Hi, welcome back. In this presentation, I want to say a little more about what I mean by these terms, traditional and modern, and make this a lot more concrete for you. Let's think about this as a series of contrasts. First, in the traditional world, things move based on natural energy. In other words, for most all of the history of the human species, the only energy available to people was the energy of animal power, wind, water, maybe assisted by crude pulleys. In the modern age, we've tapped sources of energy embedded in fossil fuels. Even in the atom itself. So the contrast between a world of natural energy, which seemed to be the eternal limits for all of human history up to about 250 years ago, and a world in which we have manmade energy of entirely new kinds. Second contrast. The traditional world is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Just to give you some sense of this: for most all of human history at no point do more than 10 to 15 percent of the population even live in towns. That is, no more than 10 to 15 percent of the population live in a community of more than 2,000 people. Overwhelmingly rural. In the modern era, larger and larger fractions of the human population are not only living in towns, they're living in cities to a degree that had no precedent in human history. They're moving into an urban and industrial age. This being a picture of the dawn of that era. The warrens of an industrial city in England in the mid-1800s. Another contrast. Through most of human history, we saw that real income remained relatively constant. Remember that chart that showed the Malthusian trap? It's remaining pretty constant because there are pretty finite resources available. Most people are growing just enough food to get by, they hope. Maybe in a good year they have a little bit of a surplus that perhaps they can barter for something extra in their lives. But then that changes to a world in which economic growth becomes possible. People have more and more surplus resources. Surpluses that they can even turn into cash money that they can save or invest. This fourth point is a little more subtle. People's lives in the traditional world were highly unstable. All kinds of things could happen. Plague, war, famine. But their communities had a stable rhythm about them. Your life was much like your father's life, much like your grandfather's life, much like the lives your children would live. So, there is this reassuring sense that you see very strongly in traditional communities. That even though their personal lives may be unstable, their communities, their ways of life, are highly stable, associated with traditional rituals and ceremonies. Contrast that then, with the world of modernity. A world in which people are living longer lives, maybe even more secure lives. More sheltered from random everyday violence. But the communities they live in are now becoming more unstable. The conditions of life changing more rapidly, the way in which people make a living changing, people moving more from one place to the next. So look at the paradox. A traditional world of unstable lives and stable communities to a modern world of more secure individual lives but less stable communities. Another contrast. In the traditional world, religious faith is extremely powerful. Lots of mysteries surround people in their everyday lives. Their own personal lives, highly unstable. They seek explanations and solace in faith. Whether a Christian faith or Hinduism, or many other sets of beliefs. The modern world represents more of a fusion in which religious faith continues, but is increasingly mixed up and challenged by emerging understandings about science and scientific explanations for many kinds of phenomena, the sense of human mastery over the environment instead of human submission to the environment. A sixth contrast is one about the way people identified themselves and lived their lives. Alright. In the traditional world, almost all people were born, lived, died in a radius of maybe 30 to 50 miles - their entire life. It was difficult, if not impossible, to travel significant distances. It was not even very easy to get news of what happened in far away places. People like kings or emperors were images seen on coins, or maybe depicted in a sculpture. Therefore, peoples' identities, the sense of the community they belong to, their culture, were intensely local. Many, many more languages, for example, in the world than the number of languages routinely spoken today. In the modern world not only can people travel more, but also through modern information and communications they feel like they're participants in vastly larger communities. Their identity then becomes more of a mass identity. They're learning from participating in larger beliefs, larger cultures. As a final contrast. In the traditional world, it looks like there is some really powerful states. You look on the map, you see the Persian empire or the Spanish empire, but in a way these are relatively simple states. They�re agrarian empires in which you have a king, priest, warrior elite, and they basically extract tribute from peoples they conquer. That then helps fuel their military might at the top, or in the Spanish empire case, they're extracting gold or silver or something like that, that makes the top elite wealthy. But, the administrative capabilities of these states were very crude. Their ability to give an order and have it carried out, 100, 200, 300 miles away, even, modest. You compare that to the powers at the disposal of modern nation-states, and you can see the contrast. And we'll be talking much more about those contrasts in presentations to come. In the next presentation, we'll explore some of the why questions around the great divide. See you then.
