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The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age [see also]. Does our polycrisis moment herald another big shift?

Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noema, introduces two provocative articles from the current issue that suggest that it might…

Is our present moment comparable to the first Axial Age some 2,500 years ago? This was a time when major religions, philosophical frameworks and ethical systems — from Hinduism and Buddhism to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophes — emerged around the world in relative simultaneity.

In a Noema essay, Otto Scharmer thinks this is likely so. If history moves by cycles of challenge and response, he argues that today’s “planetary polycrisis” — widespread anomie, social distrust and disorientation in the face of war, climate change and the upheavals of AI — “demands not just better policies or technologies but a shift in our structure of consciousness” at the level of collective awareness. He continues, “For the first time in human history, the challenges we face require a planetary response.”

In the first Axial Age, the attainment of written language capacitated an inner life of reflection on the basis of abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings. That critical self-distancing capacity for reflection, or “interiority,” enabled people to transcend their immediate circumstances, tribes and local narratives to become self-aware as individuals in the larger universe. The sociologist Charles Taylor called this process “dis-embedding.”

In this context, written language — the first cloud technology of stored information — fostered philosophical exchange, the codification of ethical systems and shared metaphysical notions of salvation from the earthly storm. The sense of ontological security these narratives promised amid perpetual turmoil spread the appeal among constituencies far and wide.

In our era, Scharmer sees a new axial shift toward “collective interiority,” in which a new consciousness of the relationality of all being as an indivisible unity conjoins the subjective inner world with the outer world. In a word, he sees the “re-embedding” of the individual back into the interdependence of community and nature, this time not out of narrow ignorance as in the ascribed past, but through an enlightened ecology of mind. 

Scharmer’s prime anxiety is what he calls “an emerging epistemic monoculture.” He writes: “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.”

In this, he follows the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who feared in the 1960s that the integral nature of Being would be extinguished by the advent of cybernetic technologies, in which encompassing feedback loops self-reinforce calculating reason to the exclusion of any spiritual dimension or philosophical frame to elevate or govern it. He worried that what he called the “technicity” of instrumental means with no substantive end would inexorably prevail over the diminished soul.

The key question going forward is whether this is necessarily so. Is AI the path to an epistemic monoculture that depletes the rich soil of experiential existence? Or, through the capacity for planetary-scale computation, can it cultivate the very collective interiority that comes from a fuller understanding of how multiple intelligences comprise the Earth system as one self-regulating organism? Won’t augmenting the human field of experience with AI, and vice versa, generate the very awareness of relationality that bridges the divide between individual and collective interiority?

In a related Noema conversation, theoretical biologist and complex systems scientist Stuart Kauffman discusses how this new consciousness would manifest as a transcendent presence awakened within individuals’ inner lives.

Frontier scientific advances have made us humans realize we are embedded and entangled within Earth’s habitat. We are not above and apart from our biosphere, Kauffman says, but “co-creators” in its evolution. Like the poet Goethe, he sees a dynamic, creative universe as a continuous “divine” activity rather than a static set of laws for all time — creatio continua —in which humans are participants.

“What are the implications for the self-understanding and responsibility of human civilization in this undetermined unfolding?” I asked Kauffman.

He explained: “The spiritual consequence, I would argue, is a new sacredness of participation. If the world is not fully given in advance, then Creation is not only ‘back then’ but ongoing. The sacred is not merely a completed order; it is the act of becoming itself … [it is] reverence for the creative unfolding, not worship of a finished blueprint.

“A ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.”

The observant reader will surely note how far all of this is from the dominant zeitgeist of bitter polarization in both culture and politics, the backtracking on climate commitments, the waging of hard-power wars and the acceleration toward superintelligence with few guardrails in place. Yet it is precisely these extreme conditions that are fueling the search for a new way of seeing and organizing the world. It is in the nature of an axial shift that it arises in opposition to the present order…

Awareness of the relationality of all being is a response to the planet in crisis: “What Might The Next Axial Age Look Like?” from @noemamag.com.

Both of the cited pieces– “We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age” and “Emergence Is Not Engineering“– are eminently worth reading in full.

Apposite: “On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology” by Sharon Blackie, complemented by Nicholas Carr‘s “Restoration of the Demon” and Alan Jacobs‘ “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology” together, a caution against mistaking re-enchantment for re-connection.

* Albert Einstein

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As we speculate on sea change, we might send compassionate birthday greetings to a man who tacked against the tide that may now be turning, Gustavo Gutiérrez; he was born on this date in 1928. A philosopher, theologian, and Dominican priest, he was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology, and his 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology at large.

Gutiérrez’s theological focus connected salvation and liberation through the preferential option for the poor, with an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the impoverished. Gutiérrez argued that revelation and eschatology have been excessively idealized at the expense of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. His methodology was often critical of the social and economic injustice he believed to be responsible for poverty in Latin America, and of the Catholic clergy itself. The central pastoral question of his work was: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?”

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