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We Have Stepped Blindly Into Tomorrow
Why it’s so important that we try to understand what’s really happened over the last few weeks.
With the world’s media focused exclusively on our present hysteria du jour, it’s easy to overlook the real significance of the covid-19 illness: we’ve just stepped into the future.
Sometimes it takes a while to see the true impact of something entirely new. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, it wasn’t obvious that the result would ultimately be an entirely new type of society hitherto unknown in human history. No one could have foreseen the connections between making it easier to replicate information and the subsequent explosion of scientific knowledge that led first to dramatic improvements in agriculture and then, thanks to the surpluses thereby created, enabled to the industrial revolution.
Neither could anyone have foreseen that by making books cheaply available, mass literacy would change the way we think about ourselves.
In Gutenberg’s day everything was ordained by an imaginary invisible magical creature and everyone believed their place in society was predestined as part of a Grand Plan for the overall good, no matter how obviously real-world facts contradicted this idea at every turn. Today we believe in “freedom of will” and imagine ourselves to be independent actors in control of our…
