Our lives are short, but history is forever.

If we had been born ten thousand years ago, our lives would not be substantially different from the lives of the oldest people we knew, or that we had even heard of. Time moved slowly. A thousand years ago, we might be aware (if we were a member of the educated elite) that the distant past was different from the present day, but we would still live in the same world our grandparents inhabited. If we were born a century ago, our world would be different from our parent's world, and noticeable change would have occurred in our own lifetime.

Today, the speed of change is fast enough that if we take a year sabbatical we come back to work hopelessly out of date. We are all playing catch-up all the time, no matter how hard we try to keep up. It is simply impossible to stay current with everything that is going on, no matter how well-informed or how open to change we are. Those of our own generational cohort look at the past as the Old Country, and the present as the land of our exile. The future is a stange new world altogether.

This change in the rate of change has two effects on us. First, it blinds us to the fact that this is a very unusual aberration in human affairs. We seem to think that because we live with this change all the time that it is part of the human condition; it isn't, it's something quite new in history. We are the first generation in history that can actually perceive change as it occurs, you may not realize this if you're in your twenties, but when you get to my age it becomes an inescapable fact of life.

Second, because this is all we know, we all fall into the trap of thinking that this process will go on indefinitely, that the future will be just like this, only more so. Science fiction tells us that, short of some external catastrophe, the future will be even more complex and technological than our present because that is all we know.

But what if we are now, or will soon be, at the point where technology and the economy and society (in a word, history) will simply be changing too fast for anyone to keep up. We can see that complexity breeds complexity, and complexity brings change, but human beings have limits, and so do human cultures. There will come a point when we simply will not be able to adapt any faster. Even today, for example, new software products seem to be introduced faster than we can master the old ones; by the time we really get good at something, and that takes time, it is obsolete. Pretty soon, no one will be good at anything. Technological progress will stop when technologists can no longer master the changes in the technology because they will be coming too fast. And societies and cultures are even slower to adapt than individuals.

That is what is happening now. The world is changing too fast and cultures are breaking down, or rebelling against the change altogether.
Break away if you can from the concept of good vs bad, or us vs them,
or even progress vs decline. Look at our own culture, the most fundamental human institutions, such as the family and community, play less and less of a role in society. We are becoming a nation of strangers: where once most of the people we knew were acquainted with each other, now most of us know mostly people who do not know each other. We barely have kinship groups, tribe, clan and extended family are no more, and the nuclear family is rapidly becoming an anomaly. Primates were not designed to live like this.

Perhaps the "barbarians" are the racial subconscious of humanity, violently resisting this and trying to go back to a more familiar and stable social universe, one that still resides in their memory in a way it can no longer do so in ours.