We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age - NOEMA

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We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age

The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.

Studio Nokori for Noema Magazine

Credits

Otto Scharmer is the author of “Theory U” (2016) and co-founder of the Presencing Institute and the MITx u-lab. He works with leaders in the United Nations and in public, private and civil society organizations on awareness-based systems change.

I owe the primary inspiration for my life’s work to growing up on a family farm. Sixty-eight years ago, my parents transformed their farming methods from conventional to regenerative, prioritizing long-term soil resilience over short-term crop yields. And what I learned from my father is this: The quality of what grows above the ground depends on the quality of the soil beneath it.

Today, many decades later and many thousands of miles from the farm, my work focuses on cultivating the social soil: the relationships, awareness and shared sensemaking from which all visible social systems grow. When the social soil is healthy — when trust runs deep, when shared reality holds, when people can communicate and sense together and act from it — everything above ground flourishes. When the social soil is depleted, no amount of structural reengineering can compensate. Structures become hollow. Coordination fails. Conflicts and wars increase. The system eats its own foundations.

We are living through a moment of radical depletion of our social soil. Three symptoms summarize this condition: Anomie is the erosion of our moral norms, the collapse of our ethical behavior. Atomie, the breakdown of social bonds into loneliness and polarized echo chambers, is the collapse of the relational web of connections on which society depends. Atrophy is the gradual loss of the deeper human capacities needed to create, converse and collaborate in ways that embody our humanity. It is the collapse of agency itself, both individual and collective.

Beneath all three lies a fourth dimension that connects them. Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single, computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.

The quality of the human-AI interface is sure to shape the future of society and humanity. More than $2.5 trillion is projected to flow into AI in 2026 alone, yet the human side of the equation — the cultivation of sensing, relating and sensemaking — receives almost none of it.

This is soil depletion at a civilizational scale. We see it manifest in the deepening of ecological devastation, such as climate change and biodiversity loss; in social divides, including polarization and war; and in spiritual consequences, like hopelessness and feelings of insignificance. And so we find ourselves at a threshold, one where the planetary polycrisis demands not just better policies or technologies, but a shift in our structure of consciousness.

The First Axial Age

Roughly 2,500 years ago, something remarkable happened. It occurred not in one place but across the Eurasian continents, largely in parallel. Against the backdrop of Bronze Age civilizations collapsing, empires disintegrating, city-states competing and waves of migration and warfare reshaping social structures, the old mythic orders were failing. Local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience. And out of that turbulence, new kinds of questions broke through: What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?

Within a few centuries, the responses to these questions crystallized into several of the world’s enduring wisdom traditions. In China, Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi explored ethics, harmony and alignment with the Dao. In India, the Upanishadic traditions, the Buddha and Mahavira investigated the nature of consciousness, liberation and nonviolence. In Persia, Zarathustra articulated a cosmic moral struggle between good and evil. In the Hebrew world, the prophets, voices like Isaiah, called for justice and ethical monotheism. And in Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle began a systematic inquiry into ethics, knowledge and the nature of reality.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers named this the Axial Age. What these movements shared, despite their vast differences, was the discovery of a deeper interior dimension of the human being. For the first time, human beings stepped back from the immediacy of mythic experience and turned inward. They developed capacities for moral reflection, compassion and the articulation...