Is the world changing faster than ever?
Ian Mortimer
“Although life is more complex than it was, complexity itself is not change”
We must start with another question: what do we mean by ‘the world’? Some regions saw their most rapid development in the distant past – Mexico on the arrival of Cortés in 1519, for example. Local political events could also trigger a short period of extremely rapid change. Did life alter in France faster in the period 1789–94 than it has done in the past five years? You bet it did. Likewise across Europe in the years 1347–51, as plague ravaged the continent. And just consider how people’s lives changed during the war years 1914–18 or 1939–45.
Today, technology is developing rapidly. But technology isn’t everything. Language is arguably more important, and that is comparatively static. We understand the language of Shakespeare, whereas he would not have understood more than a few words of 13th-century English. Printing standardised the language, and standardisation stops change. Many things now don’t alter at all – property ownership, driving on the left, limited liability, pasteurisation, musical notation, you name it. Even technology becomes standardised: viz, units of measurement, the ohm, ampere and volt. Most aspects of our lives are not open to yearly fluctuation – unlike in the Middle Ages, when a failed harvest or invasion might suddenly obliterate your village.
The real question is, therefore, whether technological change is so penetrating that it is changing the whole world at the same pace. If ‘now’ is the past quarter of a century, then no, I don’t think so. Although life is more complex than it was, complexity itself is not change – and much of that complexity
