AfterThought

In this episode, (part one of our two-part conclusion), we aim to tie together – like a nice bow on a Christmas present, know what we mean? – a number of themes (“thoughtlines”) raised throughout the series that present a diverse number of strategies for thinking the present. We engage the notion of thinking strategically relative to scale, and compassionate readings as preferable to egocentric ones. We recur to the theme of “sitting with” rather than getting things done, a spiritual demand the ego resists. How to affirm community rather than technology; the importance of thinking in critical, two-sided terms rather than in polarized terms; and equally, the importance of identifying resources to deal with the present moment rather than a focus on solutions.

Power manifests in a regularly recurring historical pattern: when there is a successful critique of the dominant power and its institutions and accompanying mythology, the critique in turn becomes institutionalized as the new center of power and new mythologizing and in that process falls into a corrupted form of the original.   This pattern emerges with civilization, disrupting the community basis that is normative for the human ego: as collective power structures scale up, the ego scales up its identification. Thus the origins of this recurring historical pattern are evolutionary and psychological: dating back to the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens around 200, 000 years ago, the individual ego identifies with collective power structures greater than itself in order to counter its weakness and anxiety over survival. Today collective power - modern highly industrialized technology supporting an economy of infinite growth - has attained a global scale of destructiveness, and we must divest from our identifications with it.

We continue our discussion of the Axial Age begun in the previous episode, in terms of how our current time is (and is not!) a type of second Axial Age. Some key aspects of the Axial Age - as a highly self-conscious response to perceived crisis, as critique of existing power, as presenting an alternative spiritual vision of what could be, the marginality of its positioning relative to centers of power, and the crucial importance of living in small-scale communities and undertaking spiritual practices of meditation or contemplation aimed at transforming the self through overcoming the ego - are engaged and related to our current times.

References: the following are some examples of discussion of  the present as a second Axial Age

Ewert Cousins , 1992, Christ of the 21st Century (New York, NY: Continuum).

Adam Bucko & Rory McEntee, 2015, New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (New York: Orbis).

Ilia Delio, 2020, Re-enchanting the Earth (New York: Orbis).

This episode introduces our listeners to "the Axial Age", the time period of the middle first millennium BC.  The adjective "Axial" is derived from the notion of an "axis" as a dividing line, but within history. Karl Jaspers coins the phrase, although the notion of a "dividing line within history" around 500 BC was a scholarly thesis since the 1700s. It serves as a precedent for our time: it, too, was a time of "the world in multiple crises". Specifically, many of the great Old World civilizations of Eurasia undergo their own version of a "great acceleration" of power, with attendant volatility. The myths, religion, and spirituality, of those civilizations, undergo a revolutionary transformation.  Visionaries of the time articulate the crisis as imperiling our humanity, criticize the politics and religions of the time for their role in developing such dehumanizing power, and argue for a higher spirituality that breaks through the mythical ceiling into claims of universality and transcendence.

References:

Karl Jaspers first presents "the Axial Age thesis" as such in his post-war book:

Jaspers, K. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History. Yale University Press.

I (Chris) finished a book last year on the Axial Age:

Peet, C. (2019). Practicing Transcendence: Axial Age Spiritualities for a World in Crisis. Palgrave.

The following books/anthology are relatively recent, excellent introductions and overviews:

Armstrong, K. (2006). The Great Transformation: The beginning of our religious traditions. Knopf.

Baskin, K., & Bondarenko, D. (2014). The Axial Ages of World History: Lessons for the 21st Century. Emergent.

Bellah, R. (2011). Religion in human evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Belknap.

Bellah, R., & Joas, H. (Eds.) (2012). The Axial Age and its consequences. Belknap.

Globalization means that economically, industrially, technologically, all humans have become interconnected. In this episode we argue the other side to the globalization story is a great diversity that we summarize as living in different cultural, religious, spiritual, metaphysical, realities - in a word,  different mythological worlds. Globalization from this side of the story means the coexisting together of different mythologies without reconciling their differences. How to understand this plurality? What is its relation to scientific objectivity, and to claims of universality? Recognizing the climate emergency, how to undertake a solidarity of action without reconciling all of our differences? Our discussion continues to think the theme of mythology developed earlier, but now pursues this thoughtline in the contemporary context of a pluralistic globe.

Resources

Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade are two of several twentieth-century scholars who develop a deep insight into myth.

Campbell, Joseph. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Pantheon Books.

Eliade, Mircea. (1963). Myth and reality. Harper & Row.

Campbell also features in The Power of Myth, a PBS documentary series in which he's interviewed by Bill Moyers.

The phrase “overshoot” refers to the recognition that since 1970 human demand globally on earth systems (our ecological footprint) exceed what those systems can supply (the Earth's biocapacity). (Since 1987 an “Earth Overshoot Day” has been implemented, as the day in that year when we exceed our annual resource budget.)

See, for example:

Catton, William. (1980). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. University of Illinois.

The 1972 Club of Rome Report on “the limits to growth” is regularly cited as one of the “classic” articulations of overshoot”

Meadows, Donella, Meadows, Dennis, Randers, Jørgen, and Behrens III, William W. (1972). The limits to growth. Universe Books.

If key to the modern Western worldview was the discovery of deep space, deep time, deep process, and deep consciousness, and a corresponding conception of no limits, what follows after that worldview’s demise in 1945 with WWII undoing European power? Does a new worldview and mythology emerge? (No, not exactly, but the old one unravels, and is unravelling...) Acknowledging that myth can mean everything from an impossible story proved false to a profound articulation of our existential belonging, our discussion ranges across a diversity of understandings of myth within our globalizing moment.

The scientific, as well as political, and industrial revolutions that are key to the development of the “modern West” and its worldview from 1500 to WWII are examined. The shattering of the medieval Western worldview through discovering deep space, deep time, deep process, and finally deep consciousness, is traced; connections between this development and the podcast's earlier discussion of “expansionism” are explored. Understanding WWII  as the culmination of the modern Western period and the end of centuries of European imperialism and colonialism is discussed, particularly in relation to how the ideology of “infinite growth” transforms through the war into a global phenomenon.

Some recommended sources for “history of the West” to understand the emergence of the modern Western world & worldview:

Arendt, Hannah. (1968). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tarnas, Richard. (1991). The passion of the Western mind. New York: Ballantine Books.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

In this episode we will explore the notion of thinking at different timescales. We will look at four different time scales: the Great Acceleration (1950-2020), Holocene (last 10,000 years), Anthropocene (current epoch), and the emergence of Homo Sapiens (200,000 years). 

Some references:

On the notion of "crisis" in Chinese meaning danger + "incipient moment" (rather than opportunity), reference is to Sinologist Victor Mair. See http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html

On the Great Acceleration, the work of Will Steffen and others; graphs depicting different components of the Great Acceleration are first published in 2004, the updated in 2010. (cf. http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html)

On the notion of a "safe operating space", the phrase comes from Johan Rockstrom and others working out of the Stockholm Resilience Center, two major papers published in 2009 in Ecology & Society and in Nature researching "planetary boundaries".

New episodes coming out every Thursday! We'd love to hear from you! Feel free to get in touch with us on instagram @afterthought_podcast, facebook @AfterthoughtPodcastCDK, or by emailing us at afterthoughtpodcast2019@gmail.com

In this episode we take a closer look at the COVID-19 global pandemic and corresponding lockdown, discussing what possibilities for reflection and potential transformation the experience of lockdown affords. New episodes coming out every Thursday! We'd love to hear from you! Feel free to get in touch with us on instagram @afterthought_podcast, facebook @AfterthoughtPodcastCDK, or by emailing us at afterthoughtpodcast2019@gmail.com

Meet your hosts for Afterthought podcast! Dawson Strand, Chris Peet, and Karambir Singh.