Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 16

1. _Opportunists_ propose to act now and win what they can today. Never mind about tomorrow with its sequences and consequences of today's action. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.

2. _Pragmatists_ believe in serving their own interests, on the theory that whatever serves personal interests must have first priority. "What is good for me/us is good for the universe".

3. _Experimentalists_ are prepared to try out any suggestion which promises to achieve the desired goals. Singly and in working teams they test and try out, seeking the most effective means of reaching desired ends.

4. _Innovators_ formulate projects and test out results, checking and rechecking as they search for more effective means of achieving results.

5. _Radicals_ seek out the roots, digging, sifting, cla.s.sifying, a.s.sembling their findings, announcing their conclusions and working to apply them in theory and practice to the structure and function of their communities.

6. _Revolutionists_ are in a hurry. Disillusioned with the past and the present they seek by "direct action" to create a new social order, out of whole cloth, quickly, here and now.

Never mind the means, get results!

7. _Totalists_ have the whole truth, attained through reasoning, experimentation, revelation. Having learned the truth, they dedicate their energies to the propagation of the faith.

Where they encounter opposition they counter it and, if necessary, annihilate it with its originators and advocates.

As a matter of practical experience, proponents of all seven approaches to social problems and social change employ a wide range of techniques from persuasion to coercion. To support their projects they advance logical arguments, elaborate half-truths, make emotional appeal; employ trickery, deceit, preferment, privilege, flattery, soft living, bribery, coercion, physical and social violence--individual and collective extermination.

Civilization as reported in history and in its current practice is based on five faulty ideological a.s.sumptions:

1. _Compet.i.tive survival struggle results in social improvement._ Survival struggle has certainly played a role in stimulating discovery, invention and the diffusion of culture traits. Its end results have always included civil and inter-group war with its unavoidable costs in destruction, dissolution and death.

2. _The effort to grab and keep, with its accompanying compet.i.tion, is a chief source of social progress._ The game of grab and keep is play for children. Mature human beings should strive to create, produce, share.

3. _The acc.u.mulation of goods and services brings happiness._ At the out-set of life this may be true. But acc.u.mulation for its own sake produces the miser. Misers are not happy people. Riches yield happiness only as they are distributed.

Acc.u.mulation brings many headaches, and few abiding satisfactions.

4. _Successful acc.u.mulators "have fun."_ Perhaps they do, for a time, at the expense of others on whose backs they ride and whose life blood they suck. But mature men and women do not "have fun"; they shoulder and carry their share of social responsibility.

5. _Progress can be measured by the mult.i.tude of personal possessions._ Not so. True progress for humanity consists in movement from having to doing; from the possessive to the creative; from the material toward the spiritual.

Ideologies have played a role in determining the structure and function of every civilization. As civilization grows up, matures, and declines, ideologies change with the changing times. In its early history each civilization seeks acceptance for its picture of reality and its techniques for reaching individual and social goals. As each civilization declines and disintegrates, a mult.i.tude of counselors clamors for attention to a particular formula that will prove acceptable and workable in the existing emergent circ.u.mstances.

_Part III_

Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete

CHAPTER TEN

WORLDWIDE REVOLUTION DISRUPTS CIVILIZATION

Every organism, mechanism or social construct reaches a point in its life cycle at which its existing apparatus must be repaired, renovated and updated or sc.r.a.pped, redesigned and replaced. Today western civilization in its totality faces that dilemma.

The culture pattern variously known as European, western or modern civilization, dating from the Crusades, has existed for about a thousand years, and spread across the planet. During that millennium western civilization has pa.s.sed through a life cycle similar to that of its predecessors. According to Oswald Spengler's historical perspective, a civilization pa.s.ses through its life cycle in about a thousand years. If the Spenglerian a.s.sumption is in line with the course of history, western civilization should be in an advanced stage of decline and should eventually disappear as a decisive factor in world affairs.

Spengler's argument is fully and floridly presented in _The Decline of the West_. The author offers a theory of history based on the existence of an arbitrary and rather mechanical life cycle. It includes a period of gestation, rise and expansion, a period of maturity and stability and a final period of decline and dissolution. Spengler believed that western civilization is in the grip of an irreversable decline.

The Spenglerian perspective is based on the a.s.sumption of a normal pattern in the growth and decline of civilizations. The normalcy on which Spengler based his a.s.sumption was disrupted around 1750 when a series of new dynamic factors entered the stream of modern social history:

I. Mankind gained access to immense stores of energy which supplemented human energy, the energies of domesticated animals and a miniscule use of water power and air power. To these traditional energy sources the revolution in science and technology has added steam, electricity, and the energy stored in the atom.

II. These new sources of energy were harnessed and directed through mechanical and chemical agencies that greatly extended human capacity to convert nature's stored wealth into goods and services available for human consumption, and to develop a surplus of wealth and a release of manpower sufficient to build up a backlog of capital which, in its turn, produced goods and services with economic surpluses convertible into additional capital.

III. This revolution in the tempo of production and capital acc.u.mulation was parallelled by a like revolution in transportation and communication by land, water, and eventually by air and in s.p.a.ce. Electricity played an essential part in the process by speeding communication and helping to put transportation on wheels.

IV. Building construction was also revolutionized--metals, concrete, gla.s.s and synthetics replaced wood and stone as the basic construction materials.

V. New energy sources and the new capital expanded the volume and variety of production far more rapidly than the increase in population and turned the resulting surplus into a technical apparatus that made possible ma.s.s production for a ma.s.s market.

VI. Ma.s.s production, transportation, construction and marketing ushered in an era of surplus that replaced the age of comparative scarcity with an age of rapidly increasing abundance.

Changes in the means of production play havoc with any established social pattern. The economic alteration that accompanied and followed the eighteenth and early nineteenth century transformation of western economy overturned various aspects of the western social structure:

1. Representative government made its appearance and spread widely;

2. Social services and social security, previously reserved for the elite, were provided for wider and wider circles of the population;

3. Changes in technology, advances in science, the replacement of landlords, clergymen and soldiers by businessmen and professionals, including the military, as the recognized leaders of the modern society, put social control in the hands of a new ruling bourgeois cla.s.s;

4. The bourgeois revolution brought into existence two other cla.s.ses: the industrial proletariat as an ally and/or an acceptable leader of the peasant ma.s.ses of Europe. At the same time it enlarged the middle cla.s.s to a point at which it was able to play a decisive role in the formulation and direction of social policy in industrialized communities.

5. Fragments of the industrial proletariat and the greatly enlarged middle cla.s.s came together in an avowedly revolutionary movement: socialism-communism, which reached the power summit between 1910 and 1917.

6. The bourgeoisie countered with a cold war aimed to exterminate socialism-communism, using propaganda, petty reform and armed intervention as its chief agencies.

7. The high birth rate, the prolongation of life and ma.s.s education provided society with a substantial body of skilled, experienced, socially conscious, alert citizens, increasingly aware of the historical changes through which they were living and determined to intervene whenever their well-being was threatened.

8. Extension and equalization of opportunity opened the way for an informed citizenry to express itself and defend its interests.

9. Emerging planet-wide social consciousness spread an awareness that the concerns, plans and programs of any part of the human family are of vital importance to the whole of mankind.

Change is a universal force which operates in nature, in society, in man himself. At times it takes place so gradually that one day seems like another. At other times it operates with furious energy, turning things upside-down overnight. Such change, whether it takes place in nature or in society is revolutionary.

Rome's demise as a world power was followed by centuries of quietude--The Dark Ages. These in turn yielded to a period of revolutionary change that found its early expression in the voyages and discoveries that spanned the earth after 1450. Three centuries later the rebirth of western humanity expressed itself in the industrial revolution that flooded across the planet and became an early stage of the planet-wide sweep that has played havoc with nature, turned the old society upside down and presently promises to produce a new society for a reborn human race.

World-wide revolution is the predominant force in the twentieth century.

Its existence and some of its consequences have become an all-embracing theme for thought and discussion. They have put into the hands of present-day humanity the ideas, experiments and experiences needed for transforming nature, rebuilding social inst.i.tutions and practices and opening the way for mankind to move confidently into a future replete with intriguing and exciting possibilities.

An excellent summary of this entire field is appearing in a six volume _History of Mankind_, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Volume six of the history is t.i.tled _The Twentieth Century_. Particularly noteworthy is an Introduction of more than a hundred printed pages, Part I, _The Development and Application of Scientific Knowledge_, and Part II on _The Transformation of Societies_. Events surrounding the war of 1914-18 are correctly described as "a turning point in world history." (Vol. VI p. 11)

World revolution is one aspect of present-day society. From our present vantage point we cannot tell how far it will go or what it will do to humanity and its present habitat.