One of the most significant movements of the last generation (roughly two centuries after the divide) is the rise of postmodernism as a reaction against and critique of the Enlightenment. Our view of this must be conditioned by the realization that our eonic model proceeds to describe the eonic sequence, its termination in the nineteenth century, and then stops. It makes no predictions about the future of the system. The dynamism of the eonic sequence is tremendous and no reactive philosophical initiative or revolutionary re-start is likely to succeed in overcoming the momentum of the modern transition. But what exactly does this mean? It is not possible to peg a simple ideological viewpoint to this immense and strangely balanced emergent era. We can see that this transition creates a net effect that stretches across all conceptual boundaries, showing its effects in every area of culture. To undo the total effect of this evolutionary era would be a catastrophe and throw civilization into retrograde confusion.

We can see that confusion has entered the postmodern viewpoint, even as it fulfills a critical task spawned in the very Enlightenment it would reject. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with a critique of modernity itself. But the typical postmodern rejection of histories or metanarratives of freedom, for example, flies in the face of our insight that the 'evolution of freedom' is at the core of the drama of man's historical emergence. We should note at once that criticisms of such 'metanarratives' are appropriate challenges to the ideological or teleological formulations of many modern philosophies of history, beside the equally false teleologies influenced by Darwinism. Our account is indeed a metanarrative, truly 'meta' indeed, and yet it is ironically a kind of reversed postmodern perspective itself, because it contains its own critique of teleological ideology. Nothing in our account of the modern transition makes a final teleological claim on the far future, nor is it automatic grounds for the rote repetition of watered down imitations of its own dynamic.

Thus the real interpretation of postmodernism springs from our own eonic model which projects a 'post-transitional' period when the swiftly accomplished achievements of the early modern stabilize and seem to leave a vacuum of impotent efforts to replicate its action. The eonic model spawns its very definite but highly generalized prescription of the right course of action: history as Freedom is emerging from the evolution visible in the eonic sequence. We are both executing its own and moving to transcend the passivity it generates, and this leaves the ambiguous question of what constitutes true social change outside of the eonic series. The way to start is to be able to at least maintain the vigor of the innovations initiated in modernism, thence to study comprehensively its multiple aspects, wary of the downshifting 'flying off on a tangent' that begins to lay claim on the Enlightenment yet perpetuates a limited version of that mysterious moment. Here the philosophies of freedom castigated by postmodern critique must in fact be the source of right perspective, along with a correct disposition toward the powerful impetus of the Scientific Revolution, whose place is both crucial, yet limited, since it makes no definite contribution to the right understanding of cultural evolution. Our transition has already solved this problem via the independent parallel emergence of resonant opposites, e.g. the causal analysis of reality produced by science, and the thematic of emergent freedom produced by evolutionary liberalism.   

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