Por Que o Ocidente Domina?

Artigo sobre a obra do historiador de Stanford, Ian Morris: The moral order of society had rested on rulers who claimed privileged access to the gods—"hotlines to superhumans," as Morris puts it. But after 1000 BC, he says, people across Eurasia begin to question that system. "Cosmological angst" descends on the intellectuals. We're cut off from the transcendental realm, they think. What to do? Axial thought emerges as a response to this problem, says Morris, a way that people themselves can reconnect to the transcendental. That's the intellectual story. But why is that happening? Why do people start questioning godlike kings in the first place? In Morris's telling, the answer isn't so much culture. It's material forces. From the Mediterranean to China, he says, population at least doubles between 1000 and 500 BC. Social problems explode. One result is a change in the organization of societies. The old way of doing things—illustrated by the dorm-raiding story—breaks down. Godlike kings morph into something "more like a CEO." These manager-kings control states with big bureaucracies, taxes, and armies. Long story short, as godlike kings give way to high-end states, an "intellectual vacuum" opens that gets filled by Axial Age thinkers. And their ideas, "countercultural" at first, eventually get co-opted by shrewd rulers. "This is why the ancient world is important," Morris says. "You go from these little disorganized societies to these big, really organized societies. In the process, you create this Axial thought that lays the intellectual foundations for the next 2,000 years."