Temporality of Change

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

""The problem is that most of the large, helpful transformations of history are invisible. Agriculturalization takes thousands of years; civilization takes centuries. If you project all these transformations onto a timeline, starting with big bang and moving towards the present, you would find a kind of logarithmic progression in the change and the rate of transformation. We start with a scale of billions of years with big bang and then we move into evolutionary scales with millions of years. With agriculture we begin to get an acceleration of history. Once we get into civilization, writing and literacy, and the intensification of information, the rate of change begins to pick up. Then with the technology and cybernetics of our world, we begin to see a rate of change indefinitely where knowledge will double every ten years and where full technology will almost reincarnate every five years. The rate change is so fast and the individual life is so long that the individual and not the species can become the theater of the evolutionary transformation.

So part of the problem is that the cultural transformations that someone like myself talks about are not really historical events. They are on so large a scale that they tend to reflect themselves down into our consciousness through mythology or art or religious movements and begin to be reflected through the unconscious, rather than being seen through the limitations of the conscious ego as an historical event that you can see in the daily newspaper. "

(https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/54/the-end-of-the-modern-world)