Name: The Great Transformation
ISBN: 9780385721240

Karen Armstrong

Examines the origins of the religious traditions of the world during the ninth century B.C.E. in four distinct regions--Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

The Great Transformation

The centuries between 800 and 300 BC saw an explosion of new religious concepts. Their emergence is second only to man's harnessing of fire in fundamentally transforming our understanding of what it is to be human. But why did Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu and others all emerge in this five-hundred-year span? And why do they have such similar ideas about humanity? In The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong examines this phenomenal period and the connections between this disparate group of philosophers, mystics and theologians.

The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah

Tim Pendry

The core of this book is a solid account of the 'spiritual' traditions of four great civilisations (the Hellenistic-Pagan; the Judaean; the South Asian; and the Chinese) during the thousand or so years before the end of the third century BC. As far as it goes, it is an excellent and coherent narrative. But I have my doubts. The story sometimes seems shoe-horned not only into the contention that all four cultures saw a first axial age that defined Old World culture until a second 'axial age' in the early modern era but it seems to be designed to be a rather passive-aggressive polemic for religion. Although the range of reading is extensive, the transmission of specialist research impressive and the insights to be had considerable (until the very last chapters when Armstrong sometimes just tells a story most educated people already know), some claims for the early period seem excessive. There are occasions when she appears to lack imagination about the claims of her sources. Is it really so that the very ancient Chinese conducted war in such stately fashion? Perhaps but perhaps the story is derived from later literary tropes. She takes texts on trust sometimes. But the book disappoints because one soon becomes suspicious of her ideological motivation. The first and last chapter spin a yarn about religiosity that I found irritating and even misleading insofar as an empathic sentimentality was linked without warrant to her academic findings. I found this shoe-horning of history into a 'sell' for religion in an age of violence (the book was written five years after 9/11) on the edge of objectionable as if somehow the essentialism of religion was not in itself part of the problem of all times. Complexity went out the window. Still, if you can get her spirituality 'sell' (what the hell is this thing called 'spirituality' when it is not ideology or sentiment?) out of the way, her narrative flows, she is readable and one gets a sense of how one idea builds on its predecessors and why some particular ideas take root. As history it is mostly very worthwhile but as proselytising for empathy and idealistic sentiment, it is in cloud-cuckoo land. There is some very good analysis of the social and political conditions in which ideas take root but very little critique of the nexus between material reality and 'religion'. This intellectual weakness frustrates when the book is taken as a whole. It stays in the library as a ready reference on some key ideas and thinkers, with some sound general history thrown in, but it cannot be regarded as a first class text because its final analysis is overwhelmed with apologia. The fashion for 'spirituality' is one of the problematics of current Western culture. The main theme of the sentimentalists is that if only we would listen to the great teachers and become empaths or submit to something outside ourselves, the violence would cease. Well, perhaps! In fact, the violence and terror won't cease because universal empathy is a human impossibility. We are who we are, complex creatures. If someone has an idea you can be sure that the idea will be used as a tool or a weapon to gain advantage. Yes, this is what we are. Her book-ending chapters presents a world of shoulds and oughts that defies reality and creates a vision that is always going to be more fiction than fact. Exhortation may influence some people to be better persons but as many or more will and must ignore the message. If anything an excess of empathy, when faced by the standard alleged sociopathy of social systems, simply neuters the 'good' and sends them into defensive postures, private life, clerisy or the monastery, leaving everyone else as prey while the faithful protect themselves with 'sacred space'. If humanity is to be liberated in terms of both private freedoms and the avoidance of oppressive harms, it is a moot point whether a passive intellectual and 'spiritual' approach will offer anything more than this defensive protection for the few (often at the expense of the many). I have no problem with people believing in nonsense or even coming together consensually in societies that believe in nonsense but the idea that 'spirituality' will do anything other than abandon the mass of the people to the wolves is increasingly absurd. 'Spirituality' (I am still waiting for a non-nonsensical definition beyond mere sentiment) may be regarded as any belief system that eases the suffering and neuroses of life. There is nothing wrong with that - unless we think it reflects anything other than magical thinking. Out of spirituality comes religion which is little more than the imposition of social order on the crooked timber of humanity, a process of containing and corralling the human 'spirit' (actually the human being) in despair at any other form of social organisation possibly 'being good'. This book, for all its descriptive and narrative value, thus becomes a false friend to a species that needs to stop evading and avoiding material reality and the actual structures of power, stop trying to find bolt holes for itself and start creating practical approaches to solving problems. In essence, there are only two problems here ... how to ensure human autonomy within an otherwise functional social system and how to ensure that one person does not do harm to another person. The great faiths partially solve the second but usually at the expense of the first. They are only a partial solution because religious and 'spiritual' tendencies to treat personal liberation as liberation from the world will often result in the accidental de-humanisation of humanity, running away from materiality by (for example) 'abandoning the ego'. The religious obsession with abandoning the ego is cowardice. The real task is to embrace the ego and put it to work as a lifetime project of self improvement and the social project of equalising the value of all egos viz. a society where you can 'do what thou wilt an harm no-one'. There are arguments, of course, for mystery and ritual - like the Greek tragedies or Chinese li - as undogmatic artistic and magical endeavours that are not trying to make too many claims. The poetry, drama, art, ritual and magic in the performance art that is 'religion' is not a bad thing but it is only valuable when it allows persons to appreciate the liminalities and absences in the world. Subsequently building a system out of such things destroys that very purpose. One final world of praise for the book, however. It is very well served with maps, charts and plans - 25 in all. These are invaluable in comprehending the narrative. Despite the irritations, the book still remains recommended for anyone wanting a basic overview of ancient intellectual culture.

The Great Transformation The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

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