The Future=A Humanistic society in a Flat world?

Revolution, according to webster.com a revolution is "a sudden, radical, or complete change". Humanism certainly wasn't sudden, but it was radical, that's for sure. Following in Humanism's footsteps however is another revolution that looks to be happening much more suddenly, and possibly even more radical and complete. The flattening of the world, is without a doubt, very similar in many aspects such as idealistic goals, individuality, and empowerment based on availability of knowledge, and as such there are conclusions which can be drawn about what it's end effects will be, by comparing the two.

Humanism as a concept is simply that the human experience is indeed meaningful, and is not just a test as to whether or not you are worthy of eternal bliss in Heaven. Ancient Rome and Greece embraced this way of thinking, and as such their arts, education, and overall quality of living were higher then during the middle ages. The extreme change in style of art is really one of the biggest indications to the change in thinking that Humanism entails, no longer focusing all efforts on conveying a religious theme, time and effort from a humanist artist, is spent on creating detail in the people; the people who had personal struggles, and accomplishments. In brief, Humanism is simply a mindset in which achievements of people alive, and on earth, are celebrated because their life means something.

The flattening of the world as a concept is simply that due to technological advances distance no longer matters in relation to what you can accomplish. With a flat world you can communicate, do business with, and share ideas with anyone in the world... instantly. A flat world eliminates any barrier to how far someones voice can be heard. People are no longer limited by the resources of their immediate physical community, their community from which they can draw upon is now everyone else in the world. There are no limits.

Before Humanism, everyone based everything they did in their mortal life to reach an idealistic goal of reaching heaven, and attaining eternal bliss there. With Humanism people started realizing that not everything they did had to be working towards that goal. Comparatively, in a flat world you could say that children are now pushed to compete against everyone else in order for them to grow up and be successful; this in essence is a step back to the middle ages where everyone based their entire lives trying to attain that idealistic goal of heaven. Simply put getting a good, untouchable job is the new heaven. Getting to heaven for eternal bliss is no longer thought of nearly as much, or frequently; and with the flat world we are told we need to do everything we can in our short time before we are thrown in the real world, to ensure that we will be happy for the rest of our lives.

Both Humanism, and the Flat world gave people greater availability of knowledge then had ever been possible previously: Humanism by challenging the churches habit of collecting all knowledge, as well as encouraging the search for knowledge not of a divine origin, and with the flat world simply through the accessibility through the Internet. With this greatly increased knowledge comes a great sense of empowerment, that didn't exist before. In Humanism this causes people to start to question things, to think for themselves, and to delve into the arts, everyone developed their own voice. In the flat world the empowerment comes in the form of people being able to express their thoughts, and ideas through blogs, or youtube, or many other ways, and have it be seen by an astronomical amount of people, everyone's voice has power.

Where the Flattening is looking to impact economics, being driven by technological advances, Humanism impacted the religion hugely. With Humanistic thinking, people started to question things, even (especially) the previously unquestionable, the epitome of unquestionable was the church. Humanism unintentionally caused the splitting of the Church. The Flattening however will have no affects on the religious state of the world, it does though affect the world economy drastically. Humanism also wasn't in the slightest spurred by technology, in fact it was influenced by the discovery of ancient documents, quite the opposite of scientific advances.

With the similarities between the two concepts there are a few things that can be assumed will occur as a result of the flattening of the world (which is still in progress), from what was caused by Humanism. One, like the gigantic source of power that was the Catholic church in the middle ages, America will lose it's overall prosperity. Fear not about this, because like the church America will not disappear entirely, it just simply won't be superior to basically everything on the planet; and quite possibly as the church had some questionable characters in it's midst before Humanism, so might America become a more purely good establishment after the revolution is all said and done. Two, people will again reach a new level of artistic, and creative prosperity as the great Renaissance artists created, only with the flat world it won't be from the focus on the human experience, but rather, other humans who you are competing, to get paid, with. All in all, Humanism created huge ripples in the fabric of society, and the flattening looks to mirror those ripples.