Election 2018

[Eric the Green]

(10-29-2018, 06:53 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-29-2018, 05:11 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Most of the above people are clearly Industrial Age.  Thus, using violence as a solution would be expected.  FDR is the cusp figure, who faced a double crisis.  

Sorry to interrupt, but how do you define the Industrial Age?  Wikipedia claims it started in 1760 without specifying an end date. 1991 looks plausible, since it marks the end of Bolshevism, an ideology designed for industrial workers above all. Orion's Arm has 1700-2000, which looks way to simplistic for me. My somewhat heretical choice is 2006, when MySpace kicked in and "You" (anonymous Internet user) was chosen as Time's person of the year. This marks a cultural transition to the Information Age, but as our global economy still uses fossils as the main energy source, one could argue we are still in the Industrial Age.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm said the industrial takeoff in Britain began in the early 1780s. His study is definitive. In 1760 Watt's steam engine had not even been invented. The Industrial Age did not start in 1760. Wikipedia gets things wrong sometimes.

I would say the advent of the world wide web in 1993 was a good date for the start of the Information Age, although the major tools were invented by the late 1960s.

The Green Meme, which arrived in the 1960s, is associated with the Information Age too. But the Greens have yet to attain appreciable power politically. The liberal Enlightenment of human rights is considered Orange, and it is dated from the late 17th century, but its social class the bourgeoisie did not start to really take over until the French Revolution, and even then suffered many reversals in Europe for the duration of that revolutionary cycle; even until 1872 when the 3rd French Republic, the first one that lasted, took over. So it took a while for the Enlightenment ideas and the class that championed them to truly take over power. In Britain too, constitutional changes at about that same time increased middle class liberal power there. And the North's victory in the American Civil War in 1865 cemented the triumph of liberal over the aristocratic, agricultural values that dominated Dixie.

The industrial age also took off in the 1780s, just before the French Revolution and exactly contemporary with USA independence, but even then it did not spread much beyond Britain until the 1840s and 50s, and beyond The West until the turn of the 20th century era at least.

And even then, the Orange Enlightenment/Industrial Age meme then began to split politically into bourgeois liberalism vs. proletarian socialism (which I call Lemon), and the two battled it out from then on, and still do today.

So if the Information Age is associated with the Green Meme that succeeds the Orange/Lemon, and the Orange/Lemon is Industrial, then we can be sure it will last a while longer and take time to truly dominate world affairs, and is not at all mature yet.