About ten generations ago (200 years), another change started in human lifestyle. In Western Europe people started using steam-powered machines to help them do things. This was the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Once again the push on the gene pool changed direction dramatically. Once again successful thinking patterns changed.
One place to look for examples of what changed in thinking styles is the famous French Revolution that started in 1789. The people of France wanted a change. They couldn’t know that they were asking for a change from good agricultural thinking to good industrial thinking. It was too early in the process.
So what are the significant changes between Agricultural Age lifestyle and Industrial Age lifestyle?
In both Neolithic Village and Agricultural Age living, the world around humans is relatively constant and the tools humans have to cope with the world are relatively constant. There are seasonal changes, migration changes, and natural disaster changes, but these tend to come and go. Or if a change for the worse happens and it doesn’t get better soon, the humans go. Either way, the world humans live in doesn’t change much from generation to generation.
In the Industrial Age this isn’t so. Humans are constantly coming up with new tools, new ways to do things, new ways to live, and new ways to think about the world around us.
The Industrial Age is all about change: The new generation doesn’t live the way the old generation did.
This is what the Industrial Age is most famous for: Building machines to do what mankind used to do for itself and much, much, more.
In Neolithic Village times the old people were repositories of knowledge. In Agricultural Age times those few who could read and write were not only repositories but also extractors of “book knowledge”. In the Industrial Age, things work best when everyone is a repository and extractor of book knowledge.
The Industrial Age has produced a steady stream of new ways for humans to cooperate. The most potent symbols of this widening cooperation are money and finance.
Another example is the steady increase in the number of kinds of jobs people can work at. Today there are tens of thousands of kinds of jobs instead of hundreds.
Four hundred years ago, a quarter of the world’s humans worked at being a farmer and another quarter at being a farmer’s wife. In the early 21st century, that half has been reduced to a third worldwide, and in developed Industrial Age countries, the percentage is a lot lower, approaching 5%.
As a result of this increasing diversity in things to do, humans have steadily been inventing new ways to make groups. They have invented ways to make larger groups work well, and ways to make groups of all sizes work well in accomplishing the thousands of new and different kinds of tasks that happen in Industrial Age societies.
As the Industrial Age has produced new tools humans have used those tools to study the world they live in. They have come to understand how it works much better. This is a virtuous circle: As humans understand more, they can make even better tools and better living conditions for humans, and then they understand even more about the world they live in.
In a harkening back to Neolithic Village times, travel is big again. Industrial Age humans move around a lot again. Even more, in fact.
Industrial Age living depends a whole lot on layers and layers of tools.
How do these changes push human thinking? This is harder. We live in the Industrial Age, it’s all around us, so it’s harder to pick out what’s changed. But here’s a good try at it.
The Industrial Age is new. It’s all about new. This means that what works well must be learned. We still have instincts—feel-good thinking—but following your heart is not going to work as well as it does in Neolithic or Agriculture lifestyles.
The call for universal education and the call for getting a college degree are two examples of filling human minds with adaptive learning.
Doing all this learning is easier for some people and harder for others. Those who do it well tend to be more successful in the grandchild test so the gene pool is being pushed.
Farms depend on weather, factories depend on timing. Most machine processes have tight timing constraints. The complaint that in modern times humans become cogs in a huge machine is valid, and to be a successful cog you have to develop good time sense.
Industrial Age humans deal with a whole lot more people than earlier age peoples. Not betraying strangers tends to pay big benefits compared to betraying them.
Driving is the coming-of-age skill in developed societies.
These are examples of useful thinking that has been useful for ten generations or less. The gene pool has barely been nudged by these, but the great crises of the 19th and 20th centuries—the wars, the revolutions, the movements—have their roots in the transition from Agricultural Thinking to Industrial Thinking.
There is one final transition to talk about, the one we are in the midst of today: The transition to the Information Age.