What Age is This?

Chinese Proverb :: May you live in interesting times

I love this sort of chart. It could only have been made by a human because none of the rest of the inhabitants of this planet ever figured out how to type or draw. It is sobering that the person who made this fun graphic and all the rest of us are stuck way at the right edge of the chart. One phrase that we seemed to hear a lot when our boys were growing up in the early 2000s was “epic”. If I had a nickel for each time I went down in the basement amidst visiting friends of my sons and heard “that was epic” I would have collected quite a few. I think that referring to something as epic is not that different than saying “that was epochal”. I think the former expression flows more easily. I also think that it is the nature of humans to believe their experiences and impacts reach beyond themselves. I guess that is why teenagers are apt to say “that party was epic”. One of my great interests is history. About eight years ago, my wife “encouraged” me to join a book club. I joined a history book club in the town I live in. While not original, our club is aptly named The Rosemount History Book Club. In the course of my life, I always enjoyed reading history books and biographies. The longer a person is dead, the more likely it is that sufficient time will have passed to lend a balanced view of who they were and what they meant to the world.

Sometimes, we read books not about a particular person, but more about a significant event or a particular region. I don’t find that I necessarily enjoy one over the other but more so realize that it is the talent of the writer that makes a particular thing come alive. Some of the more “important” events of history bear this out. When you have been reading for a lifetime and now read and evaluate a book as a group, some of the topics repeat. I find it amazing when we may be reading about something that I “know about”, the author and their accompanying research can make the tale come alive in unexpected ways.

One of the types of books I enjoy is the epoch. I love words and sometimes go down the rabbit hole to make sure I am using the best word for the point I am trying to make. Sometimes, that means I might have the opposite effect. Being familiar with lots of words is helpful when doing a crossword puzzle but not so good when having a conversation with strangers. Here are three possible definitions of an epoch:

ep·och /ˈepək/

noun

1. a period of time in history or a person's life, typically one marked by notable events or particular characteristics. An example would be "the Victorian epoch"

2. the beginning of a distinctive period in the history of someone or something. An example might be "welfare reform was an epoch in the history of U.S. social policy"

3. Geology — a division of time that is a subdivision of a period and is itself subdivided into ages, corresponding to a series in chronostratigraphy. An example would be "the Pliocene epoch"

While I have always loved science, earth science was very hard for me. The last definition of epoch freaks me out. Looking back to freshman Earth Science I have concluded that of all of the “hard sciences” presented in the classroom, it was the one that the scientists really didn’t know what they were talking about yet. In later life, as the science of plate tectonics more fully emerged, I came to believe that I was born in an unfortunate time as that science was just emerging. I think high schools should have suspended the teaching of earth science in the 1960s and 1970s and taught us something else while scientists sorted out plate tectonics. It would have been a great moment in teaching to declare that the underlying science here is really changing so much we have to let things settle out before we end up filling your head with old nonsense. We were taught in those days we lived on a big rock with a liquid center. What we now more fully understand is we should think of all these big masses of land as hard chunks sort of floating in the pudding.

Well sorry for that tangent but it still leads quite nicely to today’s topic. I could imagine a time traveler who hops from one date in history to another. If the traveler were not allowed to look at a calendar or ask about the date, one somewhat useful question that could help them along would be “What age is this?”. I think that the age we live in provides context about what is likely to happen, how people are getting along, and what might be driving them apart. Authors like to set their books and use the period to help describe what is happening. Living near the beginning or end of an age, means you get to live in interesting times per the Chinese proverb.

One branch of writing I enjoy is a bit of sci-fi and futurism. I think that the most appealing type of story of this genre is to take the facts of the time we live in today and try and project what comes next. What is the next age that is going to steamroll us into a new way of being? In our history book club, we vote annually to select our books to read next year. The person who manages many of the club’s practices now took over for our founder. Our founder has been an important figure in our little town. He labors for the historical society and many other volunteer organizations that make our little place on the map a community. He is committed to so many activities but had the wisdom to step back and share some duties a few years back. One of our long-time members stepped up and has organized some efforts including the choice of what we will read and when.

Our “active member” who has taken over these duties is a retired engineer. Once an engineer, always an engineer. If that is not really a saying it should be. I think that it explains how processes work in our book club that he touches. To save time, I will call him G. The time to choose the books for next year that we will read each month is upon us. G sends out lists sorted in every conceivable way to accommodate all of the members. G makes it really easy for anyone to participate in the nominating and voting process. G sends reminders and sometimes even subtly shames our group of nearly 50 about how few nominations we have received to date. The group owes G some credit because it is that general coaxing and follow-up that leads to the continuous improvement of the club. It is really a great thing and makes it easy for people, at all levels of computer literacy to be able to participate equally. Our membership shades toward the older so there is even a way for people to submit paper nominations. Each member can submit up to three books as candidates to read. He assembles them into a master list and then everyone votes. The top 12 books become next year’s to-do list.

Ugh, time to get back to the story. I am sure that many of the books we read next year will be about an “age”. We always get a few. After all of the books we have read about America, I think that almost everything can be usefully deposited into an age. When our country was settled, this amazing country was open for business and land was available to the intrepid who were willing to clear it. All that occurred in North America almost to the middle of the 1800s neatly fits into the agricultural age. As it nears its end, we are starting to run out of “good land” to farm. This leads to pushing Native Americans further and further, trying to “improve” the performance of the land we have through any means possible, even the maintaining of involuntary servitude, that wonderful and innocuous substitution for human bondage and slavery.

I think that around 1850, perhaps earlier, we firmly are transitioning into the Industrial Age. Mechanization moves people off the farm into cities on a grand and perhaps brutal scale. Being a numbers guy, here are some fun facts.

• In 1840 about 70% of Americans work in agriculture

• Today, about 1.3% of Americans work in agriculture

• It is the age that replace the agricultural age that made much of that possible, at least in the early years.

• While I am sure there are museums and collectors of horse-drawn plows, the world is quite different, and that former way of doing things is long gone.

I think that starting after WW II, the world began to ease out of the Industrial Age and into the Information Age. I think that while mechanical things can be more readily grasped, the age we live in today has begun to appear like magic. So many technologies working cooperatively together. Whole industries nurtured through the Industrial Age are swept aside. Farewell to cameras, encyclopedias, datebooks, typewriters, and all sorts of other items. All of these things are vanquished by an item you hold in your hand, pocket, or purse. It does almost anything without wires and can reach almost anything and anyone on the planet at the touch of a graphic of a button. Cameras, encyclopedias, landlines, phone booths, camcorders, alarm clocks, calculators, maps; the list goes on and on. Even things we thought were cool and amazing only 15 years ago like iPods are simply relics. Swept aside in a revolution that moves faster and faster. The items we associate as the Industrial Age are now hamstrung without help from every matter of electronic computer doing almost everything for them. The most obvious example is the automobile. A typical car today has 30-50 computers and a luxury vehicle may have 100! Soon, perhaps they will even drive themselves. It is likely the internal combustion engine at its core is facing the first genuine challenge to its existence as electrification grows quickly.

So are we in the Information Age? I think for all of the people in the Industrial Age who made those things, the answer is an emphatic yes as they have felt the impact of the changes. This Information Age we are amidst has something in common with the ages that came before it. That is, it is more consequential and is happening over a shorter period of time. It took humans nearly 2,000,000 years to scatter around the globe. For all that time, we were referred to as hunter-gatherers. Only in the last 15,000 years or so did we begin to settle down and stay in one place. We figured out that staying in one place and developing other parts of our lives that we couldn’t carry on our backs would give us the freedom to grow, educate, and explore so many other things our brains could think of. This was mostly due to our focus on farming instead of hunting and gathering. Once we could begin to establish a place where we could call home, the stage was set for future revolutions. Change used to be slow and ages stretched over great time periods.

So what is the difference between an epoch, and just a big change? My opinion is that in an epoch, there is a lot of accompanying social disruption, maybe wars, and most of all large groups of winners and losers. When you move from 7 of 10 people doing something to 1-2 of 100 to accomplish the hard task of feeding us all, the Agricultural Age has been transformational. Seven of ten toiling at farming was an improvement over being a nomad and hoping to find a mammoth. When an age ends, it does not go quietly into the night. The hostility that accompanies the end of a given age speaks to that individual problem of change is hard. For the person who toiled to make typewriters in a factory, their abrupt end and rapid decline to irrelevance were personal. When an old way is swept aside we seem to preserve the memory with nostalgia, collecting, or simply denial. There are many people today who insist that a tube amplifier fashioned from 1930-1940s technology is simply “better”. While there is nothing wrong with nostalgia, the reality is the items of the past are largely gone forever. They are replaced with references in our art be that movies, paintings, or books. One other thing we humans are good at is art. I think now that the factory farm has become reality, a pastoral painting of a farm of the past is embraced by so many of us. This is one of the many benefits of that great brain of ours. It is built, as I’ve described before, to do just about anything we desire given patience, practice, and probably some fuel.

I am so intrigued that many of the periods we can now analyze are getting shorter and shorter. Recorded music is one of my favorites. The narrow focus to have music on wax, plastic or vinyl is probably the same tendency. The recorded music “age” has only really been going for about 150 years. When it meandered from wax to vinyl for 100 years, it was still moving very slowly. The last 20 years swept the previous 130 years aside as we moved to digital music. It is not surprising how nostalgia and the desire for something tangible have led many people to collect and play old vinyl records. Soon people will collect old iPods even though they are less than 20 years old. So it goes.

So what is so special about the Information Age? It began to exert itself into our daily lives in earnest in the 1960s. That means many of you reading this have lived through THIS ENTIRE AGE. That is quite amazing because that makes you unique in all of human history as you are likely seeing the beginning AND end of an age in your lifetime. Time has truly begun to fly. Lucky us!

So what comes next and has it begun yet? I am sure all the computer geeks think that their Information Age will rule forever. History tells us they are as wrong as the farriers who thought people would continue to prefer horses when the cars arrived. There are a lot of beautiful paintings of horses though. Some futurists think that the next age which perhaps has already begun is the mimicking of creation using the Information Age tools to do it. What does that really mean? We have been given the building blocks of creation to discover here and we call it deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). We “discovered” this quite recently and took many years to start figuring out what to do with this discovery. We started the human genome project in 1990 under President Clinton. The goal was to “sequence” what makes us human. Every living thing on earth contains DNA and it contains the instruction to make us in all our intricacy. It took the project 13 years finishing in 2003 to identify the 20,000+ unique genes that seem to be in the mix of a human. In the comparative history of the planet, 13 years is pretty impressive. Here is a great story about that project and where we have traveled since. The article was written on the 10th anniversary and references how FAST we are progressing. The original project cost $1B and took thirteen years. As of 2013, modern sequencing equipment could complete the same job for around $2000 and take 1-2 days. It sure sounds like things are speeding up. This next age, if that is what we eventually call it seems like it is going to be a steamroller also. One of these days I am going to write about using DNA structure as the basis for making all sorts of things. It is a fascinating topic I have read a lot about. Alas, this post is probably already too long. It is time to wrap it up.

When you look at a timeline of human history or earth history, what is interesting is how long a given “age” is. What is all the more interesting is how short the ages are becoming as we accelerate into the future. What has not changed, is that a new age ALWAYS brings social disruption it seems. One of the more overused but true, at least to me, sayings is “Change is hard.” So there is the challenge of living in the ages. Each new age brings benefits. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for us humans to adapt. I guess that means that we need to be attentive to the social requirements to manage change in this modern world. It has never been more important as the world continues to accelerate.

Thanks for reading. By the way, today’s post was a little heavy at times and definitely, too long I think. Here’s some fun music to lighten the mood. Whenever I need a lighter mood, zydeco-style music does the trick. This one is called “Jambalaya On the Bayou”. For those of you who are hesitant to click a link, the video EVEN INCLUDES the expert playing of the WASHBOARD. One of the conclusions I draw from the understanding I was lucky enough to be born on the far right of the chart is captured in this song. See you again tomorrow I hope.

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