Modernity Secularizes the Axial Age’s Moral Absolutes

As a hotbed of religious and philosophical inspirations for social equality and human rights, the Axial Age in the middle of the first millennium BCE was like the revenge of the nerds.

In effect, in India, China, Persia, Palestine, and Greece, the outcast gurus, prophets, and philosophers protested the stratification of castes in kingdoms and empires that appealed to polytheism to excuse mass slavery. Just as most humans were the gods’ playthings, most of humanity served at the royal class’s pleasure.

This is because these ancient mystical dissidents functioned like shamans in revealing the dictates of the spirit world or the conscience that was often buried in the unconscious. They posited abstractions such as Atman, Brahman, the one true God, the natural creativity of Logos, or the cognitive powers of personhood, and these abstractions implied that slaves were metaphysically or spiritually equal to kings.

Apocalyptic progress

One of the key innovations in the lead-up to the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions was Zoroastrianism’s conception of history as being linear rather than cyclical. According to daily perceptions, nature operated instead in cycles that governed everything from the seasons and the migrations of animal herds to the milestones of life, including birth, reproduction, aging, and death.

This cyclical conception of time was antithetical to progress, so societies that affirmed these cycles were inherently conservative. If the future will only repeat the past, just as the Sun will rise again tomorrow as it did yesterday, there’s no sense in trying to change the natural order. If men governed throughout the civilized past, they should keep governing in the future. If animals busy themselves with their evolutionary aims of finding food, shelter, mates, and guarding their territory, humans should do likewise.

In short, for conservatives, natural cycles set the agenda, according to a brazen resort to what philosophers would later call the naturalistic fallacy.

But Zoroastrianism proposed something very different, an apocalyptic, divinely revealed, hidden supernatural pattern that’s working itself out in time. This pattern is linear in that time itself will end with a moral rather than a natural victory. Goodness and truth will triumph over badness and lies, and our job isn’t to keep doing what we’ve always been doing thanks to conservative traditions.

Instead, we should set our sights on that ultimate endpoint of history and the ideals that that final triumph will realize. We should judge ourselves according to what hasn’t yet transpired anywhere in nature, so that instead of deferring to natural cycles, we should strive to be supernatural. This implies that the conservative traditions of gross social inequality, such as patriarchy, slavery, and monarchy, should be overturned in an ascetic, anti-natural lifestyle.

This Persian innovation impacted Judaism during the end of the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE, so that Jews, too, began fantasizing about the world’s messianic salvation. Judaism provided fertile soil for this radicalism because Jews belonged to an underclass in world-historical terms. To borrow Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation, Jews were “slaves” rather than “masters,” so they looked for myths and rationales to soothe their alienation.

Having been conquered by various empires, Jews saw themselves as suffering servants of a righteous God, a deity that transcends nature and thus represents a supernatural ideal. This God would make fools out of the worshippers of polytheistic idols and natural cycles. While God made all things in nature, he calls on Jews — and by extension everyone, who ought to follow Jewish monotheism — to be moral, not strictly natural or animalistic.

So Jewish “slaves” determined what counts as spiritually moral. More precisely, the neo-shamanic Jewish prophets who seemed to speak for God, and who were often at odds even with conventional Jewish society, channeled an apocalyptic sense of the need for a repudiation of natural and political norms. Whereas the strong tend to dominate the weak, God fights on behalf of the weak, his “chosen people,” the longsuffering Jews.

Christians would go on to combine that Jewish alienation and moralizing with Greco-Roman philosophy, the Roman Empire itself, and thus an imperial political mission. While Rome sought to conquer all the world’s territories, Christendom would aim to conquer everyone’s minds and convert them all to this one true faith. Again, all Christian eyes were set on Judgment Day, when God would redeem Jesus’s gospel and glorify those who had been last in conventional, natural terms, while sending to perdition those who had thrived in such ungodly times and persecuted the righteous losers who were “spiritually poor.”

Muslims maintained this apocalyptic outlook but preferred the relative purity and strictness of Jewish monotheism to Christianity’s implicit polytheism. So, while Christians regarded Jesus as a god or an avatar who was somehow exclusively identical to the one true God, Muslims agreed with Jews that Jesus was just an exemplary prophet.

But whereas Jews perfected existential alienation and the resulting pragmatic humanism that you find in Ecclesiastes, because Judaism was based on Jews’ experience of being marginalized nomads, Muslims set about conquering lands in their prophet’s name.

Islamic morality was about submitting to the mightier force that was honour-bound to be graceful and hospitable, like the desert Bedouin, rather than overbearing and nakedly tyrannical. Islam itself is just a code for submitting to Allah, the mightiest force of all. God is so powerful that his will can’t be naturally resisted because Allah reigns from a supernatural vantage point that Muslims sought to emulate by conquering vast territories.

Paradoxically, then, Muslims were dominators with the moralistic mentality that belongs to the dominated. The paradox is resolved when we observe that Muslims began as outcasts, inhabiting some of the world’s desert regions, places where life in general is on the outskirts. Indeed, the Muslim world is still confined mostly to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. (Only a quarter of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live in Southeast Asia.)

Share

Humanistic progress

But not all the Axial Age’s revolutions were apocalyptic or guided by theology. By comparison, the ancient Greeks especially were philosophical humanists (along with Chinese Confucians and some philosophical schools in India). The Greeks, too, posited underlying causes of events, but they did so with rational, proto-scientific arguments. Ancient humanistic philosophy, though, was far from a neutral reflection of facts, contrary to modern secular propaganda. Instead, this philosophy of our place in nature was meant to provide a way of life and even a rationale for human dominion over animals.

While the monotheists used religious myths as selling points for morality that favours those who would naturally be dominated, such as hypersensitive introverts and neurotic idealists, philosophical humanists would use reason to exploit the natural order and empower our species.

And of course, this ancient secular humanism regained a foothold in the West when, after the fiasco of the Church’s handling of the Black Death, early modern thinkers in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution turned to pre-Christian Greco-Roman texts, fueling a sense of godless human progress that secularized or “modernized” Europe and some of its colonies.

Comparing the varieties of progress

What we have here are two conceptions of progress. Both monotheists and secular humanists think of history as being subject to linear advances, so that cultures can be compared, for instance, depending on the extent to which they conform to certain ideals that don’t equate with natural norms. But monotheists think this progress is guaranteed since God foreordained it, and no created thing can thwart God’s will, not even his rebellious angels.

While some secular humanists (like Georg Hegel and Karl Marx) think progress is metaphysically or economically guaranteed, most of these thinkers assume any such progress would have to be supported by nature, and nature is neutral towards our values. Thus, while monotheists are supposedly assured to prosper in the afterlife, according to their respective religions, there’s no philosophical or scientific consensus that humanists or our species will be able to sustain our reign over nature. We could destroy ourselves in the attempt to apply our scientific knowledge with technology, or the planet’s cycles could ruin us because we lack the ingenuity to circumvent them.

Monotheistic progress is supernatural, so it entails the undoing of the whole “fallen,” natural order. Similarly, the most radical secular humanist fantasies project that the will of intelligent species could overtake nature, in an apocalyptic taming of all wild things. Again, though, setting such science fiction aside, most secular humanists are far more cautious and moderate. For them, godless human progress means using our anomalous cognitive traits to our advantage while working within natural limits, without destroying ourselves or the ecosystems in the process.

While religious apocalypticism developed from marginalized sensibilities, secular humanism sprang mainly from the golden age of ancient Athens, and launched “modernity,” which is to say the greatest spread of liberal, secular advances in civilized history, starting in Europe in the fourteenth century CE.

Monotheistic morality is ascetic in contrasting natural cycles with a supernatural mission: this moralist is supposed to subdue his or her natural impulses, ignore the dictates of profane social conventions, and adhere to a prophetic calling that makes sense only in supernatural, “spiritual” terms.

By contrast, secular morality is pragmatic or “realistic,” even as it, too, holds out the prospect of progress. This is to say that humanism is liberal rather than conservative. Modern conservatives are closer to the ancient polytheists in using religions as excuses not for progress but for earthly tyrannies. These religions told a story that rationalized the dubious status quo that adapted most social animals’ penchant for forming dominance hierarchies. Such conservatives don’t think of humanity as an ideal but defer to the prevalence of dominant and submissive castes or “races.”

Humanists idealize our species’ potential, as they uphold a vision of where we all ought to go and how we should get there. In effect, modern humanists secularize the monotheist’s myth of progress. We can’t count on a deus ex machina but must shrewdly engineer our welfare, like Odysseus. The point of liberalism, of course, is to liberate humanity, including the lower and middle classes, women and minorities, and the mentally ill and disabled. We should use our know-how and ingenuity to solve all our problems, to terraform nature and perfect our bodies, minds, and cultures.

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin made roughly this point in 1952 in The New Science of Politics, when he spoke of how so-called secular “Gnostics” “immanentized the eschaton,” or attempted to build a utopia on earth. Voegelin said, “The problem of an eidos [form or essence] in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis [substrate or guarantor] of the eschaton [the world’s supernatural ending], however, is a theoretical fallacy.”

On the contrary, the fallacy was Voegelin’s if he assumed that reason was crucial to the original, supernatural conception of the “eschaton.” Only on that assumption could we speak of “fallacies” in theology that are distinct from a logical talk of gods, prophecies, and miracles. There’s no such rationally legitimate theistic discourse. We’re dealing here with art and fantasies that served social purposes, such as the underclass’s dignification or, more exoterically, the upper class’s glorification. Storytellers are free to adapt motifs to different contexts, which is what the early modern humanists did with their religious heritage.

In any event, according to this secular account of progress, modern cultures are supposed to be superior to premodern ones in that the former hold out this prospect of human advances, whereas the latter, for all their talk of the supernatural, are more likely to be defeatist in succumbing to some natural impulse or compromise.

For instance, whereas Judaism and Christianity have mostly been modernized (or liberalized and neutered, at least in the Global North), Islam still works largely as it always has, in relatively benighted, apocalyptic, “medieval” terms. Most Muslims are anti-natural only in some respects since they model God on conservative grounds, depicting him as a male, honourable king.

Trumpism: the dystopia of a secular apocalypse

Notice, though, that apocalypticism can also infiltrate secular societies such as the United States. Trumpism is effectively a secular revenge fantasy, led by the deranged outcast Donald Trump and his cabal of Christian fundamentalists and billionaire tech nerds. This cabal speaks mainly to the country’s neglected rural regions, the ones that have been hit hardest by the failed promises of neoliberal economists.

Trump is somewhat like the Buddha in that he grew up with great wealth and opportunity but abandoned conventional thinking to pursue a radical course. Of course, those two courses are opposed to each other in that the Buddha rejected egoism whereas Trump is a raging narcissist. Still, neither a buddha nor Trump would belong in polite company. Both are radicals, from the perspective of conventional, profane mores.

Trump, too, fantasizes about an apocalyptic demolition since he thinks of himself as a god or colossal “winner” among countless losers. While the monotheist’s God will bulldoze everything that fails to live up to his standards, including everyone who rejects God’s prophets and scriptures or who even denies that God exists, Trump means to destroy everyone who opposes him or fails to humour his grandiose self-image. So, while modern humanism secularizes the monotheistic fantasies of revenge against the natural order, Trump adapts those fantasies to serve his gross personality disorder (malignant narcissism).

In any case, we should beware the difference between supernatural and natural forms of progress. The former is apocalyptic in that it’s supposedly revealed from a standpoint that ought to compel us to abandon all mundane worldly pursuits. The latter is liberal, pragmatic, and humanistic in that it seeks to make the best of our existential condition as clever, ambitious primates adept at finding opportunities for improvement in a cosmic wasteland.