You Should Be Very Happy You’re Here, Now – Part 3

Now is the most rapidly changing time in human history. Embrace the chaos, and enjoy!

Professor David Christian, in his excellent Great Courses lecture series on “Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity,” gives us much to appreciate about the times we live in.  First is the remarkable absence of coercion in most modern societies, thanks to the growth of free markets and trade:

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 flourished. Today, behavior is steered more effectively by market forces rather than by coercion, and modern states increasingly frown on the private use of violence … In the wealthiest societies, capitalism evolved into “consumer capitalism,” in one of the most important transformations of the century. Karl Marx had argued that as capitalism developed it would impoverish most wage earners, generating huge revolutionary movements that would eventually bring about its collapse. By the end of the 20th century it was clear that this prediction had proved wrong. Why? Marx had missed something that would be seen clearly by industrialists such as Henry Ford … As productivity outstripped population growth, producers had to work harder to find markets for the massive numbers of goods they produced. Early 20th-century pioneers such as Henry Ford saw that wage earners themselves provided a huge potential market. But they could only purchase goods if their wages rose. So it was in the interests of capitalists to raise wages and increase consumption … In the most developed capitalist societies, led by the U.S., average consumption levels rose, creating a large, affluent middle class. Affluence deflected the revolution Marx had anticipated, as prosperous wage earners became contented supporters of consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism also generated a new rhythm of change. For the first time in history, major economic crises (such as the Depression) were more likely to be caused by overproduction than underproduction … Whereas in all earlier societies, slow growth had limited consumption, in the era of developed capitalism, consumption became the main driver of growth.

With free markets came an explosion in fantastic things, and wonderful outcomes, including rapidly rising life expectancies and reductions in poverty worldwide.  But with those changes came vast disruptions in the “normal way of things”:

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 flourished 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 five 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 [in 2022, some 8 billion] counts as one of the most striking emergent properties of the modern world … 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 magnified by the use of intellectual prosthetics such as computers. Global integration has been painful, as it has forced communities with diverse ethical and social norms into close proximity.

The often-vitriolic nature of social media interactions today is attributable to the fact that not only are more people living closer together than ever, but they’re also communicationally connected to just about everyone else in the world, such that people can now complain to even more people in huge numbers — be they next door or half a world away. And by having their complaints reenforced by the support of so many social media “likes,” even the most unreasonable complaints can come to seem reasonable, making for even greater churn. So if you feel that there are dizzying changes afoot today, you’re not wrong, even in a deep historical sense:

Accelerating change makes it difficult 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.

Not just change, but rapid change, is inevitable and all-encompassing today.  You can’t change it.  So you might as well embrace its accumulation of knowledge, and appreciate it for all it’s done for humanity today.  Humans have exponentially benefitted from their ability to share “cumulative culture” and associated knowledge across generations.  As Steve Stewart-Williams describes it,:

Cumulative culture makes us smarter in another way as well: It frees us from the limitations imposed by the anatomy of our brains, furnishing us with knowledge far beyond the reach of any isolated individual. If you were to make a list of every person who’s ever contributed in any way to the vast storehouse of our knowledge, and then add up every hour they devoted to making their contribution, you’d have a rough-and-ready estimate of the number of hours it would take for one individual to single-handedly assemble all the knowledge we now possess. What kind of time period are we looking at? Probably hundreds of thousands of years, and maybe even millions. This means that, by learning about science and getting a good education, we become as knowledgeable as a person who spent thousands or millions of years thinking and exploring the world … Newton is about as good an example of a genius as we might ever expect to find: a genius among geniuses, I’d argue. But even Newton was unable to comprehend the idea that matter warps space and slows time – not because of any constitutional incapacity, but just because he lived before Einstein. Einstein, for his part, couldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been able to build on the work of Newton and Newton’s intellectual descendants. Matt Ridley captured the general point nicely in a discussion of the causes of economic growth: “I cannot hope to match [Adam] Smith’s genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

In just the past few hundred years, the Industrial Revolution and successive events technologically super-charged that accumulation of knowledge, to the benefit of all who tap into it.

That concludes this series of essays.  I leave you now with Professor David Christian’s grand summary timeline of all of history:

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.