The Architecture of Civilization

For millennia First Wave society held sway over the Earth's population.

Almost four hundred years ago, a technological explosion happened which sent shock waves around the world. Like most explosions, it destroyed all in its path. It destroyed ancient cultures and created an entirely new civilization. The blast wave was the industrial revolution. This giant wave force ushered in— the Second Wave —and it struck with full force all the preceding institutions and transformed the way of life of millions of people.

For millennia First Wave society held sway over the Earth's population.  All the people of the world basically fit into two groupings— the primitive and the civilized. The much-maligned primitive peoples, living in tribes and existing as hunter-gatherer societies, were bypassed by the agricultural revolution.

Where the agricultural revolution took hold, it grew into the civilized world. This was the region of the world where people worked the soil. For it was agriculture that gave birth to our idea of civilization. From India and China to Benin and Mesoamerica, in Greece and Rome, these civilizations grew and crumbled, wage war, and blended into diverse cultures.

However, beneath their dissimilarities lay underlying connections. In all of them, the land was the basis of socio-economic life. Everything about the family unit, culture, and politics revolved around agriculture. Life was centered around the village-type community. An uncomplicated division of labor existed, and a simple system of castes and classes evolved: an aristocracy, a clergy, soldiers, slaves, or serfs. In all of them, power was usually autocratic. In most cases, a person’s birth decided one’s position in life. And usually, the economy was decentralized, so that each village produced most of its own basic needs.

History is never so simple and there were exceptions to these rules. Some cultures dared to be seafaring commercial societies, and others created kingdoms with centralization so they could build irrigation systems. Yet despite such distinctions, all these seemingly unique civilizations are agricultural— the base civilization spread by the first great wave of change. The First Wave.

Hidden within some of these First Wave civilizations there were indications of future things to come. There were nascent mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Petroleum was drilled as early as 400 B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Large bureaucracies thrived in ancient Babylonia and Egypt, huge urban cities grew up in Asia and South America. There were money and methods of exchange. Trade was rampant across this world from Mali to Mongolia.

We even see the early growth of corporations and embryonic nations forming. History even tells us that in ancient Alexandria, a prototype steam engine was invented.

Yet these oddities of history could never be called an industrial society. Such peeks at the future, were sprinkled through various times and places. They in no way were carried forward into a consistent method. So, until the period from 1500 to 1750, the world was still a First Wave world, but the tide of the Second Wave was beginning to surge. Despite the glimpses of the industrial future, First Wave agricultural civilization dominated the earth, yet it could not see the forces that would displace it. People mistakenly believed their civilization would go on forever.

When the industrial revolution exploded upon the world it launched the Second Wave and creating a strange, formidable, intensely dynamic counter civilization. Industrialism was more than factories and assembly lines. It was a powerful, multi-faceted social system that radically impacted every aspect of human life and confronted every element of the First Wave past. It produced the great factory systems of Detroit and the Ruhr. It replaced the horse-drawn plow with a John Deer tractor, not only did it put the typewriter in the office, but it created the office.  It delivered the newspapers and the motion pictures, the subway, and the Lockheed Constellation. It gave us Modern art and twelve-note composition. It gave us Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and deck chairs, labor strikes, vitamins, and greater life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More critical, it tied all these things together— into a vast worldwide system, like a machine— to form the most formidable, organized, and sprawling society humans had ever known: Second Wave civilization.