Civilization and Beyond/4

by Scott Nearing

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: TEN BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A NEW WORLD

In the previous chapter I argued that we are marking time in a fool's paradise while western civilization slips backward and downward toward dissolution and oblivion. Like many of its predecessors, our civilization seems to have exhausted its capacity to create, progress, advance. Instead it is disintegrating and breaking up in our current time of troubles.

In an earlier epoch of human history civilization helped to bridge the wide gap between man the victim and plaything of nature, and man as the user, director and, to a limited degree, the coordinator of natural forces. Today questions of our demise or our survival and advance are pressing and urgent.

Civilization has played an important role in the social history of mankind during the several thousand years when segments of the human family have turned their backs on barbarism, regrouped their forces, revamped their patterns of association and experimented with the more complicated, specialized and integrated life pattern of civilization. These experiments have paralleled or followed one another, separated by shorter or longer ages of rest and recuperation. Each epoch of civilization has contributed ideas, artifacts and institutions to the sum total of human culture. This has been the case with past civilizations. It is true of western civilization.

Civilization, like other aspects of human culture, is never static but always dynamic. It changes constantly, waxing and waning. It develops, expands and contracts. It reaches out toward universality, then breaks down and dissolves into a welter of conflicting regional and local interest groups. These changes are the outcome of hard-nosed experience. They are related to alterations in ideas, outlooks and purposes. They are often associated with technical discoveries and inventions. They come and go in more or less clearly defined cycles. They are influenced by deep running political, economic and social forces and trends.

Each civilization matures into forms and develops functions and institutions that tend to consolidate and crystallize in well defined social patterns and habit grooves in which two forces oppose each other: one force is status--preserving that which is; the other force is change--that which tends to become or is becoming.

Status and change confront each other at all social levels. During periods of rapid social change they take the center of the stage and dominate the drama.

The planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 is an outstanding example of rapid change. The current opposition of status and change has pushed other aspects of social life into second place and has made the social status of yesterday outmoded today and obsolete tomorrow.

The disintegration of western civilization (indicated by its 1910-1975 time of troubles) is having profound effects on western man. The effects are physical, mental, energenic and moral for individuals. Socially they find expression in vandalism, hooliganism, major crime, in the break-up of the family; in alienation, inertia, boredom; in laxity, indiscipline; loss of faith, weakness or absence of purpose. Most serious of all, perhaps, western peoples are learning to ignore principle, live for the moment, satisfy their already sated appetites and pay little or no attention to the future. These attitudes are widespread in the western world of the 1970's, particularly among the young. These effects, on the whole negative, are offset by a number of positive factors. Human beings are curious and imaginative. They are also ingenious, inventive and intuitive. All of these attributes are assets when dealing with the future and the unknown.

In a previous generation, preceding the war of 1914-18, a very large part of the West was under the influence of the Christian church, which promised good things in the hereafter. During the ensuing years of military conflict, planned destruction and wholesale murder, another considerable part of the West, both socialist and liberal, was promising security, comfort and convenience here and now. The influence of the Christian church on life style, even among its own membership, has declined in the past half century. Affluent monopoly capitalism, meanwhile, has provided the rich, the middle class and important numbers of workers and farmers with necessaries and amenities far beyond the levels imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of a previous generation. As an integral part of this maturing revolutionary situation a generation of human beings born since war's end in 1945 has come on the scene, surrounded by the concrete and glass buildings, block printed nylons, the automobiles and domestic appliances of monopoly capitalism and by the social security of socialism. In both segments, capitalist and socialist, the more gifted, original, sensitive, creative members of this comfort-pampered generation have turned their backs on affluence and security and begun shouting a new slogan: "We want to live!"

There is nothing surprising about this development. Many trained, experienced observers have been predicting it. Youth, idealism, aspiration, optimism, ambition--cannot be satisfied with status in any form. They want to live, to achieve, to face difficulties, to overcome dangers, to express themselves, to create. They are not content merely to arrive at physical affluence. Affluence and social security cannot satisfy. They merely sharpen the appetite for a continuance of the life journey, on the best terms permitted by the current time of troubles.

Among the members of the post-war generation, this ambitious, perceptive elite is aware of two disturbing and compelling realities. The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of purpose and promise.

Current frustrating experience with the breakdown of western civilization, coupled with historical precedents, confront the present generation of mankind with a compelling challenge and a unique, precious opportunity. The challenge arises out of experiments with particular civilizations and with civilization as a way of life. Our analysis of this situation leads to only one possible conclusion: Repeated experiments with civilization unmask it as a way, not of life, but as a cycle of rise, expansion, maturity, decline and certain death.

The challenge is emphasized by the failure of reforms and reformers of civilization to make changes in structure and function sufficient to meet the challenge of the birth-maturity-death cycle. Nor has it been possible for western civilization to take advantage of the drastic changes and challenges arising out of the current world revolution.

Man's top negative priority at the present moment is to reject the wiles, the temptations, the mortal conflicts and the annihilative destruction which have disrupted and decimated civilized society during the past six thousand years and reached their apex in the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. These experiences prove beyond the shadow of doubt that this pattern of human collective life is inadequate to meet the present and future needs of the human family.

Man's top positive priority is the present-day occupancy of the planet Earth by 3,700 million human beings who wish to survive, to utilize and conserve the natural habitat and to improve the social environment. Within narrow limits, almost all members of the human family want to live and to help other humans to do likewise. Multitudes of human beings, particularly among the youth, want to enjoy outward looking, satisfying, productive, creative lives. They also want those near and dear to do the same thing.

What steps must they take in order to realize their hope and fulfill their aspirations?

Broadly speaking, they must pick their way warily through the maze of artifacts, gadgets and gimmicks produced by human ingenuity during the current world revolution. Most of them are superficial and time consuming. A few are fundamental. They are of the utmost importance as implements to human advance. Taking what advantage they can of recent innovations, avoiding dead-ends and illusion leading to rainbows, the more sensitive and more competent segments of mankind must close ranks and move upward and onward to a new level of culture. The chief instrument available for such an enterprise is the twentieth century version of the political state. The bourgeois revolution was achieved through the developing, evolving political state. The political state is the binding force that held scattered fragments of the human family together during the stresses and strains of the current revolution in science and technology. It is the political state that must be depended upon to resist the fragmentating forces of a disintegrating western civilization, to preserve the social structure and administer human society through the transition from civilization into the structure and functioning of the new social order which is presently supplanting civilization.

Through Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, the feudal state, here and there, step by step, was replaced by the bourgeois state as the chief structural building block of western civilization. The bourgeois revolution, in various parts of Europe, lasted for several centuries; the process was well under way by 1450. As lately as 1945 feudal pockets remained in Eastern Europe.

An even more profound transformation of European society is made in the course of the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. The transformation is in its early stages. During the process, the political life of Europe-in-transition will be administered by the political institutions of the bourgeois state, together with the closely related state patterns of socialism-communism which have come into being during the present century.

During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois interests.

Today the bourgeois state is a bulwark of conservatism; devoting its energies to the preservation of bourgeois forms and practices and doing its utmost to fulfill its counter-revolutionary role of resisting and, if possible, destroying the institutions and practices needed to replace the political institutions and practices of civilization by the new institutions required to move mankind from the outmoded lifestyle of civilization to a lifestyle beyond and above that to which humanity has become adapted during the now obsolete epoch of civilization.

At the same time, the socialist-communist variant of the bourgeois state pattern is providing the framework within which the institutions and practices needed for the transition from civilization to a newer and more universal social order are being matured. At the next stage in the birth process, the institutions and practices necessary for upbuilding the social order that will replace civilization are being worked out in theory and embodied in experimental practice.

In practice, an accurate distinction must be made between the conservative bourgeois state, the temporary transitional state and the universal socialist-communist state that will shepherd humanity along the difficult and dangerous path of the political life pattern beyond civilization. In theory such distinctions are needed as part of the scaffolding within which the social pattern of beyond-civilization will be constructed.

Like most decisive epochs of human history, the revolution through which we are passing has had both a negative and a positive aspect. In Chapter 11 I wrote about one of its destructive aspects--the extreme destructivity of two periods of general war. At this point, I would like to list ten positive contributions made by the same revolution toward the development of a social life style that is offering itself as an alternative to civilization.

1. NEW SOURCES OF ENERGY. Up to 1750 human beings had the energy of the human body plus the energy of domestic animals. They used wind to turn mills and sail ships and water to turn crude wheels. They also burned various things, particularly vegetable fibres, to produce heat. During the revolution they have learned to use steam, electricity and chemical explosives. Recently they have learned to use the energy in the atom, to use water power extensively and, to a slight extent, the energy of the sun and the tides.

2. The revolution has taught people who previously feared CHANGE, to welcome change and take full advantage of discoveries and inventions that modified nature and profoundly altered human society.

3. Among the INVENTIONS were the extensive use of the wheel for movement on land, the use of steam engines and electric motors for moving, manufacturing and transportation and the use of electricity for communication.

4. INCREASED HUMAN MOBILITY on land and water, and, more recently, in the air and, still more recently, in outer space. Easy and rapid movement, and almost instantaneous communication brought people together in towns and cities, built up trade in goods and services, increased speed of communications and enabled people living at a distance from one another to keep in close touch, bringing human enterprises and human beings into continuing contact. Human life, thought and action were coordinated. Increased mobility UNIFIED HUMAN SOCIETY.

5. RESEARCH is now an accepted aspect of all phases of human life and activity. Research is a recognized occupation. Research teams solve problems, map the paths of enterprise. We are learning first to think, then, only after careful study, decide on courses of action and follow them through.

6. The field of inquiry and research covered the entire range of human experience. Information, resulting from research, provided the subject matter of new sciences. In the new fields new skills were developed and new professions built up. The members of this new TECHNOLOGICAL INTELLIGENTSIA, added to the learned professions, created a large group who expected and enjoyed affluent living conditions.

7. SPREADING AFFLUENCE increased the number of families that enjoyed abundance of goods and services, comforts and luxuries mass produced and offered in a mass market, lifting people out of scarcity by growing abundance. Scarcity ceased to restrain. Instead, people learned the values of RESTRAINT, ECONOMY, FRUGALITY, SIMPLICITY.

8. Increase in size and complexity called into being a new profession. MANAGEMENT with the necessary PLANNING, BUDGETING, COST KEEPING.

9. Large numbers of well-fed, housed, educated and aware human beings created the possibility of arousing, mobilizing and utilizing people--especially young people--to take part in voluntary group projects, co-operate and create. Such experiences developed SOCIAL AWARENESS and led to LARGE SCALE MASS ACTION.

10. People growing up in affluence, living above the rigors of poverty, asked questions about themselves, their society and the universe in which they lived. They learned that they and their fellows had not only the five accepted "senses," but additional senses with corresponding experiences. This opened their eyes to the possibility of additional or extra senses, opening the immense field of "EXTRA SENSORY PERCEPTION," E.S.P.

These ten areas, opening up largely during the years of the great revolution are "new wine" which cannot be contained in the old wine skins. They raise questions and open up vistas which transcend the narrower confines of civilization. They are among the materials and facilities out of which a new world is coming into existence.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MOVING TOWARD WORLD FEDERATION

One of man's earliest collective experiences is summed up in the saying: United we stand; divided we fall.

United we survive and prosper. Divided we quarrel, fight and sooner or later break up into smaller sovereign competing groups. If human beings wish to utilize nature or to enjoy the advantages of collective action and group life they must get together and stay together.

This necessity for collective action has appeared and reappeared all through written history. It is one of the most important lessons of present-day human experience. It holds for families, neighborhoods, villages, cities, nations, for mankind as a whole. It is joint action for the general welfare.

The principle of collective action has been recognized and put into practice during the ten centuries that span the rise of western civilization--put into practice up to a certain point--the nation or the empire. Beyond that point, collective action has taken two forms: competition and conflict, including war, and coordination or cooperation under agreement, contract or treaty.

Among the outstanding results of the great revolution, improvement in communication and transportation have brought humans into contact with one another on an increasingly extensive scale, reaching its high water mark in planet-wide networks of trade, travel, migration and diplomacy, leading up to the One World which was so much in the foreground of public discussions between the two general wars of 1914 and 1939.

Much has been written on the subject. I contributed by two bits in _The Next Step_, a book published in 1922 and _United World_, published in 1945. Perhaps the most critical failure of western civilization was its inability or unwillingness to take that next step during the decisive years that followed the Hague Conference of 1899.

In listing the Ten Building Blocks for a New World (Chapter 13 of this book) I began with world federation because in terms of the public life of the earth around 1900, the planet was divided into two alliances of nations and empires--the Allies, headed by Great Britain and the Central Powers, headed by Germany.

Instead of cooperating to gain their declared objectives of peace, prosperity and progress these two power blocs engaged in an armament race from 1903 to 1914, leading up to general war in 1914, with a second general war between the rivals in 1939.

When I was organizing Part II of this study (A Social Analysis of Civilization) I had to decide whether to begin with economics or politics. As an economist I was inclined to put economics first, but since the study centered on civilization, and since all known civilizations were not groupings of economic subdivisions but aggregates of nations, empires and their dependencies, and since the expansion of civilization has consisted in enlarging the geographical area of the civilization in question, I decided to begin with politics. As the study has progressed I have seen no reason for reversing the choice.

On the contrary, since I began collecting data for this study at the time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center of the stage to politics.

This is another way of saying that the present-day world is divided primarily into political nation states rather than into areas of economic function. Always, economics is important. But, at least superficially, political considerations are in the foreground to clinch decisions. A time may come when economists or sociologists occupy the central offices where primary decisions are made. That time has not yet arrived. In so far as the present generation is concerned, politics is in the foreground. The politicians make the crucial announcements and sign the key documents.

Therefore our survey of the Steps Beyond Civilization begins with politics. Our attention centers on the political aspects of World Federation with economic considerations present and always operating, but not dominating the crucial decisions.

For better or worse, in 1975 and the years immediately succeeding, we will be living on a planet divided into some 140 politically sovereign states. In view of the widespread pressure toward self-determination, the number of sovereign states has increased considerably, especially since war's end in 1945.

Presumably the principal "united we stand" applies to those 140 sovereign states.

Sovereignty includes the right of self determination--putting the interests of one particular state above the interests of the entire family of nations--the part before the whole. Here is a contradiction and a possible conflict of interest. Britain's Prime Minister Heath, like many another spokesman in his position, summed up the issue in the pithy phrase: "British interests come first."

If the French, Italian, Japanese and other prime ministers take a similar stand, implied by the principle of sovereignty, situations are bound to arise in which the interests of two or more nations clash, opening the way for conflicts at many levels: differences of interpretation, negotiations in the course of which concessions may be made by both parties. The differences may be settled by diplomats sitting around conference tables or by armies on the battlefield.

With 140 sovereign states on the planet, the probability of conflict would seem to be overwhelming. As a matter of daily experience such confrontations and conflicts do occur. Most of them are handled by negotiation. A few lead to armed struggle.

Since 140 sovereign states exist on one earth, means must be found that will enable them to co-exist, if possible, without conflict, and certainly without military conflict. The means generally relied upon today for dealing with such problems is negotiation between representatives of all parties at interest. At the national level this would mean negotiations between representatives of the involved governments.

Negotiations between representatives of various governments are always going on--dealing with political, economic and cultural issues. Within each nation such negotiations are conducted between spokesmen for various government departments. Internationally they are conducted by representatives of various governments working through their diplomatic or consular services. Within each nation and between nations confrontations may be settled by negotiation. At each level they may result in armed conflict.

Governments exist to deal with conflicts and, where possible, to resolve them before they reach the shooting stage. This is notably true in domestic affairs because there are usually public officials charged with the duty of dealing with problems. Internationally, unless there is an international agency such as the Universal Postal Union of the Organization of American States, the issue must be settled by special representatives of the parties.

The argument for a world government begins with the assumption that means should exist to deal with international issues before they reach an acute stage. Such means exist within each local government. Similar arrangements should exist at the international level to deal with issues that arise between governments.

The political core of a social stage beyond civilization will be a planet-wide, international, regional and local network of institutions, integrated, coordinated and administered on the federal principle: local affairs controlled locally; regional affairs controlled regionally; international affairs controlled by a planet-wide political authority. Such a relationship would imply states rights for the local authority; regional rights for the regional authority, and full awareness in the central authority of the possibility, at this juncture, of establishing order, justice and mercy on the planetary level--in our present terminology, a "world government."

Basic to this federal structure would be the Jeffersonian assumption: "That government governs best which governs least", with an amendment: "provided that the authority in question governs sufficiently to establish and maintain physical health, social decency, order, justice and mercy in reasonable proportions throughout the area subject to its jurisdiction".

At each level, local, national, regional and planetary, there will be committees, councils or other authorities with full responsibility for the conduct of public administration at the local, the national, the regional and the planetary or international level.

Currently the federal principle is widely established at local and national levels. Attempts are being made in various regions to effectuate stable authorities at the regional level, such as the United States of North America or the United States of Mexico. There has been much talk of planet-wide government established by one wealthy and militarily powerful nation over its peers, or by a voluntary association with its peers. Institutions established thus far: League of Nations, The United Nations, The World Court, the Universal Postal Union, have fallen far short of stable, planet-wide, all inclusive political authority.

At the moment there are 122 states which are members of the United Nations. There are perhaps an additional score of nations which have applied for membership or which might be accepted if they made an application. Accept this rounded figure, and we have perhaps 140 nations or potential nations on the planet. Some are long established and stable. Other nations are new-born, with small populations, few resources and minimal means of defense or offense. By and large this is the family of nations which might be coordinated into an effective world authority which would be responsible for order, decency and peace in a federally coordinated world.

World authority, to be effective and reasonably stable, must be equipped with sufficient delegated powers to maintain orderly and decent relations between its members, establish peace, and carry out policies necessary to provide and promote ecological and sociological welfare. To achieve such results it must have a built-in balance between central authority and local-regional self-determination. It must also enjoy sufficient elbow-room to provide for social change and for consistent social improvement.

The goal of world government, as of any political enterprise that pretends to represent human needs, will be social stability, security, efficiency of service, and enlarged opportunities for citizens to speak and act for themselves, directly or through their representatives, at all levels. Politics is the theory and practice of the possible in any given situation. Executives and administrators in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo or in the United States, Britain and Japan will deal with public transportation, public education and public law and order in terms of general principles such as those stated in the opening sentences of this paragraph. They will also face specific situations arising out of climate, access to raw materials, custom, habit and other ecological and cultural factors which differ profoundly from continent to continent, nation to nation, city to city and district to district in the same nation.

Human communities have sought and found different means of dealing with the problems of community administration. At one extreme of social administration are various types of arbitrary, personal dictatorships. The Greeks called them tyrannies--arbitrary rule by individuals or small groups subject only to their own decisions.

At the other extreme are social groups that arrive at decisions as the outcome of discussion in which all group members may take part. Group decisions may require unanimity or they may be the outcome of voting, with a majority or plurality vote carrying with it the right and duty to put decisions into effect as part of the public life of the community.

Various forms of government have been established locally and regionally. At the level of a civilization, the government has been established almost universally as the outcome of armed struggle and military conquest, and has been exercised through the use of armed force in the hands of armed minorities.

A century without general war, 1815 to 1914, led to a widespread balance-of-power assumption that planet-wide peace and prosperity could be established and maintained by preserving a balance between the armed forces of individual nations or alliances. Hence there need be no more general wars fought for survival or supremacy.

The bitter struggle for markets, raw materials and colonies that followed the French-German War of 1870 developed into an armament race after 1899. From the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 to the outbreak of general war in 1914, desperate efforts were made to maintain the power-balance and avert a general war. The failure of these efforts proved the ineffectiveness of the balance-of-power formula.

Today it is generally taken for granted that a balance of power between armed nations is no guarantee of peace and order. It is also taken for granted that frivolous talk like that of an "American Century" after 1945 has no justification in the light of present-day history. As matters now stand neither a balance between rival armed powers, nor the domination of the planet by any one power can be relied upon to maintain world order and keep world peace.

Forms of self-government and representative government developed during the bourgeois revolution and advocated and partially applied during the proletarian up-surge, are being continued or are reappearing during the current struggle for power and prestige at the planetary level. As the planet approaches one world technologically, there is an increasing possibility of a planetary political federation, directed by a world governmental apparatus.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: INTEGRATING A WORLD ECONOMY

Repeated efforts have been made to establish large-scale, widely ranging economies. This was the case during Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. It was certainly true of the economy of the Roman Empire and of Roman civilization.

Such efforts faced drastic limitations. The most formidable was the narrow margin of surplus produced by hand labor in the forests, on the fields and in the workshops, operated, in the main, with hand tools, with minor inputs of energy supplied by domestic animals and with the small amounts derived from wind and moving water.

Two further limitations existed. First, as each civilization matured its leaders and policy makers ceased to labor on the land or in the workshops, preferring to keep their hands and clothes clean, to free themselves from irksome demanding toil and devote themselves to tasks more befitting "gentlefolk." This was notably true of landlords as a class. It was also true of the richer traders, merchants and moneylenders, particularly of the third and fourth generations.

Expansion of empires and the civilizations which they developed entailed military operations. Military operations, in their turn, produced war-captives, who must earn their keep and, if possible, something more. Sold in the market to the highest bidder, war captives and their descendants became chattel slaves. As civilizations were expanded by conquest and matured by struggle, they developed some type of forced labor to balance the increased parasitism of the masters and the growing numbers who were called upon to produce "services" rather than material goods.

Certain areas of civilized economies were taken over by the public authorities. Planning and building of cities and their ports, of highways, including bridges, of viaducts, aqueducts, of drainages for the cities, of public buildings. The construction of defenses, including city walls, were partly or wholly public enterprises. Temples and tombs for the mighty were often in the same category.

Maintenance of large elaborate households by political leaders, and in later periods of empire building, by the successful merchants and technicians, led to the employment of many servants, including subordinate members and relatives of the elite.

Much necessary labor was performed by members of each household. The resulting economy was therefore fragmented at the household level with virtually all of the energy supplied by human beings and domestic animals.

As each civilization developed its pattern of forced labor, including the labor of war captives, it launched the deadly competition between freemen and slaves which almost inevitably ended in favor of the slaves, who were housed and fed by the masters and who could operate at overhead costs lower than those involved in the hiring of wage or salaried workers.

Land ownership tended to center in the political-military leaders, the temples and, as each civilization matured, in the hands of its bourgeoisie.

Integrating such economies proved to be a difficult, arduous task, well beyond the powers of the average political, military or hereditary leader. In a very real sense, the problems of management were extremely personal and correspondingly concentrated in the hands of skillful acquisitors. Nowhere was the impact of the 1750-1970 revolution more far reaching than in the area of management.

Economic activities, in the course of the great revolution, had less and less connection with the homestead, and except for a tiny minority of the personnel, had no connection with the family of the owner-operator. The seat of the family--the home--continued to exist, but on a far more restricted basis. Arts and crafts moved from the household into the workshop, where they expanded both in extent and in complexity. Domestic tasks were associated with hand labor and simple tools. The great revolution filled the workshop with the ancestors of present day machinery, but with a prodigious difference. In the early step from home workshop to factory, hand tools in plenty were being used in the workshops. As "modernization" progressed, hand tools were replaced by specialized machines.

The implements of specialization--the machine building tools and the machine tools themselves--were housed in forests of associated workshops. The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and square miles of factory floor space. Nowhere were the results of the great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.

Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the planet in any historical period. After two hundred years of meteoric development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last century.

Modern industry "plants"--steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines, textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil refineries--not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and services. An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any industrial center, on any continent. In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management are similar.

Unit plants and their coordinated managements in the aggregate compose the present-day world economy. They are the essence of its being. They occupy the skyline and dominate the economic life of modern industrial society. They are the units which make up the sum-total of modern industry which, in its turn, is the bony structure around which have grown the sinews and muscle of present-day planetary economy.

Modern state structure goes back through the half dozen centuries during which it has been developing. Its ancestors may be met with in the history of previous civilizations.

Modern industrial structure on the other hand is something essentially new under the sun--newly imagined, designed, constructed, productive. It has no ancestry before 1750 because its essential building unit--the modern machine--did not exist previous to that date.

In the last chapter we dealt with the growth of states into empires and the aggregation of empires into civilizations with the possibility that the existing states could be welded into a world federation. One of the chief obstacles to such a development is the centuries of conflict during which modern nations have been built up and the strong bonds of nationalism have been established as a means of holding divergent groups of people in line by particular oligarchies operating in particular civilizations.

On the economic level such difficulties are minimal. The process of coordination and consolidation was far advanced before the end of the last century. The practice of integration--joining productive units in functional sequences--was also accepted and followed, with little regard for political or cultural considerations. The result has been an economic integration which has developed inside the chief industrial nations and across national boundaries.

Despite political obstacles, economic integration has proceeded with giant strides, especially during the past hundred years. Under a well developed world political federation the world economy could be integrated and used to provide the necessaries, conveniences and minimal comforts for the entire human family. There are nationalistic obstacles to political federation. Economic integration is an obvious must and a logical outcome of the industrial integration that has gone on so swiftly during the great revolution of 1750-1970.

When we talk about integrating the world economy we are dealing with a problem which no previous civilization has faced because no previous civilization had machines or the social and cultural institutions which have grouped themselves around the ultra-modern machine phenomena.

World economy in 1975 includes three essential elements: the planet earth and its resources; the institutional structure of modern society; and human beings with their diverse concepts and skills which provide its motive force. These three factors, land, capital equipment, and human energy, are the three-fold apparatus upon which 3.7 billion human beings depend for the goods and services which sustain them from day to day and year to year.

At an earlier period this economic apparatus centered around the land and its cultivation (agriculture). Since the onset of the great revolution the goods and services have come increasingly from a factory-office centered occupational apparatus. When we consider the integration of the world economy, it is this industrialized, modern economy that we have chiefly in mind. No previous civilization faced such a problem. There are no real precedents upon which we can rely. We must go forward, if we do go forward, experimenting with problems which face the human family for the first time.

The integration of planetary economy in 1975 is a total, or unitary, problem. It is not a problem of one continent, of one nation or empire, of one racial or cultural group. It is a problem which the human family faces as a human family, occupying our planet Earth. It is our capital equipment. It is the success with which we apply our know-how to the earth, using our capital equipment and our skills, producing the goods and services upon which our physical existence depends. We rise or fall, sink or swim in terms of our own capacities, our own abilities to adapt ourselves to historical circumstances which will determine the conditions of life on the earth. Indeed, our decisions and consequent actions may determine our own extinction or survival.

Planetary economy will aim to provide the means of livelihood for its constituents along six lines: to conserve the human heritage of natural resources, using them sparingly and, where possible, adding to them; to produce and distribute those goods and services which are needed to maintain health and provide for social decency; to produce and distribute goods and services honestly, efficiently and economically; to assure simple necessaries for all, including dependents, defectives and delinquents; to give high priority to local self-sufficiency; to maintain enough central economic authority to guarantee adequate goods and services to successive generations of the planetary population.

An effective world government, therefore, must adopt and administer an economic program designed to: (a) Utilize and conserve natural resources, making them available, on a just basis, for the use of successive generations; (b) End involuntary poverty and insecurity and the exploitation of man by man and of one social group by another social group; (c) Make necessary public services generally available on equal terms, to all mankind; and (d) Guarantee equal opportunity to earth-dwellers based on the greatest good to the greatest number.

Feeding, clothing, housing and educating an agricultural village was a prime consideration at an early stage in social history. Providing the necessaries and amenities of life in a commercial-industrial city occupied the attention of city fathers as a consequence of the shift from agriculture to trade and commerce as the principle source of livelihood. Caring for the physical, physiological and cultural needs of populations in the United States, Britain, Japan and other growing commercial-industrial nations presented difficult challenges. The organization, expansion, defense and improvement of the American, British, Japanese and any other contemporary empire, posed even larger and more complex problems which have nagged mankind during recent generations. Recently, the planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 has brought the entire human family with 3,700 million members isolated in 140 different nations, face to face with political, economic and social problems on a planet-wide scale. These problems are planet-wide in their dimensions. Measures designed for their solution must be equally planet-wide.

Villages, cities, regions and nations have learned, often the hard way, how to think, plan and act in terms of their own interests, or, more concretely, in the interest of their owners, masters and exploiters. It is with politics and economics of this planet-wide level that we of the present generation are particularly concerned.

Dwellers in western Europe and North America have to deal with the politics and economics of monopoly capitalism. Its central offices are generally located in particular countries--Britain, Holland, France, Germany, where big business enterprises had their beginnings and from which representatives of oil, steel, textile, motor and banking enterprises spilled over into the territory of their competitors as well as into the "third world" of erstwhile colonies and other dependencies.

Monopoly capitalism has made no real effort to organize a functioning world economy. On the contrary, it has established, maintained and consolidated centers of economic interests and activities at the national level. In theory and in practice the bourgeois-dominated planet is divided into economic and political states and spheres of influence, each equipped with the separatist institutions of political sovereignty.

Politically the task of setting up a competent world government has not been seriously taken in hand. The same may be said for the organization of a planned, organized, supervised planetary economy. So far as we know, such world economic institutions and practices cannot exist in the chaos of one hundred forty sovereign states, each exercising authority over its economy, each with its own program for growth and expansion, and putting its claims for wealth and power above peace, order, justice, and mercy for the entire human family.

General economic practice throughout the 1450-1970 experiments with nation building, empire building, competitive struggle and sporadic efforts at world conquest, occupation and exploitation have crossed national boundary lines as a matter of necessity. It could not be otherwise, because no nation has been able to reach the cultural level of civilization on a basis of economic self-containment. Primitive agriculture can maintain a high degree of self sufficiency. City populations abandon self-sufficiency and adopt the principles of expansion, occupation and utilization of foreign territory and exploitation of resources and manpower, at home and abroad.

As western civilization has matured, power struggles at the top, conquest, occupation and exploitation have come more and more to the fore until, in the era of monopoly capitalism, they dominate the field. In this period of human history nothing less than the just sharing of available goods and services will implement the principle of "to each according to his need".

Monopoly capitalism, throughout its entire history, has tended to function internationally, moving across frontiers in search of raw materials, markets, and fields of profitable investment. Inter-group trade has been carried on between and through "foreign" markets, cities and states. Not only has the flag followed the investor, but the investor has used governmental agencies, including the military, to protect economic interests, promote them and expand them. Early in their history, western nations subsidized private organizations like the Dutch East India Company and the British Hudson Bay Company and authorized them to exercise quasi-public authority. International banking and insurance paralleled international trade.

Western civilization, from its earliest beginnings in foreign business relations and ideological adventures like the Crusades, has spilled across national frontiers in its search for adventure, for experience, for information, for pelf and power. A part of the expansionist drive was "strictly business" in character. Another part--international conferences, public and private; tourism; the export of artifacts and of information, were promoted by mixed motives, from missionary zeal for the propagation of The Faith to international business for profit, public and private.

One of the most spectacular aspects of European expansion during modern times has been the growth of production and trade; the rapid increase in "foreign" investment; and governmental efforts to tie together geographically and ethnically remote places and peoples into neat bundles tagged Spanish Empire, British Empire, French Empire, Russian Empire. Nineteenth and early twentieth century history centered around such international experiments and included inter-state build-ups like the European Common Market and the Organization of American States.

War losses and emergency spending incident to warfare led to large scale financial assistance from one government to another. Such transactions are not confined to recent times, but during the war years from 1914 to 1945 they reached fantastic proportions. The United States foreign aid program alone, following the war of 1939-45, involved grants and loans of $125,060 million dollars from July 1, 1945 to December 31, 1970 (_Statistical Abstract_ 1971 p. 958). Similar grants and loans were made by other countries to their allies and associates. These examples illustrate the build-up of an extensive international relationship that has been an integral aspect of the 1750-1970 world revolution.

Throughout this experience two parallel forces have been at work. One was the effort to establish a stable, renewable and self-renewing social environment. The other was the effort to adapt and remake man (human nature) to fit into the rapidly changing social environment and to expand and deepen relations with nature.

Sociology, the science and art of staying together in more or less permanent social groups, thus becomes the theory and practice of association. Politics and economics are specialized aspects of association. Political relations, economic relations and other aspects of association make up the overall field of the human community or human society.

Groups of human beings are brought together and held together by various means, among which communication is outstanding. At every level, from the local to the general or universal, and in every aspect of politics, economics and other forms of association, human beings communicate.

One function of planetary association involves the establishment and maintenance of a network of planetary communication. Locally, nationally, regionally, and internationally the channels or means of communication have been extensively developed.

Devices designed to reproduce and elaborate oral and written communication blanket the planet so extensively that the individual and family privacy enjoyed by human beings before the middle of the last century has literally ceased to exist. In its place is a communications network that operates twenty-four hours in the day and seven days in the week. By a move of the hand and a flick of a switch everybody can be in touch with anybody and anybody with everybody almost everywhere.

Channels of communication, trade and travel keep members of the human race constantly in touch with one another. Except for the solitary, living alone in the wilderness (urban or rural) there is no hiding place. Mechanisms supplementing man's five senses, see, feel, hear and report everything.

Facility in communication provides a wealth of information. Using available means of human communication, a central planetary authority can inform, alert and arouse the entire human family with its 3,700 million members. Socially minded, it could announce and initiate the measures necessary to maintain peace and order through conformity to a common program of social action. Coordinating, integrating and administering the channels of communication at the planetary level will be a primary responsibility of any planet-wide economic program.

Planetary government will be responsible for establishing, maintaining and improving a network of communication and education designed to ensure both uniformity and diversity in the human population. The revolution in science and technology has been particularly noteworthy in the field of communication, extending from the family to the entire human race; from the home telephone, the morning newspaper, the phonograph, radio and television to regular mail delivery, the printing press, the camera, lithography, the typewriter, tele-communication, the computer, public address systems and the various devices for overhearing and recording that produce more or less permanent records of casual vocal expressions.

Planet-wide communication in the 1970's provides an example of the transformation from economic localism to economic worldism during recent times. By its very nature, communication tends to involve all four corners of the planet. In that sense, communication tends to become unique. It is not a real exception, however. Through communication channels, knowledge concerning every aspect of man's economy, from agriculture to commerce and finance, crosses frontiers almost automatically, strengthening, deepening and integrating planet-wide economy.

A planet-wide economy will not be designed, planned and coordinated as a result of either military conquest or political expansion and predation. Rather, it will be a public enterprise of the entire human family, operated by a world government in the public interest for the social service and well-being of mankind.

The worldwide revolution of 1750-1970 provides the economic basis for a planet-wide society--for One World. The real danger--that any local or regional war may grow into another general war in which nuclear weapons are used--provides reason aplenty to put the whole before the part and, in the pursuit of general human welfare, to federate the political life of the human family, following the many steps toward worldism already taken by various aspects of its economy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CONSERVING OUR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Beyond civilization we will conserve, share, beautify and, if possible, improve the earth, which is our physical base of operations.

The earth is an irregular sphere, one of a number of planets circling the sun, from which we get light, heat and radiation. The earth has a shell or crust made of various minerals. Two-thirds of its surface is water of various depths up to six miles. Above the surface is an atmosphere, some twenty miles thick, composed of various gases, dust particles and water vapor. Operating throughout the earth there are vibrations of different wave lengths.

As a whole the earth is a going concern that carries out its daily, seasonal, yearly business of providing a home for an immense variety of forces; for living forms, in the earth, on the earth, in the water and in the air. The earth and its attributes are the common host or mother of us all.

Some of earth's inhabitants are "alive". Many of the living forms move about--and reproduce themselves, passing through a life cycle from birth to death.

Some among the living forms cluster together into more or less permanent groups which develop social relationships including communities in which individuals are born, live and die.

Speaking in metaphors, the sun is the common father of us all, providing us with light and heat, the earth is the common mother of us all, providing us with sustenance. We living beings, progeny of sun and earth, pass through a span or cycle of earthly existence--helping one another, ignoring one another, jostling one another, annoying and even killing and devouring one another.

This is a roundabout way of saying that nature, human beings and human society are part and parcel of a total relationship which includes the planet earth, the solar system and an immense range of celestia which includes minute particles of celestial dust, like our earth, and majestic assemblies of celestial notables like the Island Universe of which we are unnumbered and barely noticed particles.

At some point in this vast assemblage, actually before the assemblage came into existence, there were responsible, animating forces in play. There was also the responsibility for the use or exercise of the operating forces. We humans are a product of those forces. We also share in their functioning. Consequently we share in the responsibility which is associated with their exercise.

It is the task of philosophy to designate the responsibility; to describe it, measure it and perhaps to assign it. At any rate, we find ourselves in a position where certain things are expected of us, perhaps even required of us as members of the human family and/or of the human family as a functioning whole.

It is entirely possible that, instead of overlooking, ignoring, bickering, quarreling and periodically maiming and killing each other wholesale, we humans should be devoting our energies, emotions, thoughts and plans to furthering the larger purpose of which the earth and its inhabitants are small segments. In a word, that we humans should be acting as a responsible part of a functioning whole engaged in the vast enterprise of being and becoming.

Whatever our ultimate tasks may be, our immediate problem is three-fold: (1) To make the earth the fittest possible living place for all of its inhabitants; (2) to organize human society in the way best calculated to achieve that objective; and (3) to make every reasonable effort to prepare ourselves to play a meaningful part in this cosmic drama to which we have been assigned.

Item (1) is the theme of this chapter, item (2) is the theme of Chapter 17. Item (3) is the theme of Chapter 18.

Passing beyond civilization we will attempt to conserve, share, beautify and if possible to improve our earth.

Our first task is to make the earth the fittest possible place for _ALL_ of its inhabitants. In a way that is a simple assignment, but its implementation will take us into every nook and corner of the land, water, air, radiational field, and every other aspect of the planet, including the weather.

When we say _ALL_ forms and phases of life we mean all. All microscopic life, all lichens and mosses, all vegetation on land, in the water, in the air. All insects, all birds, all fish, all quadrupeds. All two legged animals. All centipedes and all those in between.

All forms of life have been assigned to our earth for a purpose, or have made a place for themselves in the vast scheme of things or are clinging parasitically to life after their assignments have been fulfilled or as their usefulness is drawing to a close.

In a broad sense, that which lives on the earth, including mankind, has a right or an opportunity to be here, living to the utmost of its always limited capacity. How limited? Limited by the similar rights of all other forms and aspects of life. In a word life on the earth--each life and all life--is a shared opportunity.

Doubtless there are planners, regulators and arbitrators whose task it is to decide, at any particular moment, who shall survive and who shall perish. Actually we humans perform a part of that function every time we thin out a forest, weed a garden, select our seed or teach a class. At one stage of life we are the judges, at another stage we are the judged, performing multiple tasks that must be fulfilled during each moment of each day and each year.

In our Island Universe this earth is small. But in each backyard, on each acre or square mile of earth, decisions may be made or are being made that determine survival, utility, order, beauty. The results of those decisions appear constantly in the life all about us.

We have all been in homes where neatness, usefulness and good taste abound. We have been in villages and towns where the same conditions prevailed. On the other hand, we have been in situations that can be described only by the words littered, disorderly, chaotic. We have also seen neat orderly homes in disorderly, slovenly neighborhoods. Much depends upon who makes the decisions and whether the plans that are carried into effect promote or obstruct the ultimate purpose.

At the moment, we have the satisfaction of orderly, beautiful neighborhoods at the same time that we are surrounded by a disorderly, littered, chaotic international battleground.

The earth with its oceans and its atmosphere is a storehouse containing many if not most of the essentials for survival, growth and development, for mankind as well as a multitude of other life forms. Perhaps its most valuable single asset from the human viewpoint is its topsoil. Topsoil plus light, air and moisture provide the elements necessary for producing vegetation. Vegetation, in its turn, furnishes the nourishment on which animals thrive.

At the top of our priority list for the well-being of the earth stands the injunction: conserve and build topsoil.

Topsoil is lost through erosion--wind erosion, water erosion, erosion through over cropping. It is held in place by stones, grasses, and the roots of shrubs and trees. Untouched by human hands, on the prairies and in the forests, topsoil is deepened year by year as winter frosts break up soft rocks, as dead grasses, leaves, twigs break down into humus, to become part of the topsoil and provide the nourishment for a new round of vegetation.

Topsoil is renewable, replaceable. Lost through cropping and erosion, it may be rebuilt and deepened by natural processes. In temperate climates with normal rain and snowfall, the topsoil of grasslands or a forest may be deepened year by year and century by century. Topsoil may also be deepened by dust storms that pick up particles of humus from dry lands and carry them to moister areas.

Through a carefully controlled sequence, semi-desert lands planted first to grasses and then to shrubs and trees can be protected against wind erosion. As vegetation flourishes it increases dew formation and rainfall. Plant roots prevent runoff and retain the water in gulleys and low places. Evaporation builds up moisture content in the atmosphere. Water vapor forms drops and falls in rain or snow.

Foresighted husbandry not only prevents erosion but, practiced on a sufficiently broad scale, increases air moisture and modifies climate--the weather.

We are less fortunate with some of the critically important minerals that make up the earth crust.

During early centuries in the history of western civilization adventurers and prospectors concentrated on the precious metals. The voyagers and discoverers who sailed fifteenth century seas were seeking supplies of gold, silver and precious stones that could be cut and converted into the highly prized jewels adorning the crowns and scepters of the mighty.

Production at that stage meant agriculture, with side occupations such as hunting, fishing, weaving, tanning, pottery, thatching and peat cutting, in the all but continuous countryside. There was a very little mining, but outside of the commercial towns and the growing capital cities people made their living by taking care of domestic animals and tilling the soil. Between seed time and harvest they tightened their belts and prayed the Powers that Be for a bountiful yield. If it came they feasted. If the crop failed they struggled to survive on the narrow margin between hunger and starvation.

If they saw any money it was likely to be copper, with perhaps an occasional piece of silver. Gold was for the rich, of whom at that period there were precious few, even among the owners of land and the wielders of power.

Country folk barely scratched the surface of the earth. Roads were wheel tracks in the mud. Bridges were fords that became more or less impassable with high water.

These assertions sound strange and romantic to the modern beneficiaries of asphalt and reinforced concrete. They were the lot of most Europeans and North Americans when our great grandfathers and great grandmothers were in their prime.

What has made the difference between their use of the earth and ours? Chiefly, the newly tapped sources of energy and the wide variety of minerals--whose names were unknown except to scholars and scientists before 1750. It is the new sources of energy and the only recently utilized metals that have made the difference.

Farm land can be used and abused many times before its productive possibilities are exhausted. Even then, with foresight, technical proficiency, the investment of labor and capital, agricultural land can be restored to fertility. Iron ore, tin, copper and tungsten are extracted from the earth, refined, put to some use or wasted as the case may be, but they are gone. They may be replaced by other minerals. Through geological ages they may redeposited in the earth's crust. But to all intents and purposes, they are finished.

It is a source of pride to promoters and propagandists for the status quo that western man has removed more metals and minerals from the earth's crust in the past two hundred years than his predecessors removed during the previous two thousand years. It is also a source of danger, because the possibilities of taking those particular minerals from that particular cubic foot of the earth are ended.

Replaceable natural resources such as soil fertility, grasses and trees can be restored and reproduced. Irreplaceable natural resources are exhausted by one use. In so far as they are concerned, that part of the earth's crust has been impoverished--made poorer.

Wasted through neglect and careless use, squandered in the senseless destruction of war, the earth is still a rich treasure house for its multitudinous forms of life. Its remaining treasures can be carefully conserved. Such replaceable resources as topsoil, vegetation and water can be husbanded. Oceans, mountains and, deserts can be dealt with as we proceed with our programs for the most economical use of the natural resources that remain to us.

Western man is presently emerging from a boisterous era of invention, discovery, of multiplying productivity and corresponding waste of irreplaceable natural resources-temporarily justified by "national security" and "war emergency." The temporary loss of replaceable reserves and the permanent loss of irreplaceable resources is none the less tragic, no matter how urgent the immediate cause for their consumption.

At this stage in the history of earth's conservation, when so much is waiting to be done, if each family, each village and town, each city state and nation will do its bit to conserve, plan, shape, utilize, beautify, improve what remains of the natural environment, the results will be impressive enough to justify the time and means devoted to the enterprise.

Wherever we go with our plea for the foresighted and economical use of the earth and its remaining resources, we are met with the question: "But what can I do?" The answer is simple. Find your place in the nearest team working to utilize, conserve, and, where possible, enlarge the natural wealth of the planet. If no such team exists, join with your neighbors in organizing one. Take seriously your assignment to use the part of the earth with which you are in contact intelligently, economically, wisely.

Whether you are a novice or a professional, a homesteader or a longtime resident, be sure that each contact you make with the earth enlarges its possibilities of utility, order, beauty.

This crusade to save and utilize the earth as the common mother of so many forms of life must be carefully planned and well organized through successive generations. Men have spent far too much time and energy in destroying. The time has come when they must conserve, plan, shape, utilize, beautify, improve.

If the energies now going into business, sport, social events, frivolities, make-believe and the deliberate destruction of waste and war could be directed to planning, utilizing, beautifying on the circumferences and at the centers of population concentrations, immense forward strides could be taken in a single generation.

The planet still has immense, unused or little used reserves of natural resources. The old order is slipping, floundering, wasting. Civilization has told the best of its story and is busy writing its epitaph. The revolution of 1750-1970 provides the opportunity for a new beginning. The place is here. The time is now. Let us conserve, beautify, share, utilize and, in so far as possible, improve our natural surroundings.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: REVAMPING THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PLANET

Beyond civilization we could develop a sociology-a cluster of associations, institutions, outlooks, purposes and practices designed to revamp the social life of the planet in much the same way and with the same general outlook with which we approach the political, economic, sociological and ideological problems arising from the presence, on the planet Earth, of some 3,700 million different human beings.

There are at least two approaches to the sociological aspects of our planet-wide, coordinated society. One way is that with which nature's cyclism has made us familiar--the "day" of manifestation (activity) and the "night" of rest (recuperation, restoration and renewal). This might be described as a natural, gradual evolutionary way.

The other way is based on creative intervention which shortcuts evolutionary gradualism in the same way that a great leap shortcuts many ordinary steps.

Perhaps the conception can be illustrated in a most effective way by the alternative presented during the great revolution of 1750-1970. At the beginning of this epoch man walked the earth literally, except when he sailed on the water or used the horse or some other swift animal to travel by land. In the course of the great revolution mankind has learned to move his body at speeds which sometimes exceed the movement of sound, on the land, on the water, through the air and into space. He has done this short-cutting by revolutionary changes in types of energy coming from outside his physical body. In another sphere--communication devices--man has stepped up the movement of his emotions and thoughts and his creative imagination beyond the speed of light.

This analogy is not complete, nor is it wholly convincing. But the great revolution in science and technology, applied in the field of social science can quite conceivably provide humanity with the means of short-cutting the normal or "natural" processes in sociology as it has already short-cutted the normal or "natural" process in human transportation and communication.

As long as human beings accept the normal, traditional, "natural" principles of association and group action, humanity will continue on the tread-mill of civilization with its long established cycles of beginning, expansion, exploitation, maturity, conflict, decline and extermination.

This aspect of planetary sociology may be illustrated by the rise and decline of total membership in the human family. We know that Roman civilization passed through a completed cycle of population expansion to an optimum, followed by a catastrophic population decline. Western civilization has been experiencing a population expansion or explosion that can be measured with a moderate degree of statistical accuracy. Planetary human population doubled from 500 million in 1650 to 1000 million in 1850. Between 1850 and 1950 population more than doubled (from 1000 million to 2,500 million). In 1975 the human population of the earth is close to 3,700 million.

An essential aspect of world government will be a population program designed to adjust social structure and planning to the means of production and to make generally available to all humans and, where possible, all living things, the results of invention, discovery and experience with affluence, general security and wide variations of vocational and avocational choice. In practice such a program would include the planned utilization and conservation of nature and the conscious improvement of society by society.

Social planning at the planetary level could deal chiefly with large national or regional groupings, more or less divergent in viewpoint but conscious of the necessity for bringing local and regional groups together in order to secure common agreement and to take part in directed joint actions. Such efforts must aim at sufficient cohesion to provide for normal social function at all levels; sufficient permissiveness to allow for a measure of self-determination at all levels; sufficient authority to carry on production and distribution at all levels, and sufficient libertarianism to tolerate discussion and opposition at all levels, with a maximum degree of self sufficiency and self-determination at all levels.

Nowhere is the need for social planning more in evidence than in the sphere of human population. In the early years of the present twentieth century, the human population was doubling in about 50 years (from 1500 million in 1900 to 2500 million in 1950, from 1,900 million in 1925 to 3,800 million in 1975). Had this rate of growth continued for another hundred years the planet's fertile acres would have been fully occupied by jostling crowds with _standing-room only_ signs in the more desirable living spaces. Japan, the United States, several countries of West Europe and China have launched campaigns to reduce net population increase to one percent per year or less.

A culture level, to be effective in the present predicament of a human race (oscillating uneasily between the possibility of social advance and the probability of recession into another Dark Age of ignorance, superstition and social stagnation), must include certain essential elements. First and foremost, it must be planet-wide. Given planetary unification by communication, transportation, travel, migration, trade and commerce, and cultural interchange, one world has become a factual reality. World oneness is laced by contradictions, confrontations, conflicts; by traditional, customary, habitual, ideological, legal, and national barriers of greater or lesser rigidity. Despite these divisive forces, our need to function in terms of planetary oneness is so great that the term "citizens of the world" not only makes sense, but is accepted and even flaunted in the face of tough restrictions and hard nosed nationalism.

Segments of humanity that are ready and willing to sign up as world citizens already enjoy world consciousness, carrying world passports; and are experimenting with various aspects of worldist thinking, contact, organization. They are ready and willing to take part in a multitude of planetary experiments in world-wide human association.

The great revolution of 1750-1970 has made two notable contributions to the institutions of western civilization. In the field of politics it has contributed the nation state. In the field of economics it has contributed industrialization with its twin sociological consequence, mechanization and urbanization.

Machines and cities are the Siamese twins of the modern age. They are also the twin forces that helped to push the nation state into its strategic position of sovereign independence.

Nationalism today is a unifying force inside the frontiers of the 140 nations that presently litter and clutter the earth. Beyond each frontier, however, nationalism has become one of the most divisive sources of misunderstanding, controversy, disruption and conflict presently cursing mankind. In the exercise of their sovereignty the oligarchs who make policy and direct procedure in each sovereign state put national interests first. On a planet which currently hosts 140 sovereign states this policy of putting the interests of the part before the interests of the whole results in controversy, conflict, and may result in collective self-destruction.

It is reassuring and encouraging to compare the rise of nationalism and Europeanism during the past thousand years with the rise of planetism and worldism from 1450 to 1970. The development of nationalism and Europeanism is still incomplete, but the drive in that direction has thus far survived the fragmenting forces of self-determination and political independence which have played so vital a role in human society since the beginning of the present century. Europeanization is still a dream rather than a reality. The forces of regionalism, nationalism, and separatism still dominate European life. But the ideology and techniques of Europeanization are widely recognized, accepted and put into practice. The development of worldism seems to be following a parallel course.

Consequently, wisdom, foresight, and the acceptance of change as a major factor in all social relationships seem to justify our assumption that sooner or later man's survival on the planet will depend on a degree of worldist thinking, association and institutionalism that will guarantee the preservation of order and decency at the planetary level.

Since conformity implies and involves a will to diversity, measures to establish and maintain order and peace would include the widest possible latitude and the utmost effort to encourage the greatest possible diversity at regional, national and local levels. Thus diversity would become a virtue in much the same sense that conformity became a virtue in bourgeois Europe toward the end of the last century and in North America during the Joseph MacCarthy period. Through the past dozen years American youth has reversed the trend, adopting a permissiveness under which the sky is the limit in language, clothing, sexual conduct and professional choice and behavior.

Non-conformity is all very well as protest against super-conformity, but it fails utterly to meet the basic need of the 1970's for a mass movement away from the institutions and practices of civilization, plus a disciplined and purposive mass determination to assume attitudes, adopt practices and establish institutions leading beyond civilization to a world culture pattern which insists upon conformity up to a point necessary for survival and social advance, and beyond that point, a diversity--including recognized and organized opposition at the planetary center. At the same time there must be a degree of regional and local diversity that will provide for the utmost independence, self-confidence, self-expression and regional and local self-determination compatible with the basic principle: to each in accordance with need.

Beyond civilization, matters of general concern will take precedence at the same time that matters of regional and local concerns will be dealt with regionally and locally. In such a society individuals and communities at all levels will be schooled and experienced in self-discipline and prepared to follow conduct patterns that emphasize the principle: live and help others to live to the fullest and the utmost.

Beyond civilization lies the recognition and practice of the principle that the welfare of the whole takes precedence over the demands of any of its parts. At the same time, each part or segment of the social whole has specific rights that the directors of the whole are bound to recognize, respect, defend and implement.

Such results can be achieved under a social pattern aimed at respect for life--all life; the preservation and improvement of the conditions under which the good life can be lived by all members of each community as well as by the human family as a whole. If human society is to be preserved and progressively improved it must encourage individuals and cherish institutions whose responsibility and duty it is to stimulate self-criticism to a point that will make survival and social improvement the first charge on community life--from the locality, through the region to the whole human family.

Should self-discipline and self-criticism falter, militant minorities must urge and initiate those revolutionary changes which are necessary for the health and well-being of any ailing human community. This is one of the contradictions that faces every human enterprise, including the human race itself.

Cyclic renewal or regeneration is one aspect of life on our Island Universe. The principle operates in the life cell, and from the cell on up and out, to the more extended and extensive aspects of life and being. The course is well marked and increasingly understood. Alternatively, humanity can put its creative imagination to work; plan, organize, prepare and by a carefully designed, revolutionary technique take a great leap onto another culture level, establishing other norms beyond those currently accepted by civilized peoples.

"Beyond civilization" lifestyles are being planfully introduced in order to save humankind from impending disaster. In that sense, they are emergency measures. Developmentally, they are being designed as a planned replacement of the life style current in the matured centers of western civilization.

Under such conditions the habit patterns of civilizations could be deliberately abandoned or superceded by life styles more appropriate to the institutions and practices of human beings prepared to live and able to live and develop in a community which is establishing itself on a level beyond civilization.

Let no reader retort: Old things are best; old ways are most secure; beware of the errors of human judgment, the lures and wiles of human imaginings, the reckless enthusiasm of inexperience; the machinations and subversions of the counter-revolution.

Whether he will or no, man has already advanced far along the path that leads beyond the culture level of civilization into a culture pattern which includes new means of association and new social institutions. The most obvious examples of the universal pattern which the human race has been developing during the present epoch are to be found in the "one world" consequences of the planet-wide revolution in science and technology.

Planetary fragmentation which accompanied the dissolution of Roman civilization divided and sub-divided mankind into unnumbered self-contained segments: families, tribes, classes, villages, cities, kingdoms, principalities, nations, empires. They were separated from one another by geographic, ethnic, ideological and political barriers which were intensified by tradition, custom, migration, and the competitive struggles among the elite for pelf and power. Ignorance and superstition played a major role in the decentralizing process. Conflicts at various levels led to further social segmentation and isolation of autonomous social groups.

In the backwardness of those Dark Ages--curiosity, fellow feeling, mass migration, the spirit of adventure, trade, travel and the need for common action to master nature and repel enemies--broke down barriers and created fields of mutual interest and general well-being, reversing the trend toward fragmentation and replacing it by a trend toward universality which reached its high point during the closing years of the nineteenth century. The slogan of this movement was "United we stand, divided we fall. The bell which tolls for one, tolls for all. When one benefits all benefit. Peace, progress and prosperity promote general welfare."

Two general wars in 1914-18 and 1939-45, brought pre-meditated, deliberated suffering, hardships and death to multitudes. Each war led to a clamor for peace and order that resulted in a World Court, The League of Nations and the United Nations. The efforts at planet-wide united action for peace and disarmament were paralleled and supplemented by the growth of specialized public services for communication, travel, scientific interchange, arms limitation. They were further augmented by a spectacular expansion of trade, travel, capital investment and scientific research and interchange.

Events since war's end in 1945 have marked out the steps which the human race might take in the immediate future to deal with the new problems arising out of the world revolution of 1750-1970 and to stabilize human life on the planet.

  Step 1. Revise the United Nations Charter to make all citizens
  of member nations also citizens of the United Nations
  and therefore under its direct jurisdiction.

  Step 2. Delegate to the United Nations authority to levy taxes
  or otherwise provide its own income.

  Step 3. Call a planet-wide convention of delegates from all
  nations, authorized to draft a world federal constitution
  and submit it for ratification by all member
  states.

  Step 4. When approved by two thirds of the states represented
  at the constitutional convention the constitution
  so adopted would became the basis for world
  law and the administration of world affairs.

  Step 5. Inaugurate a world government that would be responsible
  for maintaining and promoting peace, order,
  stability, justice, equality of opportunity and general
  welfare at the international level.

Heretofore, the nearest approach to a universal state has been an empire like that of Egypt or Rome built by conquest and maintained by military authority exercised by the imperial nucleus over its associated and subordinated territories. The universal state described above would be an association of sovereign states, each delegating a sufficient measure of its sovereignty to enable the World Federation to act as a responsible planet-wide government.

The probable consequences of these five forward steps have been summarized by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (_Only One World_ N.Y. Nostrom 1972 pages 28-29). "In every case the needed steps take us away from division, from single shot interventions, separatist tendencies and driving ambitions and greeds. We have to grasp and foster more fully the truly integrative aspects of science. We have to revise our economic management of incomes, of environments, of cities. We have to place what is useable in nationalism within the framework of a political world order that is morally and socially responsible as well as physically one."

Up to this point in social history, critical situations have usually been dealt with on the battlefield. Might measured right. The victors carried the day, won the right to exploit their defeated rivals and weaker neighbors. The result was planet-wide political chaos, and an economic free-for-all, in which political power and economic superiority bestowed upon their possessors the right to plunder and exploit geographic areas limited only by existing means of communication and transportation. At no known point in social history were conquerors and exploiters able to unify the earth politically and exploit its total economic resources.

A planned, stabilized future for humanity will be assured when the earth is governed much as cities, states, nations and empires have been governed in the past and the present, but with one essential difference. At no known past time have all human beings been represented in a government authorized to make and enforce world law. In the absence of law, chaos and armed conflicts have determined the course of human affairs. Under a recognized world federal government, world law will bring, for the first time, the practical possibility of a law and order determined by and for the human population and charged with the responsibility for establishing and maintaining planetary public policy.

World law will be only one aspect of the new situation that will result from the establishment of a planned, stabilized future for humanity. Other aspects of the new society will include:

1. Shaping the future of nature on and in the planet, with all of its potential riches.

2. Perhaps also taking a hand in determining the future of other celestial bodies making up our solar system.

3. Shaping human society, the man-made and man-remade human heritage that plays so vital a role in determining the course of human life--individual and social.

4. Shaping and guiding man--the gregarious, imaginative, venturesome, productive--destructive, creative animal.

5. Building up in human society respect (reverence) for being, respect for life with its multitudinous variations of opportunity for individual and social activity.

6. Arousing interest and dedicating time, thought and energy to the new science and new arts grouped together under the title Futurology.

7. Having a hand in perpetuating and shaping one segment of our expanding universe in accord with the Cult of Excellence: good, better, and best ever! This is an exciting, constructive, long-range project worthy of the attention and devotion of any being, even the most ambitious and omniscient.

8. Aiming at the Truth--the workability, improvement and the perfectability of our planet Earth as a recognized, accepted and essential part of our planetary chain and of our Island Universe.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MAN COULD CHANGE HUMAN NATURE

Man could conserve natural resources; he could remake human society. But man himself? There, perhaps, is the root of the problem we are discussing.

Can man change himself? Can he change human nature? Could human beings as we know them be transformed sufficiently to live and survive under the life-style that replaces civilization?

In our universe as we know it today, from the least to the greatest, from the most minute to the most extensive, change is one of the basic principles of existence. Nature changes. Human society changes. Changes in nature and in society are paralleled by changes in man himself--changes in outlooks and purposes, changes in ways of feeling, thinking and acting.

Human beings have lived under the aegis of tradition, custom, habit--thinking and acting "normally" and "naturally" in ways accepted by their forebears and followed by them with little or no regard for reason, foresight, or creative imagination. Rudiments of all three capacities were known to exist in human beings. On the whole, the status quo has been preferred; innovation frowned upon and innovators discouraged, denounced, reviled and sometimes even put to death.

In the field of natural science revolutionary short-cutting through the use of man's creative imagination has been widely used. The great revolution is one aspect of the anticipated result. Similar revolutionary short-cutting in the field of social science and social technology is bound to produce a "new man" in the same way that similar practices have remodeled, regenerated and renewed man's relations with nature, and his theories and practices of association.

Despite efforts of the Establishment to impose conformity, non-conforming individuals continued to be born and to grow up as deviants, misfits and intentional non-conformists. Some of these rebels against the established social order left home, joined the army or went to sea. Others stayed at home, bided their time and, when opportunity offered, joined with like-minded fellows in organized underground opposition or open rebellion against the status quo.

History reports the existence of such dissident individuals and social groups and movements in one civilization after another.

In a very real sense any invention, discovery or innovation in any field of human thought or action, if widely accepted or adopted automatically, becomes a revolt against the status quo. Our experience with innovation during two centuries of the great revolution gives us every reason to suppose that the flow of scientific and technical invention and discovery will continue for an indefinite period into our future. On the whole the evidence suggests increase rather than decrease of innovation and therefore of change.

A time of troubles such as that through which western civilization is now passing offers individuals and social groups unique opportunities to play significant roles in shaping the course of events. In every human population there are individuals who are dissatisfied with the status quo and prefer change to status. For such individuals a time of social troubles is a holiday.

There is also an ever-renewing social group for whom a time of troubles presents a challenge and an opportunity--the young people of the on-coming generation.

Adults are generally conditioned and shaped by the social situation into which they were born and in which they matured. Young people are passing through the conditioning process. They are undergoing the process of rapid change.

Young people in their teens and early twenties stand, usually hesitant, on the threshold of life. They are bursting with energy, eager, hopeful, anxious to enter the stream of adult activity. Inexperienced, they under-estimate the difficulties, taking up any line of activity that promises quick results. They are impressionable and generally seeking "a good life."

Such resources of energy and idealism exist in every generation and reappear as the generations follow one another. Youth groups have played active roles in one country after another where opportunities were restricted by the establishment and revolutionary propagandists painted a rosy future. Political nationalism in the eighteenth century and economic and social emancipation in the nineteenth century mobilized high school and college age youth in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

It is folly to assert that human nature is a given and unalterable quantity in every social situation and that since "you cannot change human nature" intentional social changes are out of the question. The facts are otherwise:

  1. There is a wide diversity in human beings ranging from
  herculean physical strength to pitiable weakness; from the
  mental power of genius to the nonentity of imbecility; from
  outstanding and unquestionable talent in arts and letters
  to illiteracy and clumsy inefficiency. This wide diversity
  in human capacity is one of the outstanding features of
  human nature, recorded again and again in history and
  encountered in all human aggregates.

  2. There is a period in human life when the habit patterns
  of childhood are exchanged for the habit patterns of adulthood.
  At this turning point, youth is likely to follow
  dynamic and purposeful leadership.

  3. There is a wide diversity in social situations, from rock-ribbed
  stability, to entire communities teetering on the brink
  or plunging over the brink into the maelstrom of revolution.
  Such diverse situations have existed again and again
  during the 1750-1970 revolutionary epoch.

  4. When a revolutionary situation develops, a revolutionary
  leader well-established in a community trembling on the
  brink of a revolutionary overturn may seize the reins of
  power and establish a regime founded on opposition principles,
  dedicated to another set of principles and practices.
  When such a revolutionary coup is successful the bells of
  history have tolled for the older order and the trumpets
  of victory have sounded for the new society.

  5. The intensity and the direction of the social changes which
  radiate out from the climax of a revolutionary situation
  and the consequent, subsequent attempts at counter-revolution,
  are the outcome of active, purposive intervention by
  all of the social groups present at the center of revolutionary
  activity.

The current shift from a laissez-faire economy ("letting nature take her course"), to a planned, managed, controlled economy is a precedent which gives us a foretaste of what will lie ahead when a planet-wide federal government undertakes the planning, direction and management of a planet-wide economy and society.

The outcome cannot be determined in advance. Unexpected situations will arise, the resolution of which will shape the fate, present and future, of mankind. In a very real sense, our eggs are all in one basket--the Earth. Our future, for generations to come, may be determined by the decisions we are making or the social policy we are initiating at the present moment.

Large scale research and experiment should go a long way toward developing the skills required by competent and successful planetary leadership. Political experiments like the United States of North America or the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics or the League of Nations or the United Nations, the planet-wide search for petroleum or the joint scientific efforts that went into the splitting of the atom, have given us opportunities to develop the science and art of planet-wide leadership.

Behind and beyond our training courses--our formal educational system (which should be in the front rank of our priorities)--we could train apprentices in every occupational field, selecting the most apt, the most eager, the seemingly best qualified and giving them every opportunity to try out their skills and improve their qualifications in their chosen fields of endeavor.

Aspirants for any occupational assignment would divide themselves into three groups: those who feel that they have chosen wisely, find themselves in congenial surrounds and want to spend coming years in the occupation of their choice; those who are uncertain and still unable to decide upon the field of their life activity; and third, those who have chosen badly, are dissatisfied with the occupational groove in which they find themselves and who are ready to move into another field at the first opportunity.

The well adjusted will constitute the elite of their chosen occupations, learning its skills and joining with other well satisfied professionals in passing on their enthusiasm and knowledge to the next generation of aspirants for inclusion in the same production teams. The undecided should be the object of special attention. They have entered an occupational field on an experimental basis and should be advised and helped during the experimental period when they are deciding to make a go of it or to try for something more congenial or at least more acceptable.

Misfits who have made a wrong choice and who have no clear call to stay where they are should be advised and helped to find more congenial occupational surroundings.

We may think and experiment with this selective process as though it was easy and probably final. Nothing could be further from the reality. Even the best adjusted have moments of uncertainty and indecision about their occupational futures. The less adjusted spend a part of their lives looking around for a more attractive field.

In every field, some of the best adjusted go as far as their interests and capacities carry them and then shift over into other occupations which, in turn, offer them more chances to employ their talents to greater advantage.

In every field of human endeavor individuals come and go. They should stay where they seem to be useful and go when their usefulness is decreasing or coming to an end.

Balance between status and change is as desirable for the individual as it is for the group. The decision to stay or go should remain open to the endless round of individuals who comprise any working team. The existence of such flexibility is limited, however, by the need to maintain a working force of interested, alert, eager individuals--skilled, adjusted and disciplined in group endeavor and achievement.

We are describing the unending process of selection which goes on from hour to hour and day to day in any well ordered social group. Every group has its fields of endeavor, its goals and its scale of priorities. Individuals come and go. The group carries on. Excellence in group performance depends upon its competence in selecting, training and coordinating its endeavors.

Every social group has its hard corps of trained and tested veterans. Also it has its problem of aging. The apprentice of yesterday becomes the experienced, skilled operator of today. Tomorrow brings retirement for those who have reached the age limit of service and who as a matter of group routine are replaced by newcomers. In the course of this cycle the directors of the group have their opportunity to improve the level of group efficiency by phasing out the old and incorporating the new.

The range of capacity, from perception and facility to ineptitude and incompetence, holds for the new generation as it did for the old. The tone and performance level of each group is determined by the effectiveness of this selective process.

At some point it becomes necessary to inquire into the biologic aspects of any social enterprise. We are doing our utmost to select and educate and train the fit. Are we producing potential fitness?

Long experience has taught us that we cannot produce a silk purse from a sow's ear. Eugenics emerges as an important aspect of every long term group endeavor. Qualities and capacities are handed on from parent to offspring. Are we reproducing fitness or unfitness?

As we move beyond civilization onto a more mature and more complicated culture level, we may have a workable system of social priorities, but does our oncoming stream of manpower have the interest, the imagination, the competence, the sense of social responsibility and the staying power necessary to arouse in a series of generations the will and determination to carry out social policy?

Are the oncoming generations able and willing to shoulder the loads of clearing out the rubbish accumulated through ten centuries of western civilization, make effective use of science, technology _and_ available human capacity and move onward and forward to new levels of social achievement?

We could develop a corps of socially responsible technicians as we have developed a corps of competent scientists and technicians in the field of natural science. In each field priorities are constantly changing. Each field is called upon to meet the changes by making corresponding changes in its personnel, its education and its apprenticeships.

In addition to formal schooling and apprenticeship we have a vast network for the distribution of information and the formation of public opinion. The printing press, the camera and other means of communication determine the levels of information and the willingness of the public to keep abreast of the shifting social scene.

A social structure resembles every other human meeting place--it tends to accumulate dead wood. There are two answers to this problem: periodic housecleaning, without fear or favor, together with careful scrutiny of the apprentices and other newcomers in the field.

Every social group has its quota of defectives and delinquents--biological and social, physical, mental, emotional. Here the critical problem is where to draw the line. Perhaps the best general answer is to measure productiveness, including those who make a net contribution, including those whose presence is desirable and excluding undesirables. Again this involves periodic housecleanings.

Throughout the past two centuries mankind has been confronted by an epoch-making, many sided development--the great revolution of 1750-1970. As I write, the great revolution is modifying the structure and functioning of human society and, consequently, the forces which condition, shape and, in large measure, determine the directions and channels in which humanity lives, moves and has its being.

The great revolution is changing man's relation to nature, to the structure and function of human society and the ways in which men think, feel, act and live. The great revolution has shifted the human living place from rural to urban, replaced a large measure of self-employment by wagery, lifted large segments of mankind out of scarcity into abundance, led to widespread migrations across Europe and from continent to continent, expanded nations and built empires. In the course of these developments Europe became the center of world economic, political and cultural affairs, held the position briefly and lost it in the course of two general, suicidal wars.

Speaking broadly, such a period in the life of any society may be described as a revolutionary situation--one in which changes are made frequently, rapidly and with far reaching consequences. In a word, the existing social pattern is in process of being turned over, turned upside down, transformed by forces which seem to operate according to their own principles and often quite independently of human intention or intervention.

Our society--western civilization--is undergoing a revolution. People born into a rapidly changing society are often tempted and sometimes compelled to play significant roles in the revolutionary process. Unconsciously or consciously, unwilling and unwitting or deliberately and purposefully they are revolutionaries.

Among the participants in the revolutionary process, the far-seeing, imaginative, perceptive and mature develop into purposive revolutionaries. In the course of a series of political, economic and cultural revolutions like those which played so fateful a part in China between 1899 and 1969, an entire generation is born, grows up and, in larger part, retires from active life or dies off.

Long continued cultural changes play a part in local history. They have an equally important role in the lives of neighboring nations and peoples. With present means of communication, transportation and travel, the influence of revolutionary events such as those in China from 1899 to the present day may be profound.

The bourgeois revolution from 1750 to 1840 centered largely in West Europe and the Americas. In scope it was economic, political, cultural. The Chinese and other revolutions of the present period, beginning with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, are once more transforming the economic, political and cultural life of mankind.

UNESCO's _History of Mankind_ (Harper and Row), particularly its Volume 6 titled _The Twentieth Century_, presents voluminous comments from a wide range of qualified scientists and commentators on the changes associated with the great revolution of 1750-1970.

The economic, political and cultural life of the majority of human beings has been modified by the events comprising the great revolution. Its influence has been, and continues to be, planet-wide. Consciously or unconsciously, human beings have been brought into contact with influences that are transforming them as they revolutionize human society.

Western man and his way of life have been primarily responsible for this great revolution. The changes brought about in the human life pattern in the course of the great revolution have created a new world--in structure, in function, in outlook, in stepped-up capacity for even more spectacular changes in the future.

Instead of regarding human beings and human society as unchangeable and sacred we must regard both as a part of our social problem: taking the steps necessary to reach and occupy the highest possible levels of social and individual health and effectiveness. We can and should make every effort to improve human society. We should be equally concerned to improve man and his nature.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: MAN COULD BREAK OUT OF THE AGE-LONG PRISON HOUSE OF CIVILIZATION AND ENTER A NEW WORLD

We humans have been living for ages with various lifestyles--as hunters and fishermen, as herdsmen, as cultivators of the soil, as craftsmen, as traders and merchants, as professionals, as exploiters, as parasites, wreckers and plunderers. On the whole, our energies have been spent in relatively small, self-sufficient groups, staying close to nature, as a part of nature.

Occasionally we have turned from this "natural" way of life, to build towns and cities, experimenting with large scale mass enterprises and expanded aggregates of population, wealth and centralized authority to which we have given the name of civilizations.

These civilizations, in their turn, have passed through a recognizable life cycle--the cycle of growing, developing, maturing, aging, breaking up and disappearing. One aspect of their civilized life was the keeping of records. Another aspect was building with baked clay and stone. Baked clay, some metals and stone, have withstood the wear and tear of time, sheltered in the temples and tombs which we are uncovering, deciphering, translating.

While engaged in these scholarly pursuits, our variant of the pattern--western civilization--has been passing through the customary life cycle. If we read the signs correctly, western civilization reached the high point in its cycle toward the end of the last century. Since then, for seventy-five years, it has been on the decline.

If we accept the cycle of civilization as one of the facts or sequences presented to us by history, we may continue to pass submissively through the successive stages of decline until western civilization is liquidated by the same forces that wiped out preceding civilizations. This would be the normal course of a cycle of civilization as it appears in recorded history.

Need we follow this course? Must we follow it?

History answers "yes" and also "no."

History answers "yes"--the record to date reads that way.

But the record of history also shows that men have repeatedly interfered and intervened in the historical process by discovery and invention. The historical record is subject to change. Man is not entirely free. Neither is he helplessly bound on the wheel of necessity, presently known as civilization.

In Chapter 10 we listed a number of discoveries and inventions which have greatly increased man's control over his own destiny. As these innovations are embodied in the life styles of planet-wide human society, there is every likelihood that men can deal with the future almost as comprehensibly as they now deal with the past. Those who take this position argue that humanity has reached a point at which it may break out of the present cycle of civilization and begin a new cycle which will correspond with the possibilities brought to mankind during the great revolution of 1750-1970.

The idea is not new. It has appeared repeatedly in various forms: individual withdrawal from the world and its troubles to live solitary, perfected, sin-free existences; the formulation of plans for utopian or ideal communities; the establishment of such communities--apart from the workday world; revolutionary mass movements away from the current time of social troubles into a more workable, more acceptable, more basically productive and fundamentally creative life style.

Hermits and reclusive monastic life need not concern us here. They are to be found in many parts of the existing society. They live their lives apart from the main currents of human life. We may make the same comment, with slight modifications, on intentional communities organized within the bounds of surrounding civilizations. They meet the needs of exceptional individuals who find the existing order intolerable and who wish to move at once into a more congenial community life. Intentional communities founded to demonstrate particular social or economic theories usually are short-lived, covering, at best, one or two generations.

Intentional communities organized around ethical or social principles are more enduring, lasting through generations and sometimes through centuries. During their existence they may have considerable influence on the communities of which they are a part. At best they parallel the life of the civilization against which they protest, while they share its problems. Religiously oriented intentional communities may be found today in many of the countries composing western civilization.

What concerns us here is the split of western civilization into two broadly divergent groups: capitalism and socialism-communism.

Capitalism, in its present monopoly form, is the outcome of a thousand years of development. Throughout its existence it has been politically and economically competitive. The vehicle of political competition began as the nation, then continued as the empire. Economically, the vehicle of competition has become the profit-seeking business corporation, backed politically and often subsidized economically by the nation or empire.

As western civilization has developed, nations and empires have tended to form more or less permanent alliances. Business corporations likewise have tended to establish conglomerates which include widely divergent businesses, some limited to one nation or empire, some international.

Historically, the present-day business community developed out of a segmented European feudal society as a protest against political restrictions. Its early key-note was laissez-faire--freedom of businessmen to make economic policy and accumulate profits. The practical outcome of laissez-faire economy has been monopoly or finance capitalism functioning through the sovereign state or empire.

Marxian socialism-communism, organized and developed largely since 1848, has grown up as a rebellion against monopoly capitalism. At it matured, after revolutions in Mexico, China, Tsarist Russia and East Europe, it became an alternative and even a competitive life style. Marxism has been, at least in theory, cooperative rather than competitive. Its objective has been not private profit but a higher standard of economic and social life for exploited masses of the business community and of the Third World. Capitalism has had as its slogan "Every man for himself". The slogan of Marxism is "Serve the whole people".

Until 1917 Marxism was a body of social theory and a program of specific political demands. In the period from 1848 to 1917 Marxism operated through minority political parties organized in each nation, but linked together internationally in loose federations, except during the brief existence of the Communist International from 1919 to 1943.

Beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917, Marxism became a basic state doctrine, first in the Soviet Union and subsequently in more than a dozen other nations of East Europe and Asia. The area of Marxist influence, as expressed in socialist construction, spread slowly from 1917 to 1943 and rapidly during and immediately after the war of 1936-1945.

Today about a billion human beings live in countries of East Europe and Asia calling themselves socialist-communist. A second billion human beings live chiefly in West Europe, the Americas and Australasia calling themselves capitalist. A third billion, the remaining segment of mankind, living chiefly in Africa, Asia and Latin America make up the "Third World," most of which consists of former colonies and dependencies of the 19th century empires.

At the beginning of the great revolution in 1750 the planet was occupied by the European empires, their colonies and dependencies, with a segment under the control of the crumbling Chinese and Turkish empires. The ensuing two centuries witnessed a political, economic and social transformation that reached across every continent.

The revolutionary process is far from complete in 1975. Capitalism and Marxism are still pitted against each other--ideologically, politically, culturally. The Marxians form a revolutionary front. Capitalists retort with counter-revolution. Nation by nation the third world is taking sides.

The capitalist world is suffering from the rise and fall of the business cycle, from inflation and unemployment, from the scourge of militarism; from the exhaustion of two general wars in one generation; from absence of any positive common program or commonly accepted means of administering public affairs; from its failure to provide its young people with a satisfactory reason for existence, and from the fatal malady of fragmentation which is the logical counterpart of every major effort at coordination, consolidation and unification. Western civilization, despite repeated efforts, was never able to establish the kind of superficial unity that marked the high point in the Egyptian and Roman civilizations. The stresses and strains of the current great revolution have introduced into western civilization new disintegrative forces of which the capitalist-Marxist confrontation is the most extensive, divisive and decisive.

The Marxist world, in its spectacular rise during less than a century, offers the only workable alternative to declining and disintegrating western civilization. It presents an alternative theoretical program for dealing with the transition from the built-in competitiveness of western civilization to the built-in cooperativeness of a planned, coordinated, federated socialist-communist world order.

The Soviet Union and its East European socialist neighbors have survived the wars of 1914 and 1936; have survived the capitalist conspiracy to strangle infant Marxism in its cradle. In a remarkably brief period the Soviet Union has moved from a position of cultural backwardness to become the number two nation in productivity and perhaps even number one in fire power.

Today Asia's active development of several variants of Marxism is defended against any repetition of Hitler's 1941 drive to the East by the massive land barrier of the Soviet Union and its East European Marxist associates.

On the west, Asia is protected by the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean against the determined efforts of the Washington government to check the spread of Marxism. Washington's current effort to become _The_ Pacific power and also _The_ Asian power have been blocked and perhaps thwarted by the defeat of General MacArthur and his international forces in the Korean War of 1950-53, and by the unanticipated and unbelievable resistance mounted by the peoples of South East Asia against the repeated efforts made by Washington to replace the French imperial presence there after its overwhelming defeat in 1954.

The decisive political developments in South and East Asia following war's end in 1945 were first, the expulsion of the British, French and Dutch from their military strongholds in the area; second, the spectacular unification of China and its rapid advance from inferiority and political inconsequence to a place among the three major world powers; third, the meteoric comeback of Japan after its unconditional surrender in 1945; and fourth, the failure of the costly effort mounted by Washington after 1954 to establish itself in a position from which it could dominate the Pacific Ocean and East Asia.

So much we may learn from history. Turning from the past and looking at the trends of the immediate future, it seems likely that Marxism will continue for at least some years to be the dominant force in Asia. Furthermore, the Marxian presence in Asia will include both the Soviet Union in Northern Asia and China in South Asia. Both countries are unquestionably stabilized economically and viable politically. Both are headed away from capitalist imperialism. Both are moving toward Marxian forms of socialism-communism.

The wars in South East Asia after the expulsion of the French in 1954 were organized, financed and armed primarily by the Washington government. They were avowedly aimed at the up-rooting of Marxism from the area. They not only failed in their main objective but they gave the Soviet Union and the Chinese a chance to pit their advisers, technicians and military equipment against that of the United States as the major capitalist contender in the area. This phase of the counter-revolutionary drive to reestablish monopoly capitalism and imperialism in the Far East thus far has met with decisive and humiliating defeat.

This defeat marks the end of the capitalist occupation of Far Asia. It also opens the way for the Marxists to demonstrate the workability of socialism-communism as a lifestyle for Asians and, presumably, for other segments of the Third World.

Success of the Marxists in maintaining and extending their presence in Asia will make it politically and culturally possible for them to take five essential steps:

_First_, to extend the developing pattern of collective responsibility and collective action around the earth as rapidly as possible. If such an extension proves feasible, it should give Marxism a real priority in stabilizing the economy and building up the political vigor of the Far East.

_Second_, organized counter-revolution could be liquidated and revolutionaries, willing to take on the responsibility, could be provided with necessary authority, leadership and equipment.

_Third_, moving along with the formulation and fulfillment of carefully developed plans for socialist construction in all of its ramifications, to close the door gradually, step by considered step, on exploitation and profiteering. In their places, well-laid plans could be drawn up for developing a people's socialist-communist economy in the more backward areas of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

_Fourth_, the new economy could be federated as it was established and stabilized, with special attention to the need for a maximum of local self help to balance against pressures toward bureaucracy and the development of overhead costs.

_Fifth_, with one eye on its need for integration into a socialist-communist collective planetary economy, the other eye must be kept on the planetary chain of which the earth is an essential part.

Life is a process operating through the linking of causes and their effects. This is as true of social life as it is of individual life. Reviewing history we check man's past actions and learn by so doing. Turning to the future we plan and prepare to set in motion that conglomerate of causes (plans) best calculated to assure a good life individually, socially, cosmically--with a strong emphasis on the time honored sequence: good, better, best.

It is our opportunity, our destiny, and our responsibility to keep on living, constructing, creating. We must live, not die. We must not stop. We must go on.

By such steps we humans could by-pass the restrictions and limitations imposed on human creative genius by the structure and function of civilization. In its place we could elaborate a substitute inter-planetary culture in which a chastened, improved, rejuvenated humanity could play a creative role, in accordance with our capacities and our destiny as an integral part of the joint enterprise to which our sun furnishes light, warmth and vibrant energy. We have latent among us the talent and genius necessary to play such a part. Do we also have the imagination, courage and daring to accept the challenge and take our post of duty in the team that is directing the expansion of our expanding universe?