Noema Magazine – Issue VII: The Next Axial Age

Noema is an independent magazine exploring the transformations reshaping human life, from technology and artificial intelligence to philosophy, politics, climate, culture and global systems.

Published by the Berggruen Institute, it brings long-form essays, interviews and visual storytelling together around some of the defining questions of the 21st century.

Issue VII: The Next Axial Age asks whether humanity is entering a period of transformation comparable to the original Axial Age, when many of the world’s major philosophical, ethical and religious traditions emerged more than two millennia ago. Today, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, genetic engineering and the climate crisis are once again forcing fundamental questions about human purpose, consciousness, nature and our place in the world.

Across the issue, competing perspectives examine whether new technologies can expand human awareness and reconnect us with planetary systems — or instead flatten knowledge into an increasingly uniform computational worldview. Contributions move between AI, consciousness, ecology, spirituality and complexity, asking what kind of shared ethical framework might emerge from a period of profound technological and environmental change.

About Noema
Noema is a Los Angeles-based magazine published by the Berggruen Institute. Its editorial scope spans technology, philosophy, democracy, geopolitics, economics and the climate crisis, with an emphasis on long-form thinking about structural change rather than short-term news. The print edition appears annually, turning selected ideas and commissioned work into a substantial thematic issue.