Lecture 44: The World That the Modern Revolution Made

The World That the Modern Revolution Made ................................

LECTURE

And in the pace of change, this acceleration in the pace of historical

change has also had a profound impact on ways of thinking, and we

could even say on ways of experiencing the world.

N

ow, as we did with the era of Agrarian civilizations, we need to stand

back and try to get a general impression of the world created by the

Modern Revolution. What are the main distinguishing features of

the modern world? Unfortunately, the modern world is so changeable, and

we are so enmeshed in it, that it is extraordinarily dif¿ cult to see beyond the

details. Still, we must try, so here is a provisional attempt.

Rapid innovation has meant a speedup. Constant innovation means constant

change, so history itself moves faster. The Modern era has lasted for about

a third of a millennium. So much historical scholarship is about the Modern

era that it is easy to forget how short a period this is. The Agrarian era lasted

30 times as long, and human history as a whole perhaps 600 times as long. If

we collapse the history of the Universe into 13 rather than 13 billion years,

the Modern era accounts for no more than 6 seconds. Yet in this instant,

human societies have been transformed around the entire Earth, which is

why despite its brevity the Modern Revolution counts as one of the eight

thresholds of this course.

Accelerating change makes it dif¿ cult to pick out stable features of our world.

In the Paleolithic and Agrarian eras, we could identify features and structures

that endured for thousands of years, such as the rhythms of peasant life or the

basic structures of tributary states. In the Modern era, it is hard to identify

any features that will certainly be present in, say, 500 years. Fundamental

change now occurs on the scale of a single lifetime. This affects our personal

sense of time and history. Indeed, the modern vision of a Universe in which

everything has a history, including the Universe itself, is itself the product

of an era of universal change. The astonishing pace of change means that

today’s world is extremely unstable.