03.02.06

Gearing up for the Armstrong mess

Posted in New Age, The Axial Age at 9:50 pm by nemo

I have been waiting for Karen Armstrong’s new book The Great Transformation on the Axial Age. Based on her previous remarks in earlier books, with a short version in The History of Myth, the result is going to make a complete mess of the material on the Axial Age. Since she has a ready public eager to lap up her brand this is going to make life difficult for anyone who tries to deal with the Axial Age phenomenon.

Fortunately I have already beaten her to it, and anyone who reads World History and The Eonic Effect will be able to extricate themselves from the confusion she creates/will create. I will, of course, keep an open mind, but in fact the short take in The History of Myth gives a fairly good summary of her new thesis.
I find it hard to believe she is not aware of my material on the subject, and I have all along been suspicious of the switch in here thinking. The rise of the modern, she seems to have suddenly realized was her ‘second Axial Age’, which is inconvenient, since the strategy is a second postmodern Axial Age, complete with religious revival, gurus, and the propaganda for New Age religiosity.
I have made mincemeat of all of that, but without enough market share, and the total incomprehension of the current sci community, Armstrong will get the legitimation to a lot of people for the destruction of secular modernity in the name of a second Axial Age.
She should be ashamed of these tactics, but apparently can’t grasp the basics of her thesis on the Axial Age.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Having already recounted “a history of God,” the redoubtable Armstrong here narrates the evolution of the religious traditions of the world from their births to their maturity. In her typical magisterial fashion, she chronicles these tales in dazzling prose with remarkable depth and judicious breadth. Taking the Axial Age, which spans roughly 900 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E., as her focal point, Armstrong examines the ways that specific religious traditions from Buddhism and Confucianism to Taoism and Judaism responded to the various cultural forces they faced during this period. Overall, Armstrong observes, violence, political disruption and religious intolerance dominated Axial Age societies, so Axial religions responded by exalting compassion, love and justice over selfishness and hatred. Thus, the central Buddhist and Jain practice of ahimsa, doing no harm, developed in India in reaction to the self-centeredness of Hindu ritual, and Hebrew prophets such as Amos proclaimed that justice and mercy toward neighbors offered the only correct way of walking with God. Accounts of the world’s religions often present them as discrete entities developing apart from each other in a vacuum. Armstrong’s magnificent accomplishment offers us an account of a violent time much like ours, when religious impulses in various locations developed practices of justice and love. (Apr. 3)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* The foremost English-language historian of religion today, whose A History of God (1993) has become the standard popular work on the great monotheisms, expands upon German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ characterization of the long period preceding the rise of Rome–900 to 200 B.C.E.–as the Axial Age. That at first puzzling geometric metaphor crystallizes Jaspers’ sense, which Armstrong clearly shares, of that immense era as pivotal in human consciousness. During it the major religious traditions began and refined the moral attitudes they manifest to this day. Commencing as tribal and aristocratic, the pre-Christian religions became personal and democratic as the realm of divinity came to be perceived as transcendent. Most important was the development of nonviolence as a holy ideal, not least because the early religions initially employed violence in their rituals and justified violence by their adherents. The Aryans of northern India and the Chinese, both initially violent, attempted to constrain belligerence and avert chaos by fashioning what became Hinduism and Buddhism, and Confucianism and Taoism, respectively. Meanwhile, the smaller civilizational formations of the Jews and the Greeks responded to experiences of, respectively, periodic near-obliteration and social collapse with monotheism and philosophical rationalism, respectively. Armstrong tells this huge story in 10 chapters that each relate historically parallel developments among the Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Jews. Magisterially but companionably, she unfolds the successive movements that molded religious consciousness in each nation, explaining them with such clarity that this book ranks with A History of God as one of her finest achievements and an utterly enthralling reading experience. Ray Olson
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