04.26.10
Fourth edition on its way
The Fourth Edition of WHEE is on its way, so download the files from the 3rd before they disappear: A glimpse of evolution
03.01.10
Response on Kant
Another post for the record, dealing with my 4th edition survey.
Fourth edition, peer review, etc, etc…
I got a belated response below today from one respondent, Stuart Newman, on the email/survey I sent out to dozens of professors/scientists in academia.
It unwittingly illustrates my grounds for terminating any more interactions re: my work from professors. They are untrustworthy. Read the rest of this entry »
Fourth edition, peer review, etc, etc…
I have been sending out a series of pdf review copies of WHEE/fourth edition to a bunch of academics et al. My purpose is to obviate the criticism that I would not submit to peer review, and to call the bluff of those who make that criticism. And as pointed out by one commentator the first edition was cited immediately by the journal History and Theory. The issue is really one of censorship by the Darwin monopoly, so the approval of academic types is completely unwanted!
So this is for the record, whether or not you care to bother with: I want the action for the public record/. The fourth edition will be out this summer, and I hope that it represents a stage toward something easier for the public to understand.
This is a final email update on the PDF preview copy of the fourth edition of World History And The Eonic Effect sent out to a large group of academic scholars and scientists. I have decided to terminate the request for review, having accomplished my purpose, and gotten the feedback that I wanted/needed, and to expedite the printing sequence stat. If you have anything to say, act at once.
My inside anonymous ‘adviser’ in academia, previously cited here (below), suggested it was a complete waste of time to deal with academic types on the issue of evolution/Darwinism, even if they are so-called critics, as with the Altenberg 16:
“Academia is completely corrupt on the issue of evolution, and you would lose your credibility to get an endorsement from these scumbags with PHD’s. You have already gotten what you need. The first edition of your book was immediately cited by the classic Journal History and Theory in 2000, proof that it would in principle pass peer review, despite its incomplete state at that point. As you well know the Darwin Gestapo descended on that magazine and their innocent mistake was fairly well punished by the enforcers, as one can see from the Darwin garbage that began to appear. Read the rest of this entry »
02.09.10
Third edition to go offline
If you are confused by the evolution debate, a look at the so-called eonic effect can help, if only to show the real complexity of the question, and the failure of all current theories.
Start of World History And The Eonic Effect: WHEE is about to go offline and out of print as a book, in prep for the quite different fourth edition, so take the chance now to look at the material.
A huge number of people have been reading the comprehensive online selections since I announced the fourth edition. Join the fun.
Or get the book!
02.03.10
Money back guarantee: WHEE not peer reviewed! What a relief
The academic peer review system is a notable failiure on the question of evolution, and I have a bad feeling scientists will never get evolution straight, even the so-called dissenters. The system has made idiots out of intelligent scientists and biologists. Time for another way
How about a money-back guarantee on an evolution book that was NOT peer reviewed?
World History And The Eonic Effect!
01.29.10
Fourth Edition coming soon!
The fourth edition of World History And The Eonic Effect is coming soon!
Be sure to get your fill of the third edition, which is going offline very soon.
A Glimpse of Evolution
01.05.10
More on What Darwin Got Wrong: the danger of theories
What Darwin Got Wrong (Hardcover)
~ Jerry Fodor (Author), Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
This book by Fodor and P/P looks very interesting and is right up our alley here: I requested a review copy a few minutes ago.
However, as per Newman’s blurb below, I would note that the moment of paradigm shift has come many times and the Darwin establishment has slipped away unscathed.
Newman says that evolution needs a persuasive theory, but no such theory is likely to arrive from any source, and even if there was one it would not be as persuasive as the hyped theory of natural selection. The struggle for public acceptance is a false ambition that will tempt all authors to compromise.
These authors have recycled a critique of natural selection (and found a publisher, which is always suspicious) but I will bet a small sum they have no post-Darwinian theory. I don’t hold it against them, quite the contrary, but it would help to point out to the public that a ‘theory’ is hard to come by and that consumers of evolution should act defensively as to theories. Theories like the Darwin brand are dangerous instruments and it might be time to realize that for good Kantian reasons there are not likely to be any simple theories of evolution.
As Robert Wesson, in Beyond Natural Selection, points out (I will look for the exact quote), there are not likely to be any further comprehensive theories of the Darwinian type. Science as we know is not able to produce a ‘theory of evolution’ in closed form, and we can be sure any attempt to defy this logic would generate more hype.
Check out World History And The Eonic Effect: it makes this explicit, and adopts the tactic of ‘tracking evolutionary sequences’ rather than producing a theory.
“Evolution needs a persuasive theory if the struggle for public acceptance is to be won. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s bold treatise, What Darwin Got Wrong, convincingly shows that natural selection is not that theory. Drawing on scientific literature spanning the molecular, behavioral, and cognitive scales, with sophisticated excursions into evolutionary-developmental biology and the physics of complex systems, the authors perform a philosophical dismantling of the standard model of evolutionary change that is likely irreversible. Their unambiguous grounding in the factuality of evolution renders this work a service to science and a setback for its opponents.” —Stuart Newman, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, New York Medical College
If you want to be a Darwin critic, I recommend reading World History And The Eonic Effect carefully to see the way that a theory will elude you, and also to see the way that genetics is not sufficient to explain evolution.
Using this book you can defend yourself against the old hype, possible new hype, find out the problem with theories (the Oedipus paradox, etc…), get a glimpse of evolution in action across world history (yes, history) and in general note the way that a Kantian barrier obstructs our views of evolutionary dynamics.
Any theory of evolution must resolve the question of teleology, which is probably impossible, qua Kant.
Further, any theory of human evolution MUST explain the eonic effect! Best of luck.
And, no, the design argument (in the sense of the current Intelligent Design theologians) is not a fall back position (although ‘design’, whatever that means, in general is or ought to be a factor in all naturalistic theories.)
Finally, if you are a Darwin critic and found a publisher, I am suspicious. You copped out somewhere, maybe. Robert Wesson, Soren Lovtrup, Michael Denton, did not, so that is not an absolute, but I am suspicious. To be sure, public ideology could shift, making this suspicion go into reverse gear, but the ability to get a Darwin critique into print is suspicious.
The best way to go is the POD/self-publish route. That way we can be sure no profit motive/ideology gambit influenced the text.
12.25.09
Falsifying Darwinism
World History And The Eonic Effect
Falsifying Darwinism Once we see that history and evolution are braided together and that the descent of man is ‘all of a piece’, we can use the data of history to assess the earlier stages of human evolution. Armed with the eonic effect we see at once that something is missing in standard accounts. In the process we can see that natural selection is not what is driving historical macroevolution.
12.20.09
A Xmas book!
World History and the Eonic Effect: Civilization
1.1 A Glimpse of Evolution
The legacy of modern historical research is an ambiguous one: the conductor’s baton of the Universal Historian taps the podium, in a concert of art, science and philosophy, the theme of evolution rising aggressively to the fore, soon becoming the basis of all further secular generalization about human origins. Although evolutionary research has proved a success as a project of empirical discovery, beside its cousin, the archaeological uncovering of man’s entry into civilization, the claims of evolutionary theory are much less certain than we might expect. Critics of Darwinism often point to the fossil record, upon which Darwin issued a claim of evidence to come, in favor of his thesis. This evidence would now seem less than clear.
09.23.09
Evolution and ethics
From World History And The Eonic Effect
1.2.2 Evolution and Ethics
It is altogether apt that the metaphor of a trial (reference to Darwin on Trial) should appear in the Darwin debate, Read the rest of this entry »
09.13.09
Logos/mythos issue in Armstrong
The Nature of Myth – And More Good Stuff by Robert Bringhurst
This blogger at Beliefnet picks up the ‘logos/mythos’ nonsense that is peddled by Karen Armstrong, originally in The Battle For God.
The question of logos, and mythos, as handled by Armstrong is a cliche argument against the backdrop of the gross distortion of the Greeks that we see in her works, along with her denigation of modernist rationality as she trumpets some kind of postmodern ‘second Axial Age’, etc, etc…
The question of logos and mythos in Greek culture, in the context of the Axial Age is something that is beyond Karen Armstrong’s capacity to analyze, given here assumptions.
Let me note that in my treatment of the Axial Age in World History And The Eonic Effect the Greek Axial Age is shown to be the real key to the ‘age of revelation’, and that it is at once the source of secularism, and of its own take on religion. It is also the first (or else, the most dramtically first) democracy, an Axial innovation.
Armstrong could never handle Axial Age Greece in her work, and the reason might become clear from the study of the eonic effect.
Armstrong’s attempt to make patty cakes out of logos and mythos creates something not present among the Greeks.
In any case, the perception of mythos generally spells the end of that mythos. You might check out Plato on Homer, what to say of Euripides on Greek tragedy.
You can’t start serminizing to secularists about ‘belief’ as a form of embrace of mythos. It is a sophisticated con, and a disservice to tradition.
Pagan cultures have always made use of two sources of knowledge about the world, which Karen Armstrong defined in her book The Battle for God as mythos and logos. Modern societies, including most modern religion, limits itself to one, logos. We need both.
Logos is knowledge arrived at through evidence and reason as we usually think of it. It gives us knowledge about things, but not whether they have interior dimensions of meaning and awareness. You cannot measure consciousness.Mythos addresses the meaning in the world, the value that exists there intrinsically. When it is abandoned, the world slides towards meaninglessness. Being myself schooled in logos, that is, modern ways of knowing, it took me many years even after I became Pagan, to realize its limitations as well as its strengths
09.02.09
Wright: having your cake and eating it too
Robert Wright has put himself in a contradictory position. There is an irony here: his Non Zero came out just months after World History and the Eonic Effect, first edition, and the suspicion was that Wright took the Kant idea and negated the eonic version for his own purposes (I protested that at the time).
Wright’s attempt to get past Darwinism is inexorable, but game theory won’t hack it.
The point about Kant was Kant’s Challenge (which isn’t a Kantian interpretation, but a reinterpretation of his essay on history, with its implied question) as seen in Kant’s classic essay on history: the issue is to see that the antinomy of freedom and causality, so central in Kant’s critiques, is the key to the whole question of historical directionality, and in the discovery of the eonic effect we find the resolution of the antinomy and the key to historical evolution.
That’s a lot more useful that vain attempts to do this using game theory and the zero sum logic. Wright is rubbing a rabbit’s foot here, and everyone is giving him such immense publicity, and none to the much better solution in World History and the Eonic Effect.
Wright’s effort to maintain Darwinian assumptions and find historical directionality is an impossible task, and yet he has persuaded everyone that he has succeeded.
It is all a confused argument, hype, an attempt to have your cake and eat it too: you have to maintain Darwin dogma, but it you wan’t to bring in something extra, you have to be tricky. What better way than to dangle game theory in front of the reader, likely to be too stupid to see he is being had.
Coyne was right: the argument fails. There’s new for Coyne though, Darwinism fails too.
Wright believes there is logic to human history. A moral trajectory. Read the rest of this entry »
08.14.09
‘Big History’ done right: the eonic model
The other day we discussed John Dean’s essay on Big History at Truthdig: ‘Big History’ and World History And The Eonic Effect
It is a great idea, but there should be two complementary definitions: big history in the horizontal sense, and big history in a kind of vertical dimension, macro-history as opposed to micro-history.
The real issue is the idea that ‘Big History’ can resolve the problems with a science of history. But the resolution of that is not so simple and isn’t achieved by applying Darwinism to historical analysis.
In fact, ‘big history’ done right, well, consider the eonic model.
from The Legacy Of Darwinism
A science of history? The question of a science of history provokes a contradiction Read the rest of this entry »
08.12.09
‘Big History’ and World History And The Eonic Effect
Remarkably, John Dean, at Truthdig, has an article on Big History and the books of the genre: Looking for Great ‘Big History’ Books
By John Dean
Ron had introduced me to the notion of big history many years earlier, when he urged that I read Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” (1997). Diamond addresses big historical questions: “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way? For instance, why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?”
Big history is a relatively new approach which examines human history in wide frameworks. Like Ron, once I discovered big history, I too found myself looking for these works. They are not that easy to find. The Library of Congress cataloging system, for example, has no entry for big history.
Big history was introduced in the late 1980s by scholars like David Christian, who make a powerful case that to understand human history, we must look beyond our borders and our species and our planet to “the whole of time.” Accordingly, many big history writers begin with the Big Bang, tracing, examining, and compressing the historical record from the beginning to the present as they probe for insights. A well-known explanation of this multidisciplinary approach is found in Fred Spier’s “The Structure of Big History: From the Big Bang until Today” (1996).
The idea of Big History is a fascinating one, and in expounding on the eonic effect I have used the phrase (not quite in the original sense proposed: histories from the Big Bang), that is ‘macro’ history, or universal histories, of the type proposed in the eonic model, where evolution as dynamics and history as free activity interact in a two level model.
In the next edition of World History and the Eonic Effect, an explicit treatment in terms of ‘Big History’ will appear, in both senses of the term.
I think that the ‘Big Histories’ so far proposed have all been ‘weighted down’ by false assumptions about Darwinism.
World History and the Eonic Effect also has a methodology of ‘relative beginnings’, allowing one to ‘start anywhere’ (relative to the eonic sequence) and in general to look at ‘big history’ in the sense of examining closely tracked intervals at a century or less: this allows us to see if high-speed changes reveal any kind of dynamic not visible in deep time due to the coarse-grained nature of the data sets (a good example is the Axial Age).
05.30.09
Archaic Greece and the Old Testament
Delphi, prophecy, hallucinogens
But the irony is that Archaic Greece (leading into the classical era) gives us a better clue to what is going on in Old Testament history than does the Old Testament.
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap2_5_2.htm: Archaic Greece, the clue
05.12.09
The human and natural sciences
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. Whatever we think of his formulation something like it is always present, as a challenge to the reductionist monism ambitious to mechanize all explanation. This distinction is not hard to find in current science. That said, the original formulation of the eonic model consisted of studying systems theory, quantum formalism, artificial life and computer concepts, with Newtonian mechanics in the background. The transition to Kantian ideas and the philosophy of history is a subsequent stage. To complete the project of science would require a science of freedom.
05.07.09
Darwin propaganda machine and WHEE
James said,
May 6, 2009 at 6:52 pm ·
“No other book on evolution can compete with this one, which is remarkable, since ‘officially’ it doesn’t exist, and most scholars would be fired from their job if they dared mention it.”I don’t think this blog “officially” exists either. Both sides seem to be too scared to even mention it.
Afraid to mention it, but not unaware of its existence, book or blog.
The establishment is well aware of my work.
One problem is that the ‘eonic effect’ doesn’t fit into the scenarios of the ‘religionists vs the Darwinists’. It exposes both points of view.
Here’s a cute item: in 2000, almost a month after the first edition came out, the book was immediately cited at the classic History & Theory journal. That was before the book became taboo to mention. Please note that the premier historical theory journal, innocently, plugged the book before getting lambasted by the establishment. That was the last time anyone in academia had the nerve to mention the book!
Somebody behind the scenes was sending a floater, or something. And that was a prelude to an attack on historiography (indirectly) by Darwinian history promoters at that magazine, or elsewhere. The challenge to the Darwinization of historiography was met with counterattack.
I never figured out who was willing to get my work a plug there, they were too scared to identify themselves. Funny, History & Theory has been silenced as a result. I used at least to post on their email list (there are dozens of my posts there on historical theory). Now I can’t even post there. Remarkable.
Two books at least have indirectly tried to coopt WHEE, one by Robert Wilson (didn’t you notice, he doesn’t discuss evolution any more) and Karen Armstrong. I was in retrospect excessive with Wright, perhaps, but he took material in 1999 from my incipient website on WHEE (the book appeared four months later) on the issue of Kant’s Challenge, and reworked that a la Darwin, without any reference to me or my version. Outrageously unkind, and misleading.
Same from Karen Armstrong: she must have read the first edition, then tried to coopt the manner used in my eonic model to explain the Axial Age.
The result in her book is a pitiful distortion of the issue of the Axial Age. Again outrageously unkind and dishonest, not even a footnote referencing my version.
The reason, of course, is that the eonic model connects the Axial Age to issues of evolution. Controversial, guys and gals.
Keep it sugary and sweet, as Armstrong did in her book, threatening to destroy the whole subject of the Axial Age.
So, it is not as if they don’t know who I am! REALLY afraid of me, because I am a non-religious critic of Darwinism.
That’s a very hurtful thing: a celebrity rips off (making sure not to plagiarize, just taking the theme as if from scratch) someone’s work without citation and puts a new propaganda slant on it.
Karen Armstrong is a right thorough media whore. I can’t for the life of me figure out how the media thinks she is a ‘religious expert’.
I once received a very encouraging letter from an academic who wished to plug my book in public, but finally welshed, and confessed he was afraid to. He recommended patience: WHEE is a book that won’t go away.
I rest my case. I am certainly know, two books have tried to squelch me.
In vain, I fear.
And you can see why academics are extremely nervous on the subject.
05.01.09
History, evolution, and the futility of the Darwin debate
The current Darwin debate is almost like a hoax, except that its polarized participants take their positions all too seriously. The sad fact of the matter is that the Darwin debate is confusing people: the two visible alternatives are both false, and the debate therefore is a kind of two-headed brainwashing device. Mostly, when they brainwash people the importance of a single ideology is paramount. But in this case that isn’t the case. How clever. You have options on how you are going to be brainwashed, the religious or the scientific.
The point is that noone can really knows what evolution really is, or how its dynamic operates. Design and natural selection are transparently attempts by particular groups to claim control over the paradigm in terms of their worldview. Neither perspective is particularly helpful. Both are quite vague, and neither side has the empirical evidence to back up their ambitious ideologies. It is the latter that are crucial, damn the need for evidence.
The study of the eonic effect can help here because it actually deals with some evidence, evidence at the centuries level in world history itself.
We can see, even from the fragment glimpse we are given that evolution is a completely different phenomenon from what we had thought, from Darwinism.
It seems strange to apply evolution to history, but in fact the idea is completely logical. At what point do you say that man’s evolution stopped, and his history began? If you reflect on this you might come to see that all the talk about ‘homo sapiens’ is misleading. Homo sapiens doesn’t exist yet.
His emergence into civilization in the Neolithic is simply the resumed evolutionary process that seems to have halted 50000 years ago.
But this evolution is characteristically different in the sense that man’s rising awareness begins to interact with it.
The process we see in the eonic effect is apparently complete, at least for the moment, and the question is to see if man came learn from his emergence into civilization to establish his autonomy and freedom to create history as he passes beyond evolution.
There are many things to consider here, but as we look backwards on the past ten thousand years we see all at once that a completely invisible process was at work in a very definite kind of system operating over time and global space.
It is something so far beyond our easy comprehension, but its footprints are clear.
So enough of this confused Darwinian nonsense, the myth concocted by reductionists.
History shows us the clue to evolution if we have courage to simply look at it.
04.27.09
More on Kant and The Matrix
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’.
04.24.09
Suit against Diamond, Jim Blaut, and the ‘European Miracle’
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.
04.21.09
World History And The Eonic Effect to Obama!
Stephen P. Smith said,
April 21, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Someone ought to hand Obama WH&EE!
Right on. But does anyone understand it (yourself apart)? I am afraid its simple point gets lost in the Darwin noise.
The point is very simple: to replace speculations about unseen times long ago with a simple periodization of world history: evolution on a case basis. That kind of empirical chart will reorient thinking toward the complexities of world history and preempt people from absurdly applying an incorrect theory about times we don’t observe to times we do observe, history, where we can draw more appropriate inferences about development because we can see it.
The book could be a warning to politicians about Social Darwinism, about incorrect economic theories applied religiously to culture (e.g. classical economics), about the extreme danger point for democracy in general and American democracy in particular in light of the post-transitional era we have reached two centuries from the so-called Great Divide, about the ineluctable arising of the vice of imperialism as time goes on from the period of the establishment of liberal societies in the modern transition, about…. a lot more….
04.20.09
Case of the missing centuries
PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY [4.16.09]
A Talk With AC Grayling
Science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we’ve gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That’s a pressing question for our century.
This is nonsense: science in its modern form of science is unable to produce a reasonable theory of evolution and what is worse unable to generate any insight in scientists that there is something wrong. Currently Bible Belt critics, who have their own confusions, seem to have outsmarted all these brilliant scientists by seeing a problem in Darwinism.
Please note that science is illuminated by the eonic effect, and that it’s emergence is bound up in the eonic sequence, so-called. Twice we see the eonic generation of science, with the potential deviations from the mainline after that: check out ‘The case of the missing centuries’, from World History And The Eonic Effect,
Over and over again we find in the accounts of an historical process the need to work around or explain the existence of the eonic effect as if in disguise, in the form of a consideration of the cyclical nature of the long-term emergence of a process or cultural evolute. The case of science and democracy are two examples. More specifically, author after author is forced to begin his discussion of origins in the period of the early Greeks, continue his account for the duration of this period, and then, without notice, jump to the modern world to complete the ‘evolutionary’ account of this process or historical sequence. We should note, having invoked the Darwin debate, that the ‘evolution of evolutionism’ also shows this double emergentism, witness the birth of the idea of evolution, not first with Darwin, but with the Greeks. Notice the timing of all of this.[i]
In general, the most striking example of this perception, finally explicit, and one that is driven to an attempt to wrestle with a ‘law of evolution’, whether successfully or not, is Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, an account of the rise of science, or more particularly, the physical and cosmological sciences, whose history fits over the eonic effect like a glove. It is a fact that every history of science must reckon with. Less frequent than it used to be, denigration of the Middle Ages explains nothing, indeed omits the not inconsiderable developments in this deep source. But there is a clear discontinuity in any account of the rise of science.[ii]
04.19.09
Why the eonic model beats out Darwinism (on human evolution)
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
04.18.09
Evolution: a Gaian matrix
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 »
04.15.09
An Evolutionary Psychology: Classical Samkhya
A short essay on Samkhya, from World History And The Eonic Effect
04.13.09
Popper, Marx, historicism
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.
History and economy
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.
04.08.09
Slavery and the course of civilization
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.
Religion, evolution, and two level theories
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.
04.07.09
Invisible transitions: evolution in a matter of centuries
Invisible Transitions?
As we study the eonic effect a sense of alarm arises that if the crucial intervals of evolutionary change at the level of mere centuries, which we could hardly have suspected, then all our generalizations based on looking at immense intervals of deep time are at severe risk of missing the point.
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