AXIAL: PIVOTING FROM WHAT TO WHAT?

This is not going to be a post dependent on fine writing, but rather a matter of shoving ideas around in crude and fuzzy ways.

Karen Armstrong did not think up the idea of the Axial age.  The premise was that the “Axial Age” or “Pivotal Age” lasted from 800 BC to 200 BC, so what happened to the “C”?  One would expect it to be the axis or pivot!  It was Karl Jaspers’ idea.  He was a German psychiatrist/philosopher/theologian (1883 to 1969), part of a cohort of big shots from about that time and place.  Nietsche, Wagner, and Goethe were there.  I think you could make a case that these are Grandiose Narcissists in quite an impressive way, and also that they could be accused of underlying if not contributing to two world wars.  Certainly, the ideas inflamed Hitler.

Further, my suspicion is that Jaspers, assuming that he and his cohorts were the newest wave of world-changing religious theorizers, looked back to Jesus and earlier and saw a mirror, identifying with them.  Here’s the short list, the people who came to be considered “Western Thought.”

Jeremiah by Rembrandt

Judaism: founded over 3500 years ago.  The Old Testament.

Christianity founded over 2,000 years ago.  It’s supposed to be the C.  It emerged from Judaism.  The New Testament.

Islam began in the 600’s and uses many derived ideas from Christianity.  The Koran.

Zoroaster:  maybe 1,000 to 600 BCE.  Yasna Haptanghaiti as well as the Gathas, which are hymns.  We don’t think about these folks much these days, but if you know where to look, they’ve left clues everywhere. 

These four traditions, which have many similarities and are from about the same area, the institutional survivors of a swarm of ideas that seem to have fascinated the Big Guy shrinks/philosophers/theologians.

Here’s a longer list:

IRAN

ZARATHUSTRA  (MONOTHEISM)

PALESTINE

ELIJAH

ISAIAH

JEREMIAH

DEUTERO-ISAIAH

GREECE

HOMER

PARMENIDES

HERACLITUS

PLATO

TRAGEDIANS

THUCYDIDES

ARCHIMEDES

The Eastern and Middle Eastern religions and thinkers are on another list that you probably won’t recognize in total.  I don’t.  I looked up Mo-Ti.  c.472-c 391 BC.  A Chinese philosopher who preached universal love and who split off from Confucianism by challenging parental authority and loving simplicity.  He’s either Thoreau or a hippie.  Was Ho-Ti his cousin?  That jolly dancer with the round belly?  I’ll leave the others for another day.

INDIA

UPANISHADS

BUDDHA

JAINISM

SINOSPHERE

LAO-TSE

CONFUCIUS

MO-TI

CHUANG TSE

LIEH TZU

One person looking at this list suggested that these folks came from a new “elite” class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Occident which began a tradition of traveling scholars, pilgrims in search of ideas, following the nodes and connections of marketplaces and long distance commerce.  Cross-pollinators.

So there’s a flowering of subtle and beautiful schools of thought into institutions that Jaspers may have hoped his own group echoed, though life in Germany was more industrial and mathematical, which may have made them yearn for the romance of humanities, even as it was pushed aside into France.  Maybe Jaspers was trying to re-access the dark limbic parts of brains and looking for justification in the lives of the people on this list, which turn out not be confined to the Axial Age at all.  

Baths of Neptune, Ostia Attica

It looks to me as though the invention of agriculture 10,000 BC  took several millennia to consolidate and standardize enough for people to look up from their fields and flocks and wonder what it was all for, in a way that the hunter-gatherers never considered.  There was probably a period of terrible epidemics carried in by the domestication of animals and then relief when everyone who was susceptible had already died.  Judging from the beauty of material remains, some must have been prosperous.  It would have been a hard winnowing that raised a lot of questions about suffering and evil as a cause for punishment.  But the reward is the blooming of prosperity and the city with a granary and a temple where people are beginning to write hymns instead of invoices.

By the time the temple has become a stage and the kings have begun to consider their own actions, prompted by the chorus, something has changed.  The brains are different, handling abstract concepts on human emotional terms, thinking through people in an observing group.  We are beginning to understand that aside from organs, there are over 200 kinds of brain cells, each with it’s own way of dealing with information.  Rather than a new organ having evolved, maybe a new kind of brain cell had mutated.  It could have happened quickly.  We know that each individual has the potential for a stage of maturation in early adulthood that means a capacity to think in abstractions.  Not all people reach that stage.

Kinds of brain cells.  Who knew?

Beginning in about this “axial” time (which I still don’t understand, particularly in terms of being a pivot -- what did it turn from and what did it turn to?) it seems to me the intervening centuries until now are better seen as part of the “Guns, Germs and Steel” story explored in Jared Diamond’s book.  It was a time of expansion and competition, hard on those crushed beneath the wheels of progress, but leading to a brief moment of balance quite recently.  

Now the guns are domestic. Family members shoot each other.  Powerful viruses emerge from the vestiges of jungles and sweep through the huge vulnerable populations who are displaced, starving, and traumatized, challenging our commodified “compassion.” The planetary weather systems change everything.  We look out into the cosmos from our space station telescopes and again ask the Big Questions.  Some of the people on the Axial list above made some pretty good guesses.  

None of the Germans operating from a Victorian understanding of Christianity have much to say about it, except that a lot of people are wondering what happened to Jesus’ simple idea.  Why is it that the theologian who is meaningful and has a name starting with B (as so many theologians do) is not anyone trained by fancy institutions, but rather Bibfeldt, who was invented as a joke.  He’s the “both/and” guy responding to Kierkegard’s “either/or.”    

Rumored to be Bibfeldt

I suggest that NOW is the Age of Axis.  Or maybe Karen was talking about the back axle and we’re on the front axle.   Or vice versa.   I’ll wait for her book.  Diamond’s book, “The World Until Yesterday,” skips over all that grandfathery stuff and goes back to the early days, the first hunter/gatherers in their little wandering groups.  Some of us do feel an affinity.

According to Wikipedia: “Either/Or is the work of the Søren Kierkegaard. Appearing in two volumes in 1843, it outlines a theory of human development in which consciousness progresses from an essentially hedonistic, aesthetic mode to one characterized by ethical imperatives arising from the maturing of human conscience.”  If you watch Ingmar Bergman movies, you’ll get the same concept, which is essentially that growing up means being grimly duty-bound, never having any fun or beauty.  Kids around here have told me the same thing.

Paul Rorem, reviewer of Bibfeldt's book:  "The Unrelieved Paradox."

Well, screw that.  I’m with Bibfeldt.  “He” writes now and then, channeling through U of Chicago Div School, esp. the students of Martin Marty. If you manage to spend any time with true hunter-gatherers, I think you will discover that they love to laugh, esp. at blunders and tragedies.  This would cause Kierkegaard to accuse them of being children.  But Rousseau would ask,  “What’s wrong with that?

Strangely, this new layer of Internet communication is adding BOTH fun/aesthetics and a new take on ethics that includes all humans, all animals, all life, all existence, and right on out as far as you can imagine.  It challenges exclusions and elaborates on the two sidedness that can stop being a binary in order to create a spectrum.  And as T constantly remembers, the New Physics says that a particle can be both here and there at the same time.

So what are you going to do about it?  Read a book?  Write a book?

SOME SITES I WATCH

For centuries now, Euro-thinkers -- some say influenced by Arabic thinkers who developed mathematics -- have struggled to be “rational,” to stick to facts and logic.  This was the marker for being “better,” “smarter,” superior to more primitive people.  In fact, we are thrilled to admire the evolved skills of ethics and restraint that are managed by the pre-frontal cortex.  It’s “cool,” apart, a “male value,” objective and therefore unselfish, represented by professions like theology, medicine, law, that require learning a canon of technical and historic materials.  

When people like this are asked about “religion” they will talk about ethics, institutions, demographics (or anything else graphable) and theological systems or (in case they have no theory of theos) philosophy. (They can’t “see” anything but organized religions -- it is the organized part they respect.)  They want to know how the hierarchy is organized and they want to know how to be at the top.  A Major Thinker.

I’ve been following ideas.aeon.co, a participatory “Beta” website meant to be an idea “hatchery.”  One can post questions, one can answer the questions or comment on other people’s answers or submit alternative answers, and one can make short statements to a “forum.”  It deliberately turns to readers for content.  Since I greatly admire the online parent magazine called “Aeon,” I was full of enthusiasm and jumped right in.  Somehow I expected the content to be as eclectic as the magazine, but slowly I realized that the stories about artisans or small sub-cultures or nature, were mostly represented by videos.  (The magazine is half essays and half videos.)

The categories offered on ideas.aeon.co are “Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Health, Society, Technology, and Culture.”  There are no categories for religion or nature but I have the impression -- not tested by a realistic accounting -- that the majority of questions hinge on religion v. science but, more than that, there is an obsession with the traditional religious questions addressed by institutional dogmas.  It’s not that people are arguing with some particular named and organized religion, but that they simply cannot get outside the idea that religion is a box and does not exist outside that box.  They can’t escape the terms of known institutions.  No free range religion.  To them, it’s a contradiction in terms.

It’s quite transparent in naming the actual writers and their main professional tags -- they all have these tags -- so it’s easy to see that they are almost all academic, male, culturally European (a few from India), and evidently rather liberal and politically correct in their sympathies.  Also, many of the posts are by the staff.  Clearly this site is a consolidation rather than an exploration.  I do not know quite where to look for exploration.  I begin to think it is not represented on the Internet, where most people must have at least a minimum skill level, though smart phones are letting a lot of less monied folks get access.  Education is more likely to be an exercise in conformity than in exploration. 

“Religion” is an array of phenomena, formed as  survival guides out of the substance of human experience, meaning distilled from interaction with specific ecosystems, but also layered in terms of human neurology, desires, physical well-being, and participation in society. Christian denominations formed from ethnic and economic enclaves and try to maintain that identity, resisting different races, but transporting ideas from one part of the planet to another.  The Bible itself is a jumble of assumptions, some of which plainly don’t fit or are damaging.  (Mixed fibers, indeed!)

A dance about slavery.

Something as historically specific as Native American or African tribes, carefully adapted for survival in their places of origin, are half-missionized and half-reactionary, with much subversive resistance to the modern state of idea-soup.  Strangely, in America the once-distinct tribes have become Pan-Native-American which insist that NA’s have a distinct culture separated from whites, but uniform across the continent.  (Sioux bonnets, dream catchers, sweat lodges, grass dances, potlatches, or whatever else is dramatic and appealing.  They rarely pick up on the near universal starvation monsters who eat humans and often live underwater.)  Something similar happens in the way we think of African-American religions: they are either elegant Baptist ladies with hats or voodoo witches.  Either way, they are Other.

Aeon itself says:  “Since September 2012, Aeon has been publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. It asks the biggest questions and finds the freshest, most original answers, provided by world-leading authorities on science, philosophy and society.”   But this is in their own opinion.  They are actually choosing what THEY like best. 

Bioneers are more appealing to me.  They are more experience-based, more world-wide, more open to surprises, much more open to indigenous or minority thinkers.  There are three ways that environment-focused organizations usually lose me -- one is that they can get all wrapped up in laws and rules and consequently politics.  Or they can slip over into nature mysticism and go all woo-woo.  The third is the capacity to become elitist when they start creating reserves for only certain wealthy people.  Ted Turner might be an example, or Boone and Crockett as a local example.  Bioneers is, it must be admitted, just a little woo-woo.  Or maybe Kumbaya.

Evolution-institute.org looks interesting, since in the end all organizations have to choose some kind of specific ground and form.  I keep notes on the development of this small town and its infrastructure, so this is useful.  Almost all these above named groups tend towards a lack of humor.  Some fan the flames of “change-dread” that make it unbearable to think about the losses already.  It might feel like some of these ideas are powering change, but the plain fact is that it’s sometimes paralyzing.

Paul Hawken

https://vimeo.com/88694063  Can you bear to watch Paul Hawken’s talk?

https://vimeo.com/88694064  “Justice is the public face of love.”

https://vimeo.com/88693287  Testimony is religious -- well, spiritual.    But then, AAAAACK -- they want money.  (The church joke goes, “Let’s do something religious -- pass the collection plate!”)

If the internet collapses due to a sun flare that finally fries all the satellites and connecting fibers -- which happens now on a small scale -- or maybe due to governmental or corporation domination of the rules about what can be posted to whom, these Internet-dependent organizations might end.  Bioneers is reality and terrain-related enough to survive.  Aeon won’t.  It is what they call "horizontal" thinking, which is good sometimes but not always.

Wendigo

I sometimes think that in my lifetime I will see the collapse of academia -- maybe already am.  Certainly every academic connection I have -- including public elementary and high schools as well as grad schools -- is frayed at the edges.  They are dependent on convictions about what is worthy and useful, just as religious organizations are.   (Degrees mean you’ll make more money; being "high church" means making more money.)  But the cannibals are nearby.  I can smell them.  I don’t think Aeon can.  As for Bioneers, they’ve gone vegetarian.  I wonder what the Evolution Institute has to say about anarchy.