Sometimes The Future Demands A Vision. This Is Probably Not One Of Those Times.
The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot saw the world through what he called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order.
History certainly seems to bear this out. Events propagate at a certain rhythm and then converge and cascade around certain points. For roughly a decade, I’ve thought that 2020 would be one of those inflection points and that certainly seems to be the case. The 2020s are echoing the 1920s in some very troubling ways.
We always need to be careful with making historical parallels, because history is so long and varied that we can find some historical allusion to fit any potential set of facts. Yet, they can also be instructive. Clearly, we are on the brink of a new era that we do not clearly understand and we are a juncture that is fraught with peril. Looking back can help us make sense of it all.
The Dual Revolutions
Until the late 1700s, the Western World existed much as it did for centuries. Monarchs reigned by divine right over feudal kingdoms of lower nobles who, in turn ruled over peasants that were tied to the land and scratched out a subsistence living. There was a small number, making up no more than a few percent of the population, of urban artisans and tradesmen.
The Dual Revolutions in England and France would forever break that pattern. The first was the Industrial revolution that took hold in England, which had its roots in James Watt installing the first steam engines in 1776, would revolutionize the textile industry and begin the transition from rural-based cottage industries to urban-based factory production.
The second revolution began in France in 1789 when the third estate, which represented not the aristocracy or the church, but the people, produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Greatly influenced by the American Declaration of Independence and enlightenment philosophy, it insisted on individual rights rather than feudalism, popular sovereignty rather than divine right of kings and would lead to the French Revolution .
These dual revolutions would have profound consequences that no one could have foreseen. The Industrial Revolution, initially centered around England’s textile industry until the mid-1800s, propelled the British Empire to global dominance. However, it also led to the impoverishment of India and contributed to the expansion of the slave trade in America.
The French Revolution would lead to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose campaigns through Europe would spread ideas of democracy, nationalism, and liberalism. In the ensuing decades, the old feudal system would come under increasing pressure, as new forces would take hold and create three major shifts that the old order could not contain.
The Three Shifts That Shaped The 19th Century
As the political ramifications of the ideals of the French revolution spread, there was a parallel economic upheaval also underway driven by major shifts in transportation, population and commerce. Each would, in its own way, contribute to the immensely disruptive changes underway and increase the pressures on the old order.
The most obvious factor was transportation. George Stephenson’s development of the railroad, which quickly spread throughout England and then, albeit at a much slower pace, throughout the continent. Yet even before the railroads began making their impact, there was rapid expansion of roads throughout Europe as well as increasing development of canals in England. Steamships transformed ocean freight, especially between Europe and the US.
Population, which had been relatively stable throughout human history, began to grow in the middle of the 18th century and this growth would accelerate in the 19th, roughly doubling between 1750 and 1850 in Europe and trebling in England. Much of this new population came to the cities to find work in the new factories that came with industrialization.
The shift in population and logistics created an enormous shift in commerce, increasing fourfold in the western world between 1750 and 1850. Migration also increased significantly, especially from Europe to the United States, where roughly four million people would emigrate between 1818 and 1850. For the first time in history, people were no longer tied to the land of their birth.
The confluence of these shifts would make the old ways of divine right monarchies and feudalism untenable. Yet the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.
The Congress Of Vienna And The Revolutions Of 1848
After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the great powers of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, along with a wide array of lesser powers such as Spain, Portugal, Sweden and others met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. It was chaired by Austria’s legendary Foreign Minister, Klemens von Metternich.
The goal of the Congress, and the resulting treaty, was to subjugate France, restore the balance of power as well as to thwart the revolutionary winds still blowing from the French and American Revolutions. It would inaugurate the so-called Concert of Europe, a system by which the great powers would maintain peace for a full century, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Yet while the old regimes remained intact, revolutionary fervor continued to foment. The capitalism of Smith and Ricardo created a new class of industrialists which challenged the old aristocracy. At the same time, the socialist ideas of thinkers like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Owen and Marx galvanized the working class, urging them to claim the rights declared in the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Eventually things came to a head in the Revolutions of 1848, when revolts broke out across Europe. Similar to modern revolutionary waves, like those in 1968, 1989 and, more recently, the color revolutions and the Arab Spring protests, popular uprisings demanded basic rights. Meanwhile, the ruling regimes struggled to maintain order, offering minor concessions in an effort to preserve an uneasy peace.
It was, of course, just a matter of time. Feudalism and the divine right of kings had become relics of the past and, in time, the conflict would shift. The next century would be primarily a battle between the forces of democracy, capitalism, socialism and fascism.
The Rhythms Of Revolution
Over the past two centuries, we have seen echoes of the same pattern first established in the late 18th century: a wave of new ideas is resisted by the dominant powers, as tensions build below the surface and eventually explode. Sometimes order holds and sometimes it gives way to a period of chaos and destruction before, eventually, finding some sort of homeostasis. These are the “Noah effects” and “Joseph effects” that Mandelbrot described.
History during this time has largely been defined by inflection points. 1776 brought both the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations and the steam engine. With 1919 came a peace treaty establishing a new world order as well as a crippling epidemic. Within a single momentous month in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the World Wide Web was born. Waves of revolution in 1848 and 1968 marked important shifts that helped define what came after.
We are now in the later stages of this cycle. Clearly, 2020 marked a critical junture, where significant disruptions challenged the prevailing order, but it’s not clear what comes next. Authoritarianism challenges democracy, while demands for new rights from the left are met with reactionary forces on the right. As the Boomer generation recedes, Millennials are emerging. Major shifts in technology, demography, resources and migration add more stress to the system.
Some eras call for a vision, while in others certain forces are set in motion and our task is to merely survive them, averting the worst of possible calamities, overcoming the deluge so that we can make it to the other side. It seems that what we are experiencing today is the latter.
There is no doubt that the future holds great promise. Technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will power new sciences like synthetic biology and nanotechnology, which will, in turn, revolutionize healthcare, energy and manufacturing. We can, as trite as it sounds, heal the planet. But first we need to heal ourselves.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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