Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

CONVENIENT MYTHS

THE AXIAL AGE, DARK GREEN RELIGION,

AND THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS

IAIN PROVAN

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 2013 by Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas 76798

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Provan, Iain W. (Iain William), 1957-

  Convenient myths : the axial age, dark green religion, and the world that never was / Iain Provan.

  171 pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-60258-996-4 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Religion and civilization. 2. Civilization, Ancient. 3. Myth--History. I. Title.

  BL55.P76 2013

  201’.693--dc23

 2013012318

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper with a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste recycled content.

For Lynette, Andrew, Kirsty, Duncan, and Catherine

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1The Turning Point of History

The Axial Age

2Serious People, Bad Ideas

An Inquisition on the Axial Age

3Procrustes and His Bed

Mutilating the Facts to Fit a Theory

4Happy Hunting (and Gathering)

The Dark Green Golden Age

5Hard Times in the Paleolithic

Constant Battles and Unequal Rights

6Ecologically Noble Ancestors?

Why Spiritual People Don’t Necessarily Look after Their Living Space

7You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Desire (and Need) and the Past

8The Past Reloaded

A Brief History of Ancient Time

9On Loving Your Dead Neighbor

Violence, Knowledge, and History

10On Truth and Consequences

Why Myths about the Past Matter

Notes

Bibliography

Author Index

Subject Index

PREFACE

A word of explanation may be in order as to how a professional biblical scholar came to write a book that strays so far outside the area of his professional expertise. I first became interested in the two myths that lie at the heart of this book when I came across some of the writings of their propagators, and I noted just how poorly they were engaging with areas I do know something about, namely biblical literature, on the one hand, and ancient history, on the other. This led to further enquiries into the origins of the myths and into their reception history, including their critical reception. I was astonished just how influential they have been and continue to be, across a broad range of academic disciplines and (in some form or another) throughout popular culture. I was particularly intrigued to discover how immune they have apparently become to the many criticisms that have been advanced against them from various perspectives. This is mainly due (I think) to the fact that they are big-picture stories, while the criticisms have usually come from academics writing within narrow disciplinary boundaries, in journals and books that many people outside those disciplines do not read. It seemed to me, then, that there was a place for a book addressed to the general, literate reader, that might describe the myths, subject them to a critical gaze while making the specialist secondary literature accessible, and try to explain their popularity. All specialists do their work within the context of larger stories, and we all need to engage with those stories from the perspective of our specialties if we are to ensure that the stories people believe (e.g., about the past) are actually true. This book is an attempt at such engagement, in part as a specialist and in part (inevitably) as an educated amateur.

Iain Provan

Vancouver, Canada, 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book and a closely related one—Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014)—were written over a period of several years, and I need to note my appreciation for both the institutions and the individual persons who offered me support and help as I was writing it.

On the institutional side, first of all, I need to thank my employers at Regent College for their support for the project by providing two periods of sabbatical leave in the winter semesters of 2009 and 2012. Thanks are also due, with respect to the second of these sabbaticals, to the University of Erfurt in Germany, and in particular to my host, Christoph Bultmann, and his wife Ursula, both of whom went out of their way to make my wife and me welcome. I must also thank most warmly the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany, who funded my stay in Erfurt, and the Lilly Foundation, whose Theological Research Grants Program covered our travel and other expenses.

On the personal side of things, I want to thank four research assistants at Regent College who completed an enormous amount of work on this project: Jen Gilbertson, Alex Breitkopf, Rachel Toombs, and Benjamin Petroelje. I also want to thank various people who advised me on the book proposal or read sections of the manuscript and made helpful comments: my wife Lynette, Dennis Danielson, John Stackhouse, Craig Gay, Phil Hanlon, Phil Long, and Scott and Monica Cousens. I am also most grateful to both Walter Brueggemann and Tremper Longman, who took the time to write supportive letters with respect to my application for the Lilly Foundation grant.

This book is dedicated to my immediate family—my wife and my four children. I am more proud of them all than I can say, and they have made me the person I am and (by extension) the author I am. Thank you all, wonderful people, for accompanying me on this journey.

INTRODUCTION

STAN FIELDS: What is the one most important thing our society needs?

GRACIE HART: That would be harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan.

(The crowd is silent)

GRACIE HART: And world peace!

—From the film Miss Congeniality

If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses.

—Derrick Jensen, Endgame

We all believe at some level in world peace. That is why young women in beauty pageants worldwide have so often asserted their own firm commitment to it, as they have sought the judges’ approval. It is such a cliché that the 2000 film Miss Congeniality can exploit it for laughs—among the many other aspects of beauty pageants that the film mocks.

Most of us also believe in saving the planet. I say most of us, because we must acknowledge the minority in different religious traditions who cannot wait to see it blown to oblivion. Most of us, however, recognize that this is the only home we have right now, that some inconvenient truths have to be faced with respect to its sustainability, and that we have a moral obligation to deal with the problem as best we can.¹ We should not degrade the planet.

These are both noble agenda items. It is possible, however, to become so driven by our visions of the future that we cannot see clearly what is right in front of our eyes, in the present. It is also possible to become so driven by these visions of the future that we cannot see clearly, either, what lies behind us, in the past. The past gets caught up in the future as we ask it to lend support to our hopes for the future, and we get confused about what is really there and how it is different from what we would only like to be there.

This is a book about the past—the world that was and the world that never was. It concerns two influential stories about the past told by well-meaning, intelligent, and idealistic people who believe in world peace and in saving the planet. I do want to stress intelligent. These are stories told by smart people, who are often writing at a very high level—professors and the like, writing peer-reviewed books and essays. Often people in the street will never have heard of these writers, even though they will certainly have been influenced by their ideas (whether they recognize it or not). These stories are persuasive. Unfortunately, they are untrue. They are myths—using myth in the modern, popular sense of an unfounded or false notion.

The first of these stories I shall refer to as the myth of the axial age.² 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. Jaspers had just lived through a period marked by barbarism, nationalism, and fanaticism. He was concerned, in the aftermath of the war, to identify something that modern human beings hold in common—something that might unify humanity and help us all to move forward together peaceably. He believed that he had discovered what was needed, not in any single religious or philosophical system, but in a specific historical experience: the axial age. Modern human beings stand, he proposed, on the far side of this crucial turning point in history (the period 800–200 BC). This is the period which produced the basic categories within which we modern human beings still carry on our thinking—the period that saw the emergence of world religions. The cultures that experienced this new beginning constantly return to it in order to renew themselves. They recognize as they do so 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.

Few of the readers of this book will have heard of Karl Jaspers. It is more likely that they will be familiar with some of the authors who have made axial age thinking more accessible to the general public—authors like the religious studies expert John Hick or the popular religious historian Karen Armstrong. They may not have encountered axial age thinking at a sophisticated level, then, but they will certainly have encountered it in the kind of unsophisticated statements that often appear in such books (e.g., statements about the ways in which all religions are in essence really just the same, and about the present necessity of moving beyond absolutist ideologies to a more pluralist approach to truth). An increasing number of readers will also have encountered the myth of the axial age in educational curricula or privately by way of books emerging from the discipline of religious studies.

The second of the untrue stories at the heart of this book I shall refer to as the myth of the dark green golden age. This myth is in some respects older than the myth of the axial age. As we shall see later, some of its roots lie in previous notions of a past golden age that go back at least as far as the Renaissance. In its present form, the myth is specifically connected with what Bron Taylor in a recent book (2010) has called dark green religion.³ It is dark green both (he says) because it is very serious and because it is somewhat sinister. The storytellers in this case also believe in something like an axial age, but they do not look back to this age for inspiration. In the story told by dark green religionists, the axial age is one, not of enlightenment, but of repression. Axial age civilizations, they claim, 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 reject civilization. We must get back behind the axial age, in order to recover a more authentic way of being. We must revisit the Paleolithic age and reconnect with our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the state of nature. Central to our recovery from civilization, in fact, will be the renewed embrace of preaxial spirituality. This is how we shall save the planet.

Again, not everyone will have heard of the key intellectuals who stand behind this myth of the dark green golden age, but many will have read accessible books that promote it, written by such notables as the ecologist David Suzuki and the anarcho-primitivist Derrick Jensen (who is quoted at the head of this introduction). They will very likely be familiar with some of the leading ideas, such as the notion that people in ancient hunter-gatherer societies lived much happier lives than we modern people do, or that they did a much better job of looking after the environment.

Both these stories have been told and retold in recent times by well-motivated people who want to make the world a better place. Both have proved to be remarkably influential, whether at sophisticated levels of politics and government (e.g., at the United Nations, as we shall see later) or at the more popular level. The popular appetite for the myths is well illustrated in the difficulty I faced, when writing this book, in getting access to the writings of people like Karen Armstrong and Derrick Jensen for any extended period of time, because of the demand for them in our local (including university) libraries. Certainly in the Pacific Northwest, in Canada (where I live), and in the United States, many people are drawn to these myths, and in recognition of the demand their proponents’ books are well represented in our bookstores.

For my own part, I have enormous sympathy with the agendas of the writers in both camps. The problem I have is that I believe that each of the stories they tell in pursuit of these agendas is patently false, as I will show in chapters 1–6. They are so obviously false that it is hard to understand why so many smart, virtuous people have come to believe them. How is this possible? I consider this question in chapter 7, where I argue that there is a perennial danger in human intellectual activity regarding the past—the danger that desire and need, more than evidence, will drive our historical reconstructions. Both of the myths in question have important roles to play in many people’s ideas about the present and their visions of the future. They need these prior ages in order to ground the message they want to proclaim about what we should believe and do now. They want these ages to exist. Desire and need have trumped sober judgment. The authors of the materials with which I engage in this book may well want others to embrace inconvenient truths; in the course of pressing these truths upon us, however, they themselves have unfortunately been seduced by convenient myths.

Why does this matter? First of all, we have a responsibility to tell the truth about the past, so far as we are able to do so. We have a responsibility not to do violence to it, just as we have a responsibility not to do violence in the present. Chapters 8 and 9 of the book are best taken, then, as my small attempt to help redress some wrongs that have been done to the past—to heal some wounds that have been inflicted by violent words. My focus is both general and specific. In chapter 8 I offer the reader an outline (and it is only that) of an accurate, overall account of the real ancient human past. In this presentation, the axial age naturally plays no part—neither as utopia nor as dystopia—and no golden age precedes it. The real past is rehabilitated as the fog of myth is dispelled. In chapter 9 I continue this theme in a more particular way. Mythmaking does not just distort the past in general. It also distorts the past in its particulars. Both the myths in question have certainly done this, profoundly misrepresenting various individual ancient religions and philosophies in pursuit of their fictions. I take as a case study in chapter 9 the area of my own expertise, which is the Old Testament biblical tradition, and I try to put on display the depth of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of this tradition that is evident among the proponents of both myths.

Second, what we believe about the past is inevitably bound up with our understanding of the present and our vision