Karen, I must be brief 'cos my dog has injured her foot badly and I must get her to the vet's as soon as he opens this morning.
At 14:14 26/09/02 -0700, you wrote: <<<< Keith, what is your sentiment regarding Italy's PM endorsing Bush's Strike First plan? >>>> I'm afraid that I haven't come across mention of Mr Berlusconi's views yet, so I must duck this one. However, I found your comments on Karen Armstrong's new book, "The Battle for God" fascinating because this Axial Age matter first interested me -- what? -- 20/30 years ago when I read Julian Jaynes "The origin of Consciousness: the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". To my chagrin, I've long lost this book due to life's circumstances so I can only write from memory. Yes, something very important in human consciousness occurred then (700-200 BC). This was the period when Greek philosophy suddenly burgeoned into life. This was when the great philosophies and religions suddenly burst forth in the various civilisations (proto-empires) that then existed in the Mediterranean, Middle East, India and China -- Rationalism, Semiticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. (By "Semiticism" I mean the monotheistic forerunner of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.) It was the period when, quite suddenly, Egyptian prayers suddenly changed their form, when the Psalmists of the Bible suddenly started to wail: "My God, my God, why has Thou foraken me!", and when the word (and thus concept of) "psyche" first entered the Greek vocabulary (none in "Iliad", a profusion in "Odyssey"). Quite suddenly, the complexities of life in that period (according to Jaynes) meant that mankind's various Gods could no longer give clear answers to the problems that were arising. Man and God(s) had become separate. It was now up to man to solve his own problems. God had become mysterious and remote (and perhaps didn't even exist). This was the period when civilisations became empires, and when the 'lowly' pursuit of trade became the object of governmental interference and predation. (My gloss, not Jaynes'.) I don't know whether some historians see another Axial Age at the the time of the Enlightenment (circa 1700AD) -- another blooming of rationalism and the subsequent dawn of full-blown industrialisation -- but I would suggest so. Another separation took place -- this time within mankind itself -- between men of rationality and men of superstition. This was the age when some were suggesting that there ought to be a separation of trade and the new Gods (nation-states) even as the latter were arising and consolidating. Are we at another Axial Age? We might very well. We can now clearly foresee the end of that highly-concentrated and ridiculously cheap form of energy that has empowered the Industrial Revolution so easily so far. We are now at the stage where we are destroying diseases wholesale, opening up dangerous ecological vacuums and thus altering the whole balance of evolution as it has happened for 3 billion years. We can now consciously alter the human genome (and, in fact, by means of IVF and embryo selection are already doing so). Mankind might even be at the point of separating into two species. (See "Remaking Eden" [1998] by Lee Silver, professor of molecular biology at Princeton U.) No time to write further -- but I much look forward to your further comments on Armstrong's book. Keith (KWC) <<<< I've been focused on the modernist vs fundamentalist lens this morning, finding plenty of evidence in current events to indicate battlegrounds of today and tomorrow are heavy with the clashes between those who are resisting the scientific and secular world. Have been trying to finish something brief by Karen Armstrong, the author of Islam: A Short History that was gobbled up after 9/11. She's the ex-nun. Her new book The Battle for God intends to discuss the rise of 21st century fundamentalism and stakes out the three main monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. TIME magazine has managed to do a cover story on Abraham, as the patriarchal link between these three, given the current world situation about to explode in the Middle East. Armstrong says this, which I think you'll find interesting and I hope to post more later, but here is what she says about an earlier struggle between the same ideological competitors: "There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly from 700-200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. This age itself the product and fruition of thousands of years of economic, and therefore social and cultural, evolution, beginning in Sumer in what is now Iraq, and in ancient Egypt. People in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs, became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create increasingly powerful polities: cities, city-states, and eventually, empires. In agrarian society, power no longer lay extensively with the local king or priest; it's locus shifted at least partly to the marketplace, the source of each culture's wealth. In these altered circumstances, people ultimately began to find that the old paganism, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke fully to their condition." Bush et al would not agree that they are clinging to old pagans of a declining society, but clinging to old paradigms of economic power, such as fossil fuel energy dependence and governance based on its industries, does indicate some reluctance to face the future, as we've discussed at length before. The Bush administration represents in concise form this increasingly American reluctance, and making war to maintain dominance based on the old resources is just another chapter in the long history of nations and empires. - Karen >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
