Note: this question arose from a discussion on Twitter following BBH Labs' "Tale Torrent" event, a collection of stories about the Internet which (I had noted) had involved a great deal of nostalgia. Thanks to Rishi Dastidar of Archibald Ingall Stretton for the challenge, which I will take on in a loose, disjointed way before I collapse in exhaustion.
What was the deadliest conflict in the history of the world? You'll probably think one of the World Wars, and in fact the Second World War, by any estimate, killed more people than any other in history.
But there's another way to slice the numbers, by factoring in historical levels of world population. Even at its highest estimation, the Second World War resulted in the deaths of 3.1% of the population. But although the An Lushan rebellion of 8th Century China was responsible for fewer deaths, it still took out a staggering 14-15.3% of the people then living on the planet. 5 centuries later, the Mongol conquests wiped out somewhere between 7 and 17%.
In fact, if you order armed conflicts by the percentage of the world's population killed, the 2 World Wars are only at 5 and 8 - and they're the only 20th Century conflicts to make the top 10.
We are, as Steven Pinker tells us, living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. You'll also see figures from this video showing how rates of violent death in current hunter gatherer tribes far exceed those of western society - giving us an insight into death rates before records began.
So what does this tell us?
Clearly fetishisation of the past is prevalent, or else this information would not be surprising. Instead we are bombarded with messages of moral decline, educational decline, rising criminality, and economic armageddon. We're going to hell in a handcart, as we are regularly told by well-paid tabloid columnists, and we should go back to the way things were.
But is it inherent in the future? I'm going to alter that a little and say that it is certainly an inherent result of progress. We largely aspire to live comfortable lives, and breaks in our routines cause disharmony and chaos. Note the reaction every time Facebook makes a minor change to its layout. Because we fail to fully understand the new developments - and it will only ever be an elite few in this position - we worry that they threaten our habits and our way of life, whether it's where you click to get your messages, or whether your children will ever make real friends.
My old (in both senses of the word) boss used email every day, because he understood it and could relate it to the past - i.e. the simple act of writing a letter. But, however much I tried, he could never get his head around Twitter, which to him was irrelevant people saying irrelevant things all the time. What he couldn't grasp was that the past was just the same - if you could listen in to every telephone call made in the 80s, you would doubtless hear an awful lot of inconsequential nonsense. The difference is that technology now allows us to do just that, and we have to learn to apply our own filters.
But even that is actually the wrong way to approach it.
What we need to do is relate progress not to the past, but to people - to human needs and instincts. And these remain virtually unchanged over the centuries. The need to communicate. The need for artistic achievement. The desire to share creativity. Because if there was one thread that emerged from the "Internet stories" at Tale Torrent, it was that they almost all concerned relationships between people. From James witnessing his Mother finding long-distance love, to the imagination of Rachel's daughter, to J. Nicholas Geist seeing a friend come out of his shell thanks to World Of Warcraft, human relationships were at the heart of the matter throughout.
So my answer to the question is "probably, but it's up to us to change that". It's up to communicators and early adopters to take out the technology, and instead discover the human need it fulfils.
Right, I'll leave it at that. It's late and I have to present work on STDs in the morning. If I get chance, I might look at the psychological urges behind nostalgia, and what actually goes on when our brains are confronted with progress and novelty.
