If the perspective given here is secular humanism then it must be enriched with something deeper. But can the religions provide this? We have solved this issue with our own custom ‘religion’: the original religion of man: his potential for supercharged consciousness or as is sometimes called his ‘self-consciousness’. We discussed this in our section of the ‘virtual church of the Holy Brick’.
It is also true that our macrosystem generates the flow of multiple traditions into the modern secular sphere: the legacies of Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism/Israelitism, and the immense Greek heritage of the early transition. But the modern transition contains a host of riches all ignored by the usual secular humanist.
But the system of modern politics is corrupt and needs men of real awareness and ‘will’, the hidden self of man. It won’t get them in a field of Machiavellian desperation, yet with a figure like Lincoln we see the reality can manifest. This approach is the first and last religion and yet it is beyond religion as such and could never betray the independence of church and state. In any case, we have to take man as we find him and our model is a system of laws. It is the real men versus the rising tide of psychopaths.
Marx was simply wrong here: socialism will not happen in some automatic dynamic of history: it will be the achievement of real men as free agents. Best to wake up and begin the transition because history in some hypostatized sense won’t do it for men.
The modern politician is a kind of prisoner of his own straightjacket and needs the invisible church: the original ape who evolved into ‘real self-consciousness, if he can still be found. Man in civilization is a mechanical monster who has lost his real consciousness.
_________from previous version
I recommend a new kind of left, with or without the eonic model, which borders on a theory of history as opposed to the ‘eonic effect’ (or ‘the mainline periodization of world history….3000 to 600 BCE to 1500) which is an empirical pattern or chronology. This pattern is all you need and shows the way facts and values emerge in history, the reality of free agency, the sources of world religions, democracy, science, philosophy and even modern classical music (and much else). This pattern immediately leads to the eonic model but that can lead to its own confusions. Examine this pattern to see that a ‘science of history’ is not possible at this point in the emergence of science. Zoom in on the eonic effect and you find some mysterious creative force whose character is invisible to us but which defaults to the grab-bag of ‘cosmic fine tuning’. Cosmology hides an evolutionary matrix for planets (my guess) and this contains a pattern of patterns that directs the emergence of life. This is basically a non-theistic design argument.
The connection to political models lies in the way that the macro transitions show their hand trying to jump-start democracy and then again in modern times next to the emergence of socialist models. The phenomenon of revolution is more or less a modern phenomenon from the early modern, climaxing around the French Revolution which immediately devolved into its failure to bring class balance to equality, what to say of freedom and fraternity, resulting in the calls for the ‘last revolution’ in the failure of the 1848 era. The idea of the last revolution evokes the ‘end of history’ meme but the idea is not the same. The Last Revolution is really a slogan from that era but points to the way that the modern transition plants seeds that man must realize both inside and beyond the transition period (1500 to 1800). The Last Revolution may or may not be the last but once the balance of socialism and democracy is achieved the real modernity can come into existence. There may be revolutions after the ‘last’ but they will be something different, that’s all. The appearance of Kant, Hegel, and Marx is a majestic non-coincidence and each figure casts a spell on their proximate futures. But the work of Marx and Hegel are slightly speculative: note the amazing way the Kant precedes the divide and Marx/Hegel come just after: Kant is part of the transition, Marx/Hegel start to slip into free agency, yet still spawned yet just outside the transition. Neither Marx nor Hegel however can answer the question given by Kant in his essay on history. After two centuries of archaeology, the real answer to Kant is coming into view. Hegel turned into a hopeless reactionary and was castigated by Schopenhauer for his confusions and the way he created many confused disciples. The attack on idealism, Kant and Hegel’s versions are quite different, was a pointless gesture by Marx but in the context of emerging science it seemed right at the time.
I think that the model of history in the eonic chronology is sufficient for a new kind of left and has a richness that needs no theory. The only thinker who got near to the trught was Bergson with his idea of creative evolution. I say that very warily and have not studied Bergson carefully because his metaphysics will derail in short order but the point is that evolution shows a creative force at work, the term ‘creative force’ liable to lead to instant metaphysical confusion. Let us note two groups that got this point: the Taoists who say the named Tao is not the real thing and the primitive Israelite prophets who refused to name the mystery they felt, using the glyph IHVH. The later became Jehovah and soon the whole superstition of goddist theism swamps the original vision of the prophets. But the Israelite history was misunderstood by the Israelites who discovered an aspect of the eonic effect and turned their history into a cargo cult of soon debased theism.
Whatever you do don’t bring ‘god’ into he eonic model, and if you do a monster five sizes larger than the cookie monster will lock you in a library with a thousand book bibliography and/or a Zen monastery. The god ‘idea’ is a debased proliferation of gibberish. The point is essential because the concept ‘god’ implies a myth of omnipotence (usually outside of nature). But the eonic effect shows a force in nature that is not omnipotence, but struggling through multiple trials and failure closing on a ‘goal’. Even this much risks metaphysical confusion. The original edition of WHEE is better disciplined on this point. But the place of ancient Israel (900 to 600 BCE) will induce the error to generalize from the Israelite transition (which distinguishes the ‘elohim’ and IHVH). And the old testament is a poor guide to the real archaeological reconstruction. But lest one do that keep in mind that an atheist and a theistic religion come into existence in parallel in our data. So we can only point to an X that is beyond the duality of theism and atheism. Clearly we looking at a still unknown generalization of the idea of ‘energy’. Note that ‘man makes himself’ is fundamental: man makes his history, but in a strange pattern the seems to outperform himself with something like higher octane ‘energy X’.
The passage beyond capitalism beset with a tragedy and we confront the last chances of strikes two and three. We may be too late but I would claim that the DMNC model is enough to start over with the Last Revolution…(with Marx/Engels an introductory epic saga).
1848+: The End(s) of History 