Was there a difference in the growth and change that occurred throughout the twentieth century then the centuries that proceeded it? If so, what stimulated these differences?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: From the 1890s, in ways largely unremarked at the time, the long, slow, cumulative changes of the previous two or three hundred years, on a global scale, accelerated unprecedentedly. By almost every measurable index—population growth, urbanization, the increase of industrial and agricultural output, the consumption of resources, the scale and range of commerce, the emergence of new states, the convulsions of economies, the destructiveness of wars (and the speed of reconstruction that followed them), the reach of technology, the lurches of fashion, the triumphs of medicine and the multiplications of disease, the extinctions of species, the transformations of climate—the twentieth-century world probably registered mutations greater and faster than those experienced by the whole human past put together, and certainly greater than those in any previous period for which any changes of the kind can be computed. There were two conspicuous areas of stagnancy: Neither morals nor intelligence improved to keep pace with the other kinds of change, or cope with the problems they created. No one knows why the sudden acceleration began. There just seems to have been a threshold beyond which changes came so thick and fast that they stimulated each other, and further changes in turn, without pause or restraint. The causes of cultural change generally are unknown. New ideas commonly arise from the exchange of old ones, more than from any other single circumstance. If that assumption is correct, it is understandable that change should speed up in a period when trade, technology, and war shrank the distance between cultures and facilitated exchange between them.