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We already have
enough data to reconsider the basic weakness of
Darwin’s theory with its inability to account for the
evolution of ethical behavior. The current models of population genetics with
their claims about group and kin selection are forced into a corner at the
limits of purely genetic explanation and the attempts to account for altruism.
But if we look at the Axial Age data we can see that evolution in our emerging
sense shows two religions appearing almost out of nowhere, one theistic, one
atheistic, almost—we see relative transforms in each case. This process is far
beyond anything Darwinists can conceive, and we end up flabbergasted by the
sheer scale of this spectacle in our backyard. This does not mean we have solved
the question of the ‘evolution of morality’, that has long since been, in some
fashion, a human reality. But this late recursion shows a situation not unlike
that in which a group of soldiers is ordered to ‘dress right’. The religious
manifestions of human culture emerge, proliferate and decay, and in the Axial
interval we see a remarkable spectrum of situations ‘toning up’ a chaotic
religious diversity. The evolution of religion and that of behavioral morality
are not exactly the same, and yet the two must overlap. And in any case our
still incomplete picture already gives us a reality check: the issue has a
macroevolutionary component. But the point is that religion is not an adaptation
to environmental conditions, but an independent process mixed with general
evolution in the large. We are confused by the output of the system, i.e. a
particular religion associated with our pattern (as opposed to religion in
general), and the system itself, which does something ‘wholesale’.
We should be careful
here: our eonic data shows a very late stage of development and does not exhibit
the earliest stages of ‘ethical consciousness in evolution’. We see the icing on
the cake, not the earliest stage. But we can see that something far larger than
random genetic evolution is at work.
In one way the
category ‘religion’ is (possibly) redundant, since it is really a function of
the development of consciousness (often with an overlap with the category of
‘state evolution’, i.e. law codes for transcultural regions). We see that
ancient men perceived what we call ‘evolution’ as a religious phenomenon. But
then, in that case, the master clue is at hand to sorting out our elemental
confusions. We are confused by our inability to distinguish the process as it
emerges historically as a human creation
(micro-action) in an eonic context (macro-action) and the deeper dynamic of the
process itself which stands beyond the particulars of the individual religions,
here Buddhism and the proto-Judaic corpus. Even a cursory glance at the full
spectrum seen in the Axial period provokes a conundrum. For we find more than
just religion. And if we zoom in on the Indian case we see a whole field of
religious experimentation preceding the later outcome. Part of the problem here
is that, despite the advances of science, we are still very close to this
period, and tend to be caught up in the misleading historical accounts. We have
no concepts to handle this kind of sudden phasing, nor any ability to put our
theoretical present in correct perspective. Thus we fail to grasp what we are
seeing at the gestation of these two religions in the Axial period. But we must
suspect just how far off the mark
Darwin’s style of thinking really is. We can see from the
Axial period the phenomenon of ‘distributed evolution’, sourcing in one cultural
stream, then proceeding towards a more general environment, crystallizing as a
‘religion’, complete with self-generating ‘ethical codes’ confected on the spot
from the input stream culture’s mythological corpus. We are in the minor leagues
of theory still, confronted with operations on this scale.
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