AXIAL AGE

Spotted by Vito Haeckler

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Vito Haeckler returns with another installment of Words in the Wild. Readers are reminded that Vito has a longstanding habit of taking an innocent observation and extrapolating it ad infinitum, AD absurdum, and occasionally off the road entirely. The Council assumes no responsibility for where he ends up—or for the ADs encountered along the way.

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I came across this phrase the other day:

AXIAL AGE.

I’d never heard it before, so I looked it up.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers used Axial Age for that remarkable stretch of history, roughly 800 to 200 B.C., when some very big ideas were turning up in different parts of the world. You had Confucius and Lao-tzu in China, the Buddha and the Upanishadic thinkers in India, the Hebrew prophets, and the philosophers over in Greece.

Jaspers thought this was a great turning point in human history. That’s where axial comes in. An axis is the thing everything turns around.

Fair enough.

But I’ve spent enough time around machinery to know that if something is going to turn, sooner or later you’re going to need an axle.

And that got me wondering about the rest of the car.

I figure the HEADLIGHT AGE came along with the Enlightenment.

Everybody switched on the high beams and figured we’d finally be able to see everything.

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Then there was the COMBUSTION AGE.

Revolutions. Ideologies. Industrialization. Industrial warfare.

There was plenty of fuel and no shortage of sparks.

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After that came the TRANSMISSION AGE.

Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, Internet.

We got very good at sending things from one place to another. Eventually we got so good at it that everybody could know what everybody else was thinking before anybody had much time to think about it.

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Then came what I’d call the DASHBOARD AGE.

Polls. Statistics. Ratings. Rankings. Test scores. Economic indicators. Likes. Followers. Everything got a number, and every number got a little needle telling us whether we were doing better or worse.

Nothing wrong with keeping an eye on the gauges.

You just don’t want to spend so much time looking at the dashboard that you forget to look through the windshield.

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Somewhere in there we also entered the REARVIEW-MIRROR AGE.

We kept driving forward, but we started spending an awful lot of time looking backward.

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Which brings us to where I think we are now.

THE MUFFLER AGE.

A muffler doesn’t stop an engine. That’s important. The engine keeps running just fine. The muffler only makes sure you don’t hear so much of it.

And that reminds me of another name from the muffler business:

Midas.

Old King Midas got his wish. Everything he touched turned to gold. It sounded like a wonderful arrangement until he discovered that a blessing which touches everything has a way of becoming a curse. Maybe we’ve acquired the Midas touch ourselves. We wanted cameras for security. Cameras to catch thieves. Cameras to settle arguments about what really happened. Cameras to keep an eye on things. So we got cameras.

Everywhere.

And like Midas with his gold, we may be discovering that once the thing you wished for touches everything, it changes the world you were trying to improve.

There are cameras on the streets, cameras in the stores, cameras at work. Computers remember where people go and what they do. Other systems keep an eye on what gets said. After a while, nobody even has to tell you to keep your voice down.

You start doing that yourself.

That’s a pretty good muffler.

— Vito Haeckler
Words in the Wild