What does seem to be new today however, is a finer quality of reflexivity. A new layer of understanding of understanding itself seems to be forming, which could have some pacifying effects, seeing as how pretty much all of the mass violence committed in the modern era had to do with fixations on certain ideas, which reflects a pretty poor understanding of understanding. Dogmatists tend to make some very serious theoretical mistakes.
This buttressing of our metacognitive abilities should have good effects I hope, since we have come to rely so heavily on our intellect for survival. We can think of it as improving the design of our intellectual rudders, say, like adding some moving parts here and there to allow for better navigation. Our higher brain seems to have formed in part to better direct the trajectories of our emotional engines.
Besides all that, this generation seems to be especially concerned with process. All sorts of ideas have already been thought, and then repeated again and again. But we still haven't quite gotten down the actual process of bringing those ideas into material space. We've ignored what actually happens and then it happens and we are caught with our pants down time and time again. Modern anarchists, for example, are less concerned about their theoretical strength (though they certainly need that eventually as well) and more concerned about how people actually behave and how it is practically possible to implement a society that doesn't require a rigid hierarchy held in place by the threat of violent force to work. Maybe we can learn a thing or two yet.
Of course students of history will tell you that the more things change the more they stay the same. And you can read any philosopher from the ancients, the medievals, the moderns to the postmoderns and so on and all of them will complain about the tendency towards conventional thought. Every new ideology attracts its lion's share of dogmatists and power climbers. Empires form and great destruction is wrought and then they die, usually kicking and screaming, leading to even more destruction, constitutive ideas be damned.
But it does seem like things do change. Subjectively anyways. But then things become relative on the subjective level too. For the most part, one doesn't have to experience rats clawing into one's stomach (medieval torture), but it still really sucks to get shot, especially in the stomach so they say. One can feel great despair when one's internet connection goes out, maybe a despair that might be qualitatively similar to what an ancient farmer's might have been upon a cycle of unsuccessful harvest. Or not.
It is hard to say how long we will be around too. A good wallop from a meteor would do the trick, or maybe we just keep flatulating these gases and cook ourselves in good time. All these considerations could be made a moot point, which would make for an absolutely hilarious cosmic joke. I know, I know, morbid thinking and oh, that's just terrible and etc. But I mean, just think about it for a bit and it becomes a little funny. Just picture some Hitlerish figure standing up on top of a tank with his fist in the air, screaming his race or his nation or his god is the chosen one and that with a new industrial mobilization and a new dawn mankind will be redeemed and that if only we can just purge all these lowly races and all these fairies and eggheads then smoosh, he is disintegrated along with everyone else and there is true peace. Not to mention redemption. C'mon. That's kind of funny.
