(02-20-2019, 08:39 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Every era and every generation believes itself to be unique in some way. In 1945, it was widely believed the A-bomb is a harbinger of an "Atomic Age". In 1969, they were talking about start of a "Space Age". Not to mention the "Age of Aquarius".
This is not to say there are no events of historic importance. But only future historians will recognize them. The birth of Jesus was not something the world was talking about. Even around 200, an educated Roman would probably be inclined to regard Jesus as simply one of many preachers. And yet He turned out to be more important than Caesar and Augustus put together. Or did people in 1492 realize how important the discovery of America is? Could they imagine a new civilization will be created on this continent, and that it'll change the destiny of Mankind? So the new era, when it starts, might be related to something we overlook today.
My hopes are however that the Space Age will indeed become real, and then 1969 will be of course recognized as its beginning. I like the endless possibilities of the Cosmos.
The big change that I see is the divide between early capitalism (when capitalism simply meant that capitalists were as rapacious exploiters as slave-masters and feudal lords of the past) and the modern capitalism that depends upon a consumer society to giver workers a cause to not rebel against and exterminate capitalist exploiters in the wake of a proletarian revolution. When the capitalists decided to turn industrial workers into consumers, they saved capitalism and rendered Marx and Lenin irrelevant for as long as the consumer society would last.
Someone was going to blunder into the New World, and whether they did so in 1492 or 1592 was not going to make a difference. The people who would reach the New World could have been Welsh fishermen (they were fishing in the Grand Banks as early as 1475). Polynesians, Chinese, Japanese, or Arabs. Indeed the Vikings reached the New World about a millennium ago -- and had little impact upon it. That could be a pity. The Vikings might have done in America what they did in Russia, establishing a new civilization capable of holding its own. Just imagine a Viking-Skraeling world that exploited the rivers and lakes of the eastern United States and southeastern Canada much as the Vikings exploited (with their Slavic wives and descendants) the rivers of Russia. Or imagine the Chinese establishing a Chinese city at the site of San Francisco instead of simply settling in a Chinatown in San Francisco. The currents would have favored such. Or maybe the Polynesians end up in Mexico. All of these scenarios would have had better fortunes in the wake for America's First peoples. Don't you think Muhammad better than Quetzalcoatl? (Christianity would have followed the Vikings and their trade, so bye-bye human sacrifices of the Aztecs).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.