Three Taboos

I spend a lot of time imagining what the future will bring. Being wholly convinced that we are facing major changes on at least two fronts (military conflict and environmental degradation, and the related consequences), I am naturally inclined to entertain nighmarish apocalyptic scenarios. However, I find the need to continually question my instincts and a fairly dim view of humanity’s capability to forge a better future for itself. I’ve come to believe that we must transcend our current situation, not just change direction or tweak things here and there, in order to avoid catastrophe.

People throughout history have generally viewed their particular time as more dangerous, with the most at stake, than any other previous era. I think this has always been true – we are working our way, very quickly, to a global, or planetary society (distinct, of course, from culture). We are discovering the interconnectedness of everything, the way systems (political, biological, technological, etc.) seem to have the tendency to become more and more complex. 

Not only does social complexity and the extent of spatial connectedness increase from one epoch to the next, so does the pace of change. Just as historical transitions occur more rapidly than natural evolutionary transitions, historical transitions are accelerating. This is illustrated in Figure 2 [p.16], which represents schematically the evolution of complexity of the four major historical phases. Since the time-axis is logarithmic, the repetitive pattern suggests that change is accelerating in a regular fashion. The duration of successive eras decreases by roughly a factor of ten—the Stone Age lasted roughly 100,000 years, Early Civilization about 10,000 years and the Modern Era some 1,000 years. Curiously, if the transition to a Planetary Phase takes about 100 years (a reasonable hypothesis, we shall argue) the pattern would continue.