Great Awokenings In Early China

 This last year or so I've been looking deeper into "Axial Age" transitions. 

Jespers was the originator of the Axial age transition. His theory was that something fundamental happened in governenance and religion around 800 BC to 300 BC to move societies to function more liberally.

Peter Turchin's crowd did a deep dive with the Seshat database to test this idea.  The conclusion was that there was no formal axial age transition.  Rather, various liberal principles came in and went away, in a variety of Kingdom age polities.  There was no evidence for a single phase change once a critical mass of liberalness developed.

The latest book I'm reading in this vein in Li Feng's Early China.  It time focus is on 2000BC to about 300 BC. This includes the Erlitou, Xia, Shang, Zhou and later dynasties.  If I'm remembering the details correctly, during the Xia and Shang eras a very strong kin based morality developed. New territory was awarded to family lineages. The meta-morality was the taking care of ancestral roots. Ancestral veneration was tied up in this. But is was a bit more than ancestral veneration - it was an expansionist morality that tied the adaptive benefits of familial lineages into a religious code and day-to-day moral compass. In some sense, to me it seems reminiscent of North American tribal societies where religion couldn't be separated out from wise behaviour and cultural narratives.

But, what's neat is how this morality was overthrown during the fall of the Western? Zhou empire. A growing abundance of elites and geometric realities of territorial expansion meant that family lineage based city state control could no longer provide the adaptive benefits necessary to "keep things in the family". Very quickly, a new morality emerged that eschewed ancestral line control. There was a huge shift to intra-elite competition. Quid pro quo alliances quickly dominated. These quickly devolved into outright war. The number of elite "families" shrunk.  But the weak empire didn't split neatly into two nearly equal halves (or so I think). 

It's hard not to see this shift from lineage veneration/morality as anything other than a Great Awakening.

The next major Awakening is the emergence of the Shin class.  This is basically the emergence of a middle-class.  This is where Confucius comes in.  It's hard not to see this as a solution to disparity between elite classes and commoner classes.  After the warring states period, I suspect the commoner class was depopulated and the elite class growth had stalled and shrunk.  According to Turchin, that drives up commoner's real wages.  That's probably why the middle class was able to emerge and gain power.

The main relevance of these things for today is how powerful Great Awakenings and their correlated social dynamics are.  I really see resistance to Wokeness akin to the futility of resistance to Roman era Christianity, or to pagan resistance to European Catholicism.

In some ways this is not at all bad. We definitely need some more equality in society. The Iron Rule of Oligarchies is only making this more true.  One just hopes that Woke extremists don't reproduce the follies of 1900's socialism. But I don't see that as likely.  Political leaders see the power of Wokeism and the opportunities for grift it affords and just can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar.  Thus Wokeism has emerged at the wrong phase in Turchin's secular cycles.  It has emerged during the climb to peak elite overproduction, not at its denouement. To me, that's a VERY bad sign.