From this little guy on the left (don't take the whole thing literally, there were no human beings at the times of the dinosaurs), to this much smarter (!) guy on the right, things have considerably changed and it seems that they are changing faster and faster. If we take just a quick look back at the Twentieth Century, we see considerable improvements in quality of life for people in high-income countries, most babies born today stand a pretty good chance of celebrating their 70th birthday, technological inventions are never-ending, man in space.
At the same time, these same countries have produced two World Wars and the Holocaust. The Holocaust is not a unique event in history because it is a genocide, there have been genocides before and since. It is not unique because most of the people exterminated were Jewish, unfortunately, the slaughtering of Jews has been an old tradition in Eastern Europe. What makes the Holocaust unique is the fact that this was the first "modern" genocide. Modernity had initiated mass production, mass consumption thanks to the scientific organization of work and the rationalization (the process of making more efficient) of economic activities and social exchanges. The Holocaust was mass murdered systematically organized to be efficient. The Holocaust is to mass murder what the assembly line was to industrial production.
The Twentieth Century has been the most murderous century because we became more efficient at killing people. However, in the past ten years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, hopes were high that the threat of wars would disappear. This hope soon evaporated as interethnic conflicts exploded in Africa and Eastern Europe, some of these conflicts had deep historical roots, others were the direct product of the reorganization of the world.
In the past twenty years, we have also entered the "Information Age" with its new forms of economic exchanges based on networks and information technology. The effects have been both positive and negative. With the advent of new technologies, we have also witnessed the disappearing of millions of jobs in high-income countries and an increase in global inequalities with a greater polarization between the very rich and the very poor both between and within countries.
We clearly are living "strange days". How do we explain these changes? This is the challenge I invite you to take because this is what sociology tries to do: find explanations for these apparently contradictory facts, and propose solutions to solve the problems generated by new organizations of social relations and exchanges. Sociology is born of that project, it still remains its main objective. Follow me.
