The trends that everybody is talking about now aren’t usually the ones that are important in the long term‐they’re just fashionable.

Even powerful, long-term trends never go to completion. There are periods dominated by the growth of large, centralised states and empires (eg. 18th and 19th centuries) but the world never gets to be ruled by a single empire, and small states, and non-state polities, continue to exist. There are periods of widespread disintegration (4th – 5th centuries AD, late 20th – 21st centuries) but societies never get completely atomised, and empires do not completely disappear.

Large, complex societies do not collapse all at once. It takes a good couple of hundred years for a weakened but functioning empire to turn into a bunch of squabbling tribal kingdoms. Short periods of sudden partial disintegration are separated by long periods of stasis or partial recovery. Apocalypse takes a long time.

There are always many points of view in a culture. There are always people who disagree with the dominant beliefs. There are always whole groups trying to spread their minority view. There are always a few crazy people who disagree even with the most fundamental, unquestioned tenets of their society. Some of those crazy ideas will evolve into a future dominant belief, although this may take centuries.

The world is not evolving towards your own preferred utopia.

The world is not evolving towards your own worst nightmare.

Political ideologies have multiple components that do not keep the same alignment over the long term. E.g. the spectrum from leftwing to rightwing (roughly, belief in equality in some general sense, versus belief in hierarchy in some general sense) is separate from the spectrum from individualist to collectivist. From the early-eighteenth to early-nineteenth century, people whose individualist beliefs would line them up with modern libertarians were nevertheless clearly on the left, while the right was in favour of powerful central government. By the mid-nineteenth century, individualism was dominant on both left and right, and dissenting left-wing collectivist movements (socialism, communism) were appearing. By the end of the nineteenth century, the left was increasingly dominated by collectivism, and the right by individualism. During the first half of the twentieth century, collectivism was dominant on both left and right. During the post-war consensus, first left-wing and then right-wing forms of dissenting individualist ideology appeared (during the 60s and 70s respectively). For a while, the dominant left-wing parties were collectivist while those on the right were individualist. Increasingly, individualism is now becoming dominant on both left and right, forming a new consensus …

Other cycles include the cycle in aesthetic taste between ornamentation and simplicity. There is a spectacular contrast between, on the one hand, the Victorians with their overstuffed furniture, mounds of bric-a-brac, crowded history and social-commentary paintings, complex prose full of long words and sentences, heavily decorated buildings, complex music for large orchestras, long-winded scientific terminology, etc, and, on the other hand, the 20th centuries love affair with simply, unornamented architecture, paintings stripped down almost to blankness or, for narrative, simple cartoons; the dominance of simple songs in music, the preference for plain prose, the amazing reduction in women’s clothing and accessories, the simplifications in interior decoration, etc. But the Victorian era was preceded by the preference for classical simplicity and elegance of the eighteenth and mid-to-late seventeenth centuries, with its classical architecture, uncluttered paintings, striving towards simplicity in prose and regularity and economy in poetry, etc, which was preceded by the greater complexity and irregularity of the Elizabethan era, etc. (It’s no coincidence, for instance, that the reputation of Shakespeare fell considerably in the period immediately following him, and rose again spectacularly in the early 19th century).

Change doesn’t happen at a constant rate, and different aspects of culture and society change at different rates.

Every change has both winners and losers. It’s not generally possible to know in advance who these will be. Every change has many unexpected consequences.

On the other hand, the fact that some people failed to predict a change doesn’t mean that everybody failed to predict that change.

Most innovations die out quickly. A few live somewhat longer. Only a very few gain a wide foothold. Some of these are more predictable than others. This applies across all innovations, whether new businesses, new inventions, claimed scientific discoveries, new works of art, changes in language, or even biological adaptations.

Just a few thoughts.

Anyway, really interesting read.