Nice review in Nature, When did societies become modern? ‘Big history’ dashes popular idea of Axial Age Humanity’s supposed singular transition to modernity in the first millennium BC was much messier than previously thought, finds sweeping study of historical data. I blogged an earlier paper with a smaller version of the dataset that the book, Seshat History of the Axial Age, is based on.
My inclination is to believe that the authors are on the right trail. It’s rather like the thesis that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a revolution, but a gradual affair which ramped up in the 19th-century (the “long fuse”). The human mind likes to transform continuities into singular events. We create categories and classes. For various plausible reasons the “Axial Age” happening around the centuries focused on 500 BC does make sense. But like an English paper, once you have the hypothesis, all experiments prove your preconception.
One of William H. McNeill’s last books was The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. McNeill argued that over time interactions across the Eurasian oikoumene threaded together the whole zone so that civilization became more robust to external shocks. The results from the Seshat database seem to confirm that insight. Instead of independent illuminations, the emergence of Axial characteristics can be thought of as a creative and integrated synthesis.
It also seems clear now that common trends and patterns were occurring across human societies during the Holocene, and much of what we see around us is not contingent and arbitrary. A technological literate world civilization with religions such as the Roman numina and Japanese kammi seems unlikely (Japanese Shinto only exists as a substrate coexistent with Buddhism). Animism of this sort of is primal and universal. As per Paul Bloom and others, it is likely that it’s a basic and atomic unit of religious expression. But as societies become more complex, dense, and literate, new forms of religiosity emerge with common themes.* It’s inevitable.
What Seshat and other projects are doing with formalism and data to me is analogous to what happened with evolutionary biology in the early 20th-century. History has many great ideas. But now they’re being tested systematically.
* Local gods give way to universal gods and principles. Ethics and metaphysics become deeply intertwined with religion and an explicit relationship between cult and state emerge.
Lumpers and splitters. Continuity and Change.
Things are very different now than they used to be. Historians tell the stories of how we got to this pass, and of those who were left on the way. Those are their basic tools. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes they just plain wrong. Often they simply have different perspectives.
Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age seems to have been more focused on the fact that around 500 BC many important religious and philosophical people appeared. They wrote texts or people wrote texts about them. Around this time more ancient oral works such as the Upanishads and the Illiad were written down.
So it seems like the importance of this time is in the dramatic increase in writing versus the earlier oral cultures.
David Graeber has also noted that around this time is when coinage was introduced.
Yes, but what about the industrial revolution? Was that inevitable or a chance of happenstance? Didn’t the Song Dynasty nearly have the industrial revolution?
Didn’t the Song Dynasty nearly have the industrial revolution?
Absolutely impossible.
They didn’t benefit from and have the essential building block of slavery in the American South.
They didn’t benefit from and have the essential building block of slavery in the American South.
where are you getting this? this sounds dumb. (industrialization happened first in england so if u bring slavery into point to the much more economically essential element in carribean)
Sorry, Razib, I was trying my hand at sarcasm (which I have never done before)and I must not be very good at it.
hm. should i allow emojis in the comments?
Razib,
As you noted in a previous post, the Axial Age also overlapped with the Iron Age.
One of the strange ideas from the article is that China lagged behind other civilizations and didn’t catch up until 0 AD.
Also, one of their definitions of the Axial transition is a “belief in an all-knowing supernatural being.”
None of the “Big 4” from around 500 BC ( Laozi, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates) believed in that idea. If they did, the idea had no importance to them.
ordered book so will update when i get that info
Do you mean something special by using the Greek-like spelling oikoumene as opposed to the English (Latinate) spelling ecumene?
You say you blogged the earlier version, but you provide no link. Do you mean this?
I’m not a big fan of macrohistory. I find microhistory more engaging to read. ‘The Great Cat Massacre’, ‘Return of Martin Guerre’ and ‘The Cheese and the Worms’ read almost like a novel.
Oh, it was here, just a few words in a link dump.
@SDutta: Many thanks! I saw a Finnish translation of ‘The Cheese and the Worms’ about ten years ago in the Helsinki University bookshop, browsed it a little and thought “Well, this is the most interesting book I have seen here for years!” (the other books in that store were of course about all the usual grievance studies), but didn’t buy it then, and later forgot both the name of the book and its author.
Note that the book’s title gives more credence to my private theory that scholarly/scientific books whose titles are definite nouns are the best, while the publications whose titles contain participles (-ing) are the worst fluff there is.