For most of human history, the majority of cultures have walked through time ‘backwards’ looking at what their ancestors have done. Very often they will measure how well their culture is doing by comparing it to a previous golden age. In Hasidic Jewish belief, Adam the first man, is considered the most perfect human to have existed, and every generation of humans since are said to be moving away from this ideal. It can be said that a goal of Orthodox Jewish spiritual practice is to gain back some of the qualities of Adam.
The Renaissance, first in the Islamicate world and then in Europe was the literally the ‘rebirth’: a attempted return to the greatness of classical Greece, especially of the writings of Aristotle and Plato.
Petrarch in the 14th century, is often regarded as the first Renaissance scholar. He worshipped the Latin writings of Cicero (106-43 BC), and he invented the term ‘dark ages’ to try and express the period where he felt the great wisdom of the distant past had been lost.
Then something historically odd happened. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and the following Enlightenment thinkers formed a movement in which it was argued that the knowledge of the past was not superior to that of their present. Instead they believed that humanity had the potential to surpass previous generations, and that the best methods to do so were reason and empirical investigation. Bacon’s utopian novel, a New Atlantis prophesied a civilisation-wide belief in ‘progress’. This went on to be an inspirational text to the founding fathers of the United States of America.
Belief in progress was radical. The past, even when imperfectly remembered, is at least based on things that actually happened. The future, as far as humans can discern is, in contrast, something entirely imaginary. It is therefore a powerful act of magical thinking to believe the future as being more important and perhaps even ‘more real’ than the past!
The scientific and industrial revolutions followed, formulating a rational, mechanical model of the universe1. Huge changes in our way of life proceeded with the founding of factories. Steam engines allowed for industrialised food production, and quickened the production of factory goods such as textiles. The train allowed myriads of people to move around at an unprecedented scale. These movements created the modern nation, transforming languages, cultures and economics and spread a utopian vision2.
The Rational cult
With the manifest power of economics, engineering, mathematics, physics and the scientific method, the new future-facing world order got cocky. Rationalism began to reign supreme. Even direct experience began to be less trusted than that which could be measured and counted.
This scientific revolution was built upon the earlier movements of Islamic and Christian humanism. Humanists believed that because God had given humans intelligence, after his own image, it was therefore an act of worship to study God’s creation; nature.
Over time, God became conceptualised as a wholly rational power with mathematics as his language of creation.
Later the French Revolution (1789-1799) retaliated against Catholic and aristocratic corruption. God then became abstracted into ‘nature’. The proto-scientists of this age called themselves themselves ‘natural philosophers’3. Many of these natural philosophers were deists, believing God to be an impersonal power who doesn’t interfere with his creation.
The next logical step after deism, was to try and remove all religious or spiritual sentiment from science. Atheism took hold, and the academies began to be secularised.
Progress speeds up
From the late 17th to the 20th centuries, the widespread development of machine technologies made ongoing progress seem like a sure thing.
Within 147 years we went from Charles’ Babbage’s early computer, the ‘difference engine’ (1822), to the ARPANET (1967), the earliest form of the Internet.
The telegraph (1844, Samuel Morse), provided the infrastructure for the data revolution that eventually evolved into the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989). A span of 145 years.
From the Wright Brother’s first controlled aeroplane flight (1903) to the moon landing (1969) was a mere 66 years.
Throughout this period, and reaching a peak with nuclear technology, space travel and data technology, technological progress seemed to be speeding up.
At the same time industrialised farming, industrial jobs and resource distribution began pulling people out of extreme poverty at an unprecedented level. It is sobering however to note that quite a lot of technology, for instance canned goods, came out of war efforts.
‘Progressive’ youth culture and modern art
Capitalism and advertising seized upon the idea of progress as a way to create desire for new products. Modernity in city life and the family home was sold as something to constantly strive for. The concept of the ‘teenager’, was arguably invented by advertisers in 1940’s America in order to capitalise on America’s rising wealth and production from the end of the second world war onward. So perpetuated the worship of the new. Similarly, modern processed foods and household appliances were often sold as a ‘feminist’ effort to allow mothers more free time by reducing their household workload. Very quaint by modern feminist standards!
By the second half of the 20th century we had new musical movements marketed towards teenagers every five years or so. These youth were raised as cultural futurists. This culminated in utopian visions such as Star Trek’ s fictional ‘post scarcity’ universe. Around this time the year 2000 was sign posted as the ‘date of the future’.
Optimism usually lives in tension with cynicism. By the late 70’s and throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, the fear of nuclear war, a bad job market, and fears about global pollution created the nihilistic generation X. As the year 2000 approached, what once was marketed as a bright future where humans would extend into space, robots would do our work for us, and medical advances would render us immortal, became the high hysteria of Y2K.
For those who don’t remember, Y2K, also know as the ‘Millennium Bug’, was a computer formatting issue whereby dates stored using only two digits (00-99) were predicted to confuse the year 2000 with the year 1900. Hysteria escalated this rather small issue, predictably fixed by a minor update in code, to something that was prophesied to bring down government records and decimate the global economy! At new years parties in 1999-2000 we waited in both excitement and trepidation as nothing particularly went wrong. No major failures were reported.
As 2000 dawned (aged 19), I was then concerned with what the next ‘date of the future’ was gong to be. 2100? 3000? Growing up knowing only futurism, I expected all ‘progress’ to continue.
At 43 years old I’m still waiting…
A new, wide, generation gap
Modern youth, born after 2000, are growing up without this belief in progress. As internet natives in the throws of the data revolution they have been given ‘everything all at once’. It’s as if the past and the present are equally ‘new’ and equally engaging to them. Progress has been of much less importance to them as it was to 20th century people.
As a guitar teacher, my students since around the 2010’s have mostly liked the same music as their parents and grand parents. Many thirteen year olds have come through who love Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, often much more than they like contemporary music. Even modern popular music artists are nowadays decidedly ‘retro’ in their styles.
Since the 1960’s music and fashion tastes had followed a retro-futurist nostalgia. Each new era in music also brought a very particular revival from a previous decade. The 60’s saw a folk revival, largely spearheaded by Pete Seeger and later by Bob Dylan. In the 70’s and early 80’s there was a 50’s revival which produced the musical Grease, and the popular TV programme Happy Days. The film series Back to the Future accentuated both 50’s nostalgia and early 2000’s technological progress complete with flying cars.
In the first half of the 90’s there was a 60’s revival with grunge guitarists echoing Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, Vietnam war movies and hippie fashion nostalgia was present in films such as Forrest Gump. In the late 90’s there was a 70’s garage rock revival with bands like the Strokes. From roughly 1998 pop stars like Cher4 and Madonna had major comebacks with 1980’s-style pop hits.
Growing up with this nostalgia pattern, with some excitement I predicted a 90’s revival would soon follow. This would be the first revival I really cared about.
In 2002 my brother and I hosted what we hoped was the world’s first 90’s revival party. Though the party was popular with our friends, I’ve never been to another 90’s revival party every again, and it is now 2025!5
Instead since 1998, and much to my chagrin, my most hated decade, the 80’s, has become jammed on repeat. The hugely popular TV series Stranger Things (2016 to present) is evidence of this ongoing revival, as are the return of ‘mullet’ haircuts!
Perhaps in truth, due to the mass diversification of media, what is really going on right now is an ‘everything revival’.
Technological progress vs Paradigm Shifts
Throughout the 20th century and into the early 21st century it has been popular to posit new gadgets as revolutionary and life-transforming. While this is useful as a marketing ploy, I believe it is more useful to look at how much technology truly affects what we can do, than whether a hard drive has doubled it’s data storage capacity, or whether a digital device became slightly smaller.
The term ‘Paradigm Shift’ was popularised by Thomas S. Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A paradigm shift is a complete transformation in how people understand and approach a subject.
In this way I propose that the invention of the telegraph was a paradigm shift. It allowed the first, nearly instant, communication through wires. It could be argued therefore that the telephone was a mere evolution of the telegraph, piggybacking on the same network infrastructure.
The internet, especially the World Wide Web, could be construed as a paradigm shift because of radical shift in the amount of data that can be shifted around by an average person, and the non-localised nature of its data network (compared to a library for instance). In another sense though, it is simply a further evolution of the telegraph/telephone system.
In this sense, a cellphone is an evolution of the pager and probably therefore, not a true paradigm shift.
It is arguable that the amount of paradigm shifts has actually radically slowed down in comparison to the 20th century which produced aeroplanes, supermarkets, industrial warfare, nukes, space travel, medical scanners, the contraceptive pill, and many other ‘civilisation changing’ advances.
Perhaps the only true paradigm shift so far of the 21st century is the advancement of AI technology. In particular, Large Language Models, AI image generators, AI video generators and to a lesser extent, audio generators allowing particular human voices to be copied, and which allow the isolation of parts of mono audio into separated tracks6.
It is still too early to understand the extent to which these and related technologies will truly transform our lives, and there’s definitely a lot of hype built into many predictions of AI technologies.
I presume that one important effect of AI will be in its ability to organise vast amounts of scientific data, for example in the field of genome sequencing.
In any case, the impact of technological change in the 21st century has so far, been much less life transforming than it was throughout the 20th century. The once ubiquitous ‘Moore’s law’ where microprocessors were said to double in power every 18 months has radically slowed since around 20107.
Space flight, once projected to send people around the galaxy, is still only accessible to astronauts the extremely rich. So far no-one has left Earth orbit. Flying cars and jetpacks never became a popular type of transport. The human lifespan has not been extended into multiple centuries.
You may laugh, but all of these predictions were discussed as reasonable by 20th century people!
A loss of faith in progress
Just as Y2K fizzled into a non-event in the year 2000, 2001 marked the beginning of the end of the American futurism and exceptionalism with the Trade Tower bombings of 9/11.
Using the remarkably low tech weaponry of box cutters, Fundamentalist Islamist terrorists turned commercial airliners into civilisation-redefining doom engines. The symbolism of the act far exceeded the impact of its grisly death toll. Global air travel became noticeably more stressful as international border security was fortified. Americans lost faith that their military could protect them from all threats.
Even then, there were still some firm believers that a globalist union of governments might soon produce a ‘borderless’ world where global citizens of means were free to move around without visas.
In early 2020 the Covid19 virus became global, and international border shutdowns killed this idea once and for all.
Even before then, the United States, now a politically stressed country, had slowly began to pull away from globalist agreements. Now in 2025, with tariffs, popularism, and a shuffling of military alliances, it seems possible that they could leave behind the obligations that currently allow international shipping networks to function. If this eventuates it will transform global economies.
At the same time, youth born after the year 2000 have shown themselves to be very sceptical of technology. There is a widespread fear of sea level rise, a growing mistrust of smart phones, and widespread a lack of enthusiasm in futurism.
21st century people have a new relationship to time
Unlike 20th century people like myself, our 21st century youth have a totally different relationship to time. It appears as if they are turning the ship around, back to the historically more ‘normal’ approach. They appear to more or less disregard the future as ‘real’8, walking ‘backwards’ through time looking at the past. Just like our ancestors did since time immemorial.
As strange as this may appear to middle aged and older people, I propose that we 20th century people are actually the weird ones. Futurism is perhaps an unsustainable idea. Relating oneself to one’s ancestors is historically speaking, a much more solid ground on which to maintain a civilisation.
This change isn’t a mere generational shift. Instead it may well represent the end of the pattern which started way back in the Enlightenment.
Put simply, a roughly 500 year-old civilisational story is coming to an end, and we are now in a transition period. Looking historically this transition may take more than a century to play out, just as previous periods, for instance that of the Roman Empire, faded. Exactly what will follow is still relatively unclear and this likely won’t be fully resolved in your lifetime.
What is more obvious is the loss of faith in several Enlightenment values.
Quantum physics is moving science away from materialism which made matter fundamental. Now we have an ‘information model’ of the universe9. At the same time, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is causing scientists to take seriously models where consciousness is considered a fundamental aspect of the universe.
The measurable non-locality, and field effects of fundamental particles is shifting us back to a model much like that of Alchemy than true materialism: The smallest things map back onto the biggest things or ‘as above so below’.
All of these ideas echo mystical schools of the past: Hermeticism, Hinduism, Alchemy, Buddhism... This furthers my belief that society is turning ship, towards a civilisation that is much more able to incorporate the ideas of the past and much less inclined to disrespect the ideas and values of our ancestors.
In the next article I will explore what this may mean for humankind magically and spiritually.
Footnotes:
1Based on Isaac Newton’s ideas, though a careful look at Newton shows that he was an alchemist and an esoteric thinker rather than a strict materialist like most of the scientists who followed him.
2It also created widespread pollution, mining, and the removal of forests and other natural habitats. Utopias have always lived in an uncomfortable balance with dystopias.
3The term ‘scientist’ first appears in 1833. The term ‘natural philosopher’ has a long history which over laps with terms like ‘alchemist’. It is however worth noting that alchemy, with its mysticism, symbolism, and focus on spiritual experience had fallen out of favour by the Enlightenment period.
4Cher also introduced the dubious and futuristic sounding autotune effect, which has plagued global pop music ever since.
5On Youtube, and beyond there’s currently a low key 90’s revival going on right now, but it took a very long time to eventuate. I’ve also started to notice some 90’s revival trends in recent teenage fashion.
6For instance, different musical instruments are now able to be separated into tracks from an original mono or stereo mix.
7This has been affected by both miniaturisation and difficulties in cooling processors.
8This is rational. The future has never been ‘real’.
9Information and energy are, I argue, two ways of addressing the same thing.