Comments on: Axial Age

By: fnord of the lies

fnord of the lies — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:12:36 +0000

Beckwith suggests the Axial Age was an echo of the ideas of preceding Central Eurasian Indo-European groups, who at least had contact with, and in some cases assimilated/were assimilated by, cultures at both ends of the continent.

I haven’t read Beckwith’s book, but Razib’s review is interesting (http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/09/whos-barbarian-now-empires-of-silk-road.php)

By: admin

admin — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 05:20:39 +0000

For anyone invested in the catalytic importance of competition, the Singleton outcome is the ultimate calamity (but that’s another topic).

By: fake_username

fake_username — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 02:42:46 +0000

All of these regions were confronted with the disorganization and chaos inherent in the balkanized world of competing political entities they inhabited, which was an arrangement that had hitherto been nonexistent because groups hadn’t yet discovered agriculture, civilizations were relatively uncontested, or the population of individual groups wasn’t yet dense enough to necessitate fighting between proximate groups. The simultaneity of such circumstances suggests that the evolution of nascent, competing states is an inevitable stage of political development. The simultaneity of thought denotes the imperative to develop philosophies designed to assist in the formation of political stability. That these various regions birthed similar patterns of thoughts under similar circumstances reveals simply that humans may have a set of hardwired set of responses to particular predicaments in a way similar that there’s a universe grammar coded in the brain. It makes sense because there are only so many ideas that could logically result in stability, and only a subset among those that would actually prove successful in that aim. China consolidated in the Qin empire as a result, and it’s argued convincingly that the same would have happened in Europe were it not for an inhibiting geography. To take this to its logical conclusion, this theory would suggest that further consolidation is an inevitability and that eventually humanity will coalesce into what Nick Bostrom calls a “singleton”.

That’s my hypothesis, anyway.

By: fake_username

fake_username — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 02:21:15 +0000

I like that you mention coinage. Traditional functionalist approaches attempt to explain the emergence of complexity, both institutions and thought, as a result of things such as population density and processes from within a given population. I’ve always had a problem with the the underlying logic and the notion that through unspecified feedback mechanisms complexity could emerge from internal processes. However, it seems very plausible to me that external mechanisms among populations could be the explanation. One is warfare between groups, carried over from when humans were roving bands, that necessitates innovation. Another external factor is also economic activity between groups, based on principles of reciprocal altruism, that require innovations such as communications technology that ease the allocation of goods that people biologically crave.

This could carry over to thought. Of the hundred schools of thought, agriculturalism is one that died out rather quickly and undoubtedly because of its inability to translate into behavior that maximizes chances of survival or inclusive fitness. During this time so ideas were generated to alleviate the chaos, and I totally agree with you certain ones had less applicability and therefore died out. There was sort of dialectic at work, it seems, but obviously Marx was mistaken on the side that prove superior. Interesting thoughts.

By: fake_username

fake_username — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 02:07:23 +0000

That’s a fascinating article! You pose an interesting question, but I’m unsure how decisively one may answer. If warfare is responsible for the emergence of social complexity — Francis Fukuyama in his new book talks about this, and Victoria Hui’s recent book deals with this development in ancient China — it was still precipitated, as another here said, by the onset of agriculture. The new technological paradigm was necessary for this unparalleled transition, and I would posit that the recent information and computer technology revolution may usher in a new age where warfare no longer is necessary to propel further institutional differentiation and social complexity. We may have reached a point where technology can advance sans external selection forces. Of course, you could also be right, but given the existence of nuclear weapons such conflict might yield opposite result and we blow ourselves to hell!

By: C. Y. Chen

C. Y. Chen — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 16:56:29 +0000

This makes the most sense to me, along with the development of coinage. The “Hundred Schools of Thought” in China rose as a result of this.

One of these was Agriculturalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculturalism), which seems to be a pretty early manifestation of leftist thought.

I’m not well-read enough in this to know whether or not similar philosophies arose in the other contemporaneous civilisations, though. If they did, maybe the saner philosophies just won out overall, albeit with certain syncretic elements (as in the case of Agriculturalism with other schools of thought). I doubt that any society espousing stuff like Agriculturalism is going to survive too long, after all.

By: Orlandu84

Orlandu84 — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:11:05 +0000

Two thoughts come to my mind upon reading your rejoinder. First, we assume that the “axial age” was the first. The ancients had libraries that we do not have due to their being lost. Now, I am not attempting to suggest aliens or divine intervention. I am suggesting that there may have been texts that the axial age rediscovered and applied in their own time. This explanation, however, posits a thing that we have no evidence for or against so that it is not very satisfactory.

Second, consider the axial age in terms of engineering in the stead of intellectual. When different engineers are faced with the same engineering problems, they tend to create the same solutions. Also, most solutions as options are realized quite quickly. Accordingly, it is not shocking to me that in a few centuries a group of urban civilizations develop the basics of how to survive as urban civilizations. What does surprise me is that civilization survived the last collapse with as much continuity as it has. In other words that we remember Thales et al at all is the truly striking aspect to me.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:50:18 +0000

But that doesn’t help with the question why the first of (a massive chunk of ) everything happens at the same time.

By: David

David — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:31:41 +0000

Of interest from phys.org: Math explains history: Simulation accurately captures the evolution of ancient complex societies. That's some Hari Seldon shit there. If (if) it works for the past , why not the future, predictively?

By: spandrell

spandrell — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:16:37 +0000

Hard to not be original when you’re the first.