05.17.10
Posted in Science & Religion, selections at 6:02 pm by nemo
I commented already today on this book, or rather on the commentary at Truthdig, but the book arrived and I have been looking through it: Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [Paperback]
David Bentley Hart
I think this book is proof of the failed strategy of the New Atheists, and this rejoinder was invevitable. But I fear that the author is a near Christian chauvinist, and goes to the opposite extreme, in the process setting up the New Atheists to trash the whole of modernity. Won’t do at all.
I think that the cult of New Atheists needs to change tactics in a hurry, before books like this win the war and in the process destroy modernity.
Could the New Atheists sit up and think a bit? I can hope, but I don’t think so.
They have that cocky stupidity that made Dawkins a millionaire, and the high priest of Darwinian pseudo-science.
This book has a good idea, one that it can’t realize properly, because its author is too much of a Christian: the book tries to show the context of the ‘Christian revolution’ in the context of the Roman Empire. Great idea.
But what we need is something still more general: the whole of world history and all of its culture, and the right narrative of modernity. Pitting scientism against all religion, or Christianity against modernity, are both failed strategies.
More tommorrow: but it is essential to see that ‘secularism’ begins with the Protestant Reformation. It is not true to claim that the secular is against all religion, is the property of the cult of scientism, Darwinism, or the new atheism. The ignorance of history, and the history of religion, on the part of scientists and new atheists is drastic, and has invited books like this that are going to sink modernity if the stupid blab of the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens cult keeps going. Shut up already, you have made your point. Shut up as an exercise until you have studied world history, the history of religion, in some detail. We have heard the atheist blurbs. Big deal.
I think the author here, ironically, can’t explicate the rich history of Christianity in the Roman empire because he is too immersed in it, just as the modern member of the science cult is too alienated, and badly educated.
But the basic point is crucial: the action of Christianity in the culture of Rome was a world historical achievement. The nitpicking idiocy of the current science/religion debate is a losing proposition. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell has broken the spell of science, and one looks on helplessly, what a gang of idiots!
Wake up. This book is flawed on its own terms, but one sees beyond it at once to realize the need for a larger framework of world history, not just the Christian/Roman West. And the right and proper account of modernity and the Enlightenment. These Christian authors are as narrow in their own way as the New Atheists.
Incidentally, the framework of the eonic effect, which is basically an periodization outline of world history and not another theory, can help because it enforces the discipline of multiple perspectives over five, then ten, thousand years, and more. There everything has to find its place, from Christianity to modernity, and much more. With the eonic model as a failsafe you will stop making the one-sided errors we see on all sides of this debate.
Permalink
04.27.09
Posted in Kant, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:10 pm by nemo
Kant’s Challenge
Kant raises the issue of history perfectly in the opening paragraph to his essay on history:
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.
This passage contains a latent question, and also shows the connection between the individual and his freedom and the dynamics of larger history.
The eonic effect resolves this contradiction beautifully. But it doesn’t directly address the issue of the individual and his will. Rather it finds ‘freedom factors’ in History, that is ‘uncaused historical intervals’.
Permalink
04.24.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:07 pm by nemo
In light of the lawsuit against Jared Diamond, here is a posts from redfortyeight.com, dealing with the issue of the rise of the modern, with a short discussion of Jim Blaut, who was very critical of Diamond and his theor of the rise of the modern: http://www.redfortyeight.com/2009/04/24/blaut-modernism-the-european-miracle/
This post contains a selection on the rise of the modern, and theories attempting to explain it.
Permalink
04.19.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:04 pm by nemo
The problem with Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that it over-focuses attention on the small. What of the possibility of invisible macro factors that stand beyond the action of the small-scale. Everything in the debate suggests something is being missed. But what is that? It is like gravitation in Newton’s time (no direct comparison is implied): something invisible and macro (in the sense of defying the point contact in the small of static or impulsive forces), a field, was required to make sense of the data, and Newton was able to proceed despite the charge that such fields where a violation of scientific method.
Darwin’s theory is a wishfulfilment for a desired oversimplification that will fit the requirements of reductionism. Who’s to say that will work? In fact it doesn’t work, and the whole approach is a dangerous temptation to focus on the small remaining blind to the effects in the large. And these latter processes are unforgivingly complex and intangible, as befits the complexities of human nature, and its claimed evolution.
This approach is also very amenable to the basically bureaucratic character of big science where enforcing paradigm discipline is immensely simplified with a ‘by the book’ oversimplication that can be used to indoctrinate science cadres. Once enough trainees are indoctrinated the paradigm reaches critical mass, and is hard to challenge. Those who challenge it tend to lack credentials, or credibility.
But it is all in vain.
If we can examine the small band of visibility that is offered to us by the data of the so-called ‘eonic effect’ the dangers of restricting observation to one narrow band, and the equal failure to take into account the need for very rich data, data only available in human history, become all too obvious.
There is a massive ‘carrier field’ of some kind behind evolutionary sequences, and this is what gives ‘evolution’ the edge against randomness. And it is something totally unaccounted for in the legacy of reductionism.
The data of the eonic effect begins to speak for itself as we start to track sequences at close range over many millennia. Then it becomes obvious that something analogous to, though much more complicated than, this kind of ‘carrier field’ is at work. It is beyond our ability to observe, but we can detect it from the data, which must be then approached with an entirely different style of enquiry.
The eonic effect: climbing Mt. Improbable
Permalink
04.18.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 1:58 pm by nemo
Looking at the eonic effect it is hard to credit the one-dimensional random evolution of Darwinism (which is said not to apply to history, but applied implicitly and covertly). The macro aspect of this process (the eonic sequence), stretching over millennia, the overall coordination of the successive steps, and many other clues force us to wonder if the emergence of civilization (and the associated earlier stages of human evolution) are not part of a global, indeed Gaian, matrix. In fact the issues of the biosphere, and ecology, have suffered from being forced into a Darwinian framework, where the regime of natural selection influences economics, and economics taken as a hard science of markets prevents us from seeing that it is we who are imposing ideas on the environment and we who have made what is a destructive ideology seem inevitability because of the false claims of science.
In fact, ecological domains show a global aspect in and off themselves, as wholes. Our one-dimensional crude theories which we mistakenly think intelligent precipitate environmental destruction in the name of biological laws. Witness the Amazon basin destruction. The market process and the Darwinian background thinking set up a situation that is within our powers to terminate, and it would help if we realize that Darwinian and economic theories in their incestuous cohabitation are driving us into an artificially unnatural set of situations.
World History And The Eonic Effect
2.4.1 A Gaian Matrix: The Need For A Global Model
Unexpectedly we have connected the two ideas of evolution and history, seen the problems with laws of history, and we can proceed to develop this relationship in a simple model, which can double as a simple time-line approach. We have stumbled on a truly global process operating beyond the scale of individuals civilizations, and the result is a remarkable realization of a Gaian theme of planetary evolution. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
04.15.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:20 pm by nemo
A short essay on Samkhya, from World History And The Eonic Effect
Permalink
04.13.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:53 pm by nemo
I mentioned already today the way one starting point for the eonic model was the Popperian critique of historicism. Here’s the passage from World History And The Eonic Effect.
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
In the eonic model, this makes little difference: best to critique Marx, because his thinking resurfaces in a better form But this classic criticism of Marx made Popper’s reputation, and people are satisfied to apply this to the controversial Marx when in fact the argument is quite general and could be applied to many of the products of scientism. But they all seem exempted from the criticism.
In any case, Marx would have been better off without theories. Simple statements of historical insight would have been sufficient. Once you propose a theory you set yourself up for a dialectic of falsification. If the theory is not very good, the whole game is shot.
Simple historical observation can easily confirm a restatement of a Marxist insight.
The entirety of civilization as this emerged from the Paleo into the Neolithic has been subjected to the division of society in class and inequality as this came into existence in the new mode of production, agriculture.
Job done, in one sentence. And the question persists, as Marx, and the socialists asked it: will civilization through its duration remain in this condition, or will some resolution of the inherent false logic of civilization ever be possible.
An ominous question.
The left has turned the simplicity of the basic issue into a fetish of ideological commodities, and a false propaganda for a gang of psychopaths.
Permalink
Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy, selections, Ultra Far Left, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:13 pm by nemo
Since we are on the topic of Marxism, here’s a passage from World History And The Eonic Effect:
Out Of Revolution
Was I too fair to Marx here (comment in the comments section if you wish)?
I am working on a fourth edition. I would like to move on a bit here.
I think not, since the eonic model is based on Popper’s critique of Marx’s historicism and Isaiah Berlin’s historical inevitability. But the eonic model has a way of restating Marxism in one line: econostream != eonic sequence.
Which is a way of saying that the macrohistorical directionality we see in the eonic effect is larger than economic evolution.
Marx and Engels lived in the 1840′s. If you read a book on that decade, plus the history leading out of the French Revolution, their thinking makes a lot of sense in that context. If you don’t believe Marx, go read Dickens, who cogently portrayed class society in action, in all its grotesqueness.
The later work of Marx to produce his theories was less successful, although Capital, if you don’t bother to read it, serves well as a form of symbolism. That has mostly been its purpose.
Marx’s critical mistake, to me, lies in one of his most brilliant works: the critique of Hegel’s doctrine of right. To attack the system of liberal rights looked logical at the time, but created a form of thinking, so evident in Lenin, that snowballed into a monstrosity where the liberal world is taken as the root of all evil, and therefore anything goes: since liberal rights are liberal then they must be systematically negated. Observe Lenin in the Russian Revolution and this gross form of aberrant thinking takes off and becomes systematic, with calamitous results.
It is important for theorists to remember that people will take you at your word, literally, and proceed logically to many absurdities.
Much of Marxism is like that: the triumph of unintended consequences.
I think if you look at the eonic effect, and the so-called modern transition, you will see a better approach. Marx is really attempting to grapple with modernity, not just economic capitalism. The good and the bad come together, and there is no postmodern world beyond the modern that will be better. The first of the ‘postmodern’ fallacies (tho not called that) appear in Marx’s wish to completely restart history–after modernity had just restarted it. The confusion resulted in a jackknife effect: modernism/capitalism pitted against itself, in a kind of spastic effect. If you think otherwise look carefully at the way the Bolsheviks suddenly turned into another bourgeoisie in contral of the means of production. A strange swindle.
The correct response to capitalism might well be some form of socialism, but has anyone ever defined it? The entire bolshevik revolution came and went with only the most demented and ad hoc constructions substituting for a definition.
In any case, the question of historical theory in Marx is flawed, for reasons the eonic model make very clear.
Permalink
04.08.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:16 pm by nemo
Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence
One of the great mysteries of world history is the subtle pattern uncovered by the eonic model: the discrete freedom sequence.
Humanity flatters itself that it was able to freely construct the forms of civilization, and freedom. But the reality is more subtle, and a number of misconceptions abound.
We tend to think of slavery as some inchoate condition of civilization that only modern societies could truly abolish. That is true, as far as it goes. But a closer look shows that slavery is not an inevitable development or some inexorably fated first step toward something but a pathology of civilization that was not present at its beginning.
We confront the fact that civilization starts out one way and degenerates for several millennia. And that all the improvements are correlated with the eonic sequence!
The two level analysis of the eonic effect makes the point especially clear, for this kind of model allows us to see the way that a motion toward the ideal can coexist with the degeneration away from an ideal. There was never some teleological inevitability about slavery. Quite the contrary. The Egyptians, after all, outdid all later projects with the pyramids, using hired labor, and without iron tools, copper only to start.
We see by Roman times that the pathology has become terminal. Civilization can go no further until slavery is overcome, somehow.
Here is a footnote from the text of World History And The Eonic Effect citing a book on this subject:
Aldo Schiavone, in The End of the Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), notes the way the Roman system reaches its climax in the early empire, as seen in the famous oration of Aristides (second century A.D.), To Rome, celebrating the Roman achievement, even as a sense of its impasse emerges as the anxious dread before a terminal system.
Cynical elites, Darwinists/Social Darwinists, Machiavellian politicians, even some Marxist historical materialists, would see nothing but sentimental idealism in such a view. But a close look at the evidence shows how misleading the flatland view of history can be. Darwinism has been especially disastrous here, because it suggests that history could not proceed without any progression toward an ideal. But that view is false.
We must distinguish two levels, micro and macro to sort out the confusion, mostly in our own minds, so we can look at the evidence of history for what it is.
The eonic sequence suggests that about two centuries from the divide point and the end of the discrete freedom sequence, democratic assumptions may undergo chaotification.
That points to the year 2000 in the modern case.
Permalink
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:48 pm by nemo
It is worth reading the section of World History And The Eonic Effect on the evolution of religion: The Eonic Evolution of Religion
The question requires careful study of the eonic model, and its distinction of macro and micro-action: in this case the effect of the Axial Age, macro process in the large, is not the same as, or justification, of the outcomes as microaction which might show still primitive elements.
Permalink
04.03.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:27 pm by nemo
The question of the eonic effect tends to resist understanding in many but is tantalizingly close to the issues raised in the previous post, where the possible answer to the question arises in considering LIFE and MIND to (distinct and) connected to fields.
I always refused, however, to get started on such speculative approachs because they explain everything and yet go nowhere. Still, that’s only because the question is beyond our powers of correct analysis. Our glimpses may be genuine.
In any case, in this context, the purely phenomenological description of the eonic effect is an empirical discovery, whatever the provocative nature of such evidence, pushing us to consider a strange field effect at work.
The eonic effect: climbing mt. improbable
Permalink
04.02.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 1:40 pm by nemo
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap6_5.htm
There is something odd about the eonic model, the reason many have a hard time grappling with it. One confusing aspect, perhaps, but also one of its strengths is the distinction of micro and macro-action, and the way this impinges on the question of modernity, the transition to modernity, and its aftermath.
If things, two hundred years after the so-called ‘great divide’ seem to endure sudden chaotification, this perspective is relevant!
Permalink
04.01.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:06 pm by nemo
A short selection from World History And The Eonic Effect dealing with the place of aesthetics next to dynamics:
6.2.2 Rhyme and Reason: Aesthetic Dynamics
We have a little secret up our sleeve, data that doesn’t lie: follow the course of classical music as the transition rushes toward its divide, and note the climax in the period around Mozart and Beethoven, and then a nineteenth century afterburner phase, soon waning, Verdi, Puccini, and gone. The correlation isn’t just a rough measure, it is perfect, down to the decade. This makes life difficult for proponents of the economic interpretation of history.
Thus, is our prime mover technological? Economic? The rise of Liberty? Religious evolution? Humanism, and Enlightened rationality? All around creativity? Here’s a question, if Protestantism can be associated with capitalism, can Tragedy be associated with Revolution? Is it a coincidence that Shakespeare invents the Blank Verse Guillotine a generation before the English Civil War? Can’t we work Hamlet into historical theory? True, Shakespeare was still devoted to the divine right of kings, but perhaps this is a case of Hegelian ‘immanent critique’. Historical sociology has made a decision to be blindly obedient to one-dimensional causality. But the effects show a total spectrum. The appearance at this time of a man like Shakespeare, if we thought this more than an isolated chance, should swiftly disabuse us of any illusions art is an epiphenomenon. The modern also starts with a rash of Bible translators, produces a complex field of literature and music.
Tragedy: a double eonic emergent? The toughest enigma of the eonic sequence is this double recursion of the ‘tragic genre’ twice in a row in the eonic mainline. The rejected design argument suddenly rushes out of the woodwork again, only to fail, leaving us to wonder at a system with such detailed potential in the realm of ‘aesthetic dynamics’.
Aesthetic dynamics The brilliant work of Newton needs a new science, the dynamics of aesthetic emergentism across world history. Easy to invent such a science, but the first theorem is a stumbling block.
So let us throw a monkey wrench into reductionist theories by asking if the rise of classical music, and opera, is another ‘relative transform’ and why it climaxes at the modern divide, then quickly runs out of steam by the end of the nineteenth century. In modern times, the case of opera, and its evolution, is one of the most interesting details of the whole period, and a real theory breaker. In the search for the ‘causes’ of this modernism, passing through the political, diplomatic, technological, philosophic, and religious factors, it remains a sociological orphan, and yet appears in perfect concert with the most creative period of the whole phenomenon, emerging in the late sixteenth century, rising to new heights in the last part of the eighteenth, climaxing in the nineteenth, and then passing away, from Verdi, to Puccini, to nothing. It is time to demand theories of history to acknowledge, if not explain, such phenomena. We are in the presence of the ‘two line proof’ most theories of development are incorrect in their basic conceptions. What theory will avail of these strange facts? Enter Hamlet, on the way to the virtual Richard the Fourth, from the notorious Third, the first of our tadpole modern types.
In the confusion of ‘causal’ theories, the only methodology that can prefigure the problem is the Kantian, with its Newtonian idée fixe splitting in mysterious elegance into moral and aesthetic components. The evidence of general culture is routinely excluded from more hardheaded analysis, but Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Racine, the reappearance of Tragic Drama, the new opera and music, much more, emphatically contribute their element to an insight into what is happening.
Broadly, the rise or crystallization of new national literatures so swiftly in independent parallel emergence and in a fashion later generations cannot imitate is a ‘miner’s canary’ here. In this case again the resemblance, as we can show, to the classical Hellenic period is too close to be coincidence. In any case, this esthetic dimension is a kind of checkmate to standard historical sociology. It is hardly an accident that a great era of philosophy cusps at the point of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, with its curious collation of another critique of teleological judgments. Our system seems to be installing all the necessary software for an age to come. We should perhaps screw up our courage and declare Kant, beside Hegel, more evidence of eonic effects. As in his life, so in his appearance one must wonder at his historical timing.
Renaissances and ‘The’ Renaissance, The Aesthetic State We see a radical discontinuity at the rough boundary 1500 and yet there seems to a slight discrepancy with an earlier Renaissance. Are we actually seeing continuity here rather than discontinuity? What are we up to? We have fairly well answered this, in fact, but the difficulty does seem to nag at our sense of what is going on. Actually, we never solve this problem fully, and don’t need to. Our long-range pattern shows that the transition comes after the Renaissance, and the in-between can do whatever it wants. We simply looked at the correlation of our eonic sequence with the data of world history. We found a strong correlation, but the question of the Renaissance didn’t enter the picture. A close look shows the soundness of our reasoning, and the unexpected discovery that continuity thinking has confused us. No fundamental change has really occurred in the broad scope of social variables that we see in the modern period. The Renaissance can barely recover the heights of antiquity. It is not until the seventeenth century that a definite progression is visible, and the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns that breaks almost the moment this happens tokens the better insight of the people at the time who had never heard of the Renaissance, but could see they were passing beyond antiquity. Our model has a different potential from those used for flat history. As the complexity of our model increases two or more separate streams of development are possible. One way we can see the difference is that while the idea of aesthetics can enter history as ‘free action’ the processing of large-scale aesthetic motions and movements is beyond individuals and shows clear eonic determination. It is like our question of ‘technosequence’. Art has passed into general culture. Every generation produces great art. That leaves us to scrounge for ‘relative transforms’ here. Instead we see in the rise of the modern the birth of aesthetics, and something altogether novel, the idea of the ‘aesthetic state’, as a deliberate attempt to mimic nature’s action in the Greek Archaic.
Thus, the resolution lies in extending the scale of the analysis to include the whole of world history. Then we will see ‘renaissances’ occurring in the earlier period between the rise of Sumer and the Axial Age. They keep happening, there is even a bit of a renaissance as Rome declines and yet keeps going on and on. They keep happening! We will also see thus that we can easily confuse ‘free action’ and ‘eonic determination’. Please note that in our type of model two or more separate streams of evolution are possible, and that the mideonic worlds are showing increasing development under their own steam. The Renaissance fails to show the characteristic total transformation that we see later in the modern transition.
The issue of the Renaissance is often cast in terms of art. But this is misleading as a measure of cultural evolution—or is it? The point is that the fine arts show great continuity in every generation and we tend not to see the same ‘relative transformation’ effect that we see in endeavors that are not yet natural to man, a good example and exception being composition of the ‘tragedy’, which is very rare. Our system gives a fairly remarkable example just here as to the distinction of ‘eonic transition’ and ‘renaissance’. The idea that culture is crucial to evolution has an exemplar in the idea of the ‘aesthetic state’. As one author here notes,
The Aesthetic State The idea of an aesthetic state traces back to the impression conveyed primarily by one Hellenic ‘city-state’ or polis, the Athens of 480-429 B.C., that its political and social institutions were ruled by an agglomerate of forces for which the closest modern parallels belong to the esthetic sphere. The ultimate reason for this impression is the ubiquity of Homer for the culture formations of classical Athens, directly through the influence of his example on Athenian creative life from tragedy to dialectic. Homer deserves to be called the unique poetic ‘prophet’ for the religions of the Athenians, and, to this degree, their religion is a Kunstreligion or ‘religion of art’ because it stemmed from a legislation made possible primarily through a ‘poetic’ mind…The Athenian experiment in an esthetic state was defeated by various factors…Only as late as the civic humanism of early Renaissance Florence was its basic principle retrieved.
As we study Archaic Greece we see the poignancy of this example of the Greek ‘aesthetic state’ in the direct mainline of the eonic sequence. But it is thus true that the Renaissance seems to wish to revive all this. Doesn’t work, for a reason not a first quite clear. But reviving the past is not (necessarily) what the eonic system is up to. And one should now take a close look at the later rise of the modern to see how it handles the idea of the aesthetic state. Quite surprising. We have modern ‘aesthetics’ (re-)born in the transition, a Critique of Judgment and a Romantic Movement appearing at our divide. But everything is different in this case, for our system is about another issue, even as the uncanny resurfacing of the idea takes place. Here we have invaluable help, just at our divide, from the eagle-eyed Hegel, who rises to note, ‘what happened to the aesthetic state?’ Thence, wringing his hands, and poring over the texts of Stuart and Smith resigns himself to the doctrines of Right applied to ‘states of dross’, civil society in its less than aesthetic modes. The point is that our eonic system never repeats itself, and is spawning something broader than a repetition of its previous outcomes. But the slow passage of the idea of the ‘aesthetic state’ into an almost technological issue is a wild card of modern thinking, unable to match the eonic determination of the Greek Archaic.
Permalink
03.23.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:06 pm by nemo
One of the strangest episodes of the Hegelian era is the notion of a ‘science of freedom’. Lost in the rear view mirror of rising positivism, this notion, which is really a continuation of Kant’s critiques, expresses the inherent difficulty in the application of science to human/historical subjects.
The resolution of this issue in the study of the eonic effect is one of the most successful aspects of the eonic model.
1.5.5 The Science Of Freedom
From Newton to the period of Kant we see a full cycle of a dialectic that resulted in the distinction of human and natural sciences. This period seems lost to us and we live in the secondary downfield arising in the emergence of scientism as a universal discourse. The Science Wars, and the Two Cultures debate, are really echoes of this period near the climax of the Enlightenment when a deeper dimension to rationality was explored against the backdrop of the Romantic movement, and much else. The point for us will be in something like Kant’s distinction of theoretical and practical reason. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
03.14.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:19 pm by nemo
Thank you very much, there has been a gratifying response to the online text of World History And The Eonic Effect: The Eonic Effect
I am already on the move to another, the fourth edition, this time in a more popular version. The theoretical work is done, and robust, despite the strangeness, at first, of this approach, for many. So enough the third edition, even if it is hard to credit a non-establishment type. This makes Darwinists frantic with rage at the point that any publicity attends this effort.
Darwinism is dead, but Darwinists are the last to know it.
Darwinism is so heavily promoted by science elites that its public persistence is secure, and we don’t perceive that it is eroding/dying inside, and liable to take down science with it. As Soren Lovtrup noted several decades ago, how did it happen that this paradigm, or else deception, endured so long?
How is it that such a vast cadre of intelligent scientists can’t manage to let go of this obviously failed paradigm? That sword of Damocles is hanging over the Sci community.
Actually there is a whole contingent of scientists with new and interesting insights that go beyond the synthesis, e.g. the Altenberg 16 conference, and then again the recent Rome conference.
Have you heard anything about this in the mass media? Nope. These scientists are, I am sure, frustrated, because once they say even a little bit about the limits of natural selection, their press vanishes.
This has, actually, been going on for a long time. And the ground has shifted underneath the Darwinists. They control the media. So it is not clear how long they can survive. But for everyone else, time to move on.
Meanwhile, as pointed here re: The Darwin Conspiracy, Darwin was a fraud, plagiarist, and clearly a dishonest man.
So it goes also with his legacy, Darwinism.
Permalink
03.10.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:31 pm by nemo
The issue of Kant’s transcendental idealism has always far too arcane for easy understanding, as the previous post on Tittle suggested. What a pity!
It might help to study the eonic effect, where the noumenal/phenomenal distinction arises in a simple and practical way, without much philosophy.
Here is a piece on ‘Kant’s Challenge’:
Kant’s Challenge
A noumenal mystery Our eonic model almost automatically produces a structure isomorphic to Kant’s distinction of noumenon and phenomenon, and it does so deftly using different concepts and without any of the complications that haunt the original. Isomorphic, but in a different context, large-scale history. Since this was serendipitous, and unasked for, we are left to wonder what this means. The problem is that history is all of a piece, phenomenon, including our eonic sequence. And yet this sequence stages the hard evidence of the ‘uncaused freedom emergence factor’ inside a temporal oscillation. All we can do is notice this isomorphism, and proceed on our own way with our self-sufficient model, which exploits a dualism of levels for purely practical system model reasons. So what is the relationship of our eonic sequence to this enigma of Kant? Since our transitions are phenomenon yet noumenally tuned, we must consider that in some fashion our eonic sequence oscillates near the limits of manifestation (a statement bordering on a kind of metaphysics we haven’t allowed), and at the limits of our representations we see the inexplicable appearance of the freedom generator. The long lost mediating factor between the phenomenon and the noumenon suddenly appears, where least expected, in history itself. We must suspect that the ‘teleological’ aspect is beyond the limits of our representations, noumenal, as all that we see is phenomenon, directionality, a stupendous oscillation in the degrees of freedom of the system execution.
Permalink
03.08.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 1:25 pm by nemo
5.6.4 Christianity, Islam, Mahayana As Mideonic Micro-action
The eonic model produces one of the most fascinating insights into the dynamcis of ‘religion evolution’ in world history, although the level of abstraction makes it difficult to see what is being said, perhaps, for many.
That’s a pity, because there is a very simple process at work in the overall system of the eonic effect, one that, however, only applies to the eonic series, not to the middle periods in between: there’s the clue to real understaing, and some ability to distance oneself from these massive eruptions of history: the beginning of Christianity and Islam. Neither of these are included in the eonic series!
This point is kept abstract, perhaps for a reason, but the time perhaps will come when the more obvious meaning should be laid out: there is something mysteriously macro-evolutionary in the eonic sequence, but the ‘mideonic’ beginnings of things are humnan, perhaps all too human.
Our model produces a beautiful insight into the emergence of the great religions, so-called, but at the same time we must be clear that it takes a ‘hands off’ approach to their appearance since by the very nature of a discrete-continuous model they are beyond the range of our dynamical explanations, or explorations. The most we can claim is that something in our eonic sequence, here the Axial interval, produced seeds that flowed into a diffusion zone thence to be raw materials for mideonic constructs, and the mediation of new oikoumenes. Full stop. And that the evidence shows, most powerfully. And yet this ‘explanation’, even as it explains everything, explains nothing, and we must respect the historical integrity of these outcomes by opening a new file for their study. We must trace their historical chronicles without invoking the dynamics of the eonic sequence. Because of their occulted origins, that is extremely difficult to do.
Permalink
03.06.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:43 pm by nemo
Mysterious Drumbeat
In all the brouhaha over evolution one simple fact is concealed from view: noone has ever really observed evolution, and have substituted metaphysical projection on deep time as a substitute.
In one sense, of course we observe evolution: we have endless fossils to document that a something, ‘evolution’, occurred in deep time, but that is not enough. We can’t really say that we know how this happened, what the mechanism is, the dynamics.
This has become confused with debates over gaps in the fossil record. But, again, such statements are misleading: there is probably a discoverable rough sequence of forms continuously documenting a chain of organisms, in a sequence that is evolutionary. But still there are gaps in our knowledge: we don’t have a continuously observed sequence of all stages of a given speciation. Thus, even though the transformations are continuous, we may fail to observe the real dynamics behind that.
That’s why we can claim that the eonic effect is one of the only closely observed ‘evolutionary’ sequences in existence: we can see a continuous record of historical chronicle at the level of centuries or less. And this suddenly shows very clearly that a strange dynamics is behind that chronicle. We see continuity, and we see ‘gaps’, and they are both there. In fact the gaps are nothing of the kind, they are a ‘fullsome’ interval overloaded with accelerating history, e.g. the Axial interval. Think of velocity and acceleration: there is always continuity, yet acceleration is conceptually a ‘discontinuity’, a finite interval of relative change in velocity. We can’t apply this analogy directly to biology, it is not physics, but the basic matrix of concepts is almost a priori we might say, and applies to many situations.
And this has nothing to do with genetics. We might say this isn’t evolution therefore. That’s misleading. It is not genetic evolution but it is almost by definition ‘evolution of some kind’. And this must challenge the standard Darwinian picture because the latter is taken to explain by reduction and genetics such things as the evolution of ethics, or religion, and much else, but we can see that, whatever the case with genetics in this ‘evolution of some kind’, all sort of higher level cultural phenomena are connected to this other form of evolution.
It can be hard to accept this at first, but the key thing is to zoom in on world history and try to visualize the process, with the realization that we have misconstrued the meaning of evolution, and have been looking in the wrong place.
We discover what it means to ‘observe’ evolution, and realize that Darwinists are indulging in speculation. We hold the ace on evolution in the spectacular, though quiet, data of the eonic series.
Noone know what evolution, they just talk about it, play politics over the word to control opinion and belief. But evolution is something beyond our simple myths, or beliefs.
Permalink
03.05.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:03 pm by nemo
From WHEE
I am not the first person to point out that it is not an easy thing empirical evidence of a lack of a cause. Kant himself assumes that a good scientist will operate under the presumption that absent natural causes may eventually be discovered.
The small triumphs of the eonic model, problem solved…
Permalink
03.04.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:48 pm by nemo
Since we have been speaking of Kantian antinomies tonight, we should cite the one that lies at the heart of the question of a science of history, and the way that the eonic model shows the resolution of that classic contradiction:
Critique Of Historical Reason
A Science of History? What is the relation of our method to Kant’s actual system? There is a direct one in his so-called Third Antinomy.
“Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”
From one can proceed to the various parts and pieces of the eonic model to see how the famous third antinomy is reflected and resolved by the differentiation of ideas/terms, e.g. the distinction of macro-action and micro-action:
Man Makes Himself
Permalink
03.03.09
Posted in Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 10:23 pm by nemo
All of these questions of human evolution confuse people because Darwinism is always in the back of their minds, misleading them. A look at the eonic effect, and the relation of history and evolution, then the question of sudden human emergence, might suddenly click in one’s mind, because we can suspect, without being sure, that something like the eonic series might well have pushed man across the threshold to homo sapiens: The Great Explosion
Permalink
03.02.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:00 pm by nemo
It would be nice to get some feedback from this Rome Conference on evolution, but in another way the whole game is shot. I hope they come up with some interesting stuff, but do we really want another round of incomplete theories used to justfiy economic ideology, debunk religion, and pass the pretense of scientists to omniscience? We can’t even be sure anymore scientists are even truthful on the subject of evolution. It makes it hard to read books on biology, many of which are not reliable guides to the evidence.
Looking at Davies’ The Darwin Conspiracy, it seems the current generation of Darwinists/scientists can’t figure out who their real founder is, and are either fooled by the Darwin deception, or party to that deception, in which case, without basic truthfulness, science isn’t possible.
Job for the conference: resolve The Darwin Conspiracy, without hype or more lying.
Scientists aren’t the only ones who know something about evolution: I think my falsification (of a kind) of Dawinism using the study of history is decisive, but has failed to sink in among the ‘overtrained experts’ because that training has been so narrow and so crypto-propagandistic that real learning never occurred outside of the limits of scientism. And this can fail to grapple with the real issue of evolution, and fail without warning: you simply proceed along the lines of a particular specialty thinking you are really dealing with the ‘evolution’ which, as the eonic effect shows, is far vaster than we had imagined.
Scientists seem to have no awareness of the trap they have fallen into, and yet have the excessive power of any arrogant elite to dominate public opinion with their line of conditioning. The situation has a suspicious similarity to the domination by a priesthood.
One needs to learn how to defend oneself from this seemingly binding ‘science’ and a look at the eonic effect can do the trick, especially as to the descent of humans.
1.3.1 Falsifying Darwinism: A Theoretical Self-defense
In the relentless promotion of violent evolutionary theories as ideology and the equal and opposite exploitation of the ambiguities of such theories in the resurrection of design arguments, the public is lost in a closed dialectic. We need a method of theoretical self-defense to achieve a basic sanity in a debate seeding another phase of the wars of religion. However, those religions tend naturally via their sense of universal history to choke on the extreme reductionism of Darwinian explanation. Confronted with a hopelessly botched theory that has genocidal implications, it is of great importance to see that evolution Darwin-style is simply not the case, and not confirmed by the evidence. We can at least quarantine world history from the misapplication of Darwin ’s theory.
We need a more up to date approach to the idea of universal history. Study of the eonic effect provides this empirically and can act as equalizer to help us to put the whole debate in perspective, to see that our public discourse is condemned to propaganda, and little else. We cannot easily defeat these propagandas serving the agendas of technocratic Big Science and fundamentalist anti-modernism, but we can proceed from the underground, and thence move to replace the obsession with theories with an empirical matrix of historical observation.
The eonic effect shows us how to get out of the theory trap, and proceed with a simple time-line or tracker-approximator of macro-history that can give us the rough sense of our evolutionary context without the oversimplifications used to enforce the worldviews of dominant elites. This can allow us to take into account the fact of evolution without the presumption to theory that condemned Darwinism to a pseudo-science for Whiggish impostors. In the process we can bypass the cut-purse abuse of the design argument in service of theocratic domination. The most we can do is to erect a failsafe that will protect historical action from the Darwinian confusion applied to history, our proper domain of action, with its own evolutionary process, one that can better serve our real potential. We can also wrest the Old Testament from the labyrinth of mythology that has grown around it, and see its real significance in the emergence of civilization. It is time to rescue this text from the hallucinations of religious lunacy. In the process we can do better justice to science and religion both, able to recreate the essence of religion in the context of a robust secularism, beyond the derelicts of Axial Age destined break up on the shoals of modernity, and beyond the feeble idiocies of degenerating scientism.
Armed with the data of the eonic effect you can stop Darwinian claims for the science of natural selection in their tracks, without getting entangled in religious or design arguments. The associated eonic model can help in seeing the problems with current evolutionary theories and their misapplication to history and culture.
The is article goes with this: History And Evolution: The Eonic Effect
Permalink
02.26.09
Posted in selections, The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:50 pm by nemo
Yesterday’s post on Secularism and the eonic effect might profit from looking at one of the strange yet inevitable properties of the eonic effect: the way in which we begin to dissolve the ‘eonic sequence’ as we begin to observe its action, in the past. Or else, it is the case that we have reached the end of this phase of ‘evolution’ and wake up to its action, looking backward. Here is a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect on this point.
End Of The Eonic Sequence
The study of the ‘evolution’ in the eonic effect can be confusing at first because it is not morphological evolution, or organismic development, but the ‘evolution of freedom’, speaking formally.
In fact, another selection from earlier in the book might illustrate the point (don’t worry too much about the ‘deduction’, just look at the paradox of ‘evolving freedom’ versus ‘self-evolving freedom’.
An Eonic Sequence, And A Frequency Deduction
A frequency deduction A system ‘evolving freedom’ cannot cause freedom directly, since the over-determination would be causally closed. But such a system cannot leave action alone, since under-determination would not evolve freedom. Therefore, to evolve freedom such a system might alternate between higher and lower degrees of freedom, in cycles of macro-action, and micro-action left to its own devices. All at once we see that this corresponds to the eonic pattern. Thus, for example, the Axial Age shows a higher degree of freedom, but under eonic determination, while the mideonic intervals show the potential for freedom without the action of the system, ‘real freedom’, or not. The frequency system might terminate at some point to allow the realization of this potential. At the end we will suspect that we are at the end of the eonic sequence since observing the eonic effect probably preempts its future action.
In general the simplicity of the eonic effect is challenged by the need to distinguish between the ‘degrees of freedom’, almost in alternation, during the transitions and at other times. It seems obscure, but the point is absolutely vital.
If we look at the brilliance of the Axial Age and the declines and loss of quality in the continuation after the period of massive innovation we can see that there is an obvious difference, for a reason we can suddly see.
We must therefore be on the lookout in our own time for this phenomenon.
You can see the problem is difficult is you ask yourself why the great achievements of the early modern are hard to match, e.g. the sudden correlated flowering of ‘classical’ music from the seventeenth century to the period of Beethoven. We can see, stunned by the strangeness of the eonic sequence, that these phenomena are not chance developments.
But the ‘end of the eonic sequence’ is a challenge to realize a greater freedom, not the submission to some spurious Spenglerian decline.
Permalink
02.25.09
Posted in secularism, selections, The Eonic Effect, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:55 pm by nemo
Comment on Taylor’s A Secular Age
James said,
February 25, 2009 at 2:41 pm ·
I’m not trying to do justice to your book, but one gets a sense after reading it that neither side really understands the meaning of “secularism.” Taylor is just as confused as the Darwinists.
And a comment from me:
nemo said,
February 25, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Did you mean WHEE?
The issue of secularism, as I approach it from several angles, is ironically seen in its verbal history, saeculum, age period.
The rise of the modern produced a ‘new age’, and, like the Axial Age, religions pass away as new religions, indeed ’secularism’, come into existence.
World History And The Eonic Effect is probably the book you need if you are uncertain about the issue of secularism. It is a question, more broadly, of the rise of the new age of modernity, or the modern transition, with the ‘secular’ age that follows that transition.
For a depiction, all too brief, of the modern transition, 1500 to 1800 (roughly) check out the online selections from WHEE, chapter 5, “Transition And Modernity”, and this section:
6.2 From Reformation To Revolution
I should note that the eonic effect is an historical pattern, and a vast one, transcends my interpretation(s), and indicates several, or many, interpretations. Thus it is unwise to be dogmatic on what we mean by secularism.
As to religion, the effect of the Protestant Reformation is revolutionary, although the point is no longer intuitive to many now. Protestantism triggered the modern transition, and broke the power of the medieval imperialism of the Catholic Church. The issue is confusing, because Protestantism gave birth to its own post-protestant future. Furthermore, the distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism is meaningless now, almost: Catholicism is now essentially a very large Protestant sect (i.e. it acknowledges a host of modern beliefs and cultural modernities, something it didn’t do in the sixteenth century).
Secularism now seems to mean the new religion of the Dawkins/Darwinists/New Atheists/ members of the scientism cult, and demands the adherence to a set of beliefs about reality that are so narrow that if they ever became generally held would provoke the Taliban to take over New York City, and the Buddhists to egg them on.
Look at the modern transition: it sows the seeds of the ‘secular’ New Age, and it is a massive dose of parallel synchronous opposites in tandem, from science to Protestantism, to democratic emergentism, to a new philosphy from Descartes to Kant/Hegel, thousands of complex entities undergoing rapid sudden development, especially after the seventeenth century.
The sense of the secular didn’t quite come out as post-religion the way it does now: it meant many things, among them the sudden sense (seen in the Battle of the Ancients And Moderns) that a new era of history (saeculum, latin) had come into existence, and that this had begun to progress beyond or surpass the achievements of the ancients.
Part of the problem is that the modern age produced a set of potential outcomes or emergentist phenomena that are too complex for easy understanding, and we tend to fall back into oversimplifications, like scientism, or the cliche that ‘modernity= scientism’.
This emphasis on Protestantism (purely historical in my case) is excoriated by the later ‘secularists’, and they are free to create the society beyond religion they aspire to, but as we can see they are incapable of doing that.
However, the eonic effect shows the way that modernity, so far from being over in the face of the postmodern, is barely underway, and therefore the definition of its meaning remains up in the air, remains to be realized.
It can help to look at Stage 2 of the eonic effect, the Axial Age, and the period that followed the Axial Age: the past died, and the future was born, but it took many centuries after the Axial Age for that to happen.
It is also essential to study the complexities of the Enlightenment, and the several such ‘enlightenments’ occuring in tandem, along with the history of music, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement, plus much else.
From the eonic model we can see why this period at the end of the eighteenth century is one of the most innovative in world history, and a look at the The Great Divide can be helpful.
It can be useful, if you are wary of his confusing thinking, to consider Hegel’s point: it is the ‘dialectic’ that is at the heart of modernity, or history.
Well, maybe, or maybe not, but his point, taken more generally, is acutely insightful: modernity is a set of opposites in conjunction, and any attempt to reduce that to a set of cliches will not do it justice.
As I noted, we study an immense phenomenon in which we are immersed, and it is necessary to be wary of too narrow defintions of what we mean by modernity or secularism.
Permalink
02.23.09
Posted in History, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:24 pm by nemo
After the Amazon review flap it might help to start over and highlight some of the key points of World History And The Eonic Effect, to how they revolve around one simple question, and objective: a non-random pattern in world history, and its demonstration. That’s it.
1.1.1 In Search Of History: Using The Text
Historical research has greatly expanded our knowledge of world history, and the result is an unexpected discovery: that of a process of universal history in the action of a mysterious dynamic generating a non-random pattern. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 4:56 pm by nemo
This post contains a comment from my Amazon blog in response to another one-star review of World History And The Eonic Effect. This time I think I nailed the reviewer. These short one-star jobs are strong evidence that, even with a copy of the book, supposedly, the reviewer has not really read the book. They see that the book is critical of Darwinism, then fly off the handle in a rage.
I am not sure, of course, in this case, but in general must be entirely suspicious that in a week when I reviewed Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True critically retaliation comes. The Darwin groupies come out in force.
The whole Amazon review system is at risk on this kind of issue.
These tactics are effective censorship, by the way, and only someone like me who is able to survive the onslaught of sophmoric Darwin fanatics will dare to write a book critical of Darwin. You can see how, with the exception of ID writers, the old-fashioned Darwin critic has become very rare.
You may disagree with World History And The Eonic Effect, but to call it crazy is off the mark. The sheer complexity of the book, and its extreme care to be wary of theories of any kind, from a Kantian perspective, makes the charge of anti-science totally egregious.
The charge of ‘incomprehensible gibberish’ is surely false. I had the third edition evaluated by several people on just those grounds (because of a second edition claim of difficulty) and the verdict was that the book was technical and required careful study, but that is was not incomprehensible.
For a professor to make that charge is not fair. A book on Biochemistry is incomprehensible gibberish, if you have never studied it.
The days of ‘dumbed Darwinism’ are over. The evolution question needs to be looked at in its real complexity.
This book is about how the science of history is subject to paradox, and asks why science can never produce that science of history.
That is not the tactics of a quack.
I fear that it is Darwin that is the quack and these reviewers feel threatened and fly into a rage. In any case it is a most unprofessional review from a professor of chemistry.
Who’s the real quack? Darwin?
1:37 PM PST, February 23, 2009
I notice today another one star review of World History And The Eonic Effect. See below. It gets a bit tiresome. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
02.22.09
Posted in selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 6:38 pm by nemo
Dutton’s The Evolution Of Art
Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind’s universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.
This thesis at least subjects itself to refutation by trying to find some adaptive function for art. It is interesting to consider that ‘disinterestedness’ is a key to the ‘aesthetic judgment’ as discussed in Kant. It seems the antithesis to motived adaptation!
At least we can agree that art and evolution have a connection, but only evolution in the sense of the eonic effect.
Here is a passage from World History And The Eonic Effect
2.6.3 Art, Evolution And The Tragic Genre
The historian William MacNeill, in Keeping Together in Time , considers the element of dance and song in human evolution. But this process is right under our noses if we carefully do some accounting of relative transforms in our eonic pattern. Most ‘song and dance’ elements are well established in the human legacy and cease to show relative transformation. We need to find one that is inside the eonic mainline, what we will call an eonic emergent. We can see that the eonic pattern is pervaded by spectacular cases of artistic flowering. Here is a prime case for our distinctions made between what is potential at all times and what appears in our macroevolutionary pattern. We can in fact isolate one spectacular intermittent effect in the genre of Greek tragedy (whose ‘song and dance’ elements are almost vestigial, as it passes into a literary genre). Its relevance to our ‘evolution of freedom’ is direct. And the suspicious similarity of the ‘tragic theme’ to the issues of religious evolution should alert us to the importance of the issue. The potential to create art, acts of purpose, and will, and the freedom to ‘screw up’, closely resemble each other. This is a complex subject, but our remarks will be restricted to periodization, and it also true that the example of the tragic genre, although of special interest, is only one of a whole range.[i]
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
02.21.09
Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution, selections, World History and The Eonic Effect at 5:47 pm by nemo
I have been rereading a number of books on the question (s) of human origins, and ordered this one (cited in WHEE) from Amazon: The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein
This is one of the best on the whole subject, despite the author’s clutching at the straw of the ‘magic mutation’. The basic point is that ca. 50 thousand years ago, in that range, the ‘big leap’ of human evolution must have occured to produce behaviorally modern man.
We need to be careful here and listen to slightly different ‘slower’ style accounts, but the basic issue is clear. The allotments of time don’t (fully) square with gradual evolution.
To put the matter in a nutshell: Darwinian-style accounts make very little sense here because we see the whole sequence of hominids from homo habilis (and/or australopicthecus) to anatomical homo sapies (ca. 150 thousand years ago) over several plus millions of years, yet the crucial period that does almost everything happens suddenly (for 50K years ago, you could also read sometime ‘after 100K’ BCE, before 50K).
This material is prime fodder for the eonic effect: this ‘effect’ shows us a non-genetic, and very spectacular, evolutionary pattern stretching over about ten thousand years, operating with directionality, globally, according to a very specific set of principles.
We can’t be sure, but this is just the kind of situation we seem to see in the Great Leap, or Great Explosion. But biologists are unwilling to let go of their Darwin obsession, even as the evidence points to something else.
I read this book for the second edition, but the issue was only peripheral to the depiction of the eonic effect (lack of space). Read the selection from WHEE here:
The Great Explosion
Make sure you grasp how the dynamics of the eonic effect operates.
This situation is unfair. Contradictory evidence is simply finessed as the critics are ignored.
The Great Explosion Evolutionary theorists have longed puzzled over the sudden advance ca. 50000 (?) years ago at the point man seems to have crossed a threshold to become the recognizably human cultural being that he is in terms of language and culture… Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in selections, The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 2:41 pm by nemo
Just about the most popular posts on this blog have been those critiquing Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, a text that hopelessly confused the Axial Age question.
World History And The Eonic Effect (get the book!) has a short critique of her treatment (it is a bit too fair, almost):
2.6.1 Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation
The appearance of The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong has introduced a new set of confusions into the question of the Axial Age. Our previous remarks about a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ show how the analysis can go awry if we identify the Axial period with the phenomenon of religion. Thus the subtitle of her work, “The Beginning Of Our Religious Traditions”, is already a distortion of the broader balance we can see if we take into account the total phenomenon, especially the at first anomalous case of the Greek transition. Armstrong’s distinction of mythos and logos, with the comparative puzzlement or denigration of the later, shows the result of the misplaced emphasis on religion. This prejudice against rationality is a reflection of the current postmodern critique of the modern theme of reason so evident in many New Age attacks on modernity, as they call for a new era of spirituality. Armstrong, evidently aware of the first edition of World History and The Eonic Effect, seems uncertain how to proceed, on the one hand noting the modern transformation and yet pointing to the need for a second Axial Age to solve the problem of the dreaded ‘rationality’ spawned by Greeks, the black sheep of the previous Axial Age. The rise of the modern is that ‘second’ Axial Age and it is about a different business than religion.[i]
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »