05.10.06
Marxist review of Armstrong
Review at Political Affairs.net of Great Transformation: here’s a good objection, but only to Armstrong’s deteriorated version of the Axial period….
Armstrong’s analysis has totally lost its grip on what is going on and, having confused the Axial Age with a Religious Age, proceeds to garble the timing, so that it becomes, so it seems, a good question to ask about predecessors to monotheism who aren’t in the Axial interval.
Time to sit down with eonic model and study the phenomenon in detail.
The only problem with this is the roots of this approach go back to several origin points, not just to the “Aryans,” with a pedigree going well beyond 1500 BC. A “monotheistic” and compassionate religion had sprung up in Ancient Egypt several hundred years before this date, for example. Besides, if you look at any of the major spiritual traditions of today, many of their adherents have difficulties with being self-critical, inward looking or compassionate.
This great transformation supposedly “occurred independently in four different regions during the Axial Age, a pivotal period lasting from 900 B.C. to 200 B.C. …” and resulting in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and “the philosophic rationalism in Greece,” WG reports. The “Axial Age” is, however, an unscientific concept cooked up in the 1930s to provide a “mystical” interpretation for these historical developments. Four extremely important “axial” figures, who were just as foundational to our world today as anything or anybody within the official “axial” parameters, actually fall outside of the 900 to 200 BC dates– namely Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV, the “first monotheist”) and Zoroaster (both before 900 BC), and Jesus and Mohammed (both after 200 BC).