The Invention of the Coin, Mentoring Literature and Philosophy: the Economism of Axial Time and the Social Problems of Antiquity

Khaustov Dmitry Sergeevich ORCID: 0000-0002-5807-696X PhD in Economics Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Psychology, Baikal State University; Irkutsk State University of Railways 664003, Russia, Irkutskaya oblast', g. Irkutsk, ul. Lenina, 11, of. 2-111 dmitry.khaustov1982@mail.ru

The problem of Axial time

Martin Pachner, in his research on the history of literature, noticed a striking common feature in the sermons of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus. They lived in a relatively short period of time by the standards of world history (a spread of several hundred years), apparently had no idea about each other, but together engaged in a revolutionary renewal of ideas. It seems that for five centuries before the advent of a new era, the world was waiting to be guided on the right path, striving to master new ways of thinking and being. How can this be explained? And what does the appearance of charismatic preachers have to do with it? ^{[1, p. 91]}

 Actually, Karl Jaspers noticed this synchronicity in the history of ideas, calling the epoch 800-200 BC "axial time" ^[2]. In his essay "The Origins of History and its Purpose," Jaspers says that the axis of world history, if it exists in principle, can only be discovered empirically, as a fact significant for all mankind. Jaspers suggests looking for this axis where the prerequisites arose that allowed a person to become what he is; where such a formation of human existence went on with amazing fruitfulness, which, regardless of the specific religious content, could become so convincing for the main part of humanity – the West and east of Eurasia – "that thereby for all peoples there were a common framework for understanding their historical significance would be found" ^{[2, p. 32]}. The German philosopher attributed the Axis of history to the time around 500 BC, to the spiritual process that took place between 800 and 200 BC. "Then there was the sharpest turn in history. A man of this type appeared, which has been preserved to this day. We will briefly call this time axial time" ^{[2, p. 32]}.

One can criticize Jaspers in the spirit of Lev Gumilev, who believed that the "mystery" of axial time is simple: it is in the reflection of a restless person, indignant at the established way of life, and therefore inevitably uniform. Hence, there is a certain similarity of the worldview systems of Socrates, Zarathustra, Buddha and Confucius: they all sought to streamline the living, vibrant reality by introducing one or another rational principle. However, the principles of ordering were different for all of them ^{[3, p. 552]}.

It is possible to determine the reason for the formation of these ideas, as I. Kuvakin did: "The sharp growth of "moral consciousness" is typical for periods "after history". Through it, historical crises hide their nature, taking the form of a response to the crisis. Focusing on moral exposure, reproaching the world for degradation, is an important part of the process of degeneration" ^{[4, p. 206]}.

On the other hand, Ian Morris argues that the values of a person of Axial time – the values of agrarian societies – are being transformed in our era, largely returning to the values of hunters and gatherers ^{[5, pp. 252-300]}. James Scott ^[6-7] and Alexander Pavlov ^[8] prove the same thing on different materials. Apparently, these values have never completely disappeared, remaining on the periphery of social development: otherwise, the chapter on the Russian dacha as a financial asset in one of the modern investment guides should look rather strange (in fact, no) ^{[9, pp. 214-218]}!

The Invention of Coins and Philosophy

When reading Jaspers and Gumilev, the question arises: why was the "uniform reflection of a restless person" concentrated within this relatively short period of human history? And here there is a paradoxical answer by the famous anthropologist David Graeber: at that time the coin was invented. In his work on the evolution of debt relations, the American anthropologist notes that the beginning of the Axial Time of Karl Jaspers – the lifetime of Pythagoras, Confucius and Buddha – almost exactly corresponds to the period when the production of money in the form of impersonal standardized pieces of metal was mastered. Moreover, these prophets lived precisely in those three parts of the world where coins first appeared; indeed, the epicenters of religious and philosophical creativity of the Axial Time were kingdoms and city-states located along the Yellow River in China, in the Ganges Valley in Northern India and on the shores of the Aegeida ^{[10, pp. 229-233]}.

So, for example, L. Parshina believes that "gold, as the "quintessence" of money, had the opportunity to constantly satisfy society's need for connectivity, i.e. to ensure its very existence as a social institution, and gold was relatively evenly distributed over the Earth, which made it recognizable by all peoples of the world" ^{[11, p. 407]}.

I. Surikov ^{[12, pp. 161-172]} considers the following curious fact to be one of the key moments of the beginning of the ancient era: objects containing precious metals, during the transition from the Late Mycenaean era to the beginning of the Iron Age, could be found in individual graves. With the beginning of the classical era, more and more gold and silver turns out to be in the sanctuaries – Delphi, etc. Probably, this was the material prerequisite for the appearance of coins. And it firmly connected money with moral and religious problems.

At that time, the precious metals accumulated by temples and palaces fell into the hands of the masses and, divided into small standardized pieces, began to be used in everyday transactions. Most likely, most of the metal was simply stolen from the sanctuaries: for example, this explains the vivid episode of the short-term military superiority of Thebes. It was an era of constant wars, and valuables are plundered in war: in the Axial Time, a new type of army appeared in the valleys of the Yellow River and Ganges and on the shores of the Aegean Sea, which was composed not of aristocratic warriors and their vassals, but of trained professionals. This was due to the widespread use of iron, which made the use of metals in military affairs massive – sometimes this process is called the Hoplite revolution ^{[12, pp. 80-82]}. D. Greber refers to the hypothesis that the very first Lydian coins were invented specifically to pay for mercenaries. Carthage, apparently, did not use coins in trading operations until the leadership of the Punic state had a need to pay Greek mercenaries. In the period between the Second and Third Punic Wars, Carthage abandoned naval activity, switching to trade: archaeologists find very little in the cultural layers corresponding to this period coins, despite the large-scale construction work carried out in the capital and a large number of prestigious products imported from Hellenic policies ^{[13, pp. 223-228]}. All this testifies to the high level of violence that prevailed at the initial stage of Axial Time. The author of the cited work asks the question: what long-term relationship existed between coinage, military force and the teachings of Socrates, Buddha and Confucius? ^{[10, pp. 229, 231-233]}

The emergence of markets and the sacrificial crisis

At the beginning of the Axial Time, a special type of markets emerged: impersonal markets that were born out of wars and in which even members of their community could be treated the same as strangers, which became both a prerequisite and a consequence of debt slavery ^{[10, p. 244]}. "Man is the measure of all things," said the sophist Protagoras. And this phrase is filled with new and rather gloomy meanings in the context of slave trade relations.

It was during the Axial Time that a new understanding of human nature took shape, a radical primitivization of the motives of human behavior, which made it possible to talk about such concepts as "benefit" and "advantage", and made it possible to believe that this is what people strive for in all spheres of their lives, as if the brutality of war or the impersonality of the market simply saved them from having to pretend that they could care about anything else. This approach gave rise to the idea that human life can be reduced to the calculation of goals and means, i.e. to something that can be studied based on the same methods used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies - with the involvement of mathematics and some other ideas of the Pythagoreans. The initial premise, as can be seen, strongly resembles the one from which modern economists proceed, and this is not a coincidence: in an era when money, markets, states and military affairs were so strongly intertwined with each other, money was required to pay for armies that captured slaves who mined gold and silver, from which they made money. For example, in our time, works devoted to the study of the problem of extended reproduction of GRP based on the rule of the "golden section" are published ^[14]. When "murderous competition" often really turned into murders, probably few people thought that selfish goals could be achieved by more peaceful means. Such an idea of human behavior takes incredibly clear forms in those places of Eurasia where coins and philosophy appear ^{[10, pp. 244-245]}.

The use of standard pieces of precious metals as money has partly become a form of resolution of the sacrificial crisis (R. Girard's term) characteristic of polis communities: "... the sacred is primarily the violent destruction of differences, and this indifference cannot manifest itself in the structure as such. It can manifest itself ... ... under the guise of a new difference – perhaps ambiguous, dual, multiple, fantastic, monstrous, but, despite all this, having meaning. <...>

...the sacred reigns supreme wherever the cultural order has never functioned, has not begun to function or has ceased to function. It also dominates the structure – generates it, orders it, protects it, supports it, or, on the contrary, distorts it, decomposes it, subjects it to metamorphoses and destroys it at its slightest whim, but it is not present in the structure in the sense in which it is considered to be present in all other places" ^{[15, pp. 319-320, 320]}.

And further: "... no social existence would be possible if there were no victims of scapegoating, if – on the other side of paroxysm – violence was not allowed into the cultural order. Then the vicious circle of mutual violence, completely destructive, is replaced by a vicious circle of ritual violence, creative and protective" ^{[15, p. 191]}.

The experiments of evolutionary psychologists show that the more difficult the task, the stronger the belief in the correctness of mistakes. A possible psychological mechanism behind this has been dubbed the "signal detection theory". When the desired object (the truth?) it is required to find among many similar ones (Axial Time is the era of numerous preachers of true teachings, from most of whom only names have come down), then each of the options being sorted adds its own note of informational "noise". But if the object is still found, then consciousness evaluates the distinctive features of the corresponding insight as more pronounced, and recognition itself as more reliable and reliable: there is a more pronounced conversion ^{[16, p. 418]}. Hence the appearance of all sorts of "zombie economies", that is, views on economic activity that very remotely correspond to actual economic relations ^[17].

David Graeber also notes that all the religions of Axial Time emphasize the importance of mercy, which as a concept, apparently, did not actually exist before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; it is difficult to imagine one without the other; both could appear only in a socio–cultural environment that imposed such idealotypic behavior; and both, apparently, appeared together wherever cash - banknotes "without social memory" also appeared on the scene ^{[10, pp. 255-256]}.

At the same time, Pachner notes that the prophets of Axial Time had another rather unusual common feature: none of them wrote down their teachings. They gathered followers around them and taught them through dialogue, face-to-face conversation. The decision not to use written speech, to avoid creating literature, was a characteristic step in the history of the ideas of Axial Time. But suddenly something even more interesting happened: the very avoidance of records, the desire for personal, live learning, was transformed into a new literary genre. The teachers' words became sermon texts and socratic dialogues: this is how mentoring literature arose ^{[1, pp. 91-92]}.

How can one interpret this escape from the written fixation of the speeches of the great teachers, about which they clearly did not conspire among themselves?

Mentoring literature, glamour and Social Work: the Experience of Antiquity

Finally, researchers note the connection between modern motivational literature and the lives of Christian martyrs, "although they teach mainly to achieve success not in this life, but in the afterlife" ^[19]. The latter is a rather curious intersection point of modern mass psychology and the psychology of Axial Time. In a strange way, the psychology of glamour has a mysterious selective affinity with the psychology of glamour. Glamour is not only "an idealistic ideology that has a huge influence on the thinking and behavior of an increasing number of people and at the same time absolute indifference to the values that involve people in society, civilization, history" ^{[20, p. 8]}, but also the pursuit of ideal beauty, which is impossible to achieve. In the study of the attitudes of the modern era, I. Kuvakin writes that glamour embodies otherworldliness, timelessness, being an ideal unreal beauty. Glamour is not just an exorbitant luxury, but a way to think of a world so perfect that any reality is insignificant in front of it ^{[4, pp. 39-40]}. However, the "era of worthlessness" can also be called the "era of mercy" – we are talking not only about the famous detective work, but also about the growth of the "humanization" of modern crime, involving the virtualization of the corresponding activity ^[21]. Or – "neo-feudalism", where the digital revolution has led to the transformation of reality itself: "what is real is what produces a response" ^{[22, p. 6]}.

In general, we can talk about the problem of building a holistic picture of the world, especially in the context of its human dimension ^[23].

The probable reasons for the growing need for the development of proto–forms of social work are the urbanization of the policy type. As a rule, there is always a need for the development of social security systems in cities. This may be connected with a peculiar system of values of ancient policies, which distinguishes them from the mass of societies of the Iron Age ^{[5, pp. 136-143]}. For example, among such forms of social security are the free distribution of bread to the plebs in Rome and the arrangement of circus performances for them – the famous "bread and circuses".