From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Axial religion (which emerged in mostly illiterate peasant societies after the Bronze Age collapse) was a survival (defense) adaptation of the people in walled city states to marauding nomadic tribes and attacks from other walled city states or slave empires.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Axial religion (which emerged in mostly illiterate peasant societies after the Bronze Age collapse) was a survival (defense) adaptation of the people in walled city states to marauding nomadic tribes and attacks from other walled city states or slave empires.
The short definition of Axial culture and religion: contemplative/mystical awareness, mythic religion (purity myth: sin and evil are spiritual impurities, obstacles to psychological and social order).
Contemplative awareness gave Axial cultures a psychological advantage in forming social order (including military order and organization) over "pagan" tribes, who had appropriated some of the advanced technologies
Modern rationalism (Enlightenment values, classical liberalism) pretty much just ignores the problem of spiritual order.*
Postmodern relativism rejects the concept of Axial spiritual order, at least as framed in the West, because it is "absolutist".
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* I don't agree with everything Wilber says here, but his summary is insightful:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test. (Showing how that might happen was a major theme of my book, Sense and Soul.)
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Axial religion (which emerged in mostly illiterate peasant societies after the Bronze Age collapse) was a survival (defense) adaptation of the people in walled city states to marauding nomadic tribes and attacks from other walled city states or slave empires.
The short definition of Axial culture and religion: contemplative/mystical awareness, mythic religion (purity myth: sin and evil are spiritual impurities, obstacles to psychological and social order).
Contemplative awareness gave Axial cultures a psychological advantage in forming social order (including military order and organization) over "pagan" tribes, who had appropriated some of the advanced technologies
Modern rationalism (Enlightenment values, classical liberalism) pretty much just ignores the problem of spiritual order.*
Postmodern relativism rejects the concept of Axial spiritual order, at least as framed in the West, because it is "absolutist".
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* I don't agree with everything Wilber says here, but his summary is insightful:
https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
excerpt:
The way it is now, the modern world really is divided into two major and warring camps, science and liberalism on the one hand, and religion and conservatism on the other. And the key to getting these two camps together is first, to get religion past science, and then second, to get religion past liberalism, because both science and liberalism are deeply anti-spiritual. And it must occur in that order, because liberalism won’t even listen to spirituality unless it has first passed the scientific test. (Showing how that might happen was a major theme of my book, Sense and Soul.)
In one sense, of course, science and liberalism are right to be anti-spiritual, because most of what has historically served as spirituality is now prerational, magic or mythic, implicitly ethnocentric, fundamentalist dogma. Liberalism traditionally came into existence to fight the tyranny of prerational myth and that is one of its enduring and noble strengths (the freedom, liberty, and equality of individuals in the face of the often hostile or coercive collective). And this is why liberalism was always allied with science against fundamentalist, mythic, prerational religion (and the conservative politics that hung on to that religion).
But neither science nor liberalism is aware that in addition to prerational myth, there is transrational awareness.
...