We had a fabulous talk last week by David Skillen about The Industrial Revolution. There’s my brief summary of the talk (and all our Probus talks), in the Local Clubs’ Section of The Harrogate Advertiser.
Apart from being a brilliant and informative talk it started me thinking about our own age, often hyped as the period of greatest change that the world has ever known.
According to the Web (1) the major time-periods in world history include the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Ages, then through Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, The Islamic Golden Age, The Age of Discovery, The Protestant Reformation, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Age of Revolution, The Romantic Era, The Industrial Revolution, The Age of Imperialism, The First World, The Inter-war era, The Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, The Cold War and The Information Age.
What a lot of Ages!
Some of these periods of history (Eras, Ages etc.) overlap, though increasingly our world is moving synchronously, driven by the need to know what’s going on, when and wherever it happens (like the Martini advert – Any time, Any place, Anywhere).
David’s talk made me doubt what I’d lazily taken for granted – that we are now living through the greatest changes in our World’s history. He showed that a period of just a few decades in The Industrial Revolution transformed working life radically in the 1700s, enabling incredible leaps in industrial productivity – that the UK at least seemed to have failed to reach subsequently, and we invented the Industrial Revolution!
According to the Web we’re still in the Information Age, where modern technologies are shaping our society, but I think that we are meant to have arrived by now in ‘The Age of Knowledge and Wisdom’, rather than just drowning in (fake) information.
I came across a ‘wise’ saying somewhere recently that describes the difference:
‘Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad’.
(1) https://www.biographyonline.net/different-periods-in-history/