2500 years is long enough for us to have learned that escape from community, and from the earth, is not a solution, but a root cause of our troubles.

John Zerzan

In 1949, in his book The Origin and Goal of History, the German philosopher Karl Japsers coined the term “Axial Age,”. In Jaspers’ view, similar ways of interpreting the world emerged in different civilizational hotspots around the world, between 800 and 200 B.C.E. In the Near East (including Greece), India, and China, philosophers and religious thinkers were casting off older, tribal worldviews, in favor of abstract, universal, and often dualistic interpretations of the universe and human purpose. The main figures involved were Zoroaster in Persia, Deutero-Isaiah in Israel, Heraclitus and Pythagoras in Greece, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) in India, and Confucius in China.

The main factors giving rise to these new philosophies included population pressure (a doubling between 600 and 450 BCE), accelerating domestication of plants and animals, and increased social and economic tensions as classes of people became more separated and differentiated. As John Zerzan notes, these changes created a radical break with nature. An abstract, dualistic worldview emerged to deal with the waves of economic and social dislocation that were spun out by the expansion of civilizations. These same technological and demographic pressures were happening around the world, and the common response across cultures was to create disembodied, abstract systems of thought, mainly centered around two questions: “Why is everything so screwed up, and what should we do about it?”

This first Axial Age created the world we live in today, with high-order abstractions — religion, nationalism, capitalist and anti-capitalist ideologies, directional interpretations of history (both progressive and conservative) — providing the social software and technological hardware for our consumer-industrial civilization. But despite the complexity, diversity, and ubiquity of these abstractions, it is important to remember that they are all still trying to answer those original two questions from above: “Why is everything so screwed up, and what do we do about it?” Our ideological systems are all heirs of that original break between humanity and nature, a rupture that has never been healed.

Undeniably, the chickens have come home to roost, and people are starting to realize that our radical break with nature is not sustainable, and that all of civilization’s operating systems have become untenable. The Covid pandemic ripped the blinders from our eyes, and we saw how fragile and non-substantial our modern institutions really are. I would argue that most people are still suspended in a kind of post-Covid fog, not quite re-connected with many of the realities which melted away under the pandemic’s relentless pressure.

Since Covid, reactionaries around the world have retreated into the comfortable old fantasies of blood and soil, attempting to breathe new life into hoary fascistic and authoritarian wineskins. These efforts will ultimately fail, because they have virtually no relation to reality or truth. But even so, immense damage will be done, as fascism is that rare beast that grows stronger as the society around it becomes weaker. For fascistic movements like Trumpism, the damage is actually the point, because the entire infrastructure of liberalism must be destroyed before the new future can be born.

Liberalism has yet to fully acknowledge depth of the problem, that consumer-industrial civilization itself cannot be sustained. Until the fundamental building blocks of our current system are ripped out and replaced, then no amount of green energy, revived unionism, or free health care will right the ship. Liberalism’s inability to match the intensity of Trumpist rejection of the status-quo is rendering liberalism quaint and obsolete. Social teardown is, somewhat justifiably, the order of the day, and the sooner that liberals accept and embrace that reality, the sooner they will be able to turn the tide on the reactionary forces that are currently thriving.

But instead of the destructive social teardown that Trumpism embraces, there is another option for liberals: the triggering of a New Axial Age, where we engage in a constructive but radical reengineering of our society and economy from the ground up, a rebuilding project that takes the first step in healing the rift between humanity and nature that spawned the original Axial Age.

Features of the New Axial Age

• A Return to True Tribalism: the time of the micro-household is coming to an end. The tiny nuclear family can no longer handle the pressure we put on it. Households are too small to provide economic stability and emotional depth. And ecologically, our basic family unit is a planet-murdering weapon of the deadliest type. We need to leave this defective social unit behind, and reorganize into much larger domestic groups, along the lines of 50-150 individuals. Our brains have evolved over millions of years to be in these larger groups, and they are crucial for our psychological development and economic security. Civilization murdered the tribe, literally and figuratively, but it is still there in our evolved brains, waiting to be rekindled. See earlier posts in this blog to read about Bigger Home Bases, the term I use to describe these new social building blocks.
• A New Philosophy of Money: though it may be buried in the subconscious for many, we should all know by now that the age-old maxims about work, money, and virtue are dead. There is no longer any large-scale relation between monetary reward, effort, and morality. Certainly, at the edges, some of those who work hard can do better than some others who don’t. But in the big picture, the brute scale of economic inequality makes it obvious that sheer power and inherited advantage have infinitely more to do with how the spoils of capitalism are doled out. It has also become evident that the scarcity of money is a myth, a tactic of the wealthy to keep the rest of us scrambling to make ends meet, in the midst of incredible economic abundance. These money myths have to be broken, and the way to do that is by applying Modern Money Theory to our national budget. See earlier posts on this blog for more details on MMT.
• Universal Basic Income: as AI and other technological advances gouge into the labor market more robustly in the next few years, it will become undeniable that the US needs to institute UBI. The economic value of labor is declining, not just in the US, but globally. This is only a problem if we stubbornly cling to those obsolete ideas about labor, money, and morality mentioned above. If we flip our script and view labor-saving technology as an opportunity to refocus our lives on other things beyond work, UBI can be the practical engine that makes that changeover happen. It will be increasingly inhuman to force people into crummy jobs with crummy pay, just so we can continue to heap rewards on the already-rich, while shaming the people who are poor because they’re working those bullshit jobs.
• Embrace of Downscaling: in the biggest of big pictures, the planet is buckling under human pressure, There are just too many of us, and our economic and technological systems are just too ecologically damaging. Every major natural support system on the planet is in decline. Global warming is not our only problem. Topsoil is vanishing, fresh water is dwindling, species extinctions are accelerating, coral reefs are dying, microplastics and other toxins have infiltrated our food chains and bodies, and factory agriculture has disrupted vital nutrient cycles. Long story short: we need to rapidly and massively reduce our impact on the planet, which means that our economies have to contract. Capitalism’s goal of endless growth on a finite planet must be scrapped. This is a non-starter in today’s way of thinking, but enacting the changes listed above could provide enough of a springboard to get us to an Axial Age type change.
• Rehabilitation of Nature: the original Axial Age was caused by civilization’s triumph over older ways of being, tribal lifestyles that were intimately enmeshed in natural systems. With civilization, nature became dead substance for economic exploitation, an adversary to be conquered and tamed. This mode of domination quickly spread to the subjugation and even enslavement of other humans, so that natural and social oppression went hand in hand with the ‘advance’ of civilization. It is long past time to bring this era to a close. But as with their linked emergence, reversal of human subjugation must be fused with a healing of our relationship with nature. Undoing the damage we have done to our planet must become our next great human project. I think this can only be done via the concrete policies discussed above: UBI, MMT, and Bigger Home Bases. People need space, time, and resources to engage in planet healing, so a new way of life is needed before we can tackle this new meta-project.
• Send Dualism to the Trashbin: the most powerful and damaging idea to emerge out of the original Axial Age was dualism. This dualism was the product of the dysfunctions of civilized life. As opposed to the gatherer-hunter lifestyle that had been the human strategy for millions of years, agriculture created a host of novel challenges: boom-and-bust cycles, famines, plagues and other infectious diseases, overcrowding, slavery, military violence, and ecological degradation. The Axial Age solution to these challenges was to separate the physical from the spiritual, the concrete from the abstract, the evil from the good. The bad stuff of civilization, which was simply the result of living the wrong lifestyle, was instead interpreted as a sign of the evil of the world. Once this idea of evil gains traction, it is a short jump to demonizing other people as the cause of all our misfortune. We are obviously still doing this today, and it is all a result of the Axial Age transformation of the dysfunctions of civilization into the stuff of religious and ideological demonization and persecution. We will not eliminate this dualistic way of thought until we create a different way of life, beyond civilization.

The first Axial Age was a result of a changed way of life, the transition from tribal living to agriculture-based civilization. We are still living out the wrenching results of that transformation, and the fissure that opened up between humanity and nature those many centuries ago has now become a yawning abyss, one that threatens to engulf us all. If we are to engender a New Axial Age, it will need to follow the same path. We’ll need to create the new way of life first, and then work to fill in the ideological and philosophical concepts required to further that new way of life. Only this time, the ideas will be about uniting and healing, not separating and demonizing.