This book is about the Axial Age . While some version of the idea has been put forward by scholars for over two centuries now, in recent decades scholarly interest has increased and intensified. However, its interest is not only for scholars; as two of those scholars—American sociologist Robert Bellah and German sociologist Hans Joas —claim, “The question of the Axial Age is not just academic: the deep self-understanding of educated people of all the world’s cultures is at stake. How we think about the Axial Age is to some extent how we think about ourselves and the human project at this perilous moment in history” (2012, p. 6). I concur. That the world is in crisis is why I’ve written this book, and why I think the scholarly interest in the Axial Age should extend more broadly, too.
The World in Crisis: Olivia’s Story
A group of about a dozen of us were camping together last summer—friends and family, grandparents and kids, sharing a few campsites. At one point as we were gathered around the campfire—some of us cooking, others playing guitars, others talking—Olivia, a four-year-old girl, became overwrought and began sobbing, on the verge of a panic attack. “I don’t want that to happen! I don’t want that to happen!” she cried over and over again, her anxiety palpable. Something had reminded her of a video segment from the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics that had provoked a panic attack when she first saw it. The scene shows what the potential flooding of coastal cities across the world due to a rise in sea level might look like. We tried to stem her anxiety by reassuring her, holding her, trying to calm her. Someone tried reasoning (at a far too adult level). None of it worked; predictably, the reasoning least of all. I tried distracting her through stories of my family that come from the Netherlands: a whole country that should be under water because it is below sea level but which is dry and safe because of their dikes. This worked. Olivia calmed: she became intrigued by stories of dikes and windmills and wooden shoes; she started to engage the stories, started smiling, and laughed at the funny parts. Success! Panic attack averted.
It is a strange “success story.” Not because adults shouldn’t try to shield children from suffering anxiety. But because Olivia is, without any doubt, right. Her anxious response, verging on panic, seems to me to be the most rational, truthful, appropriate, and properly human response to a scenario as horrifying as rising sea levels flooding cities. It is the response that any human being should feel if he or she truly tries to imagine the consequences of global climate change . The scale of change, destruction, and suffering that can be plausibly conjectured, for this century and into the next, is overwhelming. And of course, rising sea levels causing coastal cities to be flooded is only one of many such apocalyptic scenarios for the near future that are each and all as frightening to imagine as they are plausible. We don’t want that to happen! We don’t want that to happen!
Psychologically, the moral of this story is that in most cases the human psyche cannot deal with the anxiety that ensues if it genuinely tries to face “the end of the world .” We can’t be reassured, or calmed. Nor does reason help because, given our current world situation, some kind of an end-of-the-world scenario, in some sense of that phrase, is the most reasonable prospect for the near future. It is because reason can connect the dots between the facts of our world in the present and their most plausible consequences in the near future that we are anxious. I emphasize the near future here. Unlike a child panicking upon learning that the sun will go supernova in five billion years, an irrational anxiety that misunderstands the time scale , we cannot say this about Olivia. The consequences of climate change are happening now and will continue to happen within her lifetime. Olivia’s anxiety is rational. The best we could do was distract her.
If the anxiety is too much, as it was for Olivia, the human psyche does not have many choices. The two I consider most basic and commonplace: denial and distraction. Denial is the more simple and basic option; we deny the evidence and deny our reason and put our heads in the sand. Distraction is somewhat more sophisticated and involves doing something else, getting caught up in some focus that is more manageable and less overwhelming. For one example, work: Yes, the world is ending, but we’re too busy to help out. Distracting ourselves means we avoid looking at the evidence, we look somewhere else and apply our reason and effort there—perhaps, with even more determination and intensity. I suspect the most widespread and understandable psychological responses to our present global situation involve varying degrees of denial or distraction; there is a great diversity of forms of flight into far more restricted foci that absorb attention, whether hedonistic, compulsive, addictive, self-destructive, masochistic, or narcissistic (cf. Hamilton, 2010).
Cognitively, there is a different moral to be drawn from Olivia’s story: That global events and processes, despite being, well, global in scale and arguably far removed from ordinary, everyday life, can and do manifest in individual awareness. That things happen on a global scale means they are “big,” but not big in an abstract or far-removed sense. Global scale as big means events otherwise disparate and unconnected are not; everything becomes thoroughly interconnected to each other and effects from ‘somewhere’ that would otherwise be far-removed show up ‘here’ in some form. Global scale means there are no far-removed events or effects, but an interconnectedness that is pervasive and manifests at multiple levels—including the individual. One such example of the linked-up chain of interconnections: The potential flooding of coastal cities of the world in the near future is due to the projected rise in sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps due to global warming due to increased carbon emissions due to human activity. Another such example: Brazil, a country with one of the highest levels of climate change awareness among its population, hosts the global sporting event the Olympics, puts on a many hours long opening ceremony that includes a video segment on climate change focused on the flooding of major coastal cities (like Rio de Janeiro, where the ceremonies are being held), which is viewed by a four-year-old girl in Canada, who suffers a panic attack as she grasps the meaning of the flooding images. The first chain of interconnected processes was ecological and causal; the second, cultural and technological. These two chains in turn are themselves connected: The facts of the first meet the consciousness animating the second and this meeting manifests in a particular meaning, experientially, for an individual person. For Olivia, it manifested in acute anxiety .
I’m arguing that someone like Olivia, who finds the anxiety of contemplating such a potential disaster overwhelming and breaks down into a panic attack, presents a rational, healthy response that in effect represents quite clearly the basic psychological dynamics for any of us who try to face end-of-the-world scenarios. In part, Olivia’s response represents the psychology so clearly because she is a child and thus lacks the sophisticated defensiveness and elaborate dishonesty of the adult. In part, it is because the threat to the ego by a crisis manifests reactions that are infantile, in the sense of psychologically basic, cognitively undeveloped and emotionally powerful. What is not represented in this example, nor in the discussion above which I qualified by adding the phrase “for the most part,” are those of us with greater psychological resiliency who can face our contemporary world in crisis without denial or distraction. Of course, the same psychological dynamics apply to the more resilient adult ego , too, and thus trying to deal with world crisis risks depression, despair, hopelessness, rage, cynicism, nihilism, breakdown. We need courage, we need resolve, commitment, and hope ; in a word, we need resilience to be able to face our world in crisis. We need to listen to the crying of a child.
In sum, Olivia’s story provides us with two crucial takeaways. The first is psychological: Inseparable from our current world in crisis is the end-of-the-world anxiety that accompanies it. The second is cognitive: That our current world, as a globalizing world, is profoundly and pervasively interconnected across all its many levels, including the level at which it comes into conscious awareness, the individual level. Both of these points, taken together, are a key part to how the contemporary world is unprecedented. We face a global crisis, which is unprecedented in human history, and “we” are not a particular nation or ethnic group, or particular class, or particular elite, but we are truly all humanity, globally interconnected into a universality —at least, factually—that is also unprecedented. End-of-the-world anxiety works in tandem with global interconnectedness against our ability to proactively do anything about the global crisis; they impair our response-ability to face the crisis of our times. Psychologically, our fragile egos are confronted with a crisis of overwhelming proportions; cognitively our limited conscious awareness fails to grasp our inextricable embeddedness in a world of overwhelming complexity. For you or I to face “the end of the world ” is so difficult because it is overwhelming: Psychologically, we feel too much anxiety, while cognitively we feel lost. There is ample cause today for denial, distraction, despair, and hopelessness.
We cannot afford these. The world is in a crisis of global proportions. It is unprecedented in all of human history. We are the cause of this crisis. The history that has led to this crisis is our history. We must take responsibility for it. We must face this crisis—for ourselves, for Olivia, for the earth itself.
Against overwhelming anxiety, we need to develop our resilience ; against an overwhelming complexity of information, perspectives, and possibilities, we need to gain our bearings and find some perspective on ourselves and our present moment. We need resilience to face our world in crisis; we need perspective on the present so that we are facing in the right direction and perceiving on the right scale .
The Axial Age
This book is about the Axial Age , a period of several centuries around 2500 years ago when, according to scholars, a series of events happened that prove utterly decisive for the history of the world and relevant to our current world. Since learning about the Axial Age and studying the scholarship, I too am convinced of its importance. This importance is not restricted to scholars and historians only; as the quote that opened this chapter from Bellah and Joas (2012) claims , it is important for “educated people of all the world’s cultures” at this present “perilous moment in history,” too (p. 6). Following their lead, this book is written not only for scholars, but also for a broader educated audience. And it is also motivated by the perception that our present, globalizing, world-historical moment, is “perilous”—a perception clearly shared by Olivia and many others, with anxious consequences for all.
What is “the Axial Age ”? How is it relevant to today’s world? If you consider some of our contemporary world’s most pressing problems that would justify evaluating our moment as “perilous,” the relevance of historical events that happened more than two thousand years ago might appear remote. Today, we face refugee and immigrant crises caused by war and famine; global climate change and the effort to prevent the global mean temperature from rising; peak oil and the energy crisis around fossil fuel-based economies and the need to move to renewable energy sources; terrorist attacks; the increasing disparity between rich and poor; ecological “tipping points” and the mass extinction of species… As one critic responded to the relevance question upon hearing my argument regarding the Axial Age: “No, it’s too long ago.”
This book presents my argument for the Axial Age and its relevance. I hope to convince you of the Axial Age’s relevance for understanding today’s world and for responding to its problems. Understanding the Axial Age provides perspective on the present; more so than this, it provides a way to put the present into perspective that is also a proposal for how to develop and deep...