Definition
Modernity is the historical era — beginning roughly with the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth century and accelerating through the Industrial Revolution and beyond — characterised by continuous, self-reinforcing change driven by science, capitalism, and industrial energy. It is not a period in the usual sense, because it does not settle into a stable shape; it is more like a regime of permanent transformation.
Harari treats modernity as the most consequential discontinuity in Sapiens' history since agriculture. Where earlier societies cycled through dynasties and empires that ultimately resembled their predecessors, modernity changes the underlying conditions of life faster than tradition can metabolise them.
Why it matters
How it works
The three engines lock together. Scientific discovery produces new technologies; capitalism funds their deployment and demands returns; industry burns the energy that converts both into mass-scale production. Each engine generates inputs the other two consume, so the system as a whole accelerates rather than equilibrates.
This self-amplification has no natural stopping point — it ends only when an engine seizes (running out of cheap energy, exhausting the biosphere, hitting a scientific wall, losing political legitimacy) or when an entirely new regime emerges to replace it. Harari leaves both possibilities open in his closing topics.