[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
If you have a new idea and it happens to conflict with the dominant
paradigm, you're going to catch flak. Either you back down or you don't.
Don't keep fighting just because you believe in your idea. Fight because
your idea makes sense and the current one doesn't.
I don't feel like I can respond to your many points because I don't
understand them. I don't get it. You say I need to read 5 anti-Darwin books
to begin to understand. I don't have time.
You never seem to explain the eonic effect. Explain it to me so a 10 year
old would understand. Can you sum it up in one concise paragraph? What are
all these empirical results you keep talking about? Have you released your
data to the public on your web site?
[Michael, another post on this. He made me do it, as school boys say. ]
Explaining to a ten year old would be easy, "History has three bumps in it".
But I am not sure that would quite do the job of explaining. Are we really
advanced enough to understand our own evolution? We don't really see world
history. My analyis makes doing that easy. A full theory costs extra, lots,
hard.
Nonetheless, the idea does have a simple side, open, say, W. MacNeill's Rise
of the West, and examine the Table of Contents. It shows three stages, in the
most obvious sense, the 'birth of civilization', the onset of the classical
period, and the rise of the modern. Zoom in on this (incomplete) structure,
especially the middle sector as it bifurcates in five directions or
civilizations simultaneously. This three phase clustering is both the most
obvious yet deepest feature of world history, with a crescendo in the middle.
It requires close and detailed tracking as the 'world system' presses the
reset button in Rome, Greece, Mesopotamian (Israel), India and China, a
transformation on a stupendous scale, like a ringing gong. We need then to
explain the relation of this to the middle periods.
The great search for a universal history, then, has been too
over-complicated, for too long. First it was derailed by metaphysics, then by
the search for 'laws of history'. That does not mean we can easily analyze
it. But we can follow it, and it shows in the large a number of features of
'complex systems'. But this includes value evolution. We can just take it as
it is in itself, without fancy theories. So zoom in, using periodization to
stay out of trouble with 'laws of history' and a touch of Kant for
metaphysical reifications. It goes from Pharoah Narmer to 1848, and stops. We
are just inside its third earthquake, two centuries downfield. Its full past
and future is unknown.
The interest to all forms of the left is direct, for we see that ideas and
theories of revolution
move between large scale statements (the rise of the modern) and social
evolution of the state, small scale efforts to 'do something new'. This
confusion of levels has vitiated most theories. The eonic effect puts all
theories of revolution into a good generalized category. "Evolution is from
the left" is a statement given some clout at a time when sociobiologists
denying their are conservatives wish to excise Rousseau from the Western
Tradition. They should be sent packing.
If you can't read five anti-Darwin books, someone else will do it for you and
the sausage on your plate will be whatever they want you to read (eat?).
Still, you don't need Darwin here. Forget Darwin. His theory is obsolete.
Start fresh with mine.
So history has three bumps in it. That means that while phenomenologically
what you see is what you get, there is a sort of sasquatch effect, a rustling
'behind the bushes', a hidden dynamic, universal history as evolution in
action.
John Landon
author
World History and the Eonic Effect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://eonix.8m.com
