Tough Talk About Living in a Critical and Pivotal Time
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates
An essay by Paul Kingsworth struck me as an important commentary on today’s world, and the critical situations we face.
The following is extracted from that essay and its entirety can be found at Daily Good: News That Inspires
In 1949 the German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined a new word (which is) usually translated into English as “Axial Age”
It referred to the historical period between the eighth and third centuries BC. During this period, Jaspers said, five distinct civilizations, those of Greece, Palestine, Persia, India, and China, all experienced profound transformations, which between them created “the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.”
The First Axial Age- What Transpired?
In each (distinct civilization), a combination of social, economic, and technological changes, including the spread of ironworking, literacy, urbanization, and market economies, disrupted old social and religious orders.
Philosophers and spiritual pioneers, including Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Zarathustra, Elijah, Jeremiah, Confucius, and Lao Tzu, developed new and groundbreaking ways of understanding man’s place in the world.
Hierarchies began to crumble, certainties were questioned, and new ways of thinking and seeing began to develop from the ensuing confusion.
The greatest significance of the Axial Age, in Jaspers’s mind, was that these shifts led people toward different ways of seeing the world they lived in; they may even have changed human consciousness itself.
The shift away from a communal, oral, rural culture to a more individualistic, literate, urban culture led thinkers and seekers in all five civilizations to begin to explore the nature of the self and question what it meant to be an individual human in the world.
The Axial Age, in other words, was a period of collapse from which emerged new ways of seeing and being… It sounded curiously familiar.
…New ways of communicating, speaking, and thinking. Old political and spiritual hierarchies no longer up to the job. A widespread sense of fear and uncertainty as the world changes almost faster than can be reported.
It sounded like the world I was living in. It still does.
Is This the Second Axial Age?
I wonder now if we may be living through a second Axial Age, this one birthed in Western Europe and North America.
Consider the shifts the world has undergone.
… A global economic machine, initially in the shape of the European empires and more recently in the guise of what we call globalization or development, has crashed its way into the economies and cultures of virtually every corner of the earth.
Corporate power has mushroomed and the language of business and the assumptions of the market have infiltrated previously unthinkable aspects of life, from the nursery to the kitchen.
Science has turned religion on its head.
The internet has revolutionized the manner and speed of communication and may even be altering our neurological wiring.
Robotics and computing are gearing up to replace humans in many areas of life.
Warfare has become ultra-technological and increasingly lopsided. And unprecedented waves of human migration are driving deep cultural and political shifts and schisms across the world.
This is the story of our times. It is not a comforting story.
Rather, it is a tale of constant upheaval, a never-ending storm in which it can seem impossible to find a mooring.
Environmental Concerns
And in this second Axial Age we must also cope not only with these cultural transformations but with the consequences of our ongoing attack on the life-support systems of the earth itself.
We are walking the surface of a living planet that is itself in a period of radical transition. We began that transition, by accident, as a side effect of creating our new world. Now we have to live with the consequences.
After ten thousand years of human civilization, the second Axial Age is bringing us up hard against questions that have finally become too big to look away from:
Can we recognize that we are the snake in the garden?
Can we own up to our abuses and begin to make restitution? Is that even possible?
Can We Change?
This may be our last chance to face these questions and try to answer them. Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, soil depletion, acidified oceans, melting ice: all the warning signs have long been flashing red.
It is too late now to plan for the future or to issue warnings about it. The future is here. We are living in it.
When we contemplate these changes and these threats, we tend to revert to certain ways of speaking, which themselves stem from certain ways of seeing.
We use the language of science and economics; the language of politics; the language of anger and righteousness, guilt and judgment.
…This kind of talk is easy; it is expected. But I have come to believe that it is largely useless, and not just because nobody is really listening. It is useless because it does not get anywhere near the heart of the matter.
As in the first Axial Age, so in the second: the real questions to be answered are not questions of politics, economics, or social morality.
They are questions about what is missing from all of this talk and from the world that we have built. They are questions about:
- -what has meaning?
- -what matters?
- -what is greater than us, and how we should behave toward it?
And those, whether we like it or not, are religious questions.
Spiritual Concerns
THE FIRST AXIAL AGE was, above all, a challenge to settled religious notions…
(Attacks) were being launched by a range of teachers and masters—from Israeli prophets to Chinese sages—against spiritual notions that had served people for millennia but which were proving inadequate for a new time. Animal sacrifices and ancestor worship made no sense in this new world.
The world of the spirit had to evolve with the world of economics and technology.
Then as now, old stories were failing and new ones were being conceived.
What are our modern-day equivalents of animal sacrifice and ancestor worship?
What Are Our Faltering Tales?
- We tell a story that the world is a machine that can be programmed to serve our purposes.
- We tell a story that humans are the measure of all things, that we can justify enclosing other creatures in factory farms or animal-testing labs, clearcutting the great forests and poisoning the seas, killing off other forms of life to feed our hunger and desire.
- We tell a story that we can mold the world to the needs of the self, rather than molding the self to the needs of the world.
These stories failed us long ago, and it is increasingly common now to hear the claim that we need “new stories” to replace them.
These new stories, it is said, will be stories of belonging again. They will be stories of returning to the earth, of understanding our true place in the great maelstrom of the universe, not as gods now but as family members.
…This, it seems to me, is both true and essential. But it is not a new story. Rather, it is a very old one, being haltingly rediscovered by a culture that long ago forgot how to listen to it. …What we don’t know is what to do with it.
From the perspective of our modernity, enmeshed as we are in machines, in cities, in minds trapped by what we have built, we don’t know how we might even start to live it again.
Change on the Horizon
…Deep change is going to come, just as it did in the last Axial Age, through a radical alteration in people’s lived experience. And that is only going to come from a crisis that forces people up against the consequences of what we have done.
It is going to come when economies start collapsing, when political systems crumble, when cities flood, when seas rise, when people are hungry or dying.
New stories emerge from collapses that kill off the old ones.
We can talk all we like, but until there is a world-changing shift, until our comforts really begin to slide away, we will have no incentive to change anything at all. And anyway, nobody will be listening.
Here in the West, we are deep into a centuries-long crisis of meaning.
As we chase our goals, they drift farther away. If and when we reach them, they suck out our souls.
…At the core of our animal beings, something is bleeding. If we stop and pay attention, we can feel the wound.
In the wound lies the hope.
All great changes are preceded by chaos. -Deepak Chopra
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. -Henri Bergson
Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history. -Joan Wallach Scott