Tag: modern transition

Darwinian delusions/Darwin and the Loss of the Enlightenment | Evolution News

The wrong-headed near idiocy of the ID group behind their often cogent critiques of Darwinian full idiocy betrays here the usual misfire against the Enlightenment. It is the core moment of emerging secular thought and that is detested, wrongly, by many religionists. The larger picture is something far far more complex in a portrait of the Enlightenment in its many facets far beyond the one-liners of these crypto-creationists. The Enlightenment contained the seeds of the religion of future, as far as that goes and is not some simplistic atheism but a liberation from the ‘pop theism’ and ‘god gibberish’ inflicted on the ocident in parallel to the far superior (atheistic) Buddhism. Not only is the Enlightenment far more complex than the reduced portrait given it is also an aspect of the ‘modern transition’ which is a vast tide of social innovations, starting we might note with the Protestant Reformation which spawns the very religion in question here.
The modern transition naturally moves beyond itself as physics rapidly moves beyond simple Newtonism but this a unity of subjects finally and is not some kind of displacement of the Enlightenment.
One should note that isolating the Enlightenment out of context forever misses the point. Consider the larger picture where the Enlightenement is counterpoinnt to itself in the dialectic of the Romantic movement and/or the figure of Kant who challenges metaphysics, both religious and secular. Secular humanism has its own limits but it has little claim on the Enlightenment as it, taking Marx as an example among many, as it makes a fundamentalism scientism of its own, far reduced from the richness of the Enlightenment and the modern transition (cf. WHEE). The discoveries of modern physics are the grandchildren of Newtonian physics and the Enlgitenment.
We should note that the history of Darwinism and atheism is itself another complexity ill served by the fundamentalism of the ‘new atheists’ and figures such as Richar Dawkins. Let us note that before Darwin we see the Enlightenment gestate a first real theory of evolution in the Kantian school of teleomechanists! The real theory of evolution is the first born of that period where Darwinism is a sort of dead fish of English capitalism and its rapid creation of a false thought monopoly.
The world of Protestantism would do well to extend their Reformation into a new future. There is absolutely no reason why modern Christianity has to preserve its mummified god-concept and it can as well create a liberating ‘semi’-‘atheism’ (in quotation marks) based on the ‘unspoken IHVH’ given as direct pointing.

In two articles so far (here and here), I have been exploring how justified the new atheists’ appropriation of Darwinian ideas is. This is the third and final post. As we’ve seen, Erasmus Darwin was a quintessential legatee of Enlightenment prepossessions. As its somewhat virtue-signaling name implies, the thinkers of the Enlightenment wished to distance themselves from anything that smacked of religious “superstition.” This led to the determination to declare a unilateral declaration of independence from the metaphysical sphere in favor of purely “scientific” modes of explanation. Yet in the face of the last century of scientific discoveries we have come to realize that hubristic expectations stemming from the Enlightenment dream of encompassing the whole of reality in some grand material theory of everything have been forced into a reluctant retreat.1

Source: Darwin and the Loss of the Enlightenment | Evolution News

two updates: The left and the modern transition, Christianity and Mahayana in parallel…

We added two updates to our post on /marxism/world history/eonic model, link below. The question of marxism and world history raises so many issues that the post could go on and on.
We note two issues: the rise of the left in the modern world is itself an eonic effect, which means that Marx/Engels are themselves data in the eonic history or sequence. They appear in fact just outside the modern transition (whose boundary is perhaps fuzzy) in a mixture that remains unclear of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’. The point would seem that democracy and socialism are paired eonic effects, but that socialism arrives a little late, for the obvious reason is that capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are clustered near the ‘divide’. But the issues of socialism appear very early with More (a conservative with however his Utopia) and Thomas Munzer and the early intimations of socialism in the English Civil War. The question of the divide is tricky and I would be wary of the idea before an extensive study of the eonic data in world history. But the point is that a socialist response to capitalism has its own mysterious historical signature, thus with good reason to honor its historical meaning and to also be wary of its possible distortions. More on this later…
The issue of Christianity is super complex and yet in a larger context it makes sense as a continuation of the phenomenon of emergent religions in the Axial Age, itself a part of the eonic sequence. But its actual realization is outside the early transition and its starting point is to say the least obscure. But we can see that even as Mahayana starts to emerge with its theme of the ‘savior religion’ one such appears in concert thousands of miles away in the accident. Coincidence? We must suspect the larger context of the eonic sequence going through its phase of generating religions and Christianity, and then Islam are connected with the later history of the early transitional phase of the remarkable proto-Israelites whose actual history is still barely known to us. A lot more to say here…

Update: one of the ironies of our critique here is that modern left, and the emergence of democracy AND socialism are ‘eonic effects’, correlated with the eonic sequence in the modern transition and this starts with both the Reformation and the appearance of Thomas Munzer. So, and it is a good laugh, Marx/Engels are themselves ‘eonic data’.
Update 2: the emergence of Christianity (in the context of the early Israelite transition) is in fact a mystery even now (despite its obvious connection indirectly via the Judaic legacy) and is not an eonic effect as such and yet is directly parallel with the emergence of the Mahayana in the second stage of Buddhism around the period of the turn of the millennium. The history of Christianity is thus a super mystery, yet obviously connecte to the larger pattern of religious development in the Axial Age. Historical materialism is almost laughable as a means of explanation here. But everyone else is confused also, including Christians themselves.

Source: world history shows a clear dynamic in the eonic effect…//How Marxists View the Middle Ages – 1848+: The End(s) of History

Eonic model’s resolution of the ‘end of history’ confusion

This links to a useful summary of Hegel and Marx on the ‘end of history’, which I couldn’t cut and paste, so I will summarize some parts and then the eonic model in that light….

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848779708579774?journalCode=cele20

Note to start: the term ‘end of history’ is hopelessly, wretchedly confused and should not be used, but we will try to use a different approach to clarify the term, and then leave it behind…The tem should refer to the ‘ends’, i.e. goals (??) or direction of history and not some ‘end’ in time.

1. world history shows stages or epochs?? Hegel is brilliant here but couldn’t have gotten it right given his data, ditto for Marx. Basically epochs show a discrete/continuous phenomenon in action and this where present shows at once (perhaps) a kind of driven process. This could be the clue to a directed, thence teleological process. But immersed in history we can’t see the endpoint, and our free agency,if real, could elect to contradict that end point. However our new model can resolve that. Continue reading “Eonic model’s resolution of the ‘end of history’ confusion” →

Eonic model’s resolution of the ‘end of history’ confusion

This links to a useful summary of Hegel and Marx on the ‘end of history’, which I couldn’t cut and paste, so I will summarize some parts and then the eonic model in that light….

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848779708579774?journalCode=cele20

Note to start: the term ‘end of history’ is hopelessly, wretchedly confused and should not be used, but we will try to use a different approach to clarify the term, and then leave it behind…The tem should refer to the ‘ends’, i.e. goals (??) or direction of history and not some ‘end’ in time.

1. world history shows stages or epochs?? Hegel is brilliant here but couldn’t have gotten it right given his data, ditto for Marx. Basically epochs show a discrete/continuous phenomenon in action and this where present shows at once (perhaps) a kind of driven process. This could be the clue to a directed, thence teleological process. But immersed in history we can’t see the endpoint, and our free agency,if real, could elect to contradict that end point. However our new model can resolve that. Continue reading “Eonic model’s resolution of the ‘end of history’ confusion” →

 The eonic effect and global integration…,//China needs a (neo-) communist revolution 

Without indulging in Eurocentric thinking it is important to consider the larger integrating potential of the different culture zones in question. As China moves in a kind of vacuum where the US seems in decline, it is important to see that in principle at least the Occident had a far greater set of resources to produce world civilization: it was always a mixture of multiple cultures compared to sinocentric China. It generated Christian/Muslim cultural integrator religions. The modern transition has separate German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish (and the important but slightly different case of Northern Italy). While this rapidly generated a European community it is not a question of Europe. The modern transition is system induction of the eonic sequence and succeeds proximate antiquity with its Greek/Roman, Canaanite/Israelite, Persian Zoroastrian, Indo-Buddhism, and China. It acts not as a European but as a frontier effect with respect to a global system. The European modernity is thus a eonic effect. Thus China is a key component of the larger eonic series and generated a large diffusion zone. But it is inherently less likely to create a generalized oikoumene as against the one already in existence due to the modern transition. That said the Buddhist component is an equally effective legacy, perhaps.
Thus the eonic sequence, dispelling the illusion of Eurocentric civilization, jumped to the northwest sector of Eurasia, in a typical eonic Frontier effect. Thus the modern transition emerges at the old boundary to the Roman Empire.
All this said we can see that while it suffered the dangers of nationalism, there was a far larger degree of variety and difference in unity.
Let it be said that most of these occidental pluses are already in the past now, and further that the immense beauty of the modern transition (as of the ancient parallel versions from Greece to China) seems frittered away. As Kant predicted the world system finally spawned the United Nations, etc, etc…And the socialist emergence in parallel with that of democratic spawns the idea of an International. But that whole aspect so far has failed.

The Occident had many advantages, but it seems to have squandered them. Part of the problem is the emergence of imperialism, capitalism, Darwinism and social Darwinism, all contributing to the erosion of modern potential. The socialism/communist world moved into a void to become a new kind of integrator. But its failures have been beyond expectation. So it is not clear. In any case, the sinocentrism of the Chinese succession could undermine a considerable potential where modern transition has taken effect. But it is crippled by its wretched poor Marxist version of socialist transition. We might blame this on Bolshevism, Stalinism and move to exempt the Marxist legacy. But it seems that legacy is flawed. It needs a new version and upgrade. In any case we see that China, like India, etc, is part of the modern transition, and in theory secondarily a Chinese cultural phenomenon. That raises the question of Chinese language. There are efforts to seed Africa with Chinese. Again, a look at the eonic effect shows that the modern transition zones experimented with two or three ‘koines’, Spanish, French, and English, and by and large the English version, an ultra-simple near pidgin but with hidden potential rapidly globalized. Chinese has little hope of displacing that. None of these things are chance and we note that the modern transition rapidly spawned rich literatures to give substance to this globalization of pidgin integrator languages. These are not cultural feathers in one’s cap, but gifts of eonic evolution to languages of global integration. Thus we see it is not chance but an eonic effect to examine the rise of various modern literatures.
We could leave it there for the moment, offer a warning that the Chinese case can derail faster than did the American which is barely above barbarism, capitalist domination, and genocide. Note that the US has usurped the place of the modern transition, but doesn’t have the resources of culture to do that. They can avail themselves of the huge potential of the modern transition, but we can see that Russian and the US both are struggling with inevitable factors of cultural anemia.
So in the Chinese case, a great potential is there, but the current mix seems unlikely to move beyond its limits.
Considering the immense advantages of the European and American cases it is sad to see them dissipated so swiftly as the distance to the modern transition increases. China may try to fill that void, but the judgment arrives swiftly with a warning if they can’t handle a simple case like Tibet, and have totally botched a simple case like the Uighurs.
A solution could be a new and recast international instrument that the Marxist legacy tried to provide. But that legacy is crippled by the limits of its historical materialism, pseudo-science, and reductionist science.

These are strange remarks, but they have a key: the eonic effect with its strange quirks and insights. The Chinese have a great opportunity but it must be more than a locally grounded cultural imperialism.
Overall in all cases the case of capitalism needs a resolution, the factor of democracy must be mediated with a socialist boost. China is on the verge of slipping away into oblivion on these points. The US is not far behind and is itself failing on the democracy front.

China is already communist you say? Nothing of the kind. Stalinist Maoism was a hopeless case from the start and the question shows how global Marxists are going to lose their whole legacy if they …

Source:  China needs a (neo-) communist revolution – 1848+: The End(s) of History

 The eonic effect and global integration…,//China needs a (neo-) communist revolution 

Without indulging in Eurocentric thinking it is important to consider the larger integrating potential of the different culture zones in question. As China moves in a kind of vacuum where the US seems in decline, it is important to see that in principle at least the Occident had a far greater set of resources to produce world civilization: it was always a mixture of multiple cultures compared to sinocentric China. It generated Christian/Muslim cultural integrator religions. The modern transition has separate German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish (and the important but slightly different case of Northern Italy). While this rapidly generated a European community it is not a question of Europe. The modern transition is system induction of the eonic sequence and succeeds proximate antiquity with its Greek/Roman, Canaanite/Israelite, Persian Zoroastrian, Indo-Buddhism, and China. It acts not as a European but as a frontier effect with respect to a global system. The European modernity is thus a eonic effect. Thus China is a key component of the larger eonic series and generated a large diffusion zone. But it is inherently less likely to create a generalized oikoumene as against the one already in existence due to the modern transition. That said the Buddhist component is an equally effective legacy, perhaps.
Thus the eonic sequence, dispelling the illusion of Eurocentric civilization, jumped to the northwest sector of Eurasia, in a typical eonic Frontier effect. Thus the modern transition emerges at the old boundary to the Roman Empire.
All this said we can see that while it suffered the dangers of nationalism, there was a far larger degree of variety and difference in unity.
Let it be said that most of these occidental pluses are already in the past now, and further that the immense beauty of the modern transition (as of the ancient parallel versions from Greece to China) seems frittered away. As Kant predicted the world system finally spawned the United Nations, etc, etc…And the socialist emergence in parallel with that of democratic spawns the idea of an International. But that whole aspect so far has failed.

The Occident had many advantages, but it seems to have squandered them. Part of the problem is the emergence of imperialism, capitalism, Darwinism and social Darwinism, all contributing to the erosion of modern potential. The socialism/communist world moved into a void to become a new kind of integrator. But its failures have been beyond expectation. So it is not clear. In any case, the sinocentrism of the Chinese succession could undermine a considerable potential where modern transition has taken effect. But it is crippled by its wretched poor Marxist version of socialist transition. We might blame this on Bolshevism, Stalinism and move to exempt the Marxist legacy. But it seems that legacy is flawed. It needs a new version and upgrade. In any case we see that China, like India, etc, is part of the modern transition, and in theory secondarily a Chinese cultural phenomenon. That raises the question of Chinese language. There are efforts to seed Africa with Chinese. Again, a look at the eonic effect shows that the modern transition zones experimented with two or three ‘koines’, Spanish, French, and English, and by and large the English version, an ultra-simple near pidgin but with hidden potential rapidly globalized. Chinese has little hope of displacing that. None of these things are chance and we note that the modern transition rapidly spawned rich literatures to give substance to this globalization of pidgin integrator languages. These are not cultural feathers in one’s cap, but gifts of eonic evolution to languages of global integration. Thus we see it is not chance but an eonic effect to examine the rise of various modern literatures.
We could leave it there for the moment, offer a warning that the Chinese case can derail faster than did the American which is barely above barbarism, capitalist domination, and genocide. Note that the US has usurped the place of the modern transition, but doesn’t have the resources of culture to do that. They can avail themselves of the huge potential of the modern transition, but we can see that Russian and the US both are struggling with inevitable factors of cultural anemia.
So in the Chinese case, a great potential is there, but the current mix seems unlikely to move beyond its limits.
Considering the immense advantages of the European and American cases it is sad to see them dissipated so swiftly as the distance to the modern transition increases. China may try to fill that void, but the judgment arrives swiftly with a warning if they can’t handle a simple case like Tibet, and have totally botched a simple case like the Uighurs.
A solution could be a new and recast international instrument that the Marxist legacy tried to provide. But that legacy is crippled by the limits of its historical materialism, pseudo-science, and reductionist science.

These are strange remarks, but they have a key: the eonic effect with its strange quirks and insights. The Chinese have a great opportunity but it must be more than a locally grounded cultural imperialism.
Overall in all cases the case of capitalism needs a resolution, the factor of democracy must be mediated with a socialist boost. China is on the verge of slipping away into oblivion on these points. The US is not far behind and is itself failing on the democracy front.

China is already communist you say? Nothing of the kind. Stalinist Maoism was a hopeless case from the start and the question shows how global Marxists are going to lose their whole legacy if they …

Source:  China needs a (neo-) communist revolution – 1848+: The End(s) of History