In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.
The history of religion (including secular) and culture is the decade by decade, century by century and even millennial-long response to new technologies - language and pigments gave us the Cognitive Revolution and spirituality, domestication the Agricultural and a host of Gods, literacy and the printing press were the vanguard of the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution engendered humanism and liberalism, and the 20th century's communications innovations the Age of Information... so where is the new cultural paradigm to upend the Liberal world order?
