The Great Transformation (2006)
Four Stars out of Five
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong has gained considerable notoriety as a
popular writer on religion. As a former nun and then later as an atheist, she
brings a perspective on the topic of God and religion that is generally one
steeped in compassion and open-mindedness on these subjects. She has in recent
years rejected her atheism and returned to the ranks of the believers but her
belief system seems to me (an agnostic) to be somewhat out of the main stream
in terms of the issues and values she brings to the forefront of the
discussion. She definitely brings an appreciation and sense of value to the
other major religions, and most especially she brings an historian’s
methodology to her writings.
In The Great Transformation, Armstrong investigates in great
detail the historical and philosophical origins of Confucianism and Taoism in
China, on Hinduism and Buddhism in India, on Judaism (or perhaps more
specifically on monotheism) in Palestine and on rationalism in classical
Greece. The events and philosophical antecedents for each of these four regions
are discussed in great detail, while the degrees to which each of the four
overlap is discussed somewhat more shallowly – perhaps considering the length
of the book, this was a consequent and intended decision by Armstrong.
The book is centered on the idea of the Axial era, a term
originally coined in 1949 by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. The Axial era is generally
considered to have occurred from 800 BCE to 200 BCE. Armstrong discusses the
Aryan tribes entering into Northwest India and the near constant level of
conflict that brought on the creation of the Vedic texts as a means to help
their society to bring peace back into their lives. A similar scenario unfolded
in ancient China during the era of the warring states. In this period, a rigid
set of rules (Li) and ancestor worship were used to help stabilize their
society. Meanwhile in Palestine, the various Jewish tribes were reasonably
stable from a societal point of view until the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions
of the 6th century when the first temple was destroyed and a large
fraction of the Jews deported to Babylonia. In each of these three cases,
intense social unrest and warfare threatened to destroy the various cultures
involved.
In ancient Greece, a different path was shaping up. They too
were engaged in near constant warfare either between the various polis or later
with the Persians. In the case of the Hellenic world though two different
groups rose to help their society to deal with their problems: the Tragedians
(Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus) and their nascent scientific community.
These multi-century long changes in each society slowly developed as each society
moved from hunter/gather communities to farming communities to empires. As they
did so, the level of war and dukkha (to use the Sanskrit term) or suffering always seemed to
rise. And while these four societies separated as they were by hundreds or
thousands of miles (and indeed there was no interaction with the Chinese
societies at all), they all started a near simultaneous philosophical/religious
evolution as well. Each of the non-Greek societies fostered the growth of a
belief system that moved from a belief that “one’s own needs could trump anyone
else’s, if I have the means to take what I want from you” to several variations
on the Golden Rule. As I read through this book, I was astonished at how the
concept of “do not do to others that which you would not have done to you”
arose independently in the three non-Greek regions and how in the words of
Rabbi Hillel in the year zero (or so) this simple concept could actually be used to
summarize the whole of the Torah.
The Greeks definitely took a different turn. To their credit
the Tragedians seemed (to me anyway) to be on the same path as the various
philosophers in the other regions. They would use their Chorus members to
impart the moral lessons of the various plays in which they acted out recent
Greek history and would attempt via these plays to help their society to cope
with pain and to grow in a moral sense. In the meanwhile and with the advent of
Socrates, Plato and especially Aristotle, the Greeks began their march towards
a rationalistic interpretation of the world; a worldview that came to govern
western society to this day.
The strength of this book is to be found in the careful
recitation of the events leading up to the development of Confucianism, Taoism,
Hinduism, Buddhism, rabbinical Judaism, Christianity and Islam. With Armstrong’s
careful narrative it is remarkably easy to see where these seemingly quite
different religions have come to some very similar final conclusions, again
focusing on the core of the Golden Rule. The weakness of the book is Armstrong’s
attempt to use the conclusions reached by the various Axial age sages as a
lesson plan for the modern world to solve our problems. I agree with the
concept, I just don’t see on my own nor in the book what would a successful
implementation of this ancient wisdom look like.
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