‘Nous ne sommes pas Marxistes’

Here is a selection from the Preface to World History And The Eonic Effect, which can clarify the ‘onset of the eonic model’, and its discussions of theory and ideology.
The phrase ‘Nous ne sommes pas Marxistes’ should be analyzed carefully by qualified experts. Its meaning might surprise you.

This is the third revised edition of World History and the Eonic Effect, the self-published/Internet book and underground theoretical self-defense kit in relation to the Darwinian paradigm. The online response to the second edition and associated blog has been gratifying, amusingly so next to the wall of silence from the Darwin establishment, too far gone to grasp the falsification of its ideological idée fixe. Perhaps, as the saying goes, it’s the economy, stupid. The Darwin debate is really a propaganda war, and the work of the Intelligent Design movement has crystallized the critique of Darwin’s theory around the inadequacies of the design argument, betting, no doubt correctly, their public will never encounter, for example, the Kantian critiques of such. At a time of much debate between the Intelligent Design and Darwinian factions, the reader has a different perspective on the subject of human evolution, a second, or third, opinion. The perception of the eonic effect shows the way to a new understanding of universal history, and the way to a new post-darwinian liberalism (or indeed leftism) that is not disguised economic propaganda, Social Darwinist crypto-legitimation plaubibly denied, or the reductionist scientism that has put secularism at risk.

We need a public philosophy that is not beset with the wrong application of theories to human action in the tragedies of an Oedipus Paradox. Metaphysical Darwinism, echoing Adam Smith and Malthus, applied beyond the limits of observation to deep time, is then reapplied to history, and this blocks our perception of something unacounted for by reductionists: the braiding of facts and values in the dynamic of evolution. Nothing could be simpler than the strategy of pointing this out, however cumbersome the details, and there is nothing complex about the eonic effect in that regard. All we have to do is show how this braiding occurs in action, visibly so in the vista of emergent civilization. Matched with this is the confusion of the obsessive ideologists of market mechanics, indeed, even their critics, beginning with Marx. Included in the bargain are critiques of both, although Marx must be seen to have pioneered the exposure of the ideological abuse of economic theorizing. And his first negative impression of Darwin’s theory is on the record, carefully deep-sixed by his followers, who have coopted his name. Nous ne sommes pas Marxistes. At a time of threatened ecological calamity, in an age of global warming, we need an insight into the limits of the economic interpretation of history, suffered at once by the left and right.

The eonic model can also clarify the chronic confusions of historical inevitability in revolutionary historicism. This applies as well to economic laws of market dynamics. The resolution of such ‘laws’ is for free men to flip the off switch, first and foremost with clear thinking. As to the ecological brink we face, Darwinism is surely one of the culprits here in its failure to grasp the larger dimension of natural environments, and the eonic model offers a take on global Gaian evolution, done right, that might help to broaden vision constricted by the monomania of selectionist theories. Darwinism has produced a culture unfit to survive its own bad theories, and the prospect of paradigm shift via fundamentalist resurgence doesn’t seem like the answer to Kuhnian ‘normal science’. At the same time the legacy of theistic historicism, bequeathed to us from the great text of the Old Testament, needs to enter a post-Kantian era, while the findings of Biblical Criticism have rendered its saga problematical. We can rescue the text for a secular age by seeing its core account as an unwitting depiction of the eonic effect in the context of the Axial Age.

The basic text has been extensively rewritten, even as the basic argument has remained the same. There is much new material and it has been reorganized to show a more integrated structure, with a few changes in the terminology of the eonic model. The basic model has remained stable over three editions, and that leaves the author with increased confidence in the method and demonstration. The question of punctuated equibrium has been brought in, the eonic effect being an almost canonical instance of this, if only in the bare dictionary sense of the term. The text has reached the byte limit of this form of publication, and some sections have been shortened to make room for new material. On such a vast subject as the eonic effect, the treatment might have been twice the length. A new terminology of macro and micro-action has been introduced to clarify and partially replace that of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘relative free action’. I am grateful to Joe Wheeler for pointing out the use of the term ‘Oedipus Effect’ in Géza Roheim. This has, by and large, been replaced by the term ‘Oedipus Paradox’. It has been interesting to watch a series of books, notably in the fields of Kant research and Axial Age studies, react to the basic argument, without citation. The third edition attempts to clarify the challenge to ‘asocial sociability’ in Kant’s philosophy of history.

Karen Armstrong’s work on the Axial Age might have benefited from more careful study of the eonic model. Her recent work on the Axial Age has confused or sanitized the subject, even as the enigma, and implications, of the Axial Age deserve a plain confrontation with a public. A basic perception of the remarkable phenomenon of the Axial Age is unable to enter public consciousness, and Armstrong’s concoction, the ‘Axial ethos’ threatens the loss of the whole dataset into a sausage machine. We can at least see why everyone is afraid of the basic discovery initiated by Karl Jaspers and scholars before him. The third edition was to have been a streamlined edition submitted to a general publisher, but one more long version (perhaps again with a presence on the Internet as an ‘open source’ document) seems appropriate. The author is suspicious indeed of the tactics of the major search engines, in subtly redirecting traffic away from websites they dislike. The behavior of Google is altogether suspect. The online format has nonetheless made it possible to reach a large public, and thus the search for a general publisher has been delayed once again, an interesting prospect for a fourth or fifth edition.