Election 2018

[David Horn]

(11-06-2018, 03:47 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: … The hunter gatherer period and Agricultural Age lasted long enough to be viewed as steady state.  Things remained fairly stable for much longer than the transitions.  This seems not true of the Industrial Age.  You can see first stirrings with the printing press, chemical weapons and steam power, but the Industrial Age was more a process than a steady state.  The S&H crises of the Industrial Age each moved towards a steady state which was almost reached in America, Europe, Japan, Australia and elsewhere.  Yet, some civilizations still feature autocratic government.  To my mind, some civilizations were left hanging so to speak.  Some were transitioning to the Industrial Age pattern, some stubbornly sticking to the Agricultural Age pattern, when the new age started it's rumblings with WW II. 

If you get rigid about the age / turning / civilization triple partition, we could be entering a period of chaos.  If you treat the lessons learned with a grain of salt when you cross the border of an age / turning / civilization, we may be taking things with a grain of salt a lot.

Thus, I am not in a mood to name ages after the new age.  Is it a newer age, or did the pattern of the prior age never get set?

Which finally brings us to the real question: did we define the saecular pattern just in time for it to cease being valid?  To my way of thinking, the lack of a steady state culture to overlay with the cyclic historical pattern we spend our time analyzing, makes the entire discussion of repeatability very likely invalid.   That doesn't mean that a similar cyclic process won't continue for some time to come.  It just makes it less coherent and, frankly, less useful.