Three hundred years is an excellent span of time for illustrating a past-future comparison of changes, especially changes in complexity. Looking backward we see a fantastic increase of complexity. Looking forward from today’s trends we see…well, something altogether different.

Try to picture the world as it was three hundred years ago, say about 1725, when the industrial revolution was just getting underway. World population was around 680 million people—a mere 8.5 percent of today’s eight billion. All land travel was on foot, by horseback or animal-drawn carriage or wagon; all sea travel was by sailing ship. No other options existed. Most of the food people depended on was grown locally, in their own gardens and farmyards, or easily acquired at small local markets. Trade farther afield was the minutest fraction of today’s worldwide markets and container ships. Nature and wildlife were virtually everywhere; most of the world was still heavily forested (except in the British isles where most tall straight trees had been cut for ship masts, thereby creating “garden England” as we know it).

You may be excused if you find the past just a tad hard to visualize, since none of us alive today has ever personally experienced the 300-year-old world we’re trying to re-create in our minds. The fact is we also do a poor job of remembering the changes that we have actually lived through. “What moves gradually is not at all recognized by us,” said Dante Alighieri, “and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is.” Indeed, we mortals perceive the passing of time as a slow thing, barely creeping by as our lives unfold gradually, a day at a time, year after endless year. We barely notice the vast changes wrought by time’s slow passage, changes that accumulate seemingly so slowly over the course of our lives. But this is serious illusion. Time quickly changes a seedling to a mighty oak, a youth to an elder, and eventually even most elders don’t remember what a single-tree is, because they never knew.

If you’re more than thirty years old, what significant changes have you noticed between your childhood and the society you live in today? How about if you’re over sixty years old? As I approach age ninety, I easily recall many changes that are drastic—revolutionary—between my childhood and the world I see today. In 1940, Model A Fords and horse-drawn wagons were still common on our gravel country road. Daily life unfolded full unaware that Pearl Harbor was but months away. I personally remember December 7, 1941, and the silent worried faces of the adults around me. I remember the day I learned of a new superweapon that helped end the war; then soon saw starved Auschwitz survivors on Movietone News—a sight I never got over. At age eight I had not been aware that humans could be so bestially inhumane to other humans.

I remember when we got our first crank telephone, a party line they called it, where anybody could listen in—a minor sin called eavesdropping. Our number was 37F111, then a year later it changed to 17R—I’ve always had a memory for numbers. I remember an almighty loud bang! and an involuntary muscle reaction that jerked me from the couch to the floor—and soon learned that a guy named Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier with his jet airplane. I have strong memories of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, and seeing grown people weep. I liked Harry Truman and I liked Ike, both in their own ways reflecting and furthering the progressive values that made America truly great in the eyes of distant huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and live here.

I lived the fifties to the fullest. Bought my first car—a baby blue ’51 Ford, with fender skirts and a real radio. To this day I remember every note of that decade’s rich treasury of pop music (I’ve always had a memory for melodies too). As a new young adult I experienced my first politics and remember well the Kennedy campaign, the “Ask what you can do for your country” inspiration, the exultant win—then the Cuban missile crisis, the awful desolation post-assassination. Today when I see historical documentary clips taken during the Johnson years, I recognize them as originals I first saw when they appeared as daily news. They remind of my deep sense of justice served as Johnson’s Great Society revolution filled in great holes the New Deal had failed to get past the reactionary Southern Bloc in Congress. I worked in Washington through one tragedy after another—the burning riots after MLK’s death on April 4, 1968 and, just weeks later, RFK’s death on June 6. I’ve been through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush-the-Junior, Obama, Biden and Darthvader-shall-not-be-named—plus all those earnest would-bes who failed to attract majority votes.

But that’s just the perspective of one long lifetime—a mere blip in the longer scheme of things. Sometimes I wonder about the perspective of mature but younger adults, my nation’s inheritors, who cannot have my long, full perspective because they haven’t lived long enough to have it—and I wonder how their foreshortened perspective affects social change. Then I reflect—what do I myself know about the days of my parents’ childhood? Or my grandparents? Here in 2025 what do I know of the centuries before my century, whose residents are all long-since departed. I see an old photo of bright faces in Times Square in 1880, and realize—they’re dead, all dead. What of just the past three hundred years—back to, say, 1725, and the events which were in those olden days building up to an American Revolution? I didn’t live in most of those years, so I can only try to understand them through reading the historical accounts of people who did live then—or who learned their details vicariously through diligent research of old sources that they summarized and wrote down in history books for me to read. To them I whisper: Thank you.