The World That the Modern Revolution Made

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.

Now, 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.

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 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.

has been painful, as it has forced communities with diverse ethical and social norms into close proximity. Modern weaponry has ensured that such con icts can take highly destructive forms.

Entirely new types of lifeways have evolved. Most people today are no longer foragers or self-suf cient, rural-dwelling peasants. They are wage earners, integrated into modern market systems and living, increasingly, in large towns and cities. Modern lifeways have transformed life experiences. For example, they are transforming gender relations by freeing increasing numbers of women from the lifetime of childbearing and child rearing that was their lot in peasant societies and allowing them to take on many new roles. Though many forms of gender inequality survive, traditional forms of patriarchy are being undermined. The material wealth generated by modern societies has raised the living standards of billions of people. Today, more people eat well and live without chronic suffering than in any other era of human history. The human life span has increased. As rates of child mortality have declined, average global life expectancies have risen from the Agrarian era norm of about 30 years to 65–70 years in 2000. This momentous change may prove a foretaste of future extensions in the span of a single human life.

A fourth striking feature of modern communities is the changing role of coercion. Within the tribute-taking states of the later Agrarian world, coercion was a widely accepted way of controlling behavior. Slavery, coerced labor, and domestic violence ourished. Today, behavior is steered more effectively by market forces rather than by coercion, and modern states increasingly frown on the private use of violence. Yet when they choose to do so, modern states can wield coercion far more effectively than traditional tribute-taking states. Even the most democratic states maintain signi cant prison populations (0.8% of the population of the U.S. was incarcerated in June 2006). And modern states maintain levels of military power that threaten the future of human society. Even after the Cold War, several thousand nuclear weapons remain on “hair-trigger” alert, and false alarms have led to several close calls.

Do these diverse changes represent “progress” or “betterment”? With their high productivity, modern societies have the ability, in principle, to provide everyone on Earth with a high material living standard. They have solved the fundamental problem of the Agrarian era: underproduction.

Less clear is the relationship between material consumption and well-being. Research into the preconditions for happiness, which has been conducted for many years, points to two clear conclusions. First, rising material living conditions clearly raise levels of well-being as they lift people out of dire poverty. Second, beyond a certain level, increasing consumption has little impact on the sense of well-being. In the U.S. and Japan in the last 50 years, surveys of “contentment” have shown no increase despite massive increases in consumption levels. Is continued growth necessarily a sign of progress? A second deep question is whether the growth of the Modern era is sustainable. Are there ecological limits to growth? And is it possible that the extraordinary complexity of modern human societies is creating new forms of fragility?

We have seen that the Modern Revolution has solved some of the most fundamental problems of the pre-modern world. But it has created new problems as well. Above all, how sustainable is it? Can it possibly endure as long as the Agrarian civilizations or the Paleolithic communities of earlier periods of human history?

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Brown, Big History, chap. 12. Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 14.

Harrison, Inside the Third World. Held and McGrew, Global Transformations. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century.

Questions to Consider

1. Why is it so hard to identify durable structural features of the modern world?

2. Should we interpret the extraordinary pace of change today as a sign of progress or unsustainability?