The German philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed a famous concept—the Axial Age (the Axial Period)—referring to the period between 800 and 200 BCE (especially 600 to 300 BCE).
Within this brief span of time, all the great ancient civilizations across Eurasia experienced a major breakthrough in their spiritual worlds. In China, there were Confucius and the Hundred Schools of Thought; in India, there was the Buddha. Confucius and the Buddha were almost the same age, and just a few years after Confucius died, Socrates was born in Athens.
On such a vast continent as Eurasia, sages appeared in clusters over just two or three hundred years, as if they had planned it together. It’s almost too strange. Could there have been some kind of divine will at work?
In Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker points out that, from a macro perspective, one basic predicament facing human survival is the Second Law of Thermodynamics—the law of increasing entropy: a closed system becomes more and more disordered as time passes. Under the constraints of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy throughout the universe keeps increasing, ultimately heading toward complete disorder.
Human beings, like other living organisms, are local negentropy systems within the universe as a whole, which tends toward increasing entropy. In a universe tending toward disorder, living organisms are nevertheless highly ordered. The secret of negentropy systems is that they are not closed systems: they can take in energy from outside, thereby increasing the degree of order inside the system.
The civilization created by human beings is also a negentropy system. The refinement of the ordered tools, machines, institutions, culture, and spiritual creations that emerge within a civilization ultimately depends on its ability to acquire energy.
The more energy, the more flourishing the civilization.
At this point, we can explain why the Axial Age happened. According to the research of modern scholars, several ancient civilizations across Eurasia benefited during the Axial Age from the maturation of farming technology and the organizational forms that supported it, and more or less simultaneously crossed a threshold: the ability to obtain 20,000 calories of energy per person per day on average (distributed across food, food, feed, fuel, and various raw materials). Once a civilization’s ability to acquire energy crossed this threshold, it could afford large-scale cities, large numbers of scholars, and a priestly class. And so the sages appeared.
First make sure you have enough food and clothing; then you can look up at the stars.
Note
- This series, “New Findings in Psychology: A Short Course,” consisted of short popular-science essays and miscellany written at the time to accompany the related content of Zhichao Wei: New Findings in Psychology, and published on the now-shut-down platform “Fantuan.” The original link no longer exists.
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