This Fleeting World

Our World:
The Modern
Era
The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main
eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than
200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern
era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been
more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations
have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during
just these two and a half centuries. The modern era is also the most interconnected
of the three eras. Whereas new ideas and technologies once
took thousands of years to circle the globe, today people from different
continents can converse as easily as if they lived in a single global village.
History has become world history in the most literal sense.
Here we make the slightly arbitrary assumption that the modern era
began in about 1750. Yet its roots lay deep in the agrarian era, and we
could make a good case for a starting date of 1500 or even earlier. Determining
the end date of the modern era is even trickier. Some scholars have
argued that it ended during the twentieth century and that we now live in
a “postmodern” era that is radically different from the “modern” era. Yet
many features of the modern era persist today and will persist for some
time into the future; thus, it makes more sense to see our contemporary
period as part of the modern era. This fact means that we do not know
when the modern era will end, nor can we see its overall shape as clearly
as we might wish.
The fact that we cannot see the modern era as a whole makes it difficult
to specify its main features and justifies our use of the deliberately
vague label, “modern.” At present the diagnostic (defining) feature of the
modern era seems to be a sharp increase in rates of innovation. New technologies
enhanced human control over natural resources and stimulated
rapid population growth. In their turn, technological and demographic
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