04.05.06

Email on Armstrong’s book

Posted in Evolution at 10:02 pm by nemo

An email on Armstrong’s The Great Transformation

Armstrong’s book on Axial Age, The Great Transformation

Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, dealing with the Axial Age, just
published, has brought the public’s attention to the remarkable phenomenon
first described by Karl Jaspers, but first discovered in the nineteenth
century. Unfortunately, Armstrong’s book does not do justice to the phenomenon and
is pervaded with a kind of pastiche of religious cliches that are vacuous
and pressed into service for the misleading notion of some sort of postmodern
’second Axial Age’. Armstrong’s idea that the Axial Age is purely a religious
phenomenon fails to grapple with the emergence of science and democracy, and
much else, in the same period. Armstrong’s book is so confused that it will
end up discrediting the whole issue of the Axial Age, but she stands to make
a tidy profit from her deceptive compromises. The more’s the pity since
Armstrong as a bestselling author has effectively broken the regime of silence
that has surrounded the question, almost like a taboo. The Axial Age is
controversial because it shows the most spectacular case of macrohistorical processes
operating in the large, almost on a Gaian scale, something the scientific
and religious establishments don’t seem to want the public to know about.
Armstrong has simply muddled the whole question.

Armstrong began her book in the wake of World History and The Eonic Effect,
which appeared in 2000, with a recent revised second edition in 2005, and
which offers what is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the Axial Age
in print, along with a solution to its riddle in terms of the greater pattern
of world history to which the Axial Age belongs. This book, which resolves
the Axial Age enigma using a new kind of historical model and the philosophy of
history, suggests that it is our understanding of modernity itself that we
find the ’second Axial Age’. But this requires that we understand our own
modernity! This book on the so-called ‘eonic effect’, the greater structure to
which the Axial Age belongs, has been virtually banned from discussion, review
or publication in mainstream publishing channels. The work is, however,
online, and has a very large underground audience. I hope readers of Armstrong’s
book will avail themselves of this resource in order to forestall the false
image Armstrong is likely to make widespread in her misuse of the power of
famous authors. The question of the Axial Age is relatively easy to resolve but
it requires cutting through the propaganda systems of both religious and
secular culture. There is no way to package the subject for a particular public,
since the eonic/Axial pattern breaks all moulds.
I think that it is appropriate to call attention to this analysis of the
issues in the wake of Armstrong’s frustratingly inadequate text.
Correctly analyzed the issue of the Axial Age presents us with the smoking
gun, the key evidence to understand both world history and the descent of man,
if we bring ourselves to examine it, and free ourselves from the fifty year
suppression of the questions raised by Karl Jaspers.

Permalink