03.13.06

Armstrong discredits ‘Axial Age’

Posted in History, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect, World History and The Eonic Effect at 9:23 pm by nemo

I have been waiting with a question mark in mind for the appearance of Karen Armstrong’s book on the Axial Age, The Great Transformation, reviewed here at the Financial Times (not yet available in the US). Based on a previous account in her other book this year, A Short History of Myth, her approach to the question of the Axial Age can do nothing but discredit the classic work of Karl Jaspers, which I have dealt with at length in my World History and The Eonic Effect. In the latter book, the concept of the ‘Axial Age’ disappears into a more closely detailed analysis based on a special type of model. World history shows clear evidence of non-random patterning, the so-called Axial Age being one part of a larger sequential pattern. This remarkable dataset requires careful handling, but careful periodization brings out the remarkable facts of the case. Armstrong’s religious preoccupations completely wreck all her interpretations. She simply cannot bring the right frame of mind to this problem, and the already severe regime of silence on this important issue will no doubt get worse.
The Axial Age is only indirectly associated with the question of religion. Trying to concoct a thematic of the ‘Axial sages’ is simply nonsense.
It is small wonder the reviewer here is unsatisfied by Armstrong’s pastiche. The question of the Axial Age has been almost completely ignored by conventional scholarship because the existence of a non-random pattern is the one thing noone wants to find in history. And yet the data, properly understood, is the great clue to world history, and beyond that human evolution. The ostrich behavior on this question is almost ludicrous, but given the absurdities Armstrong indulges in it is not surprising.

The reviewer here is as misinformed as Armstrong, but he is right that if we examine earlier eras in detail, or if they had left records in writing, we would detect earlier ‘axial’ periods! Precisely my point: even without that written record we can detect a larger pattern that makes clear why it is that there is such a massive clustering of innovations in the so-called Axial interval. Jaspers’ interval, -800 to -200, is too long and misleading. The real issue is why the period roughly centered on -600 shows such a massive interruption of new developments, religious, philosophical, cultural, artistic, political, scientific. There is no avoiding this data, but the current world of scholarship has simply played ostrich with it.
One problem is that the right analysis highlights the core period of the Old Testament, the eighth century prophets and the period leading up to the Exile (forget the earlier period of Moses and Abraham). This is in direct concordance with synchronous developments in Greece, India, and China, at least. This synchrony can’t be explained away, and careful study shows the global directional character of a deep level history system at work, one of almost Gaian proportions.
The mere thought of it creates panic in Darwinians. Try mentioning the Axial Age to such people, the experience can be instructive.
What a pity Armstrong produced this junk analysis. She had five years to examine World History and the Eonic Effect to avoid the traps in the analysis of this data, but she has stubbornly persisted in this obsession with the pseudo idea of Axial religions, a second Axial Age, and the rest. Surely she was aware of this book. Unfortunately I am not willing to compromise with religious mythology, and also have an analysis of the modernity phenomenon, related to the Axial question, that these postmodern or antimodern religionists don’t like. The Axial Age is their last chance for some transcendental historicism connected to the great religions, but they can’t get it straight.
And Armstrong can’t figure out how to deal with the question of Greece, which is the crucial part of the data, but which simply doesn’t fit into her religious interpretation.

Meanwhile, these reviewers would be terrified to review my conclusive analysis of the data here. This work will continue underground a bit longer, but not much.

I dare these people to acknowledge and review my book. They wouldn’t dare, in fact.

It doesn’t fit in with current social propaganda, even though it provides a clear analysis of modernity, critiques the postmodern distortions, and has a rock solid foundation in Kantian philosophy and system modeling. They can’t give up their random evolution myths.
I hope anyone disappointed with Armstrong’s approach will check out the material on the eonic effect to see the fifty ways Armstrong gets it wrong.
Between the Armstrongs trying to interpret the Axial Age in religious terms and the historians who refuse to even discuss the data out in plain view contradicting all their cherished assumptions about flat history, the public has been deprived any knowledge of this extraordinary phenomenon.

Age of enlightenment
By A.C. Grayling
Published: March 10 2006 14:17 | Last updated: March 10 2006 14:17

THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah
by Karen Armstrong
Atlantic Books £19.99, 464 pages
It is natural to feel well-disposed towards Karen Armstrong as an authorial presence whose friendly prose and good intentions merit applause. It is equally natural to wish, first, that she would try not see through spectacles smudged by a desire to reinterpret everything that happens in history in religious terms, where “religion” is so vaguely conceived that it includes even its opposite; and secondly, that she would subject her immense generalisations to the scrutiny of an informed third party before letting them escape into print.

These traits would be enough to raise question marks over Armstrong’s ambitious effort to show that the period between the 10th and 2nd centuries BC in the histories of China, Greece, Israel and India are special. Armstrong says they constitute what she calls the Axial Age, borrowing the philosopher Karl Jaspers’ phrase, in which there first arose the religions that still influence most of the world. She wishes to extract from the shared original insights of those traditions a spirituality that will help us overcome the religion-inspired divisions and conflicts that dismay today’s world.

Alas, the premise that the period and places mentioned can be lumped together under a single rubric capturing their “pivotal role in the development of human spirituality” is hopeless. For one thing, of the list of “religions” in Armstrong’s sights - Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy - only the first and third merit the label, as placing belief in one or more supernatural agencies at their core. The rest are philosophies. This fact shows that, far from being a period in which religions came to birth, the Axial Age was a period in which reflective minds were trying to break away from religion as such, and to substitute it with rational and humanist principles.

Second, there is an obvious artificiality in thinking that the first millennium BC is unprecedented in the history of the human intellect, a claim that would involve believing that there were no philosophers or sages, inquirers or sceptics in 3000BC or 10,000BC. Of course there were.

What makes the first millennium BC salient for us, artificially, is the adaptation of the then relatively recent art of writing, newly applied to recording historical events, religious convictions and philosophical speculations instead of just laws and inventories. We admire the achievements of the recently literate peoples of the period because we have some of what they wrote. If the denizens of the third millennium BC had left histories and philosophy discourses, we would indubitably have Karen Armstrongs writing about it as an Axial Age.

Third, Armstrong’s refusal to see anything in other than religious terms means she profoundly misunderstands Budd- hism and both the Greek and the Chinese traditions of thought. Ordinary Chinese were (and still are) a superstitious but very unreligious lot. There is nothing in Daoism and Confucianism that can remotely be assimilated to religion. As with the “logos” of the Stoics, the “way” of Daoism simply represents the natural order of things, taken as the norm to be complied with; no different from today’s secular attitude that, say, observing natural biological laws are our best guide to diet and health.

Confucianism is likewise a system of ethics, but also a political philosophy. There is no creator God in it who demands obedience to commandments and who punishes and rewards. “Tian” (heaven), whose mandate a ruler’s right governing preserves, is the metaphor for the natural order, taken as stipulative of what is correct. Likewise, original Buddhism, which survives in its Theravada form, is a philosophy with nothing of the supernatural in it. Take these outlooks and put them alongside the traditions of Greek thought from the 6th to the 3rd centuries BC and you have a set of distinctively philosophical, ethical, non-religious traditions, which were quelled, overtaken or abducted by the Middle Eastern “religions of the book”.

Armstrong is misleading when she treats Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy as if they were of a piece with early Judaism and Hinduism. She wants to claim that a single “spiritual awakening” was happening from Sicily to Shanghai during the eight centuries of her period. But her mixture of historical sketches and theological hermeneutics involves lumping together the unlumpable, generalising mightily and steadfastly ignoring the many deep differences.

The hermeneutical aspects of the book illustrate a pervasive problem. In writing of the unedifying texts constituting the Old Testament, with its ugly tribal deity and its litany of oppressions (and massacres) by and of the Jews, Armstrong offers an interpretation of it as the unfolding of a new religious sensibility. Is this her own interpretation, or is she reporting a consensus of biblical scholarship and theology? It seems to be the former.

On seeing that she thinks the Greeks really believed in their Olympian deities as devout Catholics believe in and worship the Madonna and saints, one begins to have serious doubts. For what Armstrong overlooks is that, whereas most people are prone to credulity and superstition, and premise their own partial understanding of a religious tradition as their working faith, educated minds tend to see as metaphorical what their brethren see as literal.

The mistaken idea throughout this account is its failure to grasp that an increase in a civilisation’s intelligence is associated with a diminution in superstition. Armstrong, in effect, argues the reverse. But to lump together four evolving civilisations over nearly 1,000 years as expressive of one “Axial Age awakening” is the generalisation that stretches credence beyond breaking point. That is the fundamental problem here, from which most of the rest follow.

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