Traits of persistent beliefs
There is an oft-repeated quip that the history of Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. One could argue, similarly, that the history of Chinese philosophy consists of footnotes to Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha. Each 5 of these figures lived and died within a few centuries of each other 1, begging the question of whether there was something special about the centuries in which they lived. In an attempt to capture the significance of this period, the centuries from 700 to 200 BCE are now termed the "Axial Age."
If you believe the Axial Age theory, cultural evolution may be analogous to biological evolution in obeying a pattern of punctuated equilibrium. Just like the Cambrian Explosion allowed for a rapid expansion in new life forms, certain periods in history, such as the Axial Age and the Enlightenment, were uniquely generative. In typical eras, ideas change gradually as they interact and recombine. In pivotal eras, the external pressures on ideas accumulate and lead to a sea change.
The motivating pressure for a new ideology is often the perception of moral decline, which apparently is an eternal human impulse. This perception is then refined and articulated into a messianic message, offering a way forward. To buffer itself to resistance, a movement must have some mechanism for absorbing and correcting its critiques — this often takes the form of making questioning itself a part of the movement's practice. And eventually, the ideas cool down from their messianic fervor into rituals, institutions, and habits that reinforce their continued existence.
If enough of these motivating forces coincide, then our present day may become known as another pivotal era in history, a Third Axial Age.
1. The perception of moral decline
In 2015, the essayist William Deresiewicz published a book called Excellent Sheep, haranguing elite colleges for churning out carbon-copied investment bankers and consultants motivated by nothing other than the search for prestige. Part of the problem, he argued, was that students were no longer engaging seriously with the liberal arts, and therefore lacked effective ways to understand the meaning of the human condition.
Deresiewicz turned out to be prescient, as the share of humanities majors continued to drop over the ensuing decade:
Students entering college between 2016 and 2022, myself included, thus arrived at a unique inflection point, in which the careerist majors conquered the university. Any perceptive teenager would have started to wonder — as Deresiewicz did — whether we were losing something important.
2. Arrival of a messianic message
I often wonder how the early Christians felt in the presence of Paul.2 Just imagine — you are poor, sick, and neglected, and the Roman Republic is in ruins, replaced by a decadent empire. What could be the meaning of all this suffering? Suddenly, Paul comes along and gives you the answer: sin is the condition of earthly life, and Jesus died for your sins, so that by believing in God and Jesus you, too, could find salvation from suffering.
Keep in mind that Jesus had just been crucified a couple decades earlier. Converting to Christianity in the days of Paul must have been an electrifying experience, because within a few hundred years, the entire Roman empire had declared itself Christian. A fitting modern analogy would be the entire city of New York becoming Knicks fans in the run-up to the 2026 NBA championship.
I joined Effective Altruism in my freshman year because I saw a picture of a famous tech founder on their table at the club fair. When I talked to the then-club president, she told me that the movement was dedicated to "doing the most good using evidence and reason," and I signed up then and there.
The tech founder on the flyer? Sam Bankman-Fried.
But that was before his crypto fraud case and the federal prison, and we were all looking for ideals to believe in. In a time of rampant careerism, when living a life of meaning seemed the least popular thing, I wanted to believe that Effective Altruism could make people care again. Eventually, I became an organizer, running reading groups and recruiting new members for the movement. What could be more important, I felt, than fighting the trend of moral decline that had captured our entire generation?
3. The movement absorbs its own critiques
There's a Kafka line that sums this up well:
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.
As I learned more about Effective Altruism, I started questioning its priorities. Why, for example, should anyone prioritize shrimp welfare over climate change?
The most powerful part of the EA movement is its capacity for institutionalized self-criticism. Don't agree with what people are working on? Take your concerns to the EA forum, and you will find people arguing for both sides. For example, it turns out that there are plenty of good reasons to work on shrimp welfare, such as the fact that most shrimp nurseries still practice eyestalk ablation — literally cutting off or crushing the female shrimps' eye stalks — to speed up reproduction, but there are also many reasons that climate change may deserve more attention within EA. Knowing that reasonable people have debated the pros and cons on every issue makes it easier to accept that a given EA cause area is likely to be a good one.
Later on, I found out that Judaism has a tradition called the Talmud — a book in which Rabbis do a similar thing to the EA Forum and develop refutations to the arguments that might question the Jewish tradition. Perhaps the world's oldest FAQ, the Talmud provides answers to questions like how to spend to Sabbath, how to act with justice, and even why we exist. Strangely enough, the Forum covers similar ground, with topics like how to spend your time at a retreat, how to do the most good, and even what the metaphysical basis of morality might be.
Making critique a core part of your ideological system is a great way to ensure its staying power, regardless of its practical effects. It works for Effective Altruism, it works for Judaism, and it might even be working for democracy.
4. Building an enduring tradition
“-Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.”
— Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986).
Around the year 1000, Christianity started to lose sight of the teachings of Jesus and Paul, and became increasingly corrupted by the legalism that early Christians had sought to escape. Over time, the increasingly dominant institution of the Church provided the perfect pretense for medieval priests to seek indulgences and for mobs to call people heretics and set them on fire.
Paul's contemporaries may have found it hard to believe that people would one day be reading treatises on the scale of Calvin and Thomas Aquinas, whose goal was to analyze scripture and form a logically consistent basis for Christianity. But without the electric energy of an Apostle — in a world where Christian love results in heretics burned at the stake — how could you keep the faith alive, other than through careful rationalization?
Because of its continual contradictions, successive Christian leaders, whether Pope Gregory VII, Martin Luther, or John Calvin, sought to reform the Church and reaffirm its ideological purity. Like Paul, they found clever ways to revive the relevance of Christian beliefs and keep the tradition alive, even as scientific evidence started to challenge its fundamental assumptions. Today, it's hard to imagine that the ideas of Christianity, and of Abrahamic religions in general, could ever truly disappear. The ideology and traditions have taken hold.
For effective altruism on college campuses, the appeal to rationality that made it so successful is also its greatest weakness. When insecurities about moral decline ran high, a movement that explained why being a quant trader or computer programmer was a moral act was made to meet the moment. As that feeling started to subside, however — as the next generation comes to terms with a careerist status quo — the demand for moral salvation isn't quite what it used to be. But removing the messianic fervor from a movement may not be such a bad thing, if it enables those left behind to act with more clarity and perspective.
The Third Axial Age
Being a Roman citizen, though they didn't know it at the time, meant having uniquely high leverage for determining the religious, moral, and cultural future for billions of future people. Since the decline of the Roman empire, there has not been a single political unit that could distribute a religious idea across all of Western civilization by fiat. If the present era is to become a third Axial age, or even just a shift in the ideological fabric, then what we choose to believe, and the way that our actions prove out those beliefs, could be be similarly pivotal in the arc of history.
Our generation is faced with an impressive slate of politico-economic ideas: effective altruism, accelerationism, the tech right, anti-AI movements, solarpunk... the list goes on. That's not to mention the "scientific" political systems of the 20th century: communism, fascism, socialism, welfare capitalism, and so on. These ideas all hold the latent potential for becoming grand new ideologies that topple the Enlightenment-era consensus. And just as the Age of Exploration toppled medieval assumptions and helped catalyze the Enlightenment, a new age of demagoguery and technological disruption may lead the world to question our fundamental assumptions about democracy and human nature.
In the long run, movements that make themselves open to critique — that, in the words of David Deutsch, have built-in error-correcting mechanisms — are the ones that I would bet on. Democratic elections, for instance, allow societies to choose new laws and rulers when the old ones aren't working, without millions of people getting killed in a brutal revolution. The scientific method allows people to create better explanations by using logic and experiments to disprove the existing alternatives. This is why, for all its faults, the effective altruism movement still seems promising, because it has the capacity to change in response to critique. Based on the success of the scientific method, market economies, and democracy, the idea of institutional error-correction has itself become a persistent belief, with many of the same useful properties of the ideologies it participates in. In this respect, Christianity provides a cautious example, most famously with the centuries of violence between Catholics and Protestants. Despite its broad appeal initially, the religion lacked a mechanism for directing critique into continuous improvement, which has led to increased division as ideological factions developed.
On the other hand, there is always a risk that directing criticism through institutional channels pacifies people into accepting the existing institutions, sticking us into a local minimum, rather than enabling the build-up of frustration that can topple an existing system. This is why I have described self-critique primarily as a strategy for developing persistent belief systems, rather than an end in itself. Even with Effective Altruism, it's not always clear when the addressing of critiques is earnest and when it's a means of persuasion, especially given that the fundamental terms of the debate are set on the grounds of the impartial maximization of welfare.
My prediction is that history will shift increasingly towards movements that can absorb their own critiques. If such a shift does happen, it will likely start in the minutiae of our everyday interactions, with the identification of moral decline, the arrival of a messianic message, the construction of a movement that absorbs its most potent critiques, and the movement's consolidation into an enduring ideology. Much like the biological strategies of K-selected and r-selected species, or hawk and dove strategies in evolutionary game theory, these cultural processes are one way of ensuring an idea can become part of the equilibrium in the social fabric, making the leap from idea to ideology.