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?
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