lpetrich
Contributor
Bellah_RBB.pdf at Cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, a biologist turned historian.
He reviews sociologist Robert Bellah's book Religion in Human Evolution, which he thinks has some important ideas about it.
It is about what provoked the emergence of the Axial Age philosophies and religions. That term was coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers around 1930, who proposed that several revolutionary belief systems emerged around 800 to 200 CE across Eurasia.
Greece: The various philosophers, notably Plato and Aristotle
Israel: Judaism
Persia: Zoroastrianism
India: Upanishads, Jainism, Buddhism
China: Confucianism, Taoism
Peter Turchin proposes that they had emerged as a result of pressure from horse-riding archers from the Great Eurasian Steppe. That's a long belt of grassland and semidesert which extends from east central Europe to northern China. The more settled people had to get better organized to fight them, and that led to Axial-Age religions and philosophies and ideologies.
Not just direct pressure, but also indirect pressure, from the Persians on all these societies but China. The Persians themselves were originally some of these nomads, and when they settled down, they got under pressure from the nomads to their north.
Why that? PT has some interesting arguments about social cohesion in large-scale societies.
Humanity had originated in small-scale societies where everybody had known each other. But we have limits on how many of us we can be familiar with and keep track of. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has extrapolated brain size and social-group size from our nearest relatives and found that we have an expected size of about 150 (
Dunbar's number, sometimes cited as between 100 and 230). That does not mean that each of us can only keep track of 150 people, only that it's hard to have close relations with more than 150.
With Paleolithic food-collection technology -- foraging -- it was hard for many people to live in one area, so our ancestors were spread out enough to avoid bumping into Dunbar's number too much. But with Neolithic food-collection technology -- agriculture -- many more people could live near each other, in groups much larger than Dunbar's number. How do we keep from fighting each other?
PT proposes that large-scale societies emerged as a result of some earlier small ones conquering others. But how to make such conquests last? Force is not enough, because conquest alone tends to provoke rebellion. So one has to look for some other source of legitimacy.
A common one in early societies was the divinity of monarchs. Kings are gods or descendants of gods or provincial governors of gods. That has worked, but it has limits. One can beat Dunbar's number, but one has difficulty getting much beyond a city-state. An early solution has been to do syncretism like crazy, associating gods worshipped by people in different places. PT did not mention that solution, and PT and RB likely think that Axial Age belief systems were a solution superior to syncretism of localized religions.
A notable feature of Axial-Age belief systems is universality. They feature a universal god or a universal impersonal natural order, though these often coexist with lots of smaller-scale deities. They are also transethnic, going beyond individual localities and individual ethnicities. These features made them convenient for uniting populations over large areas, because they could all acknowledge the same god or the same natural order. Their universality also made it easier for them to spread, since they were not tied to specific localities. They could thus leave Dunbar's number in the dust.
Judaism is an oddity, it must be said. Ancient Israel was originally polytheist and much like its neighbors, and Yahweh, its national god, was originally a rather local one. He could even be stymied by iron chariots (Judges 1:19). But a Yahweh-only faction emerged, demanding worship of this god as the only god, to discourage worshipping the gods of foreigners. King Josiah even tried to make the Jerusalem Temple the only legitimate place for worshipping Yahweh. But then the Babylonian Exile happened. Some of the exiled ones made Yahweh into a universal god, one who could be worshipped anywhere, no matter how far away from Jerusalem one was.
Judaism has remained an ethnic religion to this day, making it only partially Axialized, but some Jewish sects have become transethnic religions and thus fully Axialized: Christianity and Islam.
Turning to those philosophers, their work attracted interest far beyond Greece, and their successors in various places advanced far beyond them. Those successors ended up developing modern science, which is thoroughly Axialized.
Universal impersonal natural order? Check.
Its practice being transethnic? Check.
Strictly speaking, a science of god(s) is not impossible, but god(s) have been unnecessary hypotheses so far. If there were any, they would almost certainly be universal ones and not some deities of a particular group.
Also, some notable social and political ideologies of recent centuries are thoroughly Axialized, like democracy and capitalist libertarianism and Marxism.
He reviews sociologist Robert Bellah's book Religion in Human Evolution, which he thinks has some important ideas about it.
It is about what provoked the emergence of the Axial Age philosophies and religions. That term was coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers around 1930, who proposed that several revolutionary belief systems emerged around 800 to 200 CE across Eurasia.
Greece: The various philosophers, notably Plato and Aristotle
Israel: Judaism
Persia: Zoroastrianism
India: Upanishads, Jainism, Buddhism
China: Confucianism, Taoism
Peter Turchin proposes that they had emerged as a result of pressure from horse-riding archers from the Great Eurasian Steppe. That's a long belt of grassland and semidesert which extends from east central Europe to northern China. The more settled people had to get better organized to fight them, and that led to Axial-Age religions and philosophies and ideologies.
Not just direct pressure, but also indirect pressure, from the Persians on all these societies but China. The Persians themselves were originally some of these nomads, and when they settled down, they got under pressure from the nomads to their north.
Why that? PT has some interesting arguments about social cohesion in large-scale societies.
Humanity had originated in small-scale societies where everybody had known each other. But we have limits on how many of us we can be familiar with and keep track of. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has extrapolated brain size and social-group size from our nearest relatives and found that we have an expected size of about 150 (
Dunbar's number, sometimes cited as between 100 and 230). That does not mean that each of us can only keep track of 150 people, only that it's hard to have close relations with more than 150.With Paleolithic food-collection technology -- foraging -- it was hard for many people to live in one area, so our ancestors were spread out enough to avoid bumping into Dunbar's number too much. But with Neolithic food-collection technology -- agriculture -- many more people could live near each other, in groups much larger than Dunbar's number. How do we keep from fighting each other?
PT proposes that large-scale societies emerged as a result of some earlier small ones conquering others. But how to make such conquests last? Force is not enough, because conquest alone tends to provoke rebellion. So one has to look for some other source of legitimacy.
A common one in early societies was the divinity of monarchs. Kings are gods or descendants of gods or provincial governors of gods. That has worked, but it has limits. One can beat Dunbar's number, but one has difficulty getting much beyond a city-state. An early solution has been to do syncretism like crazy, associating gods worshipped by people in different places. PT did not mention that solution, and PT and RB likely think that Axial Age belief systems were a solution superior to syncretism of localized religions.
A notable feature of Axial-Age belief systems is universality. They feature a universal god or a universal impersonal natural order, though these often coexist with lots of smaller-scale deities. They are also transethnic, going beyond individual localities and individual ethnicities. These features made them convenient for uniting populations over large areas, because they could all acknowledge the same god or the same natural order. Their universality also made it easier for them to spread, since they were not tied to specific localities. They could thus leave Dunbar's number in the dust.
Judaism is an oddity, it must be said. Ancient Israel was originally polytheist and much like its neighbors, and Yahweh, its national god, was originally a rather local one. He could even be stymied by iron chariots (Judges 1:19). But a Yahweh-only faction emerged, demanding worship of this god as the only god, to discourage worshipping the gods of foreigners. King Josiah even tried to make the Jerusalem Temple the only legitimate place for worshipping Yahweh. But then the Babylonian Exile happened. Some of the exiled ones made Yahweh into a universal god, one who could be worshipped anywhere, no matter how far away from Jerusalem one was.
Judaism has remained an ethnic religion to this day, making it only partially Axialized, but some Jewish sects have become transethnic religions and thus fully Axialized: Christianity and Islam.
Turning to those philosophers, their work attracted interest far beyond Greece, and their successors in various places advanced far beyond them. Those successors ended up developing modern science, which is thoroughly Axialized.
Universal impersonal natural order? Check.
Its practice being transethnic? Check.
Strictly speaking, a science of god(s) is not impossible, but god(s) have been unnecessary hypotheses so far. If there were any, they would almost certainly be universal ones and not some deities of a particular group.
Also, some notable social and political ideologies of recent centuries are thoroughly Axialized, like democracy and capitalist libertarianism and Marxism.
