Comment on "The Great Transformation"

The other night my book club discussed The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong. The discussion was interesting.

Armstrong looks at the period some 2,500 years ago during which the foundations were laid for the ethical and religious systems of the West, the Middle East, the India subcontinent and East Asia. She traces the history of the evolution of these systems under the stress of rapid social and economic change, warfare, and environmental stress. Each culture adapted its own heritage but all produced leaders whose spiritual journeys led to a prescription that people should have compassion, treating others as they would themselves be treated. Armstrong notes that our time like that "axial age" is undergoing great social and economic transformations and that we face great dangers from warfare and conflict, calling for a new effort, building on our rich heritage of religion and philosophy, to develop a new cultural basis to help confront our situation.

The seemingly simple conclusion stems from mastery of the intellectual history of the axial age and deep thought. Sometimes the most profound conclusions sound like homilies.

The problem is of course that we don't live up to our ideals, and that there don't seem to be new versions of Socrates, Elijah, Siddhartha and Confucius stepping forward in our modern world. (My son points out that in another 2,500 years people may look back on our time as another axial age that generated great religious and ethical teachers.)