The Axial Age

more at Darwiniana.com on failure to replicate the Axial Age

Fallacies of New Age Evolution

In that context, we see the interconnection of ‘evolution’ and religious issues, but in an abstract and indirect way, and there is no easy or simple way to connect this to the activity of individuals. The eonic effect shows an action on two levels, and the level of system evolution is not the same as the level of individual realization. There is no other way to analyze the question, and we can see in the Old Testament the confusing difference: the historical interval of Israelite history that intersects with the Axial interval shows, remarkably, correlation with ‘eonic evolution’, but the actual realization is that of individuals, and this includes the actual formation of the Biblical corpus, which now seems to secularists as myth, which is true up to a point, but these materials do reflect the remarkable evolutionary moment of the Axial period. It is a complex issue requiring a thorough understanding of the eonic effect.

Why everyone disowns the Axial Age

Karen Armstrong and the Axial Age question

Her book The Great Transformation did immense harm to the archaeological site of the so-called Axial Age. Appearing in the wake of the first edition of World History And The Eonic Effect this book, without any acknowledgment stripped the Axial Age of its macrohistorical/evolutionary significance, and proceed to do a revolting sausage job on the religious manifestation of that mysterious period. Along with a downplaying of the Axial Greek phenomenon. The result was to make the Axial Age, among other things, safe for an age of Darwinists and Darwin mania. How compassionate.

From Darwiniana

One of the major faults of Armstrong’s book on the Axial Age is the complete silence on the subject of evolution. Examine the index, nothing on Darwin, Darwinism.
This is not an accident. As I noted several months ago, Armstrong and Eugenie Scott have interacted.
It is impossible to grasp the issues of the Axial Age without bringing in the issues of evolution, a point requiring some study. But obviously that is taboo, and one of the apparent strategies of Armstrong’s silly book is to efface anything controversial.
There is some manipulation going on here, though I can’t quite pin it down exactly.
Now, if you follow this game, you can put two and two together fairly easily.
Obviously, Armstrong has been ‘fixed’.
I find it interesting that I had a long debate on evolution and Axial Age at the Anthro-L list about two years ago, and was banned from the list, after an incident with the NCSE people there. Obviously the NCSE became aware of the Axial Age threat.

Here is the obvious link

Moral: They don’t want you to figure out the Axial Age. Anything on that scale shows something that is not supposed to exist, and which seem rightly makes a mockery of Darwinism applied to the descent of man.
Note that religious groups are equally hostile to the Axial phenomenon.

Armstrong’s confusion on Buddhism/monotheism

James comments on Armstrong post
A good point from James: Armstrong seems to confuse the (admittedly) difficult question of the Axial Age with the idea of the same thing happening in different places at the same time, surely a distortion. We can grasp the Axial Age without carefully seeing its context, and then we have to zoom in on each of its branches individually, to study the complex literatures/histories in each area, a very difficult task. We can see that an exploration of diversity or opposites is an equally good interpretation. Her treatment of Buddhism becomes hopeless on these grounds as it all goes into the sausage machine.

James said,

October 22, 2007 at 4:33 pm ·
“Armstrong is a tricky hypocrite who is an atheist who slyly peddles books to religion types and half-religion types, and maybe no religion types.”

Armstrong’s sloppy scholarship should be obvious to anybody who has taken at least a freshman level religion class. It’s just the same recycled perennial philosophy ecumenical bullsh*t. Indeed, I don’t understand why anybody would take her seriously after saying something as dumb as this:

“That’s fascinating. So in Buddhism, which is nontheistic, the message or the experience of nirvana is the same as the Christian God?

The experience is the same. The trouble is that we define our God too closely. In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.”

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/30/armstrong/index1.html

Selection from World History And The Eonic Effect, the last paragraph of one section leading into the next, with its question.

We are ready to move backwards again toward antiquity in search of the right perspective on the rise of the modern world. We have asked ‘middle of what?’ There can be only one answer, and we can move on, to examine the onset of our middle period. As we explore the world of the Classical Greeks we know that we are in the presence of another or our seminal eras, further, that as we zoom in on the phenomenon, it shows a strong resemblance with the rise of the modern world.

3.3 The Axial Age

Our riddle is solved at once, then, by slightly extending the range of examination, to see that while there may be a local explanation for decline, there must be a global explanation for the rise. Our model won’t tell us why Rome declined, only that its (relative) genesis is in the great seminal era of cyclical upturn. We are at the point of seeing the one great clue to the emergence, as evolution, of civilization itself, in this strange phenomenon of synchronous acceleration. All across Eurasia, from Rome, to Greece, to the Near East, to India, and China, we see a sudden burst of cultural acceleration, with a center of gravity around –600, the time of the Exile in the case of Israel. We are back at our starting point, the mysterious drumbeat sounding across Eurasia in the period from ca. –900, and over by –400.
Beginning in the nineteenth century this perception of synchronous emergence in classical antiquity began to crystallize. These are ‘eonic observations’, and the redactors of the Judaic tradition were the first to observe the compression of their history and immediately cast this into the classic form that we have received from them. A similar sense appears in the history of Buddhism. The Judaic tradition is exceptional here, for the Greeks tended not to realize the phenomenon of their almost more remarkable and isomorphic history of this period. Let us note in passing, lest we get confused over ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, that we see the birth of monotheism, but also the Greek proto-secular Enlightenment (matched with the last spectacular flowering of Greek polytheism). The birth of monotheism and science are synchronous, therefore. Our data is a superset of such eonic observations passing so quickly into a great myth. The distinction of sacred history has no meaning. Clearly we are seeing a spectrum of outcomes that blend into each other. But we must be wary of reducing them to a common denominator. Our system is exploring diversity.
The number of cultural processes that undergo rapid transformation in this period is remarkable, and it is not until modern times that we see anything comparable. One problem is that the scale of the process is tremendous, the study of five time slices in parallel. The logistics defeats observation, like a blind man reading a Braille text of a movie script. We don’t quite see the spectacular effect. Normal historiography specializes in the part, but this requires a greater whole. Thus specialized study tends to lose perspective on the echoing parallels reverberating across Eurasia as this drumbeat clocks multiple innovations appearing in the ongoing momentum of the target areas. The Old Testament unwittingly suggests the time frame for this interval, from after around –900 to the proximate period around –600, if we distinguish carefully a kind seminal period from its first spectacular fruits in the rough two centuries after –600.
Thus, in the clearest case we see the world of the Greeks emerge from its so-called Dark Age, suddenly begin a quiet transformation in the Archaic, then flower in spectacular fashion after –600, significantly the period of Solon. The change in character of the phenomenon shows how it is quite suddenly on the wane after around –400, and within a few centuries men are looking backwards to this era as an historical enigma. The remarkable thing is that we see this synchronous phenomenon in a fashion that transcends the possibilities of cross diffusion, which are nonetheless considerable. The Israelites had heard of the Iliad, there is an influence, but we cannot explain the one from the other. We might thus include the emergence of Rome as an additional independently emergent center, yet we see it more clearly as a variant of the Greek city state expansion characteristic of the Greek Archaic, that is, in part a case of diffusion. But with Greece, Israel, India and China we have no basis to claim that one triggers the other. We get the suggestion of something occurring ‘on schedule’.
All we can really do is to try and observe this phenomenon by setting out rough periodization boundaries. Later, on the analog of the modern we can partition our Axial phase as transition and divide, which is easy to spot. We will examine this ‘differential boundary’ below as being about –900 to –600. This puts a ‘divide’ near –600, after which we find a brief flowering followed by a rapid fall-off. It is almost eerie. Within a generation or two the character of the Greek era changes gears and a great flowering is over (this falloff and the divide are not the same). We had thought that coincidental, but it falls like ripe fruit into our periodization scheme. The factor of eonic determination is waning, and the high-octane fuel starts to be exhausted. The ‘punctuation’ is over and the eonic emergents head out under their own steam, if they survive at all. Greek democracy and tragedy don’t survive.
A birth of democracy Let us continue to track the history of democratic emergence in our system, to note once again: twice in a row, democracy shows correlated jump-start emergence in the eonic sequence, more, just at the point of the divide. Twenty-four hundred years to the decade separate Solon and the modern divide! We see the sudden appearance of a string of democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, just as our modern transition is concluding. In the Axial period, we see the fragile Athenian experiment emerge from ‘raw republicanism’ in the sixth century. To repeat, we can see that this is no coincidence. Clearly democracy as micro-action is at risk as it sets sail into the uncharted waters of its mideonic period!
We can probably extend this backwards to our first transition, the system of Sumerian city-states, but the data is blurred, and it is probable that emergent civilization is too primitive for democracy to appear.

Some posts on the Axial Age from Darwiniana
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One of the fallacies being perpetrated about the Axial Age is the possibility of a ’second Axial Age’, but the study of the eonic effect shows the problems with that view. The rise of the early modern shows the real ’second axial’ and it is proceeding toward secularism.
A New Axial Age
Karen Armstrong on the History—and the Future—of God
by Jessica Roemischer

Karen Armstrong
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The Greek Archaic and the Axial Enigma

A post at Darwiniana on the relationship between the Axial enigma and the Greek Archaic period