A second Axial Age: Back to the future

I am not sure many peo­ple under­stand what Post-Modernism is or why it mat­ters much. Most of us think we are liv­ing in mod­ern times. How then can we speak of Post-Modernity? This is not back to the future talk or fan­tasy futur­ism, but rather world­view lan­guage and how we hold the hap­pen­ings in our lives. Nev­er­the­less, I do want to go back in order to bring us up-to-date. Let’s start with the first Axial Age. This was the time of the great philoso­phers and the­olo­gians: Socrates, Plato, Aris­to­tle, the Prophets, the Bud­dha, Con­fu­cius, the Upan­ishads, Zoroaster. Because these thinkers and writ­ers saw all of life inte­grated and of one, pol­i­tics and reli­gion, nature and man existed out of a sin­gle pur­pose and there was a mighty force at the cen­ter of life. All crea­tures, events, present and future were held together for a rea­son not read­ily under­stood but embraced in mystery.

The Mid­dle Ages or Tra­di­tional Age con­tin­ued this inte­grated whole world­view. It was not all pretty. A hier­ar­chy of serfs and lords, nat­ural align­ments of a cos­mic order were taught in uni­ver­si­ties by scholas­tics, always men of the church. Peo­ple were born to their sta­tion, even pre­des­tined, but they could seek refuge in the monas­ter­ies which flour­ished. And one could argue that it was in these Bene­dic­tine orders that agri­cul­ture in the West really took off. Men were freed from serf­dom to exper­i­ment with pro­duc­tion meth­ods, brandy being one of the best prod­ucts wrought of this age! Women were pro­tected and could be of some earthly help, not mar­ried off to die in child­birth before they were 15. It also gave us our uni­ver­si­ties and lib­eral arts cur­ricu­lum, again all of the same ori­gin with a Prime Mover at the cen­ter. Earth and sky were of one creation.

It was not until the Mod­ern Age where sci­ence and its corol­lary rea­son showed that this nat­ural pre­or­dained order of life was not as it seemed. Instead of flat, the world was round. Instead of absolute power, the church’s foun­da­tion could be brought down. And so it went through 500 years or until Moder­nity showed its darker side — its abil­ity to anni­hi­late whole pop­u­la­tions and cites. It was out of two world wars that Post-Modernism was born, all authority/power was ques­tioned. Ortho­doxy became irrel­e­vant and life deter­mined ten­u­ous and pur­pose­less. In a Post-Modern Age all sturdy, last­ing things lost their mean­ing. No point in the uni­verse or in one’s life could with­stand the scrutiny of rel­e­vancy. Truth became rel­a­tive to some­thing else. No absolute could lay claim to Ulti­mate Reality.

In review the Post-Modernism is an Age of Rel­a­tivism; Moder­nity was an Age of Rea­son. How one best arrived/thrived in Moder­nity was through the sci­en­tific method. Before Moder­nity was the Age of Tra­di­tion where nat­ural law was under­stood cos­mi­cally. As the plan­ets, the sun and the moon had their sea­sons so did humans, plants, ani­mals. Most every­thing was a mys­tery, but the good news was that this was not all bad either. Life was not always Hobbsian-poor, lonely, brutish, and short! There was sym­me­try, rhythm, a place to be.

Why write about these things? Because it is no acci­dent that Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life is the most pop­u­lar book of this last decade. And most rel­e­vant to this author, land use and food pro­duc­tion. Land is the most real estate we have. We agrar­i­ans know in our bones the fun­da­men­tals of a pre­cious life lie buried in the good earth, its will­ing­ness to give up its power, to sus­tain and pro­vide mean­ing to an oth­er­wise wan­der­ing and search­ing pop­u­lace. In all its earth­i­ness, it is the most heav­enly metaphor we have. Maybe it is time for a sec­ond Axial Age!

Sylvia Zim­mer­man is the owner of Ful­ton Creek Jer­sey Cheese in Rich­wood. She holds two grad­u­ate degrees and, when not work­ing on her farm or pur­su­ing her inter­est in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, writes her own blog.

Posted by Sylvia Zimmerman on May 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.