by Morris, Ian;
In the introduction to this book I talked about another long-term lock-in theory, which holds that the West rules today not because ancient Greeks invented democracy per se but because they created a uniquely rational, dynamic culture while ancient China was obscurantist and conservative.* I think this theory is wrong too. It caricatures Eastern, Western, and South Asian thought and ignores their internal variety. Eastern thought can be just as rational, liberal, realist, and cynical as Western; Western thought can be just as mystical, authoritarian, relativist, and obscure as Eastern. The real unity of Axial thought is unity in diversity. For all the differences among Eastern, Western, and South Asian thought, the range of ideas, arguments, and conflicts was remarkably similar in each region. In the Axial Age, thinkers staked out the same terrain for debate regardless of whether they lived in the Yellow River valley, the Ganges plain, or the cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
The real break with the past was the shape of this intellectual terrain as a whole, not any single feature (such as Greek philosophy) within it. No one was having Axial arguments in 1300 BCE, when the West’s social development score first approached twenty-four points. The closest candidate is Akhenaten, pharaoh of Egypt between 1364 and 1347 BCE, who swept aside traditional gods and installed a trinity of himself, his wife, Nefertiti, and the sun disk, Aten. He built a new city full of temples to Aten, composed haunting hymns, and promoted a deeply strange art style.
For a hundred years Egyptologists have argued over what Akhenaten was doing. Some think he was trying to invent monotheism; no less a luminary than Sigmund Freud argued that Moses stole this concept from Akhenaten while the Hebrews were in Egypt. There are certainly striking parallels between Akhenaten’s “Great Hymn to the Aten” and the Hebrew Bible’s Psalm 104, the “Hymn to God the Creator.” Yet Akhenaten’s religious revolution was anything but Axial. It had no room for personal transcendence; in fact, Akhenaten banned mere mortals from worshipping Aten at all, making the pharaoh even more of a bridge between this world and the divine than he had been before.
If anything, Atenism illustrates the difficulty of making major intellectual changes in societies where god-kings are firmly ensconced. His new religion won no following, and as soon as he died the old gods were brought back. Akhenaten’s temples were smashed and his revolution forgotten until archaeologists dug his city up in 1891.
So is Axial thought the secret ingredient that makes Figure 5.1 so dull? Did Confucius, Socrates, and the Buddha guide societies through some intellectual barrier when social development reached twenty-four points in the mid first millennium BCE, while the absence of such geniuses blocked social development in the second millennium?
Probably not. For one thing, chronology is against it. In the West, Assyria became a high-end state and pushed past twenty-four points in the eighth century BCE, but it is hard to see much that is strikingly Axial in Western thought before Socrates, three hundred years later. It is a closer call in the East; there Qin, Chu, Qi, and Jin reached twenty-four points around 500 BCE, just when Confucius was most active, but the main wave of Eastern Axial thought falls later, in the fourth and third centuries BCE. And if South Asianists are right in redating the Buddha to the late fifth century BCE, high-end state formation seems to precede Axial thought there, too.
Geography is also against it. The most important Axial thinkers came from small, marginal communities such as Greece, Israel, the Buddha’s home state of Sakya, or Confucius’ of Lu; it is hard to see how transcendent breakthroughs in political backwaters affected social development in the great powers.
Finally, logic is against it. Axial thought was a reaction against the high-end state, at best indifferent to great kings and their bureaucrats and often downright hostile to their power. Axial thought’s real contribution to raising social development, I suspect, came later in the first millennium BCE, when all the great states learned to tame it, making it work for them. In the East, the Han dynasty emasculated Confucianism to the point it became an official ideology, guiding a loyal class of bureaucrats. In India, the great king Ashoka, apparently genuinely horrified by his own violent conquests, converted to Buddhism around 257 BCE, yet somehow managed not to renounce war. And in the West the Romans first neutralized Greek philosophy, then turned Christianity into a prop for their empire.
The more rational strands within Axial thought encouraged law, mathematics, science, history, logic, and rhetoric, which all increased people’s intellectual mastery of their world, but the real motor behind Figure 5.1 was the same as it had been since the end of the Ice Age. Lazy, greedy, and frightened people found easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things, in the process building stronger states, trading farther afield, and settling in greater cities. In a pattern we will see repeated many times in the next five chapters, as social development rose the new age got the culture it needed. Axial thought was just one of the things that happened when people created high-end states and disenchanted the world.
EDGE EMPIRES
If further proof is needed that Axial thought was more a consequence than a cause of state restructuring, we need only look at Qin, the ferocious state at the western edge of the Eastern core (Figure 5.6). “Qin has the same customs as the [barbarians] Rong and Di,” said the anonymous author of The Stratagems of the Warring States, a kind of how-to book on diplomatic chicanery. “It has the heart of a tiger or wolf; greedy, loving profit, and untrustworthy, knowing nothing of ritual, duty, or virtuous conduct.” Yet despite being the antithesis of everything Confucian gentlemen held dear, Qin exploded from the edge of the Eastern core to conquer the whole of it in the third century BCE.
Something rather similar also happened at the other end of Eurasia, where the Romans—also regularly likened to wolves—came from the edge of the Western core to overthrow it and enslave the philosophers who called them barbarians. Polybius, a Greek gentleman taken to Rome as a hostage in 167 BCE, wrote a forty-volume Universal History to explain all this to his fellow countrymen. “Who,” he asked, “can be so narrow-minded or lazy that he does not want to know how … in less than fifty-three years [220–167 BCE] the Romans brought under their rule almost the whole inhabited world,* something without parallel in history?”
Figure 5.6. The triumph of Qin: the East in the era of Warring States, 300–221 BCE (dates in parentheses show when the main states fell to Qin)
Qin and Rome had a lot in common. Each was a spectacular example of the advantages of backwardness, combining organizational methods pioneered in an older core with military methods honed on a violent frontier; each slaughtered, enslaved, and dispossessed millions; and each drove social development up faster than ever before. Qin and Rome also exemplify what we might call the paradox of violence: when the rivers of blood dried, their imperialism left most people, in both East and West, better off.
For both Qin and Rome, the secret of success was simple—numbers. Qin and Rome got there by different paths, but each was just better at raising, arming, feeding, and replacing armies than any rival.
In the East, Qin had for centuries been the weakest of the six great warring states.* It started moving toward high-end organization late, introducing land taxes only in 408 BCE. By then relentless fighting had forced the other states to conscript their subjects, tax them, and use Legalist methods to discipline them. Rulers did everything possible to increase revenues, and the best practices spread quickly, since the alternative to copying was destruction. Around 430 BCE the state of Wei had begun rounding up laborers and digging vast irrigation channels to raise farm output; the other states, including (eventually) Qin, followed suit. Zhao and Wei built walls to protect their valuable irrigated land; so did the others.
In the fourth century BCE Qin caught up. Lord Shang made his name there in the 340s, advising Qin’s ruler on how to turn his state into a nightmare of surveillance and discipline:
[Lord Shang] commanded that the people be divided into tens and fives and that they supervise each other and
be mutually liable. Anyone who failed to report criminal activity would be chopped in two at the waist, while those who reported it would receive the same reward as that for obtaining the head of an enemy …
This was no mere authoritarian fantasy; records on bamboo strips recovered from the tombs of Qin magistrates show that the laws were enforced in all their savagery.
If it is any consolation, Lord Shang was eventually hoist with his own petard, condemned to be torn apart with his ankles and wrists tied to chariots. By then, though, the high-end Legalist state had triumphed and the Eastern core had become an armed camp. Thirty thousand men had counted as a big army in 500 BCE, but by 250 BCE a hundred thousand was normal. Two hundred thousand was nothing special, and really strong armies were twice that size. Casualties were correspondingly enormous. One text says that a Qin army killed sixty thousand troops from Wei in 364 BCE. The numbers may be exaggerated, but since Qin soldiers were paid by the head (literally; they turned in severed ears to claim bonuses), they cannot be too far from the truth.
So alarming were the forces being unleashed that in 361 BCE the great powers set up regular conferences to negotiate their differences, and diplomats-for-hire, known as “persuaders,” appeared in the 350s. A single man might shuttle among several great kingdoms, serving as chief minister for all of them at once, weaving webs of intrigue worthy of Henry Kissinger.
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” said Winston Churchill, but brute force still beat out bargaining in the fourth century BCE. The problem was Qin. Secure behind mountainous borders that made it hard to attack, and free to use its position at the edge of the core to bolster its manpower by drawing in people from the stateless societies even farther west, its armies constantly pressed into the core. “Qin is the mortal enemy of ‘All Under Heaven,’” said The Stratagems of the Warring States; it wants “to swallow the whole world.”
The other states recognized that they needed to combine against Qin, but four centuries of war had created such mistrust that they could not resist stabbing one another in the back. Between 353 and 322 BCE Wei led a series of coalitions, but as soon as the allies won a few victories they turned on Wei, terrified that it might do better than the rest of them. Wei responded like many a spurned lover or leader, switching its affections to the old enemy, Qin. Between 310 and 284 BCE Qi led a new set of alliances, only to be brought down as Wei had been; then Zhao took the mantle. In 269 BCE Zhao won two great victories over Qin and hope flared in every heart, but it was too little, too late. Qin’s King Zheng discovered a terrible new strategy: simply kill so many people that other states could not rebuild their armies. Qin had invented the body count.
Qin generals killed about a million enemy soldiers over the next thirty years. A dismal record of massacres fills the annals, then ends suddenly in 234 BCE, when, we are told, Qin beheaded a hundred thousand men of Zhao. After that no credible enemies remained and the surrender of states replaced slaughters in the annals.
With neither jaw-jaw nor war-war working, Qin’s remaining enemies pinned their hopes on murder. In 227 BCE a hit man talked his way past the Qin king Zheng’s minders, grabbed Zheng’s arm, and lunged at him with a poisoned dagger—only for Zheng’s sleeve to tear off in his hand. Zheng ducked behind a pillar, thrashed around to get his ridiculously long ceremonial sword out of its scabbard, then hacked the assassin to bits.
There were no more chances, and Qi, the last independent state, fell in 221 BCE. King Zheng now took the name Shihuangdi, or August First Emperor. “We are the First Emperor,” he thundered, “and our successors shall be known as Second Emperor, Third Emperor, and so on, for endless generations.” No one argued.
Rome’s path to empire was different (Figure 5.7). Persia had already united most of what was then the Western core by the time Darius won the throne in 521 BCE, but his desire to tap the wealth of the Mediterranean frontier set off waves of defensive state formation and created forces that would eventually destroy the Persian Empire. Greek and Italian cities were already very developed, scoring high on energy capture and information technology but less so on organization and military power. So long as Darius tackled them one by one he could bully them into submission, but the bullying itself drove the cities to combine, ratcheting up their organizational and military powers.
Figure 5.7. Ancient empires in the West: from Persia to Rome, 500–1 BCE. The broken line shows the maximum extent of the western end of the Persian Empire, around 490 BCE, and the solid line shows the extent of the Roman Empire in 1 BCE.
Thus, when Darius’ son Xerxes led a huge force into Greece in 480 BCE, Athens and Sparta set aside their differences to resist him. The historian Herodotus (and, rather differently, the film 300) immortalized their extraordinary victory, which left Athens a great power at the head of a league of cities. Rather like what happened when Eastern states tried to ally against Qin, Athenian power scared Sparta even more than the Persians did, and in 431 BCE the terrible Athenian-Spartan conflict known as the Peloponnesian War broke out (immortalized by Thucydides, but so far no movie). By the time the defeated and starving Athenians surrendered their fleet and pulled down their walls in 404 BCE the war had drawn in Sicily and Carthage, and its tentacles had turned parts of the Mediterranean, notably Macedon, into Greek economic dependencies.
Macedon was a sort of ancient banana republic, rich in resources (especially timber and silver) but chaotic. For fifty years Greek cities pushed it around, backing rival claimants to its throne and turning its politics into a soap opera of adultery, incest, and murder, but in 359 BCE Philip II, a Macedonian version of Tiglath-Pileser, seized the kingdom’s throne. Philip did not need social scientists to explain the advantages of backwardness to him: instinctively understanding, he adapted Greek institutions to his large, rich, but anarchic kingdom. He dug up silver, hired mercenaries, and got the riotous aristocracy to work with him, then brushed the Greek cities aside. He would surely have done the same to Persia had not a mysterious assassin—driven to the act, rumors said, by Philip’s drunken rages and/or a love feud ending in a homosexual gang rape—struck him down in 336 BCE. Not missing a beat, Philip’s son Alexander fulfilled Philip’s plans in just four years (334–330 BCE), hounding Persia’s king to his death, burning his sacred city, and marching as far as the borders of India. Only his troops’ refusal to march any farther could stop his conquests.
Alexander was a child of the new, disenchanted world (Aristotle had been one of his tutors) and probably did not realize how difficult it was to fill a godlike king’s shoes.* Devout Persians held that their kings were Ahuramazda’s earthly representatives in his eternal struggle with darkness; Alexander, therefore, must be an agent of evil. This image problem doubtless lay behind Alexander’s tortured efforts (mentioned in Chapter 4) to convince Persians he was godlike. Maybe, given time, he would have succeeded, although the more he tried to impress Persians with his divinity, the more insane he looked to Greeks and Macedonians. And time was short: Alexander dropped dead, perhaps poisoned, in 323 BCE, and his generals fought civil wars, broke up the empire, and gradually became kings (edging toward divinity) in their own right.
Eventually one of their kingdoms might have conquered the others, following Qin’s route, but Alexander’s successors were as short of time as the great king had been. In the fourth century BCE Macedon had been drawn into Greek conflicts, adapted Greek institutions to its own needs, defeated the Greeks, and then destroyed the great empire of the day; in the second century Rome virtually reran the script.
Rome is a perfect example of how colonization and developments on the periphery combine to expand cores. The city had been heavily influenced by Greece since the eighth century BCE, but grew strong in local struggles with its neighbors and created an odd mix of high- and low-end organization. An aristocratic senate made most big decisions, while assemblies dominated by middling farmers voted on matters of peace and war. Like Qin, Rome was late in moving toward the high end; it began paying its sol
diers only in 406 BCE, and probably instituted its first taxes at the same time. For centuries Rome’s budget relied mostly on plunder, and instead of taxing defeated enemies it made deals with them, extracting troops to fight more wars.
Romans were as averse to godlike kings as Greeks, but understood all too well the link between conquest and divinity. Really successful generals were awarded triumphs, ticker-tape parades through Rome in chariots pulled by white horses, festooned with images of sanctity, but accompanied by slaves whispering in their ears, “Remember, you are a mortal.” The triumph effectively put divine kingship in a box, making the mighty conqueror god for a day—but no more than that.
Old-fashioned as this system looked to Greeks in the third century BCE, its combination of high- and low-end practices generated manpower on a scale to match even Qin. Persia had raised perhaps 200,000 troops to invade Greece in 480 BCE, but after losing them needed decades to refill its treasuries. Rome faced no such constraints. A century of war gave it all the manpower of Italy, and in 264 BCE the senate began a titanic struggle with Carthage to control the western Mediterranean.
The Carthaginians lured Rome’s first fleet into a storm, sending it—and a hundred thousand sailors—to the bottom. Rome simply built a bigger fleet. This went down in another storm two years later, so Rome sent out a third armada, only to lose that as well. A fourth fleet finally won the war in 241 BCE because Carthage could not replace its own huge losses. Carthage needed twenty-three years to recuperate, whereupon its general Hannibal marched his elephants over the Alps to attack Italy from the rear. Between 218 and 216 BCE he killed or captured a hundred thousand Romans, but Rome just raised more men and ground him down in a war of attrition. And like Qin, Rome redefined brutality. “The Roman custom,” said Polybius, was “to exterminate every form of life they encountered, sparing none … so when cities are taken by the Romans you may often see not only the corpses of human beings but also dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals.” Carthage finally gave up in 201 BCE.