the axial age:

The Birth of Axial Thought:

For thousands of years godlike kings had anchored the moral order in chains of ritual, linking the humblest villager to rulers who touched heaven by sacrificing on ziggurats or slaughtering captives in cemeteries. But as godlike kings reinvented themselves as chief executives, the enchantment was going out of the world. “Would that I had died before or been born later,” complained the seventh-century Greek poet Hesiod, “for now is truly an age of iron…Righteousness and Indignation, their loveliness wrapped in robes of white, depart the wide-avenued earth. They abandon mankind to join the deathless gods on Olympus; bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men; and there will be no more aid against evil.”

But that was only one way of seeing things. From the shores of the Aegean to the Yellow River basin, other thinkers began developing radical new views of how the world worked. They spoke from the margins because most stood on the lower rungs of the elite; and geographically, because most came from small states on the fringes of power. Despair not, they said (more or less); we do not need godlike kings to transcend this sullied world. Salvation is within us, not in the hands of corrupt, violent rulers.

Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher struggling at the end of World War II to make sense of the moral crisis of his own day, called the centuries around 500 BCE, the “Axial Age,” meaning they formed an axis around which history turned. In the Axial Age, Jaspers portentously declared, “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Axial Age writings and Daoist texts in the East, Buddhist and Jain documents in South Asia, and Greek philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (with its descendants the New Testament and the Koran) in the West became the classics, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meaning of life for countless millions ever since.

The classics all agree that their ultimate subject, a transcendent realm beyond our own sordid world, is indefinable. Nirvana “blowing out,” a state of mind in which the passions of this world are snuffed out like a candle be described, said the Buddha; even trying is inappropriate. For Confucius, sen translated “humaneness” was similarly beyond language. “The more I look up to it, the higher it is; the more I penetrate it, the harder it becomes; I see it ahead of me and suddenly it is behind…in speaking about it, can one avoid being hesitant?” Likewise, when pressed to define to kalon, “the good,” Socrates threw up his hands: “it’s beyond me, and I try I’ll only make a fool of myself.” All he could do was tell parables: the good is like a fire that casts shadows that we mistake for reality. Jesus was equally allusive about the Kingdom of Heaven, and equally fond of parables. Most indefinable of all was dao, the “Way” that Daoists follow:

The Way that can be spoken of is not the true Way;

The name that can be named is not the true name…

Both may be called mysterious.

Mysterious and still more mysterious,

The gateway of all subtleties!

The second thing the classics agreed on was how to attain transcendence. There is more to Confticianisrn, Buddhism, Christianity, and so on than bumper-sticker slogans, but one I saw on a car outside my favorite coffee shop while 1 was writing this chapter summed things up nicely: “Compassion is revolution.” Live ethically, renounce desire, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and you will change the world. All the classics urge us to turn the other cheek and offer techniques to train the self in this discipline. The Buddha used meditation; Socrates favored conversation. Jewish rahbis urged study; Confucius agreed, and added punctilious observation of ritual and music. And within each tradition, some followers leaned toward mysticism while others took a down-to-earth folksy line.

The process was always one of self-fashioning, an internal, personal reorientation toward transcendence that did not depend on godlike kings even, for that matter, gods. Supernatural powers, in fact, often seem beside the point in Axial thought. Confucius and the Buddha refused to talk about divinities; Socrates, though professing piety, was condemned partly for failing to believe in Athens gods; and rabbis warned Jews that God was so ineffable that they should not mention his name or praise him too much.

Did Axial thought promote social development?

Unlikely. Geography is against it. The most important Axial thinkers came from small, marginal communities such as Greece, Israel, the Buddha’s home state of Sakya, or Confucius’ of Lu; it is hard to see how transcendent breakthroughs in political backwaters affected social development in the great powers.

Also, logic is against it. Axial thought was a reaction against the high state, at best indifferent to great kings and their bureaucrats and often downright hostile to their power. Axial thought’s real contribution to raising social development came later in the first millennium BCE, when all the great states learned to tame it, making it work for them. In the East, the Han dynasty emasculated Confucianism to the point it became an official ideology, guiding a loyal class of bureaucrats. In India, the great king Ashoka, apparently genuinely horrified by his own violent conquests converted to Buddhism around 17 BCE, yet somehow managed not to renounce war. And in the West, Romans first neutralized Greek philosophy then turned Christian into a prop for their empire.

The more rational strands within Axial thought encouraged law, science, history, logic, and rhetoric, which all increased people’s intellectual mastery of their world, but the real motor behind development was the same as it had been since the end of the Ice Age. Lazy, greedy and frightened people found easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, and settling in greater cities. In a pattern repeated many times in history, as social development rises, the new age develops the culture it needs. Axial thought was just one of the things that happened when people created high-end states and disenchanted the world.

If further proof is needed that Axial thought was more a consequence than a cause of state restructuring, we need only look at Qin, the ferocious state at the western edge of the Eastern core. “Qin has the same customs as the barbarians,” said the anonymous author of The Stratagems of the Warring States, a kind of how-to book on diplomatic chicanery. “It has the heart of a tiger or a wolf; greedy, loving profit, and untrustworthy, knowing nothing of ritual, duty, or virtuous conduct.” Yet despite being the antithesis of everything Confucian gentlemen held dear, Qin exploded from the edge of the Eastern core to conquer the whole of it in the third century BCE.

- Ian Morris

the origin of the nation-state

The nation-state is more of an "imagined community"--an artificial construct largely created by political and economic elites to foster more expansive national trading markets and to secure overseas colonies.

The difficult challenge for the budding nation-state was how to eliminate all the internal pockets of resistance to free trade in a national market while at the same time enlisting the emotional support of its subjects--subjects its citizens the collective tasks of society, including the collection of taxes and the conscription of armies to protect its national interests. This was no easy matter since, in many ways, the Enlightenment idea of the detached, self-interested, autonomous agent only with his own material self in mind and determined to optimize his own property holdings strangely at odds with an effort to forge a collective sense of common purpose and identity. How does the nation-state convince millions of newly emancipated individuals to give up some of their autonomy and freedom to the state?

The answer was to create a compelling story about a common past, one appealing enough to capture the imagination of the people and convince them of their shared identity and common destiny. The architects of the modern nation-State understood the magnitude of the task ahead of them. After Italian state unification in 1861, Massimo D’Zeglio, the former prime minister of Piedmont, was said to have remarked, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.”

Every nation in the modern era has created a myth of origins complete with its own heroes and heroines and past moments of trials and tribulations, often memorialized in elaborate rituals. In an increasingly disenchanted secular world, the nation had to establish a powerful new image of a people who shared a noble past and were destined for future greatness. At the same time, the nation had to create a convincing enough utopian vision of what lay ahead to win over the loyalty of its subjects and, later, citizens. If the road to immortality no longer lay with accepting Christ as savior, then at least it could be found in the relentless pursuit of unlimited material wealth in the form of the accumulation and exchange of property. In return for giving one’s allegiance to the state—the litmus test being whether the citizen would be willing to give his or her life for their country—the state would uphold its side of the covenant by protecting each person’s right to own and exchange private property in a free marketplace.
Creating a shared identity was also essential to making viable an unobstructed national market. Before there was an England, France, Germany, and Italy, what existed was a thousand different stories and traditions being lived out in little hamlets, nestled in valleys and on mountainsides across the continent. Each story was passed on in a separate language or at least in a distinct dialect.

A myriad of local languages, customs, and regulations for conducting commerce kept the transaction costs high for producing and trading goods and services over a wide geographic terrain. Suppressing or even eliminating pockets of cultural diversity was an essential step in creating an efficient and seamless national market. Creating a single homogenized national myth required the often ruthless destruction or subordination of all the local stories and traditions that existed for centuries of European history.

The success of the nation-state model owes much to the adoption of rational processes for marshaling far activities. To begin with, it was necessary to establish a single dominant language in each country so that people could communicate with one another and understand shared meanings. It’s often thought that sharing a common language was indispensable to bringing people together under the aegis of the nation. However, that’s not generally the case. Take France, for example. In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, less than 50 percent of the people spoke French, and only 12 to 13 percent spoke it correctly. In northern and southern France, it would have been virtually impossible to find anyone who spoke French. At the time Italy was unified in 1861, only 2.5 percent of the population used the Italian language for everyday communication. In eighteenth-century Germany, fewer than 500,000 people read and spoke in the vernacular that later came to be the official German language, and many of them were actors who performed new works onstage or scholars writing for a small intellectual elite.

Much of the impetus for creating national languages had less to do with nation formation and more to do with the demographics facing the early print industry. Printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were anxious to expand the markets for the mass production of hooks. The problem was that while Latin was the official language of the Church and was used among European scholars and government officials in the palace courts, it represented too small a reading market for the new communications revolution. On the other hand, there were so many languages and dialects spoken across Europe that each one by itself would be too small a market to be commercially viable. The answer, in most countries, was to choose a single vernacular language, usually the most dominant in a region, and establish it as the language for reproduction in bibles and later for works of literature and science.

Even here, the languages that eventually became standard French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English were, in part, invented. They were usually the result of combining elements of all the various idioms spoken in a region and then standardizing the grammar. However, once a common language became accepted, it created its own mystique of permanence. People came to think of it as their ancestral tongue and the cultural tie that bound them together.

- Jeremy Rifkin

"realism" = perception

In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf describes the dilemma of Charles Steele, who’s painting a still-life portrait: a cloud drifts into view, Mrs. Flanders’s sons run around the beach, she grows upset about the letter she’s writing, and she won’t stop moving. If Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he’s altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what’s actually occurring in the world.

There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

There is properly no history, no biography.

religion is narrative, a form of language and communication

The language of morality, love, and meaning for christians is christianity. The language of morality, love, and meaning for muslims is islam. The language of morality, love, beauty, and meaning for naturalists is materialism.

For an atheist to go to a devout christian and say christianity is wrong is like some white person telling me that the korean language is wrong. "The Korean language is bullshit!", he shouts. How offended would I be?

"Why is korean wrong?! You're wrong!! English is wrong!"

Just like how there is no point in going around debating who has the best language, there is no point going around debating who has the best religion/worldview, even if you can prove your worldview is the better one.

Religion like language is ultimately a tool, a means to an end.

The best way to approach a korean person is to speak his language. Likewise, the best way to approach a christian is to speak through his language, christianity and its narratives. Try framing what you want to get across using christian narratives and vocabulary. That I believe, is the most effective way we can start building bridges between us rather than destroying them.

See below for an example in a different context:

We are reluctant to change our worldviews For the most part, when we are confronted with a challenge to our worldviews, we react by rejecting it out of hand. This is due to the dissonance of this new worldview to the one we already possess. Rather, what we prefer is to confront worldviews that coincide and amplify our own. However, on occasion we do change. This is when we confront a worldview that overlaps our own in certain critical respects and then veers in a different direction. An example of this sort of worldview change is found through the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Starting in the 1950s, King found an America - particularly the South - that was mired by Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans in a second form of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law to everyone—not just to people of European descent. King took on the monumental task of challenging the shared community worldview that allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and for segregation to seem natural. This was no easy project. As argued above, people are inclined to be conservative in changing their worldviews. But this does not mean that it is impossible.

Dr. King was the perfect candidate for instigating worldview change by overlap and modification. This is because Dr King overlapped with much of the dominant white culture: (1) by being an ordained minister in the Baptist Church; (2) he was a man of intellect as evidenced by his doctorate from Boston University; (3) he led marchers non-violently singing religious hymns familiar to most Americans. In these ways, his worldview was like theirs.

On the other hand, what he was suggesting was racial equality and integration, which was not a part of the dominant culture’s shared community worldview. But when mainstream America watched the scenes on their televisions of these non-violent protestors being savagely beaten by armed police, being bitten by vicious police dogs, and physically assaulted by fire hoses, then Americans began challenging their personal worldviews. In 1964 a major civil law was passed while in 1965 the voting rights bill was passed. Both pieces of legislation would never have occurred had not there not been a dramatic shift in the personal worldviews of most Americans. It took a crossover figure like Dr. King to effect such a change through the overlapping worldview and modification approach.

- Michael Boylan

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

- George Bernard Shaw

history as a subjective narrative