Modernity Secularizes the Axial Age’s Moral Absolutes

The varieties of progress from apocalyptic judgments to technoscientific advances

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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…