Albert Wenger
THE GREAT
TRANSITION
Images: Joshua Brown and Youssef Naddam (Unsplash)
The year 2020 has laid bare foundational issues in what was supposed to be, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “The end of history”.1 Market-based economies with democratic governments were shockingly unprepared for a global pandemic, and their responses have further aggravated historically high levels of inequality in wealth and income. In the meantime, the climate crisis is presenting an increasing threat to humanity. As Mark Twain is reported to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” We might ask what the current period rhymes with, and why. This chapter will contend that we find ourselves in a transition that is as profound as that between the Agrarian Age and the Industrial Age.
How did this prior transition play out? Every aspect of the Industrial Revolution has been studied, but the details of history are largely distractions. They are like the noise of the daily news cycle that obscures the underlying signal. The goal of a historical examination should rather be to uncover a larger pattern that can help us understand the present.
One approach to discerning a pattern is to determine a force that is moving history along. This idea is inspired by classical physics: if you know the force that applies to an object, you can, based on its current position, predict where it will be in the future. This inherently deterministic perspective can be found in thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx and Kevin Kelly, with the former applying it to economics and the latter applying it to technology.2,3 My own perspective is informed by a relatively new and somewhat speculative approach to science called “constructor theory”.4,5 In essence, instead of subscribing to deterministic laws of motion, it examines possible and impossible transformations.
In this view, technological progress changes what is possible. You can’t have an airline industry until you invent the airplane, but once you have airplanes, you can have many different types of airline industries. The same thinking applies to societies as a whole: a new set of technological capabilities enables new forms of living.
This is most easily understood with regard to the earlier transition from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age.Homo sapiens emerged roughly 250,000 years ago as foragers. Their societies were nomadic and lived in small tribes with minimal hierarchies. Humans were promiscuous and followed animistic religious beliefs in which objects and animals were inhabited by spirits. This remained largel
