The Great Transformation

I am back in the Czech Republic and left on Friday with nothing to read. Browsing in the airport bookshop enabled me to notice a book by Karen Armstrong called The Great Transformation. As I am only a few pages in, it may be too early to properly describe and extol the depth and breadth of the scholarship demonstrated by the author (a feat which may be beyond me anyway) but here goes.

She has taken a period known as the Axial Age which produced four of the great characters to guide world spiritual and philosophical consideration - Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah and examined historical and social conditions which led each of these men to arise and become great shapers of society. She also (I suspect - not having got that far yet) will dwell upon the unifying themes such as empathetic concern for their fellow man which marked them out as original within their own specific societies at their time, yet which ensured their immortal re-known.

In her introduction the author writes:

"Perhaps every generation believes that it has reached a turning point of history, but our problems seem particularly intractable and our future increasingly uncertain. Many of our difficulties mask a deeper spiritual crisis. During the Twentieth Century we saw an eruption of violence on an unprecedented scale. Sadly our ability to harm and mutilate one another has kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress. We seem to lack the wisdom to hold our aggression in check and keep it within safe and appropriate bounds. The explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of our modern culture. We risk environmental catastrophe because we no longer see the earth as holy but regard it simply as a "resource". Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice. We have found to our cost that a great university can exist in the same vicinity as a concentration camp."

Perhaps I am not opposed to a desire to be enlightened, that might be innate in all of us, or much that has been achieved in the wake of the Enlightenment (such as many of the discoveries of science, rational scepticism about the old order and such like) but simply the prevailing notion that what we need is intellectual power or a 'rational' perspective to make the world better. Two centuries dominated increasingly by such certainties have not brought us much more than material comfort (even that is rather unevenly distributed). I feel Armstrong is on to something in stirring us to consider the thinkers of the distant past. They may not have been able to burn a CD or create webpage, split the atom or have realised about the ascent of man but they discovered something profound about humanity.

Rather than material pre-occupation and the pursuit of certainty, our age should realise that there may be things beyond our control. We are the product of divine creation - with a spark of the divine within us - not masters of the universe. The emphasis of our age is upon fleeting concerns, the stuff of 'moments' not eternity. Similarly, what the post-Enlightenment world has marginalised as ephemeral is far from so - it is at the very core of our being.