SPEED OF CHANGE

Have you seen my Saturday Essay on Sentencing?
My novel, Pictures of Life, begins 22 Nov. Don’t miss it!

It is good to advance. The whole of western history has been based on the concept. We are here to change things, and in this way we sometimes improve things, sometimes not. But advance is what we do.
Yet when you talk to many elderly people today, you get a feeling that our advancement is counter-productive. Even a young fifty-something like me feels this way. Sometimes I just don’t recognize the world about me.

Does this mean that advancement is not all it’s cracked up to be?

Are our sciences, technologies and ideas all wrong? Are we marching along a road of advancement at the cost of the human race itself?
When we look at environmental damage, the speed of fast hi-tech life and decline in morality and mental health, it is easy to think so. And yes, much of our advancement IS damaging – to the planet, to community, to our sanity.

But this, I think, is a different issue.

The feelings the older generation have are really nothing to do with advancement itself. Rather, it is to do with the speed of change that advancement brings.
As our hi-tech world races forward, it is gathering speed. Several centuries ago we could expect a major change maybe once a lifetime or so. By a century ago, change could happen slowly, almost unnoticeably within a lifetime. But now changes happen quickly and several times in a lifetime.
Today the world really isn’t what it was when we were young. And the feelings of not belonging are a reality.

© Anthony North, November 2007