'Prometheus Rising' and the Axial Age

An exchange on Twitter that mentions Prometheus Rising, which will be our next online reading group after Nature's God:

I have a feeling we are now at the very start of something similar to the Axial age in ancient Greece and India. A jump in the processing and connecting power in collective human cognition. I'm reminded of camel's passing through needles and that's kind of what it feels like to me

— Stewart Alsop III - Host of Crazy Wisdom Podcast (@StewartalsopIII) April 23, 2020

This is basically the topic of "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson. You might enjoy it.

— Jim OShaughnessy (@jposhaughnessy) April 23, 2020

To understand the Tweet, I had to figure out what the "Axial Age" refers to. The answer turned out to be quite interesting.  It refers to the period from 8th the 3rd centuries BC, when most of the world's religions, philosophies and other cultural underpinnings were invented. Here is a quote from Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher who coined the term:

Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, time and time the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato,—of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.

Are we in a new "Axial Age"?

There's been a plethora of recent books complaining about stagnation during the last few decades, including one by Tyler Cowen and a new one by Ross Douthat.  But is their sample size too small? In the last 200 years, we've gotten railroads, air travel, the telegraph, radio, TV, and in recent years space exploration, advances in renewable energy and the internet. Entire new art forms  have been invented such as the motion picture and recorded music, and the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics have advanced our ability to understand the universe. So perhaps Robert Anton Wilson's sense of optimism is not misplaced.