The World That the Modern Revolution Made Lecture 44
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.
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Lecture 44: The World That the Modern Revolution Made
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.
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