What does it mean to say that we’re living in a revolutionary era?

Even political scientists can’t agree on the meaning of a “revolution,” but at the very least, we can agree that living through a revolution means living through extraordinary change in a relatively brief period.

By that standard, we’re definitely living in a revolutionary moment. The pace of change — both technological and cultural — in the last couple of decades has been astonishing. But is it really all that unusual in historical terms? Things are always changing. What makes the digital revolution so different? Is it about the scale or the scope of change? Or is it both?

Fareed Zakaria hosts CNN’s GPS and is a columnist at the Washington Post. His new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, tries to make sense of the present by situating it in this historical pattern of revolution, starting with the Netherlands in the 16th century and ending with the digital era.

I recently invited Zakaria on The Gray Area to talk about those patterns and why he thinks this might be one of the most revolutionary ages in human history. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing

It might surprise people when they learn that you think of the Industrial Revolution as “the mother of all revolutions.” Why place so much importance on this period?

Fareed Zakaria

Because it really created the modern world. The Industrial Revolution takes human beings out of millennia of poverty, backwardness, disease, and turbocharges the growth standards of living. It also gives us the idea that this is now a self-sustaining process where we’ll always grow, or we now just expect that every year the economy will grow more than it has in the past. And that was a completely new phenomenon.

It happened because we are able to do something that was technologically thought impossible, which is to harness inanimate forms of energy. The Industrial Revolution is really an energy revolution and all of that completely remakes society because you go from a world of agriculture to a world of industry.

People forget, but places like Harvard, to the extent they had trade elements, they were agricultural schools. Why? Because 95 percent of the people in America during the colonial era were engaged in agriculture. That transformation of society from an agricultural society to a modern industrial society happens because of the Industrial Revolution, and it completely overturns the politics of the age and much else.

Sean Illing

The pace and scale of societal change seems to be........

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