Archaic Revival
= contrast and compare with the ideas of a 'Archaic Revolution' by Terence McKenna,
Description
Imperium Press:
"The Archaic Revival, the literal return of pre-classical modes of human life and understanding. Environmentalism is a re-skinning of the archaic idea of cosmic maintenance, where the king would have to perform certain rites to prevent the world from ending; identitarianism is a re-skinning of the archaic idea of ancestor worship, where the highest good, and the source of all imperatives, is the blood — there are probably about half a dozen such symptoms of this revival, and the re-oralization of Western culture is one.
This re-oralization is not an isolated media trend. It is part of a deeper civilizational shift: a reversal of Axiality, and this revival of the truly archaic. Once you see the Axial age as the great rupture between folkish, ritual, tradition-bound societies and the literate, universalist, propositional world that followed, the present moment becomes legible. (Those unfamiliar with the Axial age should read this primer.) We are not merely becoming “post-literate,” we are showing unmistakable signs of the restoration of pre-Axial patterns of cognition and social organization. In this sense, the return of oral culture is the visible symptom of a much older and larger tectonic movement: the Archaic Revival of pre-Axial traits."
(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/the-death-of-literacy-and-the-archaic)
Characteristics
Imperium Press:
Axiality and Literacy — Two Sides of the Same Transformation
"The Axial age brought a suite of correlated acquisitions: propositional thinking, abstraction, universal ethics, monotheism or monism, eschatology, the individual, linear time, and the reduction of gods and values to clear conceptual categories. All of these were made possible by—or at least enormously accelerated by—literacy.
Writing freezes speech, stabilizing doctrine that would otherwise undergo gradual change—as a result, memory becomes externalized, and thus atrophies. The abstraction of speech allows the growth of complex arguments, leading to the depersonalization of authority and thence to universal law. Writing also creates consistency across time, which enables long-range planning. Axial religion and Axial philosophy depend on the literate mind. It is therefore no accident that Zoroastrianism required texts, that Vedanta required commentaries, and Buddhism required sutras. Prophetic monotheism could only take shape with the advent of scripture. Greek philosophy required treatises—Plato’s orality was only superficial. If you think Plato’s dialogues represent speech rather than writing, try staging them and watch the audience nod off. Plato is a creature of literacy; we shall have more to say about this later.
The individual emerges from literacy because the written word unbinds a person from tribe, kin, soil, and myth. No one speaks alone, but one can write alone—writing allows one to think as a separate unit because thought becomes detached from the communal setting. The literate mind and the Axial mind rise and fall together.
Abstract Thinking — The Axial Superpower That Requires Literacy
Abstraction is not normal for human beings; it is unusual, unnatural, and cognitively expensive. Oral cultures, on the other hand, are situational and concrete, because memory cannot easily hold abstractions. Speech alone, without writing, cannot stabilize complex structures, so arguments must be short and memorable. Moral thought, if it is to take root in oral cultures, is always actionable, not theoretical.
The Axial revolution invented abstract thought by inventing external memory. Writing lets you create categories, compare systems, and examine your own thoughts. This enables the development of cumulative philosophy, which can then be used to develop universal ethics. But take away literacy and you lose persistent abstraction. The mind then returns to vibe-based reasoning and lived experience. Tribal affiliation and episodic thinking then govern morality, which again becomes situational.
What we are watching today—meme logic, tribal online factions, vibe epistemology, shame culture, archetypes, narrative over argument—is simply the cognitive default in the absence of a strong literate substrate. This is why abstract movements have died, such as New Atheism, which was really just the last gasp (and one of the strongest, most consistent forms) of hyper-Axial rationalism. Enlightenment universalism and liberal proceduralism too have collapsed in the wake of the internet. The loss of this strong literate substrate has yielded folkish replacements, which are increasingly traditionalist, pagan, ancestral, and tribal. They police boundaries using shame, and orient themselves inward, toward the group.
Innovation vs. Conservatism — The Axial Bargain Has Broken
Axiality enabled not just innovation—oral cultures innovate too—but runaway innovation. This is because its abstractions allowed analytic decomposition (“a liver is a separable organ with a specific function”), technological abstraction (“a wheel is a wheel anywhere”), and the reduction of knowledge to transferable form (justice becomes a law code). Empires, trade, and literacy worked together to fetishize novelty instead of seeing it with some degree of skepticism.
Pre-Axial worlds were conservative because the oral mind cannot maintain novelty unless it is truly adaptive—new ideas fail to survive transmission unless they confer clear advantage, so the tribe tends to punish deviance. In these worlds, memory relies on repetition and ritual time is seen as circular, not progressive, so innovation is distrusted. Finally, moral law is situational, not universal, so the moral horizon is limited and contact with outsiders discouraged. The internet increasingly resembles this world—a world of no stable canon and no long-term social project, only fads, feedback loops, echo chambers, and moment-to-moment crowd judgment.
There is still creativity in the oral world, but it is performative creativity, not structurally incentivized innovation for the sake of innovation. The oral genius is clever, but not smart. Its approach is aesthetic, but not conceptual. Its epistemology is memetic, but not cumulative. This is why we are stagnating technologically despite mountains of information—because we have lost the mode of reasoning that makes innovation an end in itself.
Has Innovation Has Become Counteradaptive?
This is the crucial question, and the answer is yes.
In a world where every new technology increases systemic fragility (such as AI, biotech, finance, information warfare), innovation threatens stability. The problem is not slow adaptation but adaptation for the sake of adaptation. Systems saturated with complexity begin to favour stability and coherence, and they invoke tribal bonding in a bid for that coherence. These are the core features of pre-Axial oral cultures. Meanwhile, innovation today produces diminishing returns at best. Much of modern innovation is superficial—aesthetic and consumerist, without delivering legitimate benefit. Sometimes it is even addictive, destabilizing, and outright destructive, whereas innovations that matter (energy, materials, manufacturing) stagnate. This mirrors the late-Bronze-Age pattern before the Axial shift.
We are re-entering a cultural space that resembles the pre-Axial world. The tribe has returned in folkishness and identitarianism. Universals are collapsing as epistemology itself balkanizes. Abstract ideals are dissolving as we become less literate. Time is flattening as there is only the eternal present moment of “the feed.” Shame is replacing guilt in the rise of the hive mind and the crowd. As a result, charisma is replacing procedure, which is forcing elite legitimacy into the personal, not the institutional—politics is becoming agon, not policy.
Something civilizationally consequential has happened here and it is critical that we understand it. Axiality reversed the hierarchy of immanent over transcendent, taboo over ethics. In doing so it built up a set of superstructures (universalism, abstraction, and literate rationalism) which enabled us to organize society at unnaturally large scales, which had its benefits for a time. But paradoxically, the very scale of that organization has produced an environment (in web 2.0) which undermines this Axiality at its very core. Now the cognitive environment (digital orality) can no longer sustain Axial superstructures, and the world is returning to its baseline. The Axial age was the anomaly."