03.30.06

Armstrong’s The Great Transformation

Posted in The Axial Age, World History and The Eonic Effect at 8:59 pm by nemo

Here’s a review of

The Great Transformation : The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Armstrong, Karen)
by Karen Armstrong

Mess of pottage , March 30, 2006

I found this distorted and superficial account of the Axial Age to be a big disappointment, and I can only recommend Karl Jaspers’original text, along with this reviewer’s World History and the Eonic Effect, which has an extensive analysis of the Axial period. The latter book resolves the Axial Enigma by showing it to be part of a larger pattern in world history.
Armstrong’s treatment mishandles Jaspers’central insight: the synchronicity of the multiple parallel advances in China, India, Greece/Rome, and the Middle East(Israel). This stupendous pattern of data shows us a system operating on a global basis with a kind of Gaian effect beyond space and time. This is what makes the question controversial and almost taboo, in the regime of silence enforced by conventional historians. Armstrong must have gotten cold feet and has covered the issues up in blather.
Dealing with this mystery of synchronism is the task of anyone dealing with this subject of the Axial Age. Instead Armstrong plays it safe, no doubt to stay out of trouble with secularists. The result makes no sense and is filled with shallow snapshots of complex subjects like Buddhism, or the Greek Axial period.
The book is filled with a kind of sausage thinking trying to concoct something she calls the ‘Axial ethos’,which is complete nonsense. The emergence in parallel of nearly opposite cultural entities like atheist Buddhism and theistic Judaism cannot be hashed up into a common theme. Armstrong has totally missed the point and exploited the power of a bestselling author to wreak havoc on an archaeological site, like Schlieman at Troy. There are so many things wrong with this treatment it would be hard to list them all. Armstrong is on record speaking of a second Axial Age in a kind of postmodern resurgence of religion. But there again the only candidate for a second Axial period is the rise of modernity itself. This raises the issue of Armstrong’s inability to handle the Greek Axial, because of her bias against ‘rationalism’. The subtitle of the book shows the mistake: ‘the beginnings of our religious traditions’. But the Axial period shows much more than that: it is the source of the first Scientific Revolution, the first democracy, and much else.
Be wary of this book, it will induce a misleading image of a complex phenomenon whose importance for understanding world history is slowly becoming apparent.
I commend Armstrong for the courage to at least attempt such a book. It is a pity she compromised and filled the result with a distortion.