The Axial moment: from tribes to brotherhood
Review of The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong
If you enjoyed Gore Vidal's Creation but wanted a more academic grounding, this is the right book for you. The book covers the foundations of four distinct traditions of the "Axial" age: judeism/monotheism, confucianism/daoism, buddhism/yogic meditation, and Greek rational philosophy. Armstrong's central idea is that all four have a common goal, that is, to turn inward and gain compassion and empathy through introspection. Each tradition, she says, emerged from the worst kind of violent upheaval and sowed the kernel of what became the most important religious traditions that survive to the present day. They represented the initial ideological movements that strove to overcome tribalism, viewing “the other” not as inhuman but as potential members of one’s own community who should be treated accordingly.
This is a very interesting idea that got me to think about early history in a new way. As a classics enthusiast, I know the western antique tradition well, but there were certain things that I could not quite get my head around. Why, I have always wondered, did the Athenians invent tragedy, the Socratic philosophical method, and the discipline of history in the space of a single generation? According to Armstrong, the common thread was the impulse to introspection, knowing oneself, as a reaction to the interminable warfare between the city states and empires. The tragedians used theatre to force the audience to empathize with their adversaries, finding their common humanity. By asking questions and seeking definitions, Socrates and his followers got citizens to question whether they genuinely knew what they thought they did. Finally, Thucydides reported on the Peloponnesian War, not from a nationalistic point of view, but as a tragedy that impacted everyone, bringing out not glory but the horror, with the goal of stimulating debate on its causes. While I will have to evaluate and integrate all this, it is a priceless new perspective.
The other traditions that the book covered were far more difficult for me to absorb, due to my own deficiencies in historical knowledge. But then, Armstrong has planted a desire in me to learn more, a sure sign of the book's success. That being said, the notion of an Axial Age is by no means accepted by academic consensus. I feel unconvinced that you can really lump all of these traditions together so neatly, that what happened really means what Armstrong argues they do.
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