[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Just cool it and write less, that's all.
I for one think there's something to what your saying, but it is too
much too soon and people can't digest it property so they dismiss
it.
I agree, will do. The following is the last long one. I should say my
original intent was certainly not spam but was to do with the issue of the
'odd' concordance of Robert Wright's book and mine, as to 'Kant's Challenge'.
You will have to piece that puzzle together. It is actually a gorgeously
ugly case of ideology in action, one for this year's cleverest propaganda
award.
The subject then veered off to XAH's 'critique' of my 'thesis' based on
statements on another issue. I broke one of my rules (almost) of 'eonic
methodology', which is to beware of making pronouncements that violate issues
of scale, i.e. universal history and economics, omnisciently fuzzy-style. On
the other hand, this kind of analysis, controversial or speculative as it
might seem (and perhaps is), impinges so directly on the 'rise of the modern'
question, that I couldn't resist, especially as Blaut's book fell in my lap
on the same day. Blaut's engaging book, despite flaws, impinges on what I
call the 'somewhere versus everywhere' problem, which rises as the focalized
development of modern capitalism (somewhere) in Europe seems to contradict
the dispersed 'capitlist' developments in dispersal (everywhere). Since my
'eonic' model makes a point of addressing the 'somewhere and everywhere'
issue (its specialty, since that kind of distinction arises in a
discrete-continuous model, which therefore has two forms of evolution, one
somewhere, the other everywhere!?), I couldn't restrain myself.
As to appearing New Age, I am baffled, although not entirely. I am not a New
Ager, but that was a part of my generation. The place of India, and much
else, for example, in world history, gets special treatment in this approach,
perhaps making economic historians edgy. But there are more Buddhists, who
are not New Agers, in America now than leftists, and it might help if the
left walked into the Buddhist world and said 'you guys are socialists',
should work. Buddha's ( original highly radical) Sangha took over India in
two centuries, hardly firing a shot. The last two centuries are now ending in
some confusion for the left. Foor for thought.
That synchrony of classical India and, say, Greece, is factored out of most
accounts, and springs from the perception that macroevolution almost goes
into a multitasking mode in the classical era, hard to accept, but our views
on evolution are a bit off, I would say. In that sense, my own critique of
Eurcentrism is timely.
Anyway, this is something of a brouhaha. I was looking at Gribbin's book on
quantum mechanics (Schrodinger's Kittens) where he throws his hands up at the
number of distinct interpretations of the same QM. He simply notes the need
to examine all of them together, "physics as metaphor", constructing quarks
and all that. Excessively stereotyped Marxist 'laws of history' won't make it
any more. The core of Marx remains.
.
That 'model the phenomenon' is the mood of the eonic method (although it is
based on some solid data that is usually filtered out). We all seem to be
Popperites now. Why? His dismissal of 'universal history' is clearly refuted
in my argument, even as I use some of his ideas. Marx was a universal
historian hamstrung by the post-Hegelian change in fashion, the onset of
positivism, and the need to hybridize this with economic history. Actually,
he managed it, but we tend to recycle versions of Marx that may be Elmer
Fudd, but not Marx.
In an age of cheap modelling software, we can take the old critiques of Big
History (along with the new postmodern ones of Metanarratives) in stride and
also proceed to simply examine a spectrum of models. The only way out of
confusion is to do the thing wholesale, instead of retail historical belief
systems bordering on religion. The whole thing can be taken as an 'IF'. If
you adopt a certain type of model, the data suddenly starts to behave itself.
Trying to fit world history into a linear history model always failed, as
Marx suspected, with his 'viconian' 'stages of history' approach (which you
may note is an example of a discrete-continuous model).
Back to periscope lurking on Pen-l (for the nonce) before I catch heck from
Michael. I will send out some further e-texts, and leave it at that. That
text is very tough going, and is six hundred pages of meticulous
periodization analysis. I think, with some time and effort, it can help.
Thanks
John Landon
author
World History and the Eonic Effect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://eonix.8m.com
