A new sense of change

We live in a world that is changing, and we know we do.When we compare the conditions in which we find ourselves today with those prevailing around 1750, a mere ten generations ago, we can draw up an almost endless list of differences. There are, to mention just one of the most striking facts, far more of us. In 1750 humankind numbered around 771 million people; that is about 25% less than the population of India today (see Table 1.1). Most people were younger, with an average life expectancy of 27 years across the world, about half of today's global average. Mass-produced consumer goods did not exist at all; most of the technical and hygienic amenities that we tend to take for granted today were either unknown or available only to small privileged groups.

At the time, the conditions of a basically rural world dominated by scarcity must have seemed timeless to most people. And yet, on closer inspection, the world of 1750 was changing, as indeed the world had been doing since time immemorial. Moreover, as we now know, around 1750 humanity was approaching a cascade of radical and rapidly accelerating transformations. Among some people of that era, an awareness of ubiquitous and pervasive change was already dawning.

This sense of change was brilliantly expressed and elaborated in two lectures delivered in the summer of the year 1750 at the Sorbonne by the then 23-year-old future statesman Turgot. He pointed out the contrast between physical nature, which he saw as subject to constant laws, and the human world, which is continuously changing. In nature, he said, the same cycles repeat themselves endlessly: day and night, full moon and new moon, summer and winter. There is, however, one exception to all these patterns of never ending recurrence, and that is human society. While the rest of the universe keeps going through the same motions eternally, human beings are able to conceive new ideas, put these ideas into practice and transmit their innovations to the generations that come after them (see Manuel 1962: 11-52).