Election 2018

[Bob Butler 54]

(10-29-2018, 12:49 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-29-2018, 08:01 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Turnings are short term.  Ages are much longer term.  Civilizations divide by area.  To make sense of history, you have to be aware of all three.

I wonder if the pace of change will make your statement, true as it is today, obsolete in a relatively short period of time.  It's already the case that the saeculum may be longer than any New Age.  Can Turnings be far behind?

If we look at the pace so far, the Hunter/Gatherer Age lasted for many 10s to 100s of millennia, depending on your demark for the emergence of humanity.  The Agricultural Age lasted ~12 millennia.  The Industrial age, 150-200 years.  The Information Age already feels mature.  Obviously, the pace is rising fast.

Definitely.  You may have noted that in some of my posts I used an all lower case 'the new age' rather than 'The Information Age'.  I just don't know what the pattern will become yet well enough to name it.

I still believe things started changing with nukes, computers, and an acceptance of of culture change internally using democracy rather than war.  That would put the first stirrings at WW II, though you could claim important markers at any point after that.

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?