Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Noema Magazine’s new print issue will be hot off the press very soon. This issue’s theme explores the possibility that we are entering a new “Axial Age.”
Recent leaps in science and technology, notably genetic engineering, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, are resurrecting the religious and ethical imagination as they stir anew foundational questions about our origins and destiny. Even the survival of the species is at risk due to the planetary climate crisis.
With no shared ideational framework and dwindling trust in bequeathed faiths and institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. The time for a synchronous global rethink appears to have arrived.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called “Axial Age,” when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity more than two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer in Greece and the Hebrew prophets in the Middle East. These civilizations arose in the long wake of inventions such as the forging of iron tools, which fostered the rise of agriculture and urban settlements as well as enabled more violent and destructive warfare. Unmoored from the familiarity of close community and their natural environment, people lost their existential anchor.
For the philosopher Charles Taylor, the Axial Age awakenings resulted from the “great dis-embedding” of the person from those isolated confines, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. This lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. This attainment of symbolic competency capacitated an “interiority of reflection” based on abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings beyond one’s immediate circumstances and local narratives.
Long story very short, this “transcendence” led to the possibility of general philosophies, monotheistic religions and broad-based ethical systems. The critical self-distancing quality of dis-embedded reflection further evolved into what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “theoretic culture,” which ultimately led to scientific discovery and the Enlightenment. For Bellah, “Plato completed the transition to the Axial Age” with the concept of theoria, which “enables the mind to ‘view’ the great and the small in themselves abstracted from their concrete manifestations.”
Because the general conditions of societies from 800 to 200 B.C.E. were contemporaneous across so many lands, the transition to the Axial Age among them was also roughly contemporaneous.
This pre-Axial period was so widely characterized by the upheavals of war and violence — the Warring States era in China, the clash of emergent kingdoms in India, the recurrent battles of classical Greece — that the existential imperative to make sense of it all and seek release from the cycle of suffering reached a critical threshold. It was in this context that the technology of written language enabled philosophical exchange, codification of ethical systems and shared metaphysical notions of salvation from the earthly storm. The sense of “ontological security,” promised amid perpetual turmoil, spread the appeal among constituencies far and wide.
Jaspers characterized the Axial Age as “the moment when man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations” and “experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.” For Bellah: “The theoretical breakthrough in each axial case led to the possibility of universal ethics, the reassertion of fundamental human equality and the necessity of respect for all humans, indeed all sentient beings.”
For the historian Karen Armstrong, the great breakthrough of the Axial Age was the common recognition that the greed, egotism, hatred and violence at the root of suffering could be transcended through “the abandonment of narrow selfishness and the spirituality of compassion” — in effect, the Golden Rule of a broad enough empathetic vision of the relational nature of reality to see that you should do unto others only what you would have them do unto you.
In more complex sociological terms, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas situates the axial awakenings in the lifeworld domains of culture, society and personality. “At the level of cultural tradition,” he has said, “the perspective broadens with the reference to a transcendent vanishing point in such a way that the worldviews that now promote reflections on human beings in existence as a whole are coupled with a new historical consciousness of the contingency of all occurrences in the world.
“With no shared ideational framework and dwindling trust in bequeathed faiths and institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles.”
“At the level of social relations,” Habermas continued, “this expansion of horizons facilitates a universalist point of view that reveals both general norms binding all believers equally, as well as possible historical alternatives to the existing political order. At the personal level, the reference to transcendence gives rise to a view of oneself that is individualizing and, at the same time, reflective. One becomes aware of freedom and personal responsibility, on the one hand, and becomes interested in the success of one’s own life in terms of salvation history, on the other.”
The Divergent Interlude
In the centuries following the Axial Age, the common conditions that were the basis of its contemporaneous emergence diverged, primarily because the West accelerated away from the rest through the rationalizing ethos of secular modernity that vitalized scientific discovery and technological revolution. Taylor considers this shift an “incomplete” Axial Age 2.0.
Again, long story very short, the dominance of the West in recent centuries, first through imperialism and then globalization, fostered the rise of “multiple modernities” around the world through which economic, scientific and technological achievement, as well as the ecological destruction they entailed, converged once again into a contemporaneous condition. Collectively, everyone on the planet today faces the same challenges: AI that can be smarter than humans, synthetic biology that can create life in the lab, and the degradation of the biosphere that is the basis of all life on Earth. To boot, violence, civil strife, wars, impoverishment and oppression continue to afflict the human condition, including the menacing return of adversity among the great powers armed with weapons of mass destruction.
The New AI-xial Age Expands Awareness
Today, a case can be made that we are on the cusp of a new pivotal age. The highly advanced quality of transcendence and theoretic culture, enabled by the epoch of written language, is both surpassing and turning in on itself, marking a decisive re-composition of the first Axial Age legacy.
This is particularly clear on the climate front. Due to what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls “immunitary reason” — the survival impulse of the species — humans have recognized that climate change, a consequence of the Anthropocene’s dis-embeddedness from nature, now threatens a livable biosphere.
It is a dialectical irony that this new awareness is fully possible only because a new symbolic competency has arrived on the scene through planetary-scale computation, enabled by artificial intelligence. It unveils the Earth, to the heretofore limited scope of human apprehension, as one self-regulating organism sustained by the entwinement of multiple intelligences, from microbes to forests to humans.
As the philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton puts it, “The models that we have of climate change are ones that emerge from supercomputing simulations of Earth’s past, present and future. This is a self-disclosure of Earth’s intelligence and agency, accomplished by thinking through and with a computational model.”
This self-disclosure implies a “re-embedding” of the axial transcendence that nourished the religious imagination millennia ago back into a sense of encompassing nature and relational community, this time rooted in knowledge and connectivity rather than isolated ignorance.
Taylor describes this as a “spiral path of history” whereby “we leave an initial state of harmonious unity between humans and nature, pass through a period of their opposition, as we develop our reason and increase our autonomy, to return to a higher unity” of reconnection.
AI may play a similar role in fostering a “New AI-xial Age” to the one written language did the first time around. Such a reincarnation necessarily decenters humans in the cosmos and opens the way to “planetary sapience” — the synthesized intelligence of all lifeforms that are part and parcel of one self-regulating system and to which human technological capacities must align as a responsible participant in its co-evolution.
Here, “planetary reason” conjoins with the religious imagination in what we might call the quest for “planetary homeostasis” as the new universal ground of the sacred. In essence, this ecology of existence extends the relational empathy of the Golden Rule, which emerged from the first Axial Age, to the natural systems that human civilization inhabits. Armstrong calls the new ethos “sacred Nature.”
Though the present zeitgeist appears at odds with this longer-term worldview, it is the nature of an axial transformation that it emerges in opposition to the existing order. This revelation will anchor humanity’s spiritual condition in the centuries to come, just as the breakthroughs of the first Axial Age have for millennia. It is a paradox of the long trajectory of human endeavor that technological progress will, in the end, not have distanced us from natural systems but further embedded and entangled us in them.
“Collectively, everyone on the planet today faces the same challenges: AI that can be smarter than humans, synthetic biology that can create life in the lab, and the degradation of the biosphere that is the basis of all life on Earth.”
AI Can Make Us Visible To Ourselves
For the philosopher of technology Tobias Rees, just as AI can expand our outward grasp of planetary systems as never before, it can also expand insights into our own interiority. This potentiality also tracks the first Axial Age awakenings by orienting a new narrative that connects our inner world with the outer world, as we humans situate our presence in the cosmos.
As Rees describes it, “AI has much more information available than we do, and it can access and work through this information faster than we can. It also can discover logical structures in data — patterns — where we see nothing. AI can literally give us access to spaces that we, on our own, qua human, cannot discover and cannot access.”
He goes on: “Imagine an AI model … that has access to all your data. Your emails, your messages, your documents, your voice memos, your photos, your songs, etc. Such an AI system can make me visible to myself … it literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns, and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me and, if so, how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.
“AI can help me transform myself into an ‘object of thought’ to which I can relate and on which I can work. The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism.”
Will AI Create An Epistemic Monoculture?
In his essay in this upcoming issue, awareness-based action researcher Otto Scharmer takes the opposite view of AI. Rather than widening our horizons, he sees AI as flattening them. “Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.” Of the trillions flowing into AI, “the human side of the equation — the cultivation of sensing, relating and sensemaking — receives almost none of it,” he observes. “This is soil depletion at a civilizational scale.”
For Scharmer, the human side of the equation means cultivating a new awareness of “presence-in-relationality” as the path to “collective interiority” as the ethos of axial transformation.
The key question is whether AI is the path to an “epistemic monoculture,” or whether, through its capacity for planetary-scale computation, it fosters the very “collective interiority” that comes from a fuller awareness of the ecological interdependence of multiple intelligences that comprise Earth systems as one self-regulating organism.
How Will Humans Fit In?
The other related dimensions that will spark new aspects of an axial awakening are hard to fathom because they involve no previous human experience. If generative AI and synthetic biology live up to their hype, millions of years of evolutionary natural selection will have broken out of the organic realm for the first time. When the new species of inorganic intelligence, created in God-like manner by humans, surpasses humans’ own intelligence, and synthetic life-forms reproduce and outlive natural ones, a new era will have been born. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”
The same technological path that amplifies awareness of humans’ embeddedness in nature and might save the biosphere could also, in the end, extinguish not only the centrality of humanity, but even its role as a self-directing participant in co-evolution. This is what Gaia theorist James Lovelock seemed to conclude in his last book, “Novacene,” when he envisioned civilization organized by some superior intelligence into an ecologically efficient but totalitarian “wasp hive” where human autonomy is severely diminished.
“The same technological path that amplifies awareness of humans’ embeddedness in nature and might save the biosphere could also, in the end, extinguish not only the centrality of humanity, but even its role as a self-directing participant in co-evolution.”
The so-called godfather of “neural networks,” Geoffrey Hinton, has reached a similar view: “We were once smarter than animals; now machines will be smarter than us,” he has said. “There is little evidence in history that lesser intelligences were ever able to escape domination by some superior intelligence.”
The Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine once remarked that the future does not emerge from the past because what we do in the present is determined by our image of the future. Given the plural possibilities of evolutionary creativity that are undetermined, it is up to humans to secure a place for ourselves in the world we are giving birth to. As the complexity scientist Stuart Kaufmann says in this issue, preserving the human role as an active participant in the co-becoming of the cosmos is our “sacred” vocation in the times ahead.
This must be a founding feature of the next Axial Age. Otherwise, our species will lose any meaningful capacity to name the time and qualities of our own existence.
