Are We in an Axial Age?
An Axial Age is a moment when history, on a very large scale, pivots. When we shifted from a nomadic hunter-gatherer to a more static agrarian life built around water and crops - that was an axial moment. Everything changed. There was no going back. Cities emerged. Populations soared. Militaries and governments were organized. Trade became something accomplished with the rudiments of language and math. Religion got organized, shared and defended. Another axial moment often debated by historians, began around 800 BC and lasted at least 500 years. By modern standards that is a long time and almost defies being called an “age”. However, the shift from nomadic life to that of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Nile and the Indus took well over a thousand years. Thus, this great 500-year pivot is another good example of how history is always accelerating. What initially may have taken a thousand years soon shifted to 500 years, then to 100 years to today where it feels as if the structure of our lives is shifting within a generation. This makes all historical axial moments endlessly debatable. These include the Renaissance (& the Reformation), the Age of Enlightenment (& the American Revolution) and the turn of the century around 1900 ((& the Industrial Revolution). More recently scholars have thrown in the rise of Islam and the great Arab empire of the 7th and 8th centuries that so utterly reshaped much of the world between China and Europe in just over 100 years. Others point to the almost simultaneous rise of the Roman Empire in the west and the Han Dynasty in China. However, this only further obfuscates what is an axial moment. The key is not to confuse empire with ideas, power with thought and belief. Axial moments are rooted in our collective ability to believe – whether in God, science, art or nature. Belief in politics, leaders, and commerce is transitory. In a true axial moment, the world of man’s shared conscious life shifts into something entirely different from what existed previously.
The example centered around 450 BC embraces a primitive world as a whole discovering metaphysics – the search for meaning that is not tethered to our physical needs and accessories. In each case, the individual is provoked to ask why they are here on this earth. With Confucius it might be to respect the structure of family throughout the increasingly complex society being developed in China. In India it might be the search for a complete understanding and peace of mind that comes with separating from desire and the temptations of life. In Greece, it is the promise of the individual to imagine a life and to use one’s mind not only to realize it but to understand it. Finally, in the Middle East, it is the arrival of the first great monotheistic God and a set of principles meant to organize and bring meaning as well as identity. We take all this for granted today because in one form or another we all, in each part of the world, are a product of some blend of this most profound of axial moments. It is a true axial moment because we cannot imagine humanity – even at its worst and most anarchic – not being influenced by the ideas released over those 500 years. This is the true test of an axial moment.
It is hard to identify the parameters of an axial age without hundreds or thousands of years of historical perspective. If one chooses the Renaissance and its intellectual, spiritual and artistic empowerment of the individual, do we know where to end it? Does it include the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of science and the rights of man? How can you not throw in the Reformation and its release of the individual from hundreds of years of social and religious hierarchy? Where do we put the French Revolution? Though either apocryphal or misrepresented, Communist China leader Chou En Lai’s apparent reply in 1972 that “it was too early too tell” about the consequences of the French Revolution might be the right way to think about the social earthquake of 1789. Certainly, the Industrial Revolution seems less and less like a signature of man’s progress as we begin to ignite and destroy the planet we utterly rely on. History is like a play with an uncertain number of acts, its central characters and events evolving and changing as each newly written act unfolds.
1900 and the fifty odd years around it, however, is a particularly seductive mark to work with. Darwin is linking man to nature with an overarching theory of creation and evolution. Einstein is bringing not only the stars into alignment but time itself while Freud suggests that our daily life and the decision making that shapes it may, at some level, not be under our conscious control. The speed of the locomotive has created time zones and the electric light bulb has redefined night & day. Many parts of this brave new world, so simply reduced by only using these examples, have been hotly contested as to both their validity and relative importance; however, while there may be qualifications and new discoveries that have left some of the original ideas of that era compromised or even discarded, except for the true ostriches in our ranks, there is no going back before all that “1900” revealed.
As for today, in the early half of the 21st century, it certainly feels like we are living through an arresting pivot in history. Communication is instantaneous. Goods of all types are literally at your fingertips. If you own a phone, somebody somewhere will always know where you are. They will know what you buy. One can barely tell the difference between an automated voice and a human being. Almost 90% of the world’s population no longer experience real darkness at night. There are over 100,000 planes flights a day. Robots built your car and it will soon be driven by one. We traffic a space – cyberspace – that 99% of us have virtually no wy to define or describe. Does this and so much more qualify as an axial age? Have we reached a point of no return? Is there no going back? Just as the rise of religion and later science changed how we think of ourselves as human beings within whatever cosmology exists, has the digital age of late transformed us in such a dramatic way? Or, in fact, are most of these shocking changes in our daily lives only skin deep?
