Ending epochs and rapid change

February 16, 2023

Dear Leland,

I have some fear around today’s topic. Perhaps I am concerned I won’t be up to the task. Whatever the cause, I noticed signs of nervous energy throughout the morning.

A quick lesson here is that fear is not always bad. You, like me, avoid fear (your brother seems more willing to embrace his emotions). But fear sits right next to creativity. When athletes or performers talk about ‘nerves’ ahead of an event, they are feeling the fear that comes along as they summon their creative energies. Nerves by no means predict peak performance, but we cannot achieve peak performance without a willingness to embrace our fears.

Preamble aside, let’s go.

Yesterday I asserted that the world was about to undergo rapid change. Today I want to outline why I think this is so.

Start with technology; just in the last few months we’ve seen breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence) which augur increases in the rate of technological change. For most, the rate of technological advancement already feels breathtaking, and yet technology appears likely to start improving at an accelerating rate. That potential is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.

I also think we are ending several historical epochs simultaneously, the easiest to spot being the post-WWII era. After WWII, the world set off to incorporate into everyday life technologies such as cars, planes, and improved communications capabilities (starting with the transistor radio, and then extending through cable, broadband, and now wireless communication). All of our institutions, including governments, universities, schools, companies, and media (and especially the news media) were optimized for the post-WWII era, wherein we funneled individuals into large corporations, who through economies of scale were best placed to take (and share) the advantages these analogue technologies enabled.

Modern technological advancements are primarily digital. Thus, the scale economies of the physical world no longer apply. Systems optimize around chokepoints; the internet has moved the chokepoints in our systems. As a result, our institutions are ill-equipped to deal with the emergent problems of the modern world, and are stuck by design solving problems of decreasing significance.

Eighty years ago (1943) Americans were in the middle of WWII. Eighty years before that (1863) we were in the middle of the American Civil War. Eighty years before that (1783) we were in the late stages of the American Revolutionary War. Point being: American epochs appear to run in ~80 years cycles. Let us hope that the ending of the post-WWII epoch isn’t marked by another major war.

The second epoch I see ending is what I am tempted to call the ‘end of the age of Reason’, but that has too many potentially confusing connotations. A dear friend offered me a term: we are ending the age of homo rationalis (a made up species meant to signify the idea that humans are, or are meant to be, a primarily rational species). For the last 500 years or so, the Western world has been pushing at the limits of humans’ capacity for logical thought. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment shaped the world, with the Scientific Revolution laying groundwork for today’s rapid technological change and the Enlightenment shaping how Westerners think about how we organize societies and government and pursue individual fulfillment. These movements, and their modern echos, increasingly advanced the idea that human achievement relied on our capacity for rational thought, and deemphasized emotional and spiritual pursuits. Today we live in a culture that celebrates triumphs of rationalism and mistrusts emotional expression and spirituality. I posit that we’ve pushed rational thought, divorced of emotion or spirit, as far as it can go. I suspect that, in order to further human advancement, we’ll need to once again embrace our emotion and spirit; if for no other reason, humans are increasingly unlikely have a rational advantage over machines.

The third epoch I see ending has to do with religion. Most of the world’s major religions started with one man’s spiritual breakthrough. Think Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Confucius, or the Buddha. These breakthroughs so resonated that, over time, these religions became institutions themselves, with trained priests, elegant and sometimes gorgeous places of worship, scholars who examined the endless wisdom available within the faith, and rituals meant to help facilitate a connection to the religion and it’s god.

The ending of this spiritual epoch is perhaps the one that scares me the most (though none of them *excite* me per se, because change of this magnitude tends to be cataclysmic). As a Christian, I am not particularly excited to forecast a fundamental change in Christianity. And it’s important to say that I think Christianity will survive, and that the timelessness of religious teachings is part of what gives them weight: we can read, hear, and feel the distilled wisdom passed down over thousands of years. But religions have always faced ebbs and flows; the current era is an ebb, where religion does not particularly influence societal decision-making in any meaningful way in the developed world (and indeed, much of the developing world). The coming epoch changes will, I think, force a spiritual reawakening (there’s a saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes”), wherein cultures both learn the wisdom of the old teachings and find new lessons to pass down to future generations.

What will the new world look like? Well, that’s way too hard to predict with much accuracy. But I do think it will possess a few components: 1) we will learn to embrace technological change, while improving our ability to share it’s benefits more widely; 2) we will let the computers do more of the rational thinking, while we humans rebalance our energies between our rational, emotional, and spiritual capacities; 3) breakthroughs in scientific and spiritual thought will allow us to see that apparent conflicts between science and religion are imagined; 4) new religious practices will emerge that integrate the old and new, facilitate spiritual breakthroughs for more than a few giants, and enable the willing and practiced to access wisdom beyond their intellectual capacity.

I fear the coming changes will be cataclysmic. The ending of epochs tends to be: the old ways tend not to give way to the new gracefully, and the new tend not to ascend respectfully. But it’s time for me to stop avoiding these fears and acknowledge them, so that I may try to learn from them and, if necessary, prepare myself and others (including you and your brother) for the world to come.

I love you,

Dad