scientific history?
This is an email commentary sent to History and Theory re: a question on ‘scientific history’ (cited at the end).
We have discussed this issue here many times, and the various essays at history-and-theory.com explore the ideas of Popper at length.
The issue of evolution, post-darwinian, in the context of Kant can resolve this confusion over causality and freedom in historical analysis.
From John Landon admin@history-and-evolution.com
Subject: Scientific History?Your points are fundamental, and I think I was trying to proceed along these lines with my posts on the ‘causal mechanics of history’. Popper was my starting point along these lines. Popper (and also Isaiah Berlin with his essay on historical inevitability) critiqued the legacy of Marxism here, but his critique applies as well to the idea of scientific history. Read the rest of this entry »
01.07.10
Question from Niall Ferguson
RG Mail
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ac26eb9a-f30a-11de-a888-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=9c33700c-4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html?ftcamp=rss
Financial Times
December 27 2009
*The decade the world tilted east
*We are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy
By Niall Ferguson
I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit me.
Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid
the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official
describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west
China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the
synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was
it at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of
Angel Lam, the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the
Orientalisation of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I
really got the point about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close:
that we are living through the end of 500 years of western ascendancy.“Western Ascendancy”: that was the grandiose title of the course I taught at
Harvard this past term. The subtitle was even more bombastic: “Mainsprings
of Global Power”. The question I wanted to pose was not especially original,
but increasingly it seems to be the most interesting question a historian of
the modern era can address. Just why, beginning in around 1500, did the less
populous and apparently backward west of the Eurasian landmass come to
dominate the rest of the world, including the more populous and more
sophisticated societies of eastern Eurasia?My subsidiary question was this: If we can come up with a good explanation
for the west’s past ascendancy, can we then offer a prognosis for its
future?
Students of the eonic effect can address these questions of Niall Ferguson immediately: we see the exact timing of the modern transition in the eonic effect, and two centuries after The Great Divide the system begins to shift its center of gravity, toward a global oikoumene, a process underway since the end of that transition, in fact.
The critical two hundred period after the Divide threatens to show a deviation from the mainline momentume, something all too visible in the past decade of the US, ominous, and unnerving.
It is not about titling east, or about the ‘empire’ of America, or even about economics. The issue is the creation of a genuine oikoumene of world peoples beyond the narrow sourcing area of the ‘eonic transition’ we call the passage to ‘modernity’.
01.05.10
The eonic effect taken as a theoretical self-defense data set
The question of evolutionary theories is really one of cultural politics, and the control of public ideology with theoretical illusions. The natural selection paradigm is one such illusion, one embraced by the most stupid candidates for science who are promoted because they conform to the system of propaganda and are dumb enough to believe Darwin’s myth.
Darwinian thinking was a moment in the very smart Alfred Wallace’s development, which Darwin plagiarized. Wallace was too intelligent to remain long in what he had initially reasoned, but Darwin, and his epigones, were stuck in the simplistic natural selection rut, unable to escape.
As Darwinism falters, we might move beyond the imposition of false science on the public by seeing how theories of evolution are probably doomed to be simplistic. Look at the record of evolution, taken descriptively as a bio-historical chronicle: it is a great tale, and one that is spoiled by Darwinian obsessives trying to fit it into natural selection theory. We can have the whole lore of evolution in our public understanding without theory.
But the public needs a theoretical self-defense against this subtle hype, that fools people into thinking that scientists have the answers and that we must submit to their hyped religious indoctrination.
In fact, a look at the eonic effect shows all the impossibly difficult pieces that will never find theory because they are too elusively complex and non-mechanical.
You can ‘see’ evolution by looking at the eonic series, but as you soon discover if you zoom in, the details are elusive and subtle and don’t fit into the oversimplifications of the professional cadre of stupid ‘scientists’ who are promoted to biological expertise because they are stupid and conform to the reigning paradigm.
01.03.10
The question of Spengler
The question of the theories of Toynbee and Spengler is an emotional one for some people. All I can say is that World History And The Eonic Effect has a superior analysis of world civilization than that of Spengler (or Toynbee). Spengler is not a very intelligent thinker when all is said and done. His historical context is of interest, but his thinking had a strain of crudity that ended up feeding the ideas of the Nazis. It is hard to avoid the realization that Spengler, despite a strangely significant moment and its mood in the wake of the world war, was confused and unable to really make his case.
History, evolution, and Kant’s challenge
For the connection of evolution, philosophy and Kant check out this selection (and the one that follows): Kant’s Challenge
12.13.09
From evolution to history
Darwinists constantly apply their theory to history even as they deny the connection.
It is necessary to do the job right: the relationship of evolution to history requires a whole new perspective beyond Darwinims.
11.30.09
Another post-revolutionary generation
When Charles II stepped ashore in Dover on May 27, 1660, and then entered London in a glorious procession two days later, on his 30th birthday, he was greeted with tolling church bells, cries of joy and expressions of hope. More than a decade had passed since his own exile to The Hague, the execution of his father and the rise of Oliver Cromwell’s republican Commonwealth—regarded as a dictatorship by the many who chafed under the rule of the “Lord Protector.” With the arrival of Charles—a tall, dark-haired man of physical grace—England’s monarchy was splendiferously restored.
Early in “A Gambling Man,” a detailed and thoroughly engrossing examination of the Restoration’s first decade, Jenny Uglow notes that Charles Stuart, upon his ascension, “wanted passionately to be seen as the healer of his people’s woes and the glory of his nation.” Cromwell’s regime had featured constant war and constant taxes. The population was bitterly divided among Anglicans, Catholics and dissenting Protestants—Presbyterians, Puritans, Quakers, Baptists. A huge standing army had burdened the people financially and frightened them; such an army, it was not unreasonably thought, could be used to impose a tyranny.
11.15.09
Can we be external observers to evolution?
Scientists assume they are somehow exterior to evolution and can study it objectively as observers. But the reality is more complex: historical sequences are often really a form of evolution in disguise, and we have no simple means of being external observers to their dynamics.
10.30.09
‘Archaeology’ of inequality
Inequality, ‘Silver Spoon’ Effect Found In Ancient Societies
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2009) — The so-called “silver spoon” effect — in which wealth is passed down from one generation to another — is well established in some of the world’s most ancient economies, according to an international study coordinated by a UC Davis anthropologist.
10.13.09
A science of history?
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
Is there a science of history?
One of the amusing ironies of historical theory here is the way that Karl Popper, in attacking Marxist theory as ‘historicism’, unwittingly launched a torpedo against the ‘science of history’.
It is essentially the same argument as Isaiah Berlin’s critique of ‘historical inevitability’.
Attacking Marxism is OK, but the science of history?
Scientists shy away from this issue, in part because they can only slink away licking their wounds. And it is the case that the basic contradiction floats backward to put a ‘science of evolution’ (for man) under the shadow of the same contradiction.
All these arguments reflect Kantian reasoning.
The solution, echoing Kant’s Challenge, so called, lies in trying to see how causality and freedom can be related together under the idea of evolution
09.13.09
Danielou, and religion in the Neolithic
We had a link to some selections to Danielou’s history of India here already, here are some more: More from Danielou
The questions of religion is so hashed over in the Darwin debate. It might help to expand one’s vision to the issues of religion in world history, and to the unknown moments of the Neolithic, where we suspect that much to do with religion in civilization came into being.
09.03.09
Histories of India
I posted this yesterday at The Gurdjieff Con: Danielou’s history of India.
It is possible to get more and more confused by reading books on the history of India. The reasons for that are complicated, but Daneilou (whose many insights also contain some howlers, no doubt) wrote before the current debate over Aryan Invasion theories became tinged with the strains of ‘politically correct’.
The result is a view of Indian history that is a bit devastating but which makes sense of the data.
That the ‘Aryans’ contributed little or nothing to Indian religion, and, worse, corrupted what they found with the obsessions of caste law, which had no place in the tradition, is a sorry commentary on the fantasies of Indo-European wisdom.
08.31.09
Origins of milk-drinking
Milk Drinking Started Around 7,500 Years Ago In Central Europe
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe.
08.28.09
The use of history by philosophers
From Evolving Thoughts: The use of history by philosophers
One thing is clear: scientists, and Darwinists, have abused the study of history. Scientists because they obsessively deny freedom in thinking history is reducible to physical laws, and Darwinists because their false view of evolution is the source of endlessly denied endlessly applied Social Darinism.
The use of history by philosophers should be a question about the philosophy of history, and there the philosopher Kant proposes the clearest outline of that: Kant’s Challenge: http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap4_4.htm
08.20.09
Kant and the eonic effect
The clue to ‘history/evolution’ lies in the famous antinomy of Kant. The details are elegant.
07.25.09
Russians revinvent ‘reinventing history’
Russia acts against ‘false’ history
It may become a criminal offence to infringe on “historical memory” about WWII
By James Rodgers
BBC News
What is worrying Russia? Why is the country convinced that it is the victim of a campaign to make it look bad?
President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly “severe, evil, and aggressive”.
Dmitry Medvedev believes there is an anti-Russian bias in the Western media
“This is absolute poppycock,” says Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University. “History is all about argument. There is no absolute historical truth about anything big in history.”
Mr Service dismisses the Russian leader’s suggestion that his country is facing some kind of academic aggression.
Instead, he sees a desire to dominate, worthy of the most repressive totalitarian regimes of fiction.
07.20.09
Conservative confusion of Western civilization, vs Islam
History, and histories, of Islam
The problem with many of these critics of Islam, such as Spencer, mentioned in one of the comments, is that they drift into a right-wing perspective and then become proponents of ‘Western Civilization’ (whatever that is) and defenders of Christian traditionalism and religion against Islam, the status of secularism remaining confused.
The issue in criticizing Islam is not the Western tradition or some debate between Christianity and Islam.
The issue is the emergence of a new secular modernity, potentially global, in a ‘European context or matrix’, proceeding swiftly toward a transcultural context or matrix’. The emergence of modern freedoms is the great moment of this modern transition.
Muslims give themselves away as lacking in historical comprehension in their rejection of this aspect of modernity.
For Europeans bemused by a spurious latecomer consisting of postmodern multiculturalism and the rest of it to throw away their emergent heritage for an Islamic restoration of reactionary premodern culture is almost beyond belief, incomprehensible.
It is the emergence of modern secular culture in a Western source area, not Western Civilization, that is important. The reflexive focus on the West confuses the whole critique of the retrograde Islam, now most tragically threatening to overtake Europe.
Conservatives making a fetish out of the ‘West’ and Christianity are part of the problem and are inhibiting secular liberals from taking up the critique of Islam. Here the radical left with its idiotic alliance with Islamic culture has missed the point and is threatening to precipitate still another cultural tragedy, sharia in Holland. That is simply beyond belief. And no part of the legacy of Karl Marx, for crying out loud.
I recommend a careful look and study of the eonic effect to see the way in which emergent civilization transcends its source areas, and the dilemma that Muslims must face, with respect to the relatively weak basis for a world culture in Islam.
I don’t wish to be unfair to Islam, whose study I find of great interest, and in fact it is not unfair. Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past. The same was said of Catholicism (now a variant of Protestantism).
Westerners, so-called, need to grasp the reality of their situation, which cannot be Christian culture vs Islamic culture. It can only be globalizing secular culture, born in the ‘west’, but rapidly globalizing on the way to a new oikoumene of secular entities.
For Europe to succumb to a retrograde phase of Islamic restoration is a recipe for total catastrophe, and it is irresponsible for any secularist to contemplate such an outcome. The radical left now abetting such an eventuality is in the midst of still another screw up, in the long list of many since the nineteenth century.
The eonic effect is a good guide to the larger dynamics of religions in world history.
Islam and Christianity/Judaism, for all their claims to spiritual foundations are in fact medieval distortions in all cases. The true moment in the Axial Age of the Greek, Israelite, Indic, Sinic (et al) intervals of transformation are lost to us now, and none of the world religions that find their sources in that era have any real connection to those periods, least wise any claim of ‘revelation’.
We should note that Axial Age Greece gave birth to secularism, and much else, and the modern transformation echoes much of that.
Thus the rise of modern secularism has a far better claim for a spiritual foundation than the medieval distortions of Christianity and Islam. Strange to say, but the facts of history in the large show the reality.
We tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ in terms of Judaic, and Greek, sources, but that isn’t European! So why the exclusive focus on Europe. It is confusing the issue.
Look at the facts of the case with Islam: it is a most remarkable cultural matrix, but its basis is not adequate for a future global culture. This reality has to be faced, as the sentimental distortions of culture and history are set aside for a more realistic appraisal of Islamic history in light of the facts.
Christians and Moslems are full of themselves as they flaunt some special relationship to the sacred or to god. Such claims are without merit and are blinding millions to their real needs.
One of the problems is that secularism is misunderstood by its proponents, as scientism, darwinism, atheism, and a host of lesser episodes of modernity rise to claim the whole. The real significance of the secular has yet to manifest itself, and remains a project of the future.
History, and histories, of Islam
Comment on ‘Karen Armstrong vs Brigitte Gabriel
The historical facts are, you are correct, essential here, but they are not easily arrived at with the history of Islam. Robert Spencer’s revelations also have their problems! All these ‘factual historians’ are all too right wing.
Still, you are right, the histories here fail to arrive at History.
Here’s an eyeopener on Islamic history:
Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Hardcover)
by Paul Fregosi
07.16.09
The myths of revelation and the actual perception of ‘eonic’ evolution
Two comments on The Eonic Effect and the Emergence of Values in History/Evolution
James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:51 pm
No doubt about it, but I was backing up your point that neither side gives us any insight into our moral sense.James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:58 pm
…and I can sympathize with the desperation of religionists when they are confronted with reductionist theories.
Although the ‘eonic effect’ solves the problem, it doesn’t either provide a neat scheme of ethics. We see a system operating at a high level of abstraction, beyond human intelligence.
We distinguish macro-action and micro-action, which here can be seen in the fantastic ‘macro-action’ we can detect behind the historical interval of Axial Israel. Unfortunately the creation of the Bible is micro-action, a secondary process. Our great source of ‘revelation’ is nonesuch, but a deeper process beyond our own creativity.
The next great correlation is the realm of German Classical philosophy 2400 years later.
The point here is that the action producing ethics as an action of divine revelation has been completely misunderstood: the filter of micro-action.
As we stand back and gaze over the millennia since the Neolithic the eonic effect shows the intersection with a mysterious realm of values. But these emerge often in parallel worlds in different ways. It does not show itself in any simple fashion. It just shows itself!
At the very end we seem to get a hint for mere monkeys: the Kantian system of ethics (among other things characteristic of the modern transformation), as though this was telling us that our morality understanding is to be a function of our own self-understanding once we evolve to a higher level of intelligence.
I recommend a long and thorough study of the eonic effect, to get a feel for the way this problem works itself out, with the antique saga of the Old Testament rapidly passing into our rear view mirror.
But we will bungle our future with Nietzschean stupidity?
Our history shows us emergent values, and these include the great strain of modern liberalism, and freedom discourse. A close study shows us, then, something more complex that idiot myths of Moses figures and tablets of the law.
It is confusing because our ‘common moral understanding’ is already present in our body/mind combinations, and has been there all along, since the Paleolithic. It acts through us, but we can’t easily understand it completely.
Clearly Kant’s ethical system shows how you start to get mental overload as you try just one set of facets of that.
07.15.09
Evolution: 150 years of muddle, and counting
History And Evolution: The Eonic Effect
Look at the history of evolutionary thought: the whole thing is a muddle, confusion. The basic defining terms have never been set right.
It is world history itself that shows us the clue to evolution. Darwinists, by distracting attention to times unseen, have confused us completely. We are ready to examine the phenomenon of the eonic effect, the evidence of a non-random pattern in world history. The discovery of that pattern uncovers something more, but the basic demonstration of non-randomness in world history is conclusive, final, and almost devastating. That’s enough. And that’s that.
But we see that this pattern is hiding something more in plain sight, the ascent of Mt. Improbable. And this will uncover evolution behind history, the real meaning of evolution as a macro process, in an extended sense that is more than genetic, referring to human evolution only. The one thing Darwinists don’t want to find is such a non-random pattern, anywhere. The data for seeing such a pattern has reached critical mass only in our own times, and can be highlighted by simple inspection using careful periodization. The conclusion is inescapable: this structure demonstrates the existence of an evolutionary driver operating where least expected. There is nothing complex in the method. Throw a sine curve at world history. The results are direct, and show a degree of correlation we cannot ascribe to chance. There were many hints on the way, e.g. the data of the Axial Age. The results raise a host of other questions, and one may or may not wish to pursue that, or disagree with interpretative lines of argument. Otherwise, the basic demonstration of a non-random pattern is sufficient.
07.13.09
The age of revolt against scientism
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By RICHARD HOLMES
Reviewed by Dava Sobel
A different take on the Romantic Generation, especially its interest in science, is to be welcomed, but one is left to wonder if the real significance of Romanticism isn’t being given a revisionist disguise.
The source moments in Rousseau, and Kant, in many ways provide the real keys.
And we cannot forget the challenge to scientism that emerges from the Kantian revolution in philosophy.
Our current generation is probably too brain-dead, and its scientists too sophmoric (witness the puerility of the New Atheists) to appreciate the Romantic era.
I’ll admit I was stunned to learn that the chemist Sir Humphry Davy was so well acquainted with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth — and furthermore to find them all collegially botanizing, geologizing, analyzing, and versifying through that yeasty interdisciplinary era that Richard Holmes calls the “Age of Wonder.” It was a time defined by two great voyages: James Cook’s passage to Tahiti aboard the Endeavour to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, and the surveying mission of the Beagle, which set out in 1831, carrying the young Charles Darwin to the Galapagos islands. Within those Romantic six decades, the universe opened wider as William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and the first balloonists realized the dreams of Icarus.
07.08.09
The modern transition: from religion to liberalism
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty isn’t always convincing, but after 150 years it is still worth reading, writes Andrew Norton
On Liberty
By John Stuart Mill
First published 1859. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Penguin Books, and many other publishers.
It is important for secularists to study the liberal tradition (Mill may not be the best source for this) when they get into false arguments with religious traditionalists.
The reason these traditionalists are insidious is that in the name of spirituality they are really denying freedom (unwittingly or not) and voiding the complex gains of liberal philosophers (or their proto-liberal sources, like Kant or Hegel) and their insistence on ‘autonomy’, and ‘religion within the limits of reason’, etc, etc,…
As you confront the existential situation of modern secularism the siren song of religious tradition can sound especially persuasive, especially next to the flatfooted confusions of scientism, or darwinism.
But the way to the future was glimpsed clearly at the dawn of liberalism.
Note that the idea of freedom is as much a challenge to scientism as anything in the muddled superstitions of religionists.
The basic architecture of liberalism, that is of free men in a free society, is clearest in the seminal works of Kant.
This venture in man’s self-consciousness is as profound as anything in religion.
(Note that Armstrong is beginning to challenge scientism, imitating who one wonders, while she would never challenge darwinism, bad for book sales. False prophet indeed)
07.03.09
Native American migrations
gnxp
Steve Lekson’s new book offers a kind of unified theory of the Native American population movements that have puzzled Southwest archaeologists for many years
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/science/30chaco.html
06.27.09
New world diffusion
For thousands of years, the Pacific Ocean’s strong currents have swept shipwrecked Japanese sailors onto American shores
By Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
Smithsonian.com, June 16, 2009
One of the issues of the ‘eonic model’ is the unlikelihood of isolated civilizations appearing diffusion free. This was once a prolonged debate.
But the facts of diffusion from the Old World to the New now bear this out.
Similar currents exist between West Africa and the Caribbean.
The seas are full of the cast-offs of humanity, from tub toys that have fallen off container ships to boats swept away in storms to bottled messages deliberately set adrift. That flotsam has given oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer insight into marine currents and how they have influenced the course of history. In this excerpt from his new book with writer Eric Scigliano, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, the authors explain how a vicious current has swept sailors from Japan all the way to the Americas many times over many millennia.