02.16.06
More ‘Second Axial Age’ confusion
The confusion over the term ‘Axial Age’ has found a successor in the idea of a Second Axial Age.
I recommend graduating from the idea of the ‘Axial Age’ to the total phenomenon called the ‘Eonic Effect’.
However, because of Eurocentric confusions the wish to consider the parallelism of the Axial Age proper a repeatable property, or somehow characteristic of current inter-cultural globalization, is going to be a problem.
In another version, Karen Armstrong has proposed a second Axial Age as some kind of postmodern restoration of religion.
It is all confusion. There is no second ‘Axial Age’, unless by that we mean the rise of modernity itself.
The Axial Age proper is the second phase of a greater pattern, the eonic effect, and shows parallelism as an aspect of expansive integration, while the rise of the modern is focussed in one area/zone to create a consistent integration, with all the problems of Eurocentrism possible, the latter however compensated by the universalism now sadly rejected by postmodernists.
I can only recommend biting the bullet, sitting down and studying the eonic model, and graduating from the botched definitions of the Axial Age into something more consistent.
>>>Start.
The question of Eurocentrism is easily solved: the modern transition was over two centuries ago, as the ‘second Axial Age’. We are now in the globalizing phase of that transition. The question of Europe is long passed.
East and West the twain not only met in the blessing of shared fascination, but the lines are blurring, and a new hybridized space is being created. Tu Wei Ming, the Confucian scholar at Harvard, called our new millennium “a second axial age.” “It is a kind of era where various traditions exist side by side for the first time for the picking,” he said. Traditions not only exist in our global village, he noted, they co-exist in such a way “that a Christian project would have to be understood and perceived in a comparative religious context.”