Axiality and the Lack Thereof

The traits that make for high civilisation are relatively rare and not to be squandered

Before beginning this piece, I’d like to take a moment to encourage everyone to go over and check out The Neo-Feudal Review’s tribute to the ZMan. Sadly, we lost one of the good ones who really helped to get our entire movement into the mainstream. RIP ZMan!

I recently finished a book entitled, “Axial Civilizations and World History” which is a compendium of academic articles collected into one work. The subject of this work is the “Axial Age,” an historical theory that was originally developed by Karl Jaspers, and subsequently expanded upon by other scholars such as Eric Voegelin and Samuel Eisenstadt. The “Axial Age” as an historical concept suggests that around the middle part of the first millennium before Christ, there was a fundamental shift in the “mental framework” of several civilisations across the breadth of the Eurasian continent. By this is meant that in these civilisations (primarily, from West to East, Greece, ancient Israel, Persia, India, and China), the socio-intellectual elite underwent an intellectual revolution in which the previous “mythological” cognitive orientation that viewed this world and the “other-world” as distinctly separated and which, to the extent that it even had a concept of “history,” saw “history” as a sort of “once upon a time” phenomenon, changed to one in which transcendence in religion and philosophy became the norm and individuals developed a greater sense of interiority and reflexivity (essentially the ability to exercise personal agency).

Thus, in ancient Greece we saw the rise of pre-Socratic philosophy. Israel, Persia, and India experienced the rise of strict ethical monotheism, Zoroastrian dualism, and Buddhist enlightenment philosophy. China developed ethical philosophies under Confucius and Mencius, as well as the Mohist school. Religion became transcendent, allowing followers to live in this world while having access to the next. Philosophy was oriented towards rationalism and this-worldly concerns that often asked the individual to be personally responsible and cognizant of themselves and their influences on their societies. The question as to the cause(s) of this continent-wide shift has been explored but remains largely unsettled.

Let’s remember that Jaspers was a psychologist and existential philosopher before he was an historian. He was seeking to develop an empirical basis for a universalist view of history, one which did not focus solely upon Europe and the West but which seemed almost to be trying to “prepare” the world for a universalising future, one in which existential views of interiority and selfhood would pave the way for a true global system. Later application of his philosophy of history extended this view of axiality to the Enlightenment, viewing the development of liberalism as both deriving from and being a natural extension of the Axial Age’s characteristic individual reflexivity. Thus, while trying to escape the earlier, “pre-axial” mythologisation of man, as well as the “Eurocentric” focus of history, he ended up creating his own “origination myth” in which now-characteristically “western” values form the basis of a presumed future global arrangement.

The book itself includes papers which argue for both sides of the question of whether there really, truly was an “Axial Age” to begin with. Some argue for it on the basis that there actually was an apparent “something” that happened around the middle of the first millennium BC, give or take a few hundred years in either direction. This much is, of course, obvious - an awful lot of innovation and intellectual transformation did take place, as any student of history knows. Yet, others in this work argue against the idea of this timeframe being specifically unique on the basis that there appear to be other periods and places which at least approached, if not necessarily crossed the line into, the “transcendent frame of mind.” Thus, that mindset likely didn’t occur because of any ethereal peculiarity to those centuries, but because of other critical, intrasocial phenomena taking place.

I would tend towards the latter approach, a position which I held before reading this work and which was overall strengthened in my mind as a result of it. Of course, something momentous happened in these civilisations during the first millennium BC. But I would tend to view it as occurring from cultural transmission arising from the gradually closer economic coupling of east and west which took place during this same time period. This seems to me to fit better with the overall tenor of demographic-structural theory and its view of “synching” civilisational units together (indeed, even at this early date, cycles of growth and collapse across Eurasia seem to be at least semi-coordinated). Hence, this was less about intangible psychology and more about concrete secular cycles.

So perhaps, instead of talking about an “Axial Age” as if it were a discrete phenomenon, we should discuss “axiality” as a trait that arises periodically and applies more to individuals within civilisations and societies rather than to those units themselves. After all, even within so-called “axial civilisations,” we can see that the vast share of the axiality was driven by a relative handful of individuals. In ancient Greece, most people were farmers and other workmen, not philosophers. Pretty much every Israelite aside from Moses was not a Moses. But yet, at the same time we can see that it was within certain civilisations and not others that these “axial individuals” stood out and made their marks on subsequent history. Why is this?

The answer has to do with that great bugaboo of the modern, enlightened liberal world - group differences in IQ. That there are tangible differences in group and national IQs is extremely well documented. That these differences explain a large part of modern worldwide wealth inequalities is also quite well established. But muh GDP isn’t the only thing that IQ differences have an effect upon. I believe we can infer this same general phenomenon takes place in historically recorded axiality.

After all, let’s look at the so-called Axial civilisations. The Greeks, the Persians, and the (northern) Indians (prior to their subsequent massive admixture with the Dravidian south) were all Indo-European peoples genetically dispositioned towards high-end average IQs. The Chinese are, and presumably were, also a high IQ population. The ancient Israelites would seem to be the only real outlier for this, but even then there is the possibility that at the transition between the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age in the Levant, there was genetic admixture from Anatolia (i.e. most likely a branch of Indo-Europeans) which impacted the genetic makeup of Levantine populations such that while they were culturally Semitic, genetically they could have stronger exogenous (IE) admixture. So all of these may have had genotypical reasons for the historical phenotypic observations. Likewise, the explosion of axial behaviour in Europe (starting in the High Middle Ages, and continuing through the later Renaissance and Enlightenment, which followed on) occurred primarily in the high-IQ “development corridor” stretching from northern Italy through Germany, Northern France, the Low countries, into England.

As noted above, while not everybody in a high-IQ people group is himself high-IQ (or axial, we might say), the relative statistical proportion of higher IQ individuals capable of doing things like philosophy, science, administration, fine art, and the like will be higher. And it’s when a society can produce enough of these individuals that the signal starts to outweigh the noise that you begin to see the hallmarks of “axiality.” This is why, as I’ve noted before, it is so troubling to see the average IQ in the United States gradually declining - we’re going from a society that can innovate and continue to improve our quality of life across basically every metric to one that will essentially just be able to keep the lights on as our high IQ individuals get distracted keeping the other elements out of trouble. Sadly, the same thing is also happening in Europe, and for the same reason.

What is that reason? Well, as I noted in the post I linked above, this decline is due to the influx of black and brown third worlders - people who contribute very little if any innovation and genuine intellectual advancement while consuming outsized shares of social program spending, causing elevated crime levels, and creating enhanced social divisions. So people who normally would have the free time or the sinecures available to utilise their genetic strengths to contribute to religion, culture, and science end up having to babysit low-IQ foreigners instead.

Keep in mind that most of the people in this world are completely “pre-axial.” There are large chunks of the world population who have no introspection, no reflexivity, no capacity to understand the abstract, to plan ahead for the future, to dwell upon the consequences of their own actions. There are entire nations where practically the whole population would fail the Breakfast Question. Most of us probably remember that whole NPC thing from a few years ago? Well you, my friends, live in a world full of NPCs.

And guess what? The Powers That Be have been flooding our countries with these folks, most of whom we don’t actually need. This bodes poorly not just for the immediate future of our western nations, but for the future of humanity in the long term. You wanna go to Mars? The Bangladeshis and Sierra Leonians ain’t gonna get you there. You want a world where running water and functioning sewer systems are the norm? As South Africa has shown over the past thirty years, who’s running things really makes a difference. If we allow our western nations to be overrun then whatever bright future you might think humanity has will disappear. It’ll be a planet full of vacant-eyed ethnics perpetually doing drive-by shootings on each other, at least until they forget how to manufacture firearms.

Now this may suit The Powers That Be, who think they’re going to get to ride herd over their golems in perpetuity as they live in luxury, Elysium-style. But the reality is that this will not happen, and they will be consigning the Earth to, at best, an Iron Age future with no more science, no more transcendental religion, no more philosophy, no more of those things that are valued by even the most esoteric trad of all the esoteric trads on social media. Preserving the West is far more than just provincial chauvinism, it’s literally the existential question of the future of this Earth. As such, we’d better do all we can to make sure that Camp of the Saints doesn’t become a reality. There’s simply too much at stake.