Now and Then, Why the Present is Very Different from the Past

It has become common to define ourselves as a Knowledge Society, usually in contrast to the Industrial Society. Or before that the Agricultural Society. These are sloppy definitions, for sure, for they immediately beg the question how we can have industry without knowledge or live with knowledge without making stuff, let alone growing food. I suppose the point is, how many of us are engaged in these necessities. Today more people than ever are part of the "creative class", the folks that simply research, study, teach, write or create while a smaller and smaller portion of the population is needed for production or food.

While this is pretty well understood, the focus on these definitions is on the material aspects of society rather than what is going on in us, the people in society, human minds and their thinking.
Outwardly it would seem people grow older on average and they are taller as well, they can run faster and operate complicated stuff with ease, but generally it is assumed that human needs and abilities and the great drivers that makes us tick, remained pretty constant throughout history. Love, competition, aggression, fear, the desire to socialize, get recognition. We assume that caveman was subjected by pretty much those same forces and, indeed, pictures, narratives, books and music suggest as much. While technology changed, the human remained much the same.

What if this is assumption dramatically wrong? What if a medieval farmer who could magically be transported into  our life would not just be hopelessly overwhelmed by our technology and would have no clue what to do with I phones, TV's or cars, he would also be aghast about how women and children live and behave, about the multitude of races, about the pace with which we race through the day? About the fact that so many different things are all considered "right" at the same time, our way of questioning things and allowing new ideas very hour of our lives? Did we ever consider that he, who lived in the middle ages would have lived in a time where things at his birth were exactly the same as things were when he died and then the same again for his children and children's children?

In spite of all the technological progress of the last two hundred years, knowledge about knowledge itself has been slow in coming. We have decoded DNA and know how genes program our bodies but we know very little what ideas are, how knowledge manifests itself or what consciousness is. Of course, these questions have been asked throughout history, typically known as the "meaning of life", yet it is fascinating how much these remain still questions with no answer. We still struggle with the concepts of  the "soul" or the crudely mechanical constructs of the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego invented by Freud and Jung to explain the forces that form our mind and consciousness. Neurologists are feverishly tracking the electric currents fired off by neurons trying to find what thought and emotions are what or what may make the two different. While we know that society certainly creates common patterns in thinking and emotion we still like to think of ourselves as singularities, one of a kind prototypes, somehow driven by a mix of nurture and nature but also "free will".

While we are conscious of the fact that technological and social change have accelerated, few have a concept for logarithmic or exponential developments and many of us are, in spite of two and a half centuries of enlightenment, still deeply influenced by the cyclical world concepts of eastern philosophy in which things turn in cycles and circles without actual progress. These cyclical philosophies, actually even had a renaissance in recent decades, driven by all those who where frightened by the fast speed in which we moved away from "paradise" and our place in nature. Indeed, critical thought would have to admit that the possibilities created by technology exceed knowledge, morale and ethics, the very foundations and faculties to exert some control. Hippies and tea-partiers are united in their attempt to slow things down. The ones preach unity with nature over progress the other "the America they know and grew up in" over the change they think is brought about by sinister forces.

But nature as our model is tricky. It isn't a paradise and it sure isn't static and also not cyclical. It has entropy and it appears to have a clear arrow of time. It can't be fully symmetrical since matter somehow won out over anti-matter. The universe is getting colder and is expanding in an ever accelerating fashion. This, after all, may be an appropriate analogy for the human condition.

Some philosophers and scientists are trying to apply the methods to explain genes and their reproduction to ideas as well. They call those memes. Memes as societal formations of ideas, patterns that mutate and procreate and hop from person to person and from generation to generation. But while genes are quite slow in their adaptions to the change, memes are exploding just like the universe into wider and wider horizons of knowledge and understanding. This journey into infinity might just have begun. While our imaginary medieval surprise guest would be quite confused in our world, his puzzlement would be nothing compared to the ours if we could see the very world in which our very own children will live when they will be old. The change that will sweep through this century would make us utter strangers in it.

Reference literature: David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, Penguin Books 2011
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos