Thanks—I agree that this distinction is not as crisp as would be ideal. I’d see religion-spreading, and movement-building, as in practice almost always a mixed strategy: in part one is giving resources to future people, and in part one is also directly altering how the future goes.
But it’s more like buck-passing than it is like direct work, so I think I should just not include the Axial age in the list of particularly influential times (given my definition of ‘influential’).
Thanks—I agree that this distinction is not as crisp as would be ideal. I’d see religion-spreading, and movement-building, as in practice almost always a mixed strategy: in part one is giving resources to future people, and in part one is also directly altering how the future goes.
But it’s more like buck-passing than it is like direct work, so I think I should just not include the Axial age in the list of particularly influential times (given my definition of ‘influential’).