Convenient Myths

The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

Iain Provan

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781602589926, 9781602589964
• eBook ISBN: 9781481301015
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The contemporary world has been shaped by two important and potent myths. Karl Jaspers' construct of the "axial age" envisions the common past (800-200 BC), the time when Western society was born and world religions spontaneously and independently appeared out of a seemingly shared value set. Conversely, the myth of the "dark green golden age," as narrated by David Suzuki and others, asserts that the axial age and the otherworldliness that accompanied the emergence of organized religion ripped society from a previously deep communion with nature. Both myths contend that to maintain balance we must return to the idealized past. In Convenient Myths, Iain Provan illuminates the influence of these two deeply entrenched and questionable myths, warns of their potential dangers, and forebodingly maps the implications of a world founded on such myths.

1

THE TURNING POINT OF HISTORY

The Axial Age

…the most crucial turning point in history; it was then that man as he is today was born … the “axial age.”

—Karl Jaspers, “The Axial Age of Human History”

I believe that we are in a Second Axial Period. We are caught up in a transformation of consciousness that is as momentous as that of the First Axial Period and that will have comparable far-reaching effects on religion and spirituality.

—Ewert Cousins, “Spirituality in Today’s World”

The myth of the axial age has been widely embraced throughout the world in the course of the last several decades, whether consciously and at first hand or more unconsciously and at a distance, as its core message has seeped out into both serious and popular culture. It originated from the mind of the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, although Jaspers built on various precursors.¹

THE STORYTELLER
KARL JASPERS (1948–1953)

In an essay published in 1948, Jaspers looks back upon the record of history telling in the West up until that point and suggests that it has hitherto been grounded to an unacceptable extent in a specifically Christian account of the world.² The turning point or “axis” of human history has been wrongly identified as the entrance of Jesus Christ into the world. This faith-based approach to the past must now be rejected. “If there does exist such a thing as an axis, or turning point, in history,” Jaspers affirms,

it must be based on observable or recorded fact; and it must be valid for all men, including Christians. Such an axis would be that point in history where man first discovered the notion of himself that he has realized since, the point in time where there occurred that shaping of man’s being which has produced the most important results. And the existence of this turning point would have to be, if not absolutely demonstrable, at least convincing on an empirical basis for Europeans, for Asiatics, and for all men, without the need to appeal to the criterion of a definite religious doctrine. Only thus could it provide a common frame of historical self-understanding.

It is, in fact, in the period 800–200 BCE, he continues, that we find “the most crucial turning point in history; it was then that man as he is today was born.”³ He calls this period, therefore, the axial age.

This was the age in China of both Confucius and Laozi (the founder of Daoism). In India it was the age of the Upanishads and Buddha; in Iran, Zoroaster; in Palestine, the Hebrew prophets; and in Greece, Homer, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Thucydides, and Archimedes. It was an era, therefore, during which what are still the fundamental categories that we use in our modern thinking were developed. It was the era of the beginnings of the world religions by whose teachings we have lived until the present time—an age in which “a step was made towards the universal.” The age of myth was over. Rationality and practical experience now battled against myth, and religion became informed by ethics. The human condition was transformed in a way that may be described as a spiritualization. There are great differences among the various faiths that arise out of the axial age, Jaspers acknowledges, but “they all alike come to serve as instruments by which man transcends himself, by which he becomes aware of his own being within the whole of Being, and by which he enters upon pathways that he must travel as an individual. … What took place in this axial age was the discovery of what was later to be called reason and personality.” In this transcending of the self, humanity leapt forward, although the potentialities released at this time were never fully realized, since the masses could not follow the enlightened individuals in whom the transformation was occurring. It is to this new beginning, however, that humanity ever returns, in China, India, and the West, in its renaissances and new spiritual surges, recollecting and retrieving the possibilities of the axial age. Indeed, “when the three worlds that experienced the axial age meet with one another, a profound understanding is possible. They recognize when they meet that their concerns are the same.”⁴ There is no truth common to all three that can be put into an objective statement; nevertheless, they share authentic and unconditional truth. At the same time, people living outside these three worlds have either remained outside the stream of history as primitive peoples, or they have been drawn into it by coming into contact with one of the three and have been assimilated.

What does this mean? Jaspers argues:

Really to see the axial age, to gain it as a foundation for our universal view of history, means: to gain something that is common to all mankind above and beyond all differences of faith. It is one thing to see the unity of history only from the background of one’s own faith; it is quite another to conceive the unity of history in communication with every other human background, combining one’s own consciousness with that which is foreign to one. In this sense, it may be said of the centuries between 800 and 200 BCE that they constitute the empirically ascertainable axis of history for all men.⁵

The reality of the axial age, then, “summons [us] to boundless communication,” prompting us to overcome our narrowness and to oppose the claim that any one faith exclusively possesses the truth. It calls us to arms against fanaticism, pride, and self-deception—against the will to power that dominates Western thought in particular. We are summoned to acknowledge the empirical truth, that “God has revealed himself historically in many ways and opened up many paths to himself. It is as if God, speaking the language of universal history, were warning us against exclusive claims.” This discovery must then affect our understanding of our contemporary situation, in which we must ask ourselves how the unity of the human race can become a concrete reality for each of us, whatever our own tradition may be.⁶

In the book that arose out of this same research and thinking, published in the following year (1949) and subsequently appearing in English translation in 1953, Jaspers lays out his own vision of the future, in the light of the past: “Even the great spiritual powers handed down to us no longer support life … we must return to a deeper origin, to a fountainhead from which all faith once welled forth in its particular historical shapes, to this wellspring which can flow at any time man is ready for it. … [T]rust in the origin of all things must lay the foundations.” He goes on to envisage a new religious order—a new axial age: “In coming centuries men will perhaps arise who, sustained by the sight of the origin of the Axial Period, will proclaim truths replete with the knowledge and experience of our era that will really be believed and lived,” taking into account that “the truth of faith lies in the multiplicity of its historical manifestations, in the self-encountering of this multiplicity through ever deeper communication.” In the meantime, he tells us, “Every individual must know where he stands and for what he will work. It is as though everyone were charged by the Deity to work and live for boundless openness, authentic reason, truth and love and fidelity, without the recourse to force that is typical of the States and Churches in which we have to live and whose insufficiency we should like to oppose.”⁷

THE LISTENERS (1980–2005)

The idea that an axial age could be identified in this way, as a matter of observable or recorded fact in the past—that the centuries between 800 and 200 BCE constitute the empirically ascertainable axis of history for all people—did not apparently take hold of the general imagination immediately.⁸ Certainly from at least the 1980s onward, however, we begin to see the axial age mentioned in print with more and more frequency simply as a datum of the past. In some of this writing, we find reference also to a second axial age in our present or future.

Ewert Cousins

One of the most significant channels through which Jaspers’ thinking was communicated to others appears to have been Ewert Cousins, an early pioneer in interreligious dialogue and an influential figure in his time. He was the moving spirit behind the Classics of Western Spirituality series of classical works from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions and the general editor of the series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. In 1975 he helped to coordinate the “Spiritual Summit Conference” at the United Nations (the first interfaith conference held there), and in 1998 he cofounded the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality, one of whose objectives is to “find deeper common ground between differing worldviews.”⁹ He also helped with the planning and design of the three Parliaments of the World’s Religions held in Chicago (1993), Cape Town (1999) and Barcelona (2004). Writing in 1987, Cousins reviewed the then-recent “awakening of spirituality” in the West as a result of influence from the East, noting both its religious and its secular forms (e.g., the development of psychotherapy).¹⁰ He offers his own theory about the emergence of what he thinks of as a “global spirituality.” In order to understand this phenomenon, he asserts, we must view it from a long-range historical perspective. We must begin with the axial age identified by Jaspers—a period when a consciousness developed that was vastly different from that of preceding archaic, primitive, or tribal peoples. This new consciousness, marked above all by a sense of individual identity, has now become the dominant form of consciousness in the world: “By far the majority of the world’s population possesses the form of consciousness that took shape in the Axial Period.” ¹¹ The axial age

released a burst of spiritual energy whose influences are being felt even to this day. … The new individual consciousness could look within and find the divine in the depths of the soul. It could follow the light of its own conscience even against the opinions of the many. It could strike out alone on a journey leading to enlightenment or union with the divine. These journeys tended to take the form of an ascent: from the material to the spiritual to the divine. With extraordinary enthusiasm, the Axial spiritual seeker freed himself from the constraints of matter and climbed the lofty mountain of the spirit towards its divine summit.¹²

Cousins then offers the opinion that we find ourselves now in a second axial age. We are presently caught up in a second transformation of consciousness that is just as momentous as the first. However, whereas the first axial age produced individual consciousness, the second is producing global consciousness. This is true in two senses. First, people are “beginning to feel their primary relatedness not to their nation or culture, but to the human community as a whole,” and second, we are also newly aware of our responsibility toward the earth. The “second Axial spirituality” that must accompany this transformation of consciousness must likewise be global, in both senses.¹³ It must expand its horizons, through empathetic interreligious dialogue, “to include the spiritualities of the entire human community”; and it must “recover its rootedness in the earth, in matter, in biology,” recovering dimensions of spirituality lost in the transition into the first axial consciousness.¹⁴ “The future of the human race [itself],” Cousins claims, “will largely depend on the success of the world’s religions to develop an adequate spirituality of the Second Axial Period…. There is reason to think that the creative development of global spirituality, through interreligious dialogue, is the distinctive spiritual journey of our time.”¹⁵

Subsequent Writers

By the 1990s we find the axial age routinely alluded to as an important reference point for various reconstructions of the past, as well as for policies in the present and imaginings of (or advocacy with respect to) the future. Writing a postscript in 1994 to a volume of essays on Roman Catholic approaches to ecology, Wayne Teasdale outlines various elements of a solution to our planet’s ongoing environmental troubles under the heading “Toward a Second Axial Age.” He mentions the necessity of interfaith relations and of the Catholic Church’s commitment to interreligious dialogue. He also advocates for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, predicting (and referencing Jaspers in doing so) that “the 1993 Parliament … will be seen in time as an axial event-process, because it has inaugurated deep and far-reaching changes in human consciousness.” He further commends nonviolence as a primary value as well as the deployment of the spiritual resources found in nature-mysticism and contemplation, on the way to a global spirituality. The great task of the next millennium, he asserts, “is the evolution of a universal civilization predicated on ecological awareness and responsibility, a global society and culture animated by compassion, kindness, love, and humanity, living in sustainable and harmonious relationship with the earth. … All of our utopian dreams, recorded in many of our myths, will be realized when this new spiritual societ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  The Turning Point of History: The Axial Age
• 2  Serious People, Bad Ideas: An Inquisition on the Axial Age
• 3  Procrustes and His Bed: Mutilating the Facts to Fit a Theory
• 4  Happy Hunting (and Gathering): The Dark Green Golden Age
• 5  Hard Times in the Paleolithic: Constant Battles and Unequal Rights
• 6  Ecologically Noble Ancestors?: Why Spiritual People Don’t Necessarily Look after Their Living Space
• 7  You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Desire (and Need) and the Past
• 8  The Past Reloaded: A Brief History of Ancient Time
• 9  On Loving Your Dead Neighbor: Violence, Knowledge, and History
• 10 On Truth and Consequences: Why Myths about the Past Matter
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index