But postmodern biases are preventing its recognition.

Within contemporary academia there is, as many of you may already have noticed, a widespread and persistent resistance to grand narratives in general, and stage theories in particular. This resistance is as relatable as it is regrettable. However, if you examine the phenomenon closely and attentively, it dissolves into thin air. So please, allow me to walk you through the argument step by step.

First of all, everyone seems to be fine with two-stage models. This may sound strange, but is very obviously the case if you take a moment to listen closely. Most people don’t think of themselves as stage theorists when they suggest or employ models with only two stages. But, truth be told, every time you come up with some version of the idea that “the old way of doing things is mechanical, hierarchical, and bureaucratic, but now there’s this new way of doing things that’s organic, egalitarian, and creative” (this is a very common one these days, perhaps even the dominant model), you have inadvertently created a stage model, and a model that’s normatively hierarchical with the later stage considered at least somehow “better” and more advanced than the former, and it’s a model in which people are thought to need to grow out of, or wake up from, the mechanistic view and “realize” the ecological/organic/mycelial one.

People are doing two-stage models all the time—and no one is complaining: The notion that we’ve gone from the age of the nation state to that of a global world order. No one bats an eye. That we’ve transitioned from an industrial economy to an information economy. That we’ve gone from monarchy to liberal democracy. Conventional wisdom. Or we can go on to two-stage models that are widely accepted in academia if not by the public at large: That we have gone from mechanic to organic solidarity (in Durkheim’s classical sociology). That we’ve gone from “mode 1” to “mode 2” knowledge production (a thing that became big in the sociology of science in the 1990s). That after patriarchy comes a society emancipated through feminist critique. That after colonialism comes a postcolonial heritage. And so on.

It’s an interesting thing to note, isn’t it? People are dire opponents of stage theories, but they still subscribe to and even propose two-stage theories—just as long as they can hide that it’s actually a stage theory. So, beneath the surface, people are actually not opponents of stage theory. Scratch and the resistance dissolves in your grip.

Three stages is a bit more controversial, though. The privilege to create three stage models seems to be reserved for established geniuses. Jürgen Habermas, for example, who’s widely considered one of the world’s greatest social theorists, uses a three-stage model to describe the transition from traditional to modern society. Marx and Engels claimed, in the part of their theory people tend to talk about, that we’ve gone from feudalism, to capitalism, and soon communism. And then of course there’s Hegel’s famous dialectics, popularized as the “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” model—a three-stage model. (Nevermind that Fichte actually came up with that one, it’s mostly associated with Hegel.)

But more than three stages—heresy! You lose all credibility and are condemned to wander the desert together with all those obscene adult development charlatans and wacky new age folks.

However, this doesn’t mean that conventional academics are entirely unfair in their dismissal of one of the most popular of stage models: Spiral Dynamics. In fact, I would go as far as to claim that Spiral Dynamics in many ways, despite its intuitive elegance, has prevented and to some extent hurt the mainstream adaptation of stage theories—and rightly so!

The Awkward Uncle

It is by yet an ironic twist of fate that one of the best models of human and societal development has been invented and proposed by some of the least intelligent and intellectually honest people in the field.

The Spiral Dynamics model of Don Beck and Chris Cowan, which builds upon the work of the late psychologist Clare Graves, postulates that people develop through a clear, recognizable sequence of value memes (or “vMemes”), which largely determine the overall pattern of their values, logics, personalities, and behaviors.

For some strange reason that eludes me, the originators of this model managed to catch a simple but elegant pattern in the psychological and societal development of humans, and described it with a precision and clarity that I have yet to see elsewhere: Even as great sociologists like Jürgen Habermas and Günter Dux make attempts at similar theories, they all fall short. For instance, when Habermas formulates his theory of “communicative action” he considers Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, but fails to see how the different value memes must, by necessity, be limited in their ability to communicate with one another and find common grounds on a “rational” basis—how difficult it is, for instance, to reconcile a traditional Christian with a postmodern queer-feminist perspective. The same weakness is apparent in his later work on deliberative democracy (and even in the theories of his critic, Iris Marion Young) . How could Spiral Dynamics teach us things that the greatest of sociologists cannot? ‘Tis a tale of weeds and roses.

Strange as it may be, this model struck gold. It just needs to be seriously revised, and some parts of it scrapped. But first, let’s begin by clarifying what our awkward uncle, Spiral Dynamics, got wrong.

Why “Spiral Dynamics” Doesn’t Work

The Spiral Dynamics model squeezes all development into one single framework simply referred to as “the stages of development”—not taking into account exactly what kind of development we’re talking about, or acknowledging that there can be several dimensions of development.

These, supposedly universal, stages are presented as vividly described color codes (often depicted as a colorful spiral that looks like a popsicle) often written with CAPITAL LETTERS (not sure why): 

• PURPLE (tribal folk people), 
• RED (gang members), 
• BLUE (traditionally religious people), 
• ORANGE (modern mainstream people), 
• GREEN (postmodern people), 
• YELLOW (metamodern people) and 
• TURQUOISE (new-agey “holistic” or “integral” people). 

This crude and ahistoric formulation of stages causes a lot of problems. Besides some awkward mistakes, an apparent lack of basic education on behalf of its creators, and poor taste (all three of which are, after all, forgivable), the model really cannot answer rather simple questions. For instance, who is at a higher value meme, a contemporary fourteen-year-old with modern schooling, or a medieval genius like Thomas of Aquinas? Or, who is highest stage, a high complexity person like Michael Common, the creator of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, or an extraordinarily deep and wise person like Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher and self-help author? (The secret answer to this question is of course that both score really high in two different dimensions of development.)

But still: Once you see the value memes in Spiral Dynamics it’s certainly hard to look away. There really is something about people being Christian and Muslim traditionalists (BLUE), or scientifically- and business minded mainstream people (ORANGE), or post-1968 hippies or radical environmentalist ultra-liberal feminists who love animal rights (GREEN). At least in the world I’ve grown up in, this makes a whole lot of sense.

And there really does seem to be a developmental sequence to this thing: A few hundred years ago, most people were BLUE or below, then people in the richest countries started becoming ORANGE (starting with the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions), and when that had gone on for a while, you had a surge of GREEN people across the most economically developed parts of the Western world.

For all its weaknesses, the Spiral Dynamics model catches something vital. Its main insight is far from self-evident; indeed it has been entirely missed by almost all of social science.

Yet, the model suffers from a number of crucial issues that mandates us to scrap it in favor of something better:

First of all, it looks like a giant popsicle, uses primary colors like a kid’s crayon set to name the stages and ALL CAPS LETTERS (a bit aggressive, innit?). Seriously, being this aesthetically challenged makes you certain of eternal damnation in the halls of science and philosophy and dooms the model to never in a thousand years be taken seriously by any respectable academic or person with decent taste. Just look at this:

(Makes you wonder how many calories one of these bad boys contain?)

Yet, aesthetics can be forgiven, after all, but the next two issues cannot.

Second: The model isn’t properly anchored in the academic reference system and only makes anecdotally use of historiographical and sociological knowledge. This, of course, disqualifies the model from entering the academic discussion.

And third: Spiral Dynamics doesn’t properly separate psychological development from socio-cultural development, plus it smashes all aspects of psychological development together. This leads to the aforementioned problems in which it ranks a contemporary modern school kid above the greatest scholastic thinkers, and where it cannot differentiate between people of high cognitive complexity and people of great spiritual depth. I have addressed this problem in my book The Listening Society within which I present and elaborate the four dimensions of psychological development: Complexity, Depth, Code, and State.

Accordingly, Spiral Dynamics tries to do too many things at once and ends up failing at doing any of them properly.

Regarding the socio-cultural stages, I would argue that it needs an entirely separate model based on proper historical references and the established theoretical frameworks within sociology and historiography. (Yes, this is where the Axial Age thesis enters the picture, but hold on, however, before we move on, allow me to first—only impressionistically, simplifying to the degree that it’s downright incorrect—introduce the six metamemes).

The Metamemes

The metameme model, and the definition of the stages in particular, are significantly more well-anchored in today’s academic conventions than you may have been led to believe. The six metamemes in sequential order are as follows:

1. Animist: Hunter gatherers.
2. Faustian: Early agrarian civilization.
3. Post-faustian: Axial Age moral religions and philosophies.
4. Modern: Industrial and capitalist civilization.
5. Post-modern: Postcolonial, queer, and environmental critique of modern society.
6. Metamodern: The new emerging metameme based on the cultural logic of the Internet.

Now, let me point out that what I am doing here is a lot less controversial or far-fetched than it may first appear.

My point of departure is the century-old academic discussion on modernity (stage 4), which, since the late 1970s, has been accompanied by “the postmodern” (stage 5), i.e. the idea that something comes after modernity, something inherently different from our classical notions of modern life, and that it has begun to challenge and gradually replace it. Taken together, this already well-established framework is in fact a three-stage model since the whole idea of modernity implies a decisive break with the past; that modernity is something new and vastly different from anything that has existed since the beginnings of civilization. The pre-modern → modern → postmodern model is thus not something I just pulled out of my hat, but remains a rather conventional framework that is commonly used among the bulk of scholars and social theorists today. The idea that there are such things as modernity and postmodernity (and something that came before) of course has its opponents. But most scholars know it well, and even if they don’t use it themselves, they generally don’t protest its use by others.

The “pre-modern” category may fulfill its purpose just fine when you want to describe the present or near-past, which is what most social theorists are concerned with. But every historian ought to agree that, for the student of cultural history writ large, it simply doesn’t work to lump the entirety of human history prior to the past couple of centuries into a single juggernaut category. There’s a substantial difference between the pyramid-building civilizations and free-roaming paleolithic hunter gatherers that preceded them by tens of thousands of years, which at least merits the creation of two separate categories or stages. This should hardly be a controversial claim within neither historiography, nor archeology, nor sociology. In fact, the classification of human societies and historical eras into one of the three categories: 1) pre-agrarian, 2) agrarian, and 3) modern industrial, is so conventional that it’s almost embarrassing to explicitly mention it. And then we have all the smart social theorists eagerly engaged in the discussion about what comes after modernity, including if or how we’ve already made such a decisive break from classical enlightenment modernity. Some talk about postmodernity, others about “late modernity”, some use the term “hypermodernity”, but no matter the preferred term, we’re talking about a stage (or whichever term scholars prefer to use: phase, epoch, and so on) following the modern one.

One big part of the problem is that most social theorists aren’t historians, and most historians aren’t social theorists. The job of social theorists is, most often, to analyze and describe contemporary society. As such, they’re mostly preoccupied with modernity and postmodernity while the pre-modern stages remain largely ignored. Historians, on the other hand, are generally not too interested in social theory, or, for obvious reasons, contemporary society, so they tend to be unaware of or uninterested in the idea of the postmodern.

Depending on which country is being discussed, or which school of thought is applied, you have a veritable jungle out there of different time periods, eras, epochs, and so on. For the most part, however, all of these don’t help much to understand and explain history and the world. They merely function as chronological categories, rarely as qualitative ones. I’ll get back to this part about chronological versus qualitative categories in history, but very briefly: “The Middle Ages” is a chronological category, i.e. it’s a certain period of time (circa 500 to 1400–1500 CE), Modernity on the other hand is more of a qualitative one (it denotes certain forms of culture, as we discuss in this book). Chronological categories aren’t very useful for understanding the world. We must have qualitative categories to do so—and modernity, postmodernity, and, as I’ll elaborate shortly, “axiality” are such well-established categories that have found widespread use and recognition in academia.

It’s also worth mentioning that pre-agrarian times remain largely neglected by most historians. After all, their job is to analyze written sources, and as such, everything before the agrarian era—what historians rather impertinently dismiss as “prehistory”—is largely beyond their field of expertise. “Prehistory” then, has become the domain of archaeologists, but for the most part they’re too busy digging treasures up to care about what their more theoretically minded colleagues in other departments are up to.

So here’s the model most historians, sociologists, and anthropologists would agree on if they were talking with each other:

1. Prehistory, hunter gatherers, “Stone Age”
2. Premodern, traditional, agrarian civilization
3. Modern, industrial civilization
4. Postmodern, late modern, hyper modern etc.

My point is that even if most historians and social theorists are too busy with all kinds of other stuff than to “obsess” about stages, the established discourse within the social sciences actually already implies a four-stage model. Fortunately, however, most of them remain blissfully unaware about the heresy they’re guilty of! Many of them could literally risk their careers if they expressed the stage model that everyone is already taking for granted. Stage theories are instruments of oppression, right?

So, what have I done to get to six stages? Well, I’ve simply divided the so-called “pre-modern”, “traditional”, (or whatever scholars want to call the way of life between the agricultural and industrial revolutions) category into two separate stages. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: This category is just waaay too broad. The differences between the early pyramid-building slave societies, and the much later cathedral-building ones with their moral religions and literate traditions, are simply too numerous and deep-going to adequately fit both kinds of societies within the same category.

To me, the contrast between the former (faustian, pyramid-building) and the latter (posfaustian cathedral-building) always seemed like one of a magnitude similar to that between modernity and postmodernity.

But there is more to it. The two stages even have a similar dynamic between them as the Modern and Postmodern metamemes: Postmodern looks and feels a lot like Modern, still relying on some kind of late-stage industrialism, but there are profound shifts in culture and values that take place. Correspondingly, the world religions like Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity seem to reorder still-agrarian societies according to values that, among other things, question slavery, war, inequality, and the arbitrary use of power. As such, I chose to add the -post prefix to the latter of the two stages, Faustian and Postfaustian together constituting “pre-modernity”.

To truly notice the difference between Faustian and Postfaustian cultures, just compare the Babylonian ritual where the high priestess literally has sex with the king on a table in front of everyone (this was to celebrate the advent of spring)—compare that with the celibate life of Christian or Buddhist monks. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine more different cultural expressions: going from slam-bang elite orgies on the table as “sacred marriage”, to chastity and contemplation of moral universality. Of course, Catholic priests do get their action too, but it’s always a very clandestine affair.

So, all I did was say that we can’t lump all of “pre-modern” into one big basket. And I split it into two, which I call Faustian and Postfaustian:

As such, I merely added one additional stage to the existing sociological and historical framework, and then began exploring what the next stage following postmodernity might look like? (The box above with the question mark in it).

It’s not a huge jump, just another step following from what is already established. But it’s the final piece of a puzzle that opened up a whole new understanding of history, society, and cultural development. It revealed a pattern, a pattern that has been hidden in plain sight, namely that societal development has a certain rhythm; that the peculiar dichotomy between modernity and postmodernity isn’t something entirely novel, but simply echoes a pattern that has occurred before. History is linear, sure, with one thing leading to next, but it’s also cyclical, with certain patterns that repeat. Linear and cyclical, both at the same time, like a fractal—or, like a spiral. (Hmm, maybe that awkward uncle wasn’t that awkward after all.

In any case, one of those fractal patterns, of course, contains what has been referred to as the Axial Age. Ladies and gentlemen, and esteemed non-binaries, please allow this article’s guest of honor to enter the stage:

The Axial Age Thesis

The Axial Age is a thesis introduced by the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) to designate the period during which the great universal moral religions, wisdom tradition, and philosophies emerged. This thesis revolves around the core observation that several of the world’s major religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions emerged independently yet simultaneously during the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. The term “Axial Age” was first coined in a 1946 lecture in Genève and later became the key concept in The Origin and Goal of History from 1949. The observation that the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, The Buddha, and Confucius were more or less contemporaries is, however, much older than Jasper’s thesis and goes back to the French Enlightenment thinker Abraham Hyacinthe (take a breath, there’s more) Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). Others, such as Max Weber, also mentioned this historical time as a turning point in which a new sort of “salvation” religion supplanted the older so-called “magical” religions, but it is generally Max Weber’s brother Alfred who is credited with having inspired Jaspers to come up with the idea of an Axial Age.

Now, Jaspers wasn’t a historian, and only less than a tenth of The Origin and Goal of History is dedicated to the historical overview—the “origin”—the rest is about Jaspers’ philosophy: the universal “goal” of history. His Axial Age thesis is therefore to be considered more of an attempt at a broader philosophical effort to mediate between relativistic historicism and abstract universalism in the ideological vacuum of postwar Germany than an accurate historiographical account of the intellectual and religious developments of the 1st millennium BCE.

However, Jasper’s original work does not reflect the current state of Axial Age research which has evolved markedly since the renowned Polish-Israeli sociologist and writer Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923–2010) renewed the topic in the 1970s and -80s, and especially since the American sociologist Robert Bellah (1927–2013), internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion, resumed his interest in the Axial Age (which at the time had been dormant since the 1960s when he wrote a short paper on the topic), culminating in an academic conference in 2008 that produced an anthology containing contributions from a number of high profiling scholars, including Eisenstadt, Hans Joas, Jan Assmann, Björn Wittrock, Johann P. Arnasson, and others. In 2011 Bellah published his magnum opus, a 700-page tour de force exploring the evolutionary aspects of religion titled Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age in which he explores each of the axial civilizations (except Iran) in impressive detail. In addition, Jürgen Habermas, whose preoccupation with Jaspers and the Axial Age goes back to his youth, has addressed the Axial Age thesis continuously in his work since the 1970s, including The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his recent work, the 1700-pages-long history book on philosophy in which Jaspers, Eisenstadt and Bellah are prominently featured. Consequently, the term that initially began its life in a relatively obscure and esoteric philosophy book in post-war Germany has now more or less become the default academic term in sociology, philosophy, and theology to denote the transformational phase in religion and culture that occurred in the 1st millennium BCE and beyond. Not bad for a crusty old kraut.

I have written a paper on the subject, a comprehensive introduction to the Axial Age thesis, titled “The Axial Turn: A Critical Assessment of the Axial Age Thesis and the Historiographical Qualities of Axiality” (I know, sounds pretty wanky) that you can read here.

The main result of this investigation is the identification of the following six qualities of The Axial Age, or more accurately, of the non-temporal category of “axiality” (similar to modernity):

1. Writing and Textual Canonization
2. Transcendence
3. Second-order Thinking
4. Disenchantment and Disembedding
5. The “Individual”
6. Religion as Soteriology

These six qualities form the core of what I have described as the Postfaustian Metememe. And all of these qualities are derived from the decade-old academic discussion on axiality and the Axial Age, which thereby anchors this “missing” stage of development in the academic reference system.

However, although the Axial Age thesis has been established as a valid thesis within academia, it still to this day remains a rather obscure and relatively esoteric topic among scholars. Historians are not the only ones to have resisted or ignored the axial thesis. Most sociologists have not been eager to adopt it either. Despite having rid itself of the most esoteric aspects of Jaspers’ original thesis, along with his eurocentrism, and despite the high-quality research that has been produced during the last couple of decades, the field of Axial Age research—if we can even talk about such a thing—is still limited to a very small number of scholars. And why is that? Well, the reason may be as simple as the fact that grande histoire is not in vogue—and has not been since Jean-François Lyotard in 1979 defined our new postmodern condition as “incredulity towards all metanarratives”. The grand narrative of modernity, that rationality and science eventually would produce a perfect utopia, did not survive the post-war period’s critical assessments of the social and environmental consequences of modern civilization. The subsequent collapse of socialism, and its corresponding grand narrative of dialectical materialism, put the final nail in the coffin and discredited any such attempts at grand, overarching narratives thereafter. Accordingly, petite histoire has been the dominant doctrine within the historiographical sciences at least since the end of the Cold War.

This doesn’t mean that grande histoire or metanarratives have been entirely absent during the last decades, but it has mainly been a prominent phenomenon in popular non-fiction. Yuval Harari and David Graeber might have sold a lot of books, but that is (luckily) not sufficient to change the mind of serious scholars. And while Robert Bellah and David Christian (a historian who wrote a massive book, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, about the history of the world beginning with the Big Bang) may have gotten the respect of the academic community—having demonstrated impressive rigor and scholarly craftmanship—it would be a hard stretch to claim that their accomplishments have been trendsetting.

Yet, it’s not that the Axial Age thesis runs completely counter to the dominant intellectual currents of the past four decades. It’s arguably more an issue of aiming slightly outside the outer limits of the target ring of contemporary academia: The axial discourse is “trans-cultural”, rather than “multi-cultural”; and it’s “pre-colonial”, rather than “post-colonial”—hence, the Axial Age strays just outside the margins of what has been academically kosher in the humanities since the end of the Cold War. This liminal condition of being close, but not quite there, can explain why the axial thesis has kept resurfacing, but never becoming firmly established, nor entirely dismissed or discredited either.

This may also explain why I ran into considerable, uhm, “friction”, to phrase it mildly, in order to get the abovementioned paper approved at the historical department at Lund University in Sweden. When I finally, after a prolonged struggle, succeeded at getting the paper through the system (after all, it upheld all academic standards and requirements) the reviewer revealed their postmodern intellectual bias, by proposing—in writing on the final verdict—that the thesis probably would have been better if it had made use of—hold on—Judith Butler (the “mother” of queer feminism) and Edward Said (the “father” of postcolonialism)—despite neither of them having ever written anything about or even, to my knowledge, mentioned the Axial Age, and despite never having been referenced in the Axial Age debate either.

That the reviewer couldn’t help themselves from mentioning these postmodern heroes, despite their questionable relevance to the topic, is of course a telling sign of the prevailing postmodern bias within academia. They argued that it would have been better if I had made use of more contemporary theory to reflect the current state of historiography—but Edward Said has been dead since 2003 and Judith Butler still remains best known for her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter which came out in 1990 and 1993 respectively. The Axial Age thesis, on the other hand, has experienced a revival after 2005 and was extensively addressed by the (at the time) still living Jürgen Habermas in his mastodont work Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie published in two volumes in 2019 and 2022.

Well, well, as I’ve said so many times: Valuememes can’t be friends—and the Axial Age thesis, being transcultural and pre-colonial and defined by crusty old white dudes, doesn’t fit into the prevailing postmodern ideology and thus elicits strong allergic reactions that sadly prevents its wider recognition. But this doesn’t change the fact that I’ve come to believe that the Axial Age thesis, as it has reemerged since the beginning of the 21st century, is a valid and extraordinary insightful academic discussion that illuminates and clarifies what should be considered a separate premodern stage of development in the same way we’ve come to consider modernity and postmodernity two separate stages or modes of socio-cultural development.

With the Axial Age thesis and the associated discussion on so-called axiality (a qualitative rather than temporal category in a similar vein to that of modernity), we no longer need to refer to the “BLUE vMeme” or other pseudoscientific notions. We can simply refer to the numerous highly acclaimed scholars from all around the world who have participated in and made vital contributions to the Axial Age thesis and thereby rendered a previously obscure and esoteric term into a valid academic sub-field within the social sciences. Accordingly, the Axial Age is the missing piece to the puzzle that enables us to go beyond the implicitly established four-stage model. And with an established notion of five stages, I’d argue that the road becomes wide open for an exploration of a sixth stage, a stage of socio-cultural development beyond the postmodern.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium, and Substack, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.