As the subplots and sub-subplots cascade endlessly around the question of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and the Donald Trump campaign’s possible collusion, it would do us all good to take a few steps back and reflect more deeply on the big picture. Whether or not there was any covert collusion, there was plenty of open hanky-panky, and far too little awareness on where that might lead. Beyond any concerns that these two authoritarian leaders have been working in concert lies the question of why they might have wanted to.

President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both believe in democracy of a sort — they believe themselves very popular, and therefore empowered to do whatever they see fit. What they subscribe to is often called “illiberal democracy,” but “anti-liberal democracy” would be closer to the mark, maybe with a second set of quote marks around “democracy.” Liberal democracy operates within a normative framework of rights.  Illiberal democracy ignores that framework, while anti-liberal democracy avidly attacks it. Putin attacks it as an outsider, seeing it as a Western imposition. Trump attacks it as a different kind of outsider — a privileged rich kid who has lived his whole life outside its rules, palling around with a variety of outlaws, and enablers like his mentor Roy Cohn, lawyer for Joe McCarthy and the New York mob.

Modern democracy is a child of the Enlightenment, but Trump and Putin’s opposition goes much deeper than simply being a counter-Enlightenment position. The term “counter-Enlightenment,” first popularized by Isaiah Berlin in the 1970s, has mutated considerably since then. While critiques of the Enlightenment have by now been mounted from almost everywhere along the political spectrum, most of these are not attacks on reason per se, but on how critics see the Enlightenment as having conceived of reason and deployed it.

Trump and Putin, however, can be seen as countering something much earlier and more basic: their shared vision of anti-liberal democracy isn’t just opposition to the 18th century. It’s more like opposition to the 8th century — before Christ. What is sometimes called the Axial Age, roughly from 800 to 200 BCE, is when most major world religions and philosophies first emerged. It was the age of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Upanishads, the Hebrew prophets, Greek natural science and philosophy and so on. Jesus and Muhammad both came after this period, but built on foundations laid at this time. The term was coined by Karl Jaspers, who wrote:

If there is an axis in history, we must find it empirically in profane history, as a set of circumstances significant for all men, including Christians. It must carry conviction for Westerners, Asiatics, and all men, without the support of any particular content of faith, and thus provide all men with a common historical frame of reference.

The spiritual process which took place between 800 and 200 B.C.E. seems to constitute such an axis. It was then that the man with whom we live today came into being. Let us designate this period as the “axial age.”

In short, this is when the world as we know it — and have known it for millennia — was created. The first large, semi-stable civilizations were established, and in that new social world new ways of thinking aroused and spread. (More on the reasons behind this below.) Part of what they had in common was a shift from unquestioned — even unquestionable — ethnocentrism and authoritarianism to universalism and inquiry as foundational principles. The religious traditions that emerged brought together people of different ethnicities and even different races, and birthed monastic and scholastic traditions sprang that have profoundly transformed our world.

Of course ethnocentrism and authoritarianism have never gone away, but they have significantly retreated as primary societal organizing principles, and they’ve never regained their unquestioned status. This is one reason why Nazi Germany stands out as a rare example when the clock was turned so far back. It’s also how the current rise of ethno-nationalist anti-liberal democracy should be understood as well.  Far from defending Christianity from Islam — as Trump and Putin might both suggest — it is a fundamental attack on the universalism that Christianity and Islam hold in common, along with Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Judaism and so forth. It’s not a war of civilizations but a war on civilization, in the name of a more primitive, tribal mode that can justly be called barbarism.

There’s no real way back to a pre-Axial Age, but tremendous destruction can be sown in the effort to get there. This can be seen in Trump’s White House and his contempt for process, described by Greg Sargent in a recent Washington Post post, exploring the president’s “contempt for facts and reality-based policy.” Indeed, Trump’s contempt encompasses everything all the way back to the pre-Socratics, the Axial Age source of the Western scientific tradition.

Sargent pointed to a New York Times report that scores of science and technology officials have departed, and that consequential decisions, including the reversal of Barack Obama’s climate change policies and “proposals to sharply reduce spending for research on climate change, science and health,” have been made without input from those who remain. 

But for now, it is hard to avoid viewing all of this in its larger context. As I’ve argued, the Trump White House has been infected from the outset with a kind of deep rot of bad faith — a contempt for legitimate process, fact-based debate and reality-based governing — that has bordered on all-corrosive. This low regard for science may well prove to be another data point illustrating this pattern.

The reason for calling this pre-Axial behavior is straightforward: Science and scientific thinking are products of the Axial Age, along with a whole complex of related critical thinking practices that inform how humanity has flourished since then.

A Twitter thread by historian Seth Cotlar commenting on Sargent’s post brought this deeper significance into focus: “There are many ways to ‘message’ resistance to Trump. This WaPo summary points to one particularly effective strategy — focus on PROCESS,” he began, with a screenshot including the above. “There always will be (and should be) disagreement on policy CONTENT. The resistance will never find total consensus on policy content,” he continued. “But the place where progressives, liberals, moderates, & conservatives should be able to find common ground is around PROCEDURES.”

This highlights the broad-based way people across the political spectrum draw on a shared framework of practices, values, and institutional structures that can be traced back to the Axial Age. One thing that binds all these practices together is the glue of social trust. To make sound decisions, we need sound information, sound ways of gathering and analyzing it, and sound ways of reasoning about it. We are all fallible as individuals, but can become less so if we work wisely together, ensuring the soundness of what we do throughout the whole process.

As I noted here in 2014, philosopher Brian L. Keeley has described how conspiracy theories “throw into doubt the various institutions that have been set up to generate reliable data and evidence. In doing so, they reveal just how large a role trust in both institutions and individuals plays in the justification of our beliefs. . . . In modern science, this procedure involves the elaborate mechanisms of publication, peer review, professional reputation, university accreditation and so on. Thus, we are warranted in believing the claims of science because these claims are the result of a social mechanism of warranted belief production.”