Within just a few generations, the Modern Revolution has destroyed the
lifeways and social structures that dominated the Agrarian and Paleolithic
eras of human history. Even a century ago, viable communities of foragers
and early Agrarian era villages À ourished in many parts of the world. Today,
none exist outside of a modern state. Particularly striking is the destruction of
peasant lifeways, which had shaped the life experience of most humans for
almost 10,000 years. The Modern Revolution has also destroyed traditional
tribute-taking states.
In just a few generations, the Modern Revolution has also created entirely
new types of community and new power structures. Modern communities
are extraordinarily large. The modern world is organized into 194 sovereign
states. The most populous, the People’s Republic of China, had a population
of 1.3 billion in 2007, or more than ¿ ve times the entire population of
the Earth 1,000 years earlier. Sovereign states have divided up the entire
landmass of the Earth (with the partial exception of Antarctica). Even 1,000
years ago, states controlled only 13% of the Earth, because vast areas in
Australia, the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia were beyond their reach. There
are now 20 to 30 cities with populations of more than 5 million (the total
population of the world 10,000 years
ago), and several have populations of
more than 10 million.
Modern communities are integrated
globally through exchanges of ideas,
goods, diseases, and people. Indeed,
today’s integrated global community of
6 billion modern humans counts as one
of the most striking emergent properties of the modern world. Politically, this
global community is integrated loosely through international organizations
such as the United Nations. These provide a modern equivalent of the
meetings once held between Paleolithic communities of foragers. Collective
learning is now a global process. The exchanges of information that have been
the main driver of human history now take place more or less instantaneously
throughout the world within a diverse and often well-educated population of
6 billion people. The increasing “synergy of collective learning” is magni¿ ed
by the use of intellectual prosthetics such as computers. Global integration
Today, more people eat well
and live without chronic
suffering than in any other
era of human history.