06.07.09

Daily Kos diary and Armstrong’s distortion of Axial Age

Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:23 pm by nemo

A DailyKos diarist has a discussion of religion and rationalism, and also an extended quotation from Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, Christians and Rationalists are More Alike than Different.
Armstrong’s book is a source of confusion on the Axial Age, I don’t recommend trying to deal with the history/evolution of religion using her approach, which has almost made the subject too muddled to consider.

Here is the first paragraph of the quote:

In every single one of the religions of the Axial Age, individuals failed to measure up to their high ideals. In all these faiths, people have fallen prey to exclusivity, cruelty, superstition, and even atrocity. But at their core, the Axial faiths share an ideal of sympathy, respect, and universal concern. The sages were all living in violent societies like our own. What they created was a spiritual technology that utilized human energies to counter this aggression. The most gifted of them realized that if you wanted to outlaw brutal, tyrannical behavior, it was no good simply issuing external directives. As Ahuangzi pointed out, it was useless for Yan Hui even to attempt to reform the prince of Wei by preaching the noble principles of Confucianism, because this would not touch the subconscious bias in the ruler’s heart that led to his atrocious behavior.

Armstrong suffers the frequent confusion of collating the Axial Age with the emergence of religions. Two very different, almost opposite, religions appear in this era, but along with a highly complicated synchrony of social transformations, among them the relatively secular Greeks.
Armstrong’s attempt to summarize the gist of the ‘Axial religions’ is poppycock. They have no simple common denominator.
Note that the Axial Age is a period from -800 to -200 in the definition of Jaspers. This doesn’t include Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, which arise later.
They are influenced by the Axial Age
Her argument is without merit. True, the buddhists preached ahimsa, along with the Jains, but the appearance of ‘jihad’, the holy war, begins in the Old Testament. That’s a complex subject, but the emergence of monotheism was no picnic for pacifists. We should defer jumping to conclusions and begin a long study, setting aside Armstrong’s presumptuous idea she is some spokeswoman for this complex Axial entities.
The second paragraph of the quote is mostly pious balderdash, some truth to her statements, but a bit jargonized. The Buddhists were intent on explicating the path to Enlightenment. That’s very specific. Typically, Armstrong has a problem here, the reason for her emphasis on compassion, which looks like it can be the idea to make a generalization about the whole Axial Age.
It just doesn’t work. A study here must respect the diversity of multiple parallel emergent entities, and not sausage them with jargon.

The Israelites were attempting to create a monotheistic state theocracy, for the remnant state of Judah. In the process they produced a literature that managed to give to their diffusion zone in their wake a set of spiritual texts that weren’t too specialized to the context of israel and were able to be generalized. But the Bible nonetheless produced confusion on this point, to the unraveling of the whole history in the emergence of anti-semitism in non-Jews (and not a little spiritual chauvinism by obsessed covenental Judaism)

The Axial sages put the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion at the top of their agenda. For them, religion was the Golden Rule. They concentrated on what people were supposed to transcend from–their greed, egotism, hatred, and violence. What they were going to transcend to was not an easily defined place or person, but a state of beatitude that was inconceivable to the unenlightened person, who was still trapped in the toils of the ego principle. If people concentrated on what they hoped to transcend to and became dogmatic about it, they could develop inquisitorial stridency that was, in Buddhist terminology, “unskillful.”

This is mostly baloney. There were no ‘Axial’ sages, save that there was as spectrum of sages in five different Eurasian regions, in the temporal interval we call the Axial.
In general Armstrong’s analytical appartus for discussing the Axial Age is so confused as to be unusuable, vitiating almost all her statements.
To try and claim the Golden Rule is at the heart of the Axial Age innovations is, regrettable, not true. And the theme of compassion appears fairly late in buddhism, and not at all in Israelitism.

I don’t wish to be unfair to Armstrong, and it can be harmful to negate her sugary interpretation of that era.
What is needed is to broaden the study of the Axial Age to see that it is a macrohistorical phenomenon standing beyond its content, and that it is something far larger than what we would call ‘religion’ today. What about the Greek transition in the Axial period? This was the one absolutely crucial phase of innovation, virtually giving birth to all the categories of susequent civilization, from philosophy to science. To factor them out or denounce them as excessively rationalistic in the manner of Armstrong’s idiotic distortions misses the whole point.
I fear the data of the Axial Age has been corrupted beyond correct use by this kind of facile and PR-motivated gobbledygook that Armstrong churns out.
More to say here, but the basic warning is to be wary of Armstrong’s completely incorrect portrait of the Axial Age.

The study of the eonic effect can help to clarify some of the issues by looking at the immense vista of world history and the place of the Axial Age in that context.
In that context, we must be very wary of trying to interpret the complex innovations that arise, from Taoism, to Greek philosophy. These are immensely difficult historical jobs, and they are not at all clarified by Armstrong’s manner of postmodern sausage making.
Consider the Tao te Ching: coming to an understanding of this text, its history, and its content, is immensely difficult. And yet that is but one of at least a hundred such tasks required to study the Axial Age. And to do them all in concert can precipate disaster as you begin to see connections that aren’t there.

That’s a fact, and if saying that is less popular than Armstrong’s cavalier inventions purporting to explicate that text, as it gets thrown then into the sausage machine of Axial sages, then that’s too bad, but unavoidable. Who is to stop Armstrong exploiting her pop-religion book mill from damaging our understanding here?

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