04.03.06
Second Axial again
Karen Armstrong interview. Here’s another piece on the ’second Axial Age’.
Because of the parallels with the Axial Age, Armstrong believes, it’s highly possible that the world is at another religious turning point. “In every single case, the catalyst of major religious change was revulsion from warfare and aggression.”
Her idea is to start a new “theology of power,” based on the Golden Rule. “To understand that other people and other nations, however remote and alien, are in real terms as important as Washington.”
The United States is unique in the world, she says, the only superpower. “So what do you do? Do you start wars nobody can win? Al-Qaeda can’t bring down the U.S., but the U.S. can’t bring down al-Qaeda, either.”
“Believing in God is neither here nor there,” Armstrong says. “You have to make that belief work for the world. Christianity is about looking at other people’s point of view. It’s ‘kenosis,’ or emptying of the self. It means you have to dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put others there.
“Religion is hard. But then you begin to lose the hard edges of yourself and start to glimpse the other. All of the Axial Agers practiced what the Chinese called jian ai or concern for everybody. Not just for your own group, but for everybody. And if we don’t do that, I don’t see how we can save our planet.”
Part of Armstrong’s problem is the inability to see that the emergence of modernity is the only candidate for a ’second axial age’. To call the present a turning point then is wish for a deviation from this second Axial Age. A recipe for chaos.
Note the equivalent point in antiquity, after the Axial period. Religion and empire. All the creativity was lost. So forming religions is a medieval failsafe phenomenon, not an Axial picnic.
To wish for a formation called the second Axial Age would then reverse modernity, hence, science and democracy.
Please note that the wake of the first Axial Age did just that.
Meanwhile the gurus, fascist reactionaries, shark sufis and addlepated fundamentalists are all wishing for a come back in this second Axial Age.
Will chaos triumph again?