I heard from one of my readers recently, asking when I was going to do another entry here about futurism, which was all I needed to start the ol' gears cranking again about the subject. Ah, futurism! As regulars know, this is a big pet subject of mine, something I consider myself an amateur dilettante at, but that I'd love to one day get paid for doing, like Malcolm Gladwell or Clay Shirky or Kevin Kelly or Chris Anderson or Douglas Rushkoff or any of those dudes I obsessively follow. So I thought today I'd share some thoughts I've been having recently about what the future has in store for us, based on what history has done so far and what we can reasonably expect next.

Because to tell the truth, ever since starting my arts center and starting to do more and more critical essays about the history of creativity, my brain has been thinking more and more along much grander lines, thinking not only about what's influencing our culture these days in the here and now, but where we might be at this point along the much bigger timelines of, say, the Information Age, or even the now 500-year-old Modern Age that started with the Renaissance (which might actually better be called "The Scientific Age," but more on that in a bit). And the first complication, of course, is that there are a lot of terms that are interchangeably used to talk about these giant sweeps of history; so I thought while I was explaining my thoughts I would also do a little specific defining of my terms along the way, and use terms that are usually general ones to actually convey specific meanings today. For example...

Perhaps the smallest "grand sweep" of history is what I call the "era," usually 25 to 75 years in length or so, many times defined by a central person of importance in that era -- so think of the Victorian Era, for example, the Nazi Era, the Stalinist Era, the Progressive Era, and more. As you can see, times can overlap depending on who's doing the naming; so Brits, for example, might be more inclined to see the late 1700s as the "Georgian Era," while Americans might more naturally look at it as the "Colonial Era." It's what most people mean when they refer to the "zeitgeist" of a particular time; a specific set of ethics, mindsets, and cultural touchstones that define any particular half-century or so of human history. So in this case, I'm convinced nearly 100 percent that we are very much right at the beginning of a new era right this moment, one you can easily call the "Obamian Era" and in fact is a term I think is going to stick, which will most likely end up defining the next 30 years or so of American history, just like the "Reagan Era" defined the 1980s to 2000s, the "Kennedy Era" from the '60s to '80s, the "Roosevelt Era" from the '30s to '60s, etc etc. And in fact I think it's pretty easy already to see what it's eventually going to be known for, too -- an era of newly-found common sense again, when the governments of the world finally all acknowledged a dying planet and started the "grand greening" of humanity, the Web 2.0 rapidly began tying the entire global populace together into a real-time world-spanning multimedia communications network, and most Americans finally started to "get" the Middle East in the same nuanced way they used to only "get" Europe and Asia.

The next bigger measurement, then, would be what I call the "age," on an equal par as far as scope with the term coming in the next paragraph ("period") but defined using different criteria, and in this case with timespans that keep getting shorter and shorter with each new one. And that's because ages are based on the prevailing technology at the time, which as we know keeps morphing faster and faster because of the collective stored knowledge of humanity getting bigger each year as well; for example, look how relatively long it seems that the Bronze Age or Agricultural Age lasted, while the Industrial Age right before ours only lasted around 150 years or so. Like many, I believe that we're right in the middle of the so-called "Information Age" right now, one that started roughly around 1950 at the end of World War Two; and given that the Industrial Age lasted 150 years or so, I'm predicting that the Information Age will last around a century altogether, transitioning into the next one roughly around 2050. And in fact it's no coincidence that Ray Kurzweil and that whole crowd are predicting their so-called "Singularity" to happen right around this same time period, basically a profoundly shifting moment in humanity where the mechanical and biological suddenly come together, for example by maybe humans finally inventing the first sentient computer, or maybe building the first artificial device completely out of "living" parts. I too believe that this will signal the coming of the next age after the Information one, simply that I disagree that it will involve some giant high-profile one-time event, more that it'll simply slide into this new 'biomecha' reality bit by bit over the course of decades, as implants get more sophisticated and medical robots smaller and smaller, computers smarter and smarter, etc. After all, this is how all ages start and finish, with a whimper instead of a bang, a gentle transition over half a century that goes so slowly, almost no one at the time actually notices it.

And then like I said, on a par with this would be what I call a "period," all of them since the end of the Dark Ages roughly around a hundred years apiece, also marking a major time in human development but this time defined through the common ethics, morality and philosophy of that time, not the prevailing technology. So the 1500s saw the Renaissance Period; the 1600s the Baroque Period; the 1700s the Enlightened Period (or the "Enlightenment" as it's better known); the 1800s the Romantic Period (or Romanticism); and the 1900s the Modern Period (or Modernism). And what will be the period to define the 2000s? Well, how about "Sincerism?" Or perhaps the "Sincere Period" if you prefer? This is the term I've been using at CCLaP, anyway, to define this whole new breed of post-9/11 artistic project I've been seeing more and more, marked by a complete rejection of irony and nihilism, which after all when combined with moral relativism was the cause of nearly every disaster of the Modernist period, World War One and World War Two and Stalinism and Vietnam and the Bush Regime and everything else, which when added together caused as much destruction as such so-called "Dark Age" events as the Crusades and the Black Death. The more of current culture that I inhale these days through CCLaP, the more I'm coming to believe that we're at the beginning of this major new century-long way of seeing the world, one that will use sincerity and positivism to bring about these grand new meshes in how we understand the world -- a mesh between reason and faith, between science and religion, between moral absolutism and moral relativism. If Modernism was about declaring all alternatives possible, breaking them down into their building blocks, and first setting them up as natural enemies, then maybe Sincerism will be all about putting these ideas back together again, and in new ways so that their facets all complement each other, not clash.

And then this finally gets us to the biggest measurement of human history of all, what I call the "epoch," of which we in Western Civilization consider to have gone through three now in the last 2,500 years: the so-called "Classical Age" (500 BC to 500 AD), what's alternately known as the "Dark Ages" or "Middle Ages" (500 to 1500), and the "Modern Age" starting in the Renaissance that we're currently in the middle of. (Although like I said, since there's actually now a smaller period in history known as "Modernism," and because this term has become just a more general one in society recently anyway, used many times now to mean anything vaguely newish, I think it better to call this the "Scientific Age" instead, since science is the one really big thing to commonly define the entirety of Western history since the Renaissance.) Using history as a guide, many scholars argue that we're in fact right in the smack-dab middle of the Scientific Age right now, and that it's going to last an entire 500 years more before our next major planet-changing epoch is upon us; and this is just such a hard thing to accurately predict in the first place, precisely because of its overwhelmingly sweeping scope, that I'm more than happy to just assume at this point that these scholars are right, and that we will continue to stay in this so-called Scientific Age for another half a millennium.

Maybe more interesting, I think, is to look at the way these days we're starting to re-examine how to look at the epoch right before ours, this so-called "Medieval Period" that Westerners have had such a hard time defining and understanding. For centuries now, after all, we've been defining it strictly in insular relative terms to what came before and after just here in the West -- a common theory, for example, says that the Classical Age is when Westerners first embraced reason and science, and formed the first rudimentary forms of so-called enlightened society, as seen in its height back then of the Roman Empire ending the period; the Dark Age, then, is the thousand-year period when we Westerners forgot all this, and let religion and superstition take over our society, leading to a millennium of almost no forward progress for humanity at all, but instead a series of apocalyptic religious wars and genocidal diseases we had no idea how to protect ourselves against. And then the Scientific Age is when we rediscovered all this stuff about reason and science and whatnot; and that's what finally pulled us out of the rutting darkness of the Medieval Period, and allowed us to progress again as a culture to the now dizzying heights we've reached, where in many respects we literally hold control over nature itself by now (at least as defined by the superstitious trolls of the Dark Ages).

But the more I read and study about the world, the more I'm starting to think that perhaps it'd be better to define all this through the relationship between Western and Eastern Civilizations at any given moment in history: that what we call the "Classical Age" was one when the West and East were fairly equal in makeup, not just in terms of culture and technology but also the balance within each between reason and faith; and then what we in the West call the "Dark Ages" was in actuality a time when this balance simply got off-whack between the societies, where the West suddenly got a lot more religious and the East suddenly embraced reason, science and commerce a lot more. After all, the same exact years that shit-covered Europeans were huddled in their primitive stone towers, selling off their children and burning each other as witches, a whole series of "empire races" in the East (the Persians, the Arabs, the Ottomen, the Moghul) were flowering like never before, constructing entire glittering cities across the region devoted entirely to arts, philosophy and higher learning, and mythologically ornate libraries filled with the supposed combined sum of all human knowledge, in such fabled destinations as Alexandria and Babylon. After all, we wouldn't have had the Renaissance at all if these Eastern scholars hadn't made copies of all the West's old Greek and Roman texts, translated into Arabic and stuck in these scattered libraries across Asia and Africa; because during the Dark Ages, the Westerners were too busy torching each other's monasteries.

From this standpoint, then, you can easily see what we Westerners call the Scientific Age as simply a reversal of this: a time when Westerners suddenly embraced science, reason and commerce again in a much more profound way, and when the East suddenly embraced faith and religion in a big new scary way. And that led essentially to all these formerly grand empires falling apart, breaking up again into a whole series of tiny warlord fiefdoms; and once the Europeans started getting their shit together again, this is what allowed them to march into these places with superior soldiers, discipline and technology and easily take over each isolated fiefdom, starting the centuries-long colonialism which is such a tremendous black mark of the Scientific Age. So perhaps, then, what we're seeing these days is the start of a grand re-balancing between the East and West? It certainly seems that way at times, even if the movement itself is glacially slow -- that the West is very, very slowly starting to add a little more religion to its daily life and societal touchstones, that the East is starting to very, very slowly add reason and secular science back to their societies. It's something I like to think, anyway, that perhaps the next great age in human history will be one where the East and West balance themselves out again, and become on an equal par for the first time since before Christ but this time with the whole planet now hooked together with communications technology.

And that's what I've been thinking about these days! Well, and also some other things -- about the fact that my dentures are almost finished, that I'm finally going to start dating again later this year, and that I don't know how exactly to feel about this, among other subjects. But more on this in my next journal entry, hopefully coming in just another week or so.