Rosa Brooks, is your life really more complex than it was a century or two ago?

That’s what my friend Rosa Brooks assumes, writing that, "Even if humans are somewhat less nasty to one another than they used to be, the complexity of our world has increased exponentially, and our ability to inadvertently mess the world up has similarly increased." I know and like Rosa, but I think she’s wrong here.

Yes, we can mess up the world pretty well. But I disagree with her other assertion. That is, I don’t think life is infinitely more complex these days than it was in the 18th or 19th centuries. I think life changed faster then than now. Those times saw huge leaps in the capabilities and reach of the human race. Until the Industrial Revolution, it was hard to move people or goods much faster than six miles per hour, and that depended on the vagaries of sail. And almost all information moved at the same tortoise-like pace. Then came the railroad, the telegraph, and the precise measurement of time and goods. This all was accompanied by a massive shift of people from farms to factories, from countryside to cities. In response, the professional governments we know now in the West were created. (London didn’t have a police force until the 19th century, for example.)

In my view, the Internet is just a faster, more colorful telegraph. And the sense of change was greater in the 19th century than it is now.

That said, I think historians will regard global warming as the most important trend of our time, and will wonder why we didn’t focus on it more. So I think Rosa B. might be fundamentally correct that we are in the handbasket, which was her real point.