Currently, I’m listening to Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants. I really love historical fiction and in particular Ken Follett’s writing. I read Pillars of the Earth years ago and recently finished listening to World Without End. Fall of Giants takes place during WWI, the best thing about the work is realizing how much the world has changed in the last 100 years. I’ve grown more grateful to be living in a time with so many luxuries and creature comforts.
Our governments might seem incompetent in the moment, we should expect better. But if we compare to the situation of 100-years ago, they were were truly incompetent and in turmoil. In 1914, Europe was largely run by the landed aristocracy, democracy was rare. England had rule over many countries as territories. Universal suffrage was a dream for many countries, even women in England were just getting the right to vote. The aristocracy was cruel and poverty commonplace. Racism and classism was the way of life. The world literally fell into the Great War because of silly chains of bilateral agreements to backstop allies. Our governments today are not without their faults but there’s been objective improvement. The spread of democracy has improved the lives of many but there are cracks showing. There are social riots in the US, but in general the world is relatively geopolitically stable. Nevertheless, it’s the improvement in life brought on by industrialization and technology that stands out for me.
WWI was largely fought with horse and cart to supply front-line troops. This was a war fought largely on the ground, in the trenches, not the air. Solders would charge at machine guns hoping to overwhelm the shooter before they could reload. The Great War was fought by people who didn’t even truly understand the power of the weapons they yielded, many had never been tested in battle.
The understanding of physiology was primitive at best. At this moment, I sit at home healing from minimally invasive foot surgery. I was put under general anesthesia and they used live x-rays during the procedure to guide a power-drill. Such a procedure 100-years ago would have been technologically unfathomable, my procedure took less than an hour!
In today’s age, I watch YouTube on my flat-screen TV, control it with my smart phone, write this blog entry on a laptop. Their only forms of entertainment were theatre, tea time, drink, and sex. Maybe our endless diversions are the things that keep us from going to war.
Today, I often prefer to listen to audiobooks using a wireless headset. It frees up my hands and eyes to work on other things like woodworking with power tools. In 1914, electrical lighting inside home was uncommon except for the most wealthy. Putting on a record or the radio was a great luxury. Today, we expect to stream media and get entertainment on demand. How challenging it would be to pass a pandemic without these advances!
When it gets cold, my smart thermostat knows to turn up the heat. And now I have the equivalent of a printing press in my home the size of a shoe box. When I need goods, I don’t even necessarily need to leave the house, everything is deliverable through my smart phone. The wonders of the modern age are really amazing when we look at how much the world has changed in the last 100-years.
In Canada, we gripe about our slow COVID19 vaccination rollout, in 1918 the Spanish Flu killed 20+ million worldwide (somewhere between 1-5% of the world population, depending on your favourite source), vaccines couldn’t even be developed in the timelines we see now. We should be grateful for the advances we’ve seen in science and technology.
Food was rationed during the Great War, today we suffer from a different problem, over indulgence. During the lead up to the Russian Revolution, Russians were lining up at midnight to buy rationed bread. Today instead of starving, we are more likely to eat ourselves to death.
Sometimes technology seems to take longer than we thought it would, people says it took 20 years for the internet to really take-off. But it took smart-phones less than half that time to become ubiquitous. Today now we have vaccines that can be developed in < 12 months instead of years. It’s possible in the near future, that after a virus is sequenced, we could devise a vaccine within weeks. With advances in computing and biosciences this is not unfathomable.
I turn 40 this month, I hope I can live long enough to see what the next 50 years will bring. It is an exciting time to be alive and grateful.