A Critical Examination of Two Myths that Drive Culture: the Axial Age and Dark Green Religion

Dr. Iain Provan, Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies, Regent College

Wednesday, March 12 @ 4:00 p.m.        Woodward (IRC) Room 6, UBC near Gate One

Abstract

The contemporary world has been shaped in part by two important and potent myths.  Karl Jaspers’ construct of the “axial age” envisions the common past (800–200 BC), the time when Western society was born and world religions spontaneously and independently appeared out of a seemingly shared value set. Conversely, the myth of the “dark green golden age” as narrated by David Suzuki and others asserts that the axial age, and the otherworldliness that accompanied the emergence of organized religion, ripped society from a previously deep communion with nature. Both myths contend that to maintain balance we must return to the idealized past. In this lecture, Iain Provan will engage critically with both myths, explaining why we should not embrace them and why it matters if we do.

Biography 

With his doctorate from Cambridge University, Dr. Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College since 1997. He was born and educated in the UK and retains strong family, academic, and church connections with his homeland. He received his MA at Glasgow University in Mediaeval History and Archaeology, his BA from London Bible College in Theology, and his PhD from Cambridge, where his thesis focused on the books of Kings, and was subsequently published as Hezekiah and the Books of Kings. Iain Provan’s academic teaching career took him to King’s College London, the University of Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. He has written numerous essays and articles, and several books including commentaries on Lamentations, 1 and 2 Kings, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, and co-authored with Phil Long and Tremper Longman A Biblical History of Israel. Most recently he released Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was., the concern of this talk. Iain is an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland; a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. He and his wife, Lynette, have four children and he holds full credentials as a soccer coach in BC.

On My Book Convenient Myths: ~Iain Provan

Most people, I believe, do not comprehend the way in which each of us is inevitably caught up in what theologian Ched Myers has called the “war of myths” – a battle of overarching stories that claim to explain life (what it’s about, where it’s going, and what its purpose is).  For Myers, our lives are war-zones.  Very different “big stories” about the world vie for influence over our hearts and minds.  But most people simply take the world as they find it and get on with their lives without reflecting too much about this battle.  They simply assume that what is true about reality and about right and wrong is obvious.  However, the fact of the matter is that every one of us lives in a world profoundly shaped by other people’s ideas.  Everyone lives inside an (inevitably disputable) story, recounted to them in the first instance by other people. Human beings are always “storied” in this way—regardless of whether they reflect upon this fact—just as they are always “political,” regardless of whether they vote.  The only question that faces us is this: are we going to make any effort to ensure that we inhabit a true and a good story, rather than a false and possibly dangerous one?

 I extend an invitation to engage in the serious critical appraisal of two influential myths of our time. Both myths are stories about the past told in pursuit of present and future agendas.  The first I have labeled the myth of the axial age. The idea of an axial age was first introduced to the world by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers in the period just after the Second World War. Modern human beings stand, he proposed, on the far side of this crucial turning point in history (800–200 BC), which produced the basic categories within which we modern human beings still carry on our thinking.  The cultures that experienced this new beginning constantly return to it in order to renew themselves. As they do so, they recognize what they hold in common, beyond all particular differences of faith. It is to this common past that we ourselves must now return, as we strive to make the unity of humankind concrete in the present. We must return to this axial age—the wellspring from which all faith once emerged, behind and beneath all specific religious and philosophical worldviews and their secularized, political forms. And, having gone back, we must move forward to build a new world order. We must birth a new axial age—an age of world peace.  This myth has in turn been popularized by many others, including the religious studies expert John Hick and the popular religious historian Karen Armstrong.  Even those who have never heard the terminology may be familiar with the myth itself as expressed in the kind of statements that often appear in Karen Armstrong’s books (e.g., the ways in which all religions “are at the core really just the same, focusing on compassion”).

The second myth, I have labeled the myth of the dark green golden age. The mythmakers in this case also believe in something like an axial age, but they do not look back to it for inspiration, because they regard it as an age, not of enlightenment, but of repression. Axial age civilizations destroyed prior societies based around natural and cosmological cycles. They broke the human connection with the earth. They also broke down human community, as individual religious identity developed.  Axial age (world) religions, since they were not connected with particular places, inevitably reduced the importance of place, unless that “place” was in a spiritual afterlife. Much of what is wrong with contemporary human life results from this embrace of civilization. To recover ourselves, we must now get back behind the axial age, in order to recover a more authentic way of being. We must revisit the Paleolithic era, and reconnect with our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the state of nature. That is where we will actually find the spirituality of empathy and compassion that we need, to save both ourselves and the planet.  How can we access this Old Stone Age, which is long gone, and of which there is so little meaningful trace even in the archaeological record?  We can access it by way of surviving preaxial tribal peoples not yet entirely assimilated into axial reality – indigenous peoples of the modern period, who still tell truer stories about the world than we modern people do. It is by listening to their wisdom that we can save ourselves and the planet; for even into modern times, they have lived more world-affirming, equitable and peaceable lives than axial peoples, informed by a much more authentic, organic spirituality than is available in the world-denigrating world religions.  In particular, even into modern times, these ancient peoples, living in harmony with nature, have displayed the ecological knowledge without which we cannot now manage.  So we must listen carefully to them, reconnect with our deepest past by doing so, and in this way equip ourselves to move ahead into a sustainable future.  Among the many accessible books that promote this myth are those written by ecologist David Suzuki and anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen.