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

4. Happy Hunting (and Gathering): The Dark Green Golden Age

41 Happy Hunting (and Gathering) The Dark Green Golden Age 4 Any civilized religion, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism . . . is a religion of occupation . . . civilized religions lead people away from their intimate connection to the divinity in the land that is their home and toward the abstract principles of this distant religion. How differently would we relate to trees if instead of singing “Jesus loves me” . . . we, those of us who live in Tu’nes, were to sing “I love these redwoods , and they love me.” —Derrick Jensen, Endgame Dark green religion . . . increasingly shapes the worldviews and practices of grassroots social activists and the world’s intelligentsia . It is already important in global environmental politics. It may even inspire the emergence of a global, civic, earth religion. —Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion Many of the authors I have discussed in chapters 1–3 embrace the notion of an axial age by way of advocacy. They not only believe in the existence of such an age; they look back to it for inspiration, and they ground in it proposals about our human and planetary future. This is not the case with all the believers, however. It is not the case, for example, with 42 Convenient Myths John Zerzan. Writing in his Twilight of the Machines, 1 Zerzan’s concern is that we should all find our way back home, and the axial age is not in his view a helpful signpost on the road. 2 Instead, it is one of the very reasons why we find ourselves so far away from home in the first place. What has happened to us, to take us so far away? Zerzan’s answer, in brief, is civilization. Before civilization, human beings lived in societies organized around natural and cosmological cycles. These Paleolithic societies were founded on “the principle of relatedness [that] is at the heart of indigenous wisdom: traditional intimacy with the world as the immanent basis of spirituality.” 3 Then came the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the domestication of animals. For a while the nascent Neolithic civilization coexisted with traditional societies. But with the axial age, civilization took an iron grip, 4 “a deeper hold on the human spirit, world-wide.” The language itself indicates very clearly that whereas for others the advent of this civilization was a good thing, for Zerzan it was not: “The whole heritage of sacred places, tribal polytheism , and reverence for the earth-centered was broken, its rituals and sacrifices suddenly out of date.” There was a breakdown of community as individual religious identity developed, and a breakdown also in the human relationship with the earth. We may note the significance of the language here: this is no axial breakthrough but only a breakdown. For Zerzan, the personal now took precedence over the social, the human over the natural. In fact, “the Axial religions offered ‘salvation,’ at the price of freedom, self-sufficiency, and much of what was left of face-to-face community.” 5 Just as the axial age advocates have a present and a future agenda in mind as they describe its wonder, so too does this detractor as he describes its failings. Today’s reality of unfolding disaster, Zerzan suggests , “has a lot to do with the relationship between religion and politics —and more fundamentally, with accepting civilization’s trajectory as inevitable.” There is a direct line to be drawn from the axial age to our present moment; that is where our current troubles in modernity originate, in our “escape from community, and from the earth.” Only if our direct relationship with the world is restored “can a spirituality that matters return. Religion, a contrived human projection . . . is no substitute .” We must “allow ourselves to see what has happened to us, including the origins of this disaster.” We must abandon the industrial mode of existence, looking for guidance on the way ahead to “those who have continued to live spiritually within nature” (i.e., native peoples). 6 On Happy Hunting (and Gathering) 43 this reading the axial age is a fateful, destructive age. We must recover a more authentic way of being. Central to the recovery is the renewed embrace of preaxial spirituality, which is assessed in Zerzan’s thinking very differently than in (say) Jaspers’ thinking. This reflects a broader debate among students of religion “between those who consider nature religions to be religiously or politically primitive, regressive, or dangerous , and...