this broad sense, and despite minor departures, the life patterns of
civilization have appeared, disappeared and reappeared with close
similarity in structure and function.

Western civilization has had a life cycle of approximately a thousand
years. During that millennium it has undergone many changes--political,
economic, sociological, ideological. Throughout these changes its basic
characteristics have remained; have appeared and reappeared. In the
1970's western civilization retains the essential features which justify
us in describing it as a civilization.

The great revolution which began about 1750 and has increased in breadth
and depth throughout the past two centuries had led to vital changes in
structure and functioning, particularly of the West but generally in the
entirety of human society. So far-reaching are these changes, and so
deep running, that human society, particularly in the West, has outgrown
or is outgrowing the life pattern evolved by civilizations during the
past four or five millenia. As a consequence, geographical expansion by
the time-honored method of grab-and-keep has become more difficult, far
more expensive in manpower and material wealth and is in growing
disrepute among a sizeable minority of individuals and social groups,
even in the centers of western civilization. It is in notable disfavor
among the former colonies and dependencies of the European empires.

At the same time, war as a means of achieving social ends has fallen
into greater and greater disrepute. War costs, measured in terms of
human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before
1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak
chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far
more destructive than the fission bombs used on the two Japanese cities.

Under the conditions prevailing before the great revolution, competitive
struggle between nations and empires, expanding as a result of victory
in war, had ceased to be a practicable means of gaining, holding and
increasing wealth and power. If the costs of the international power
struggle exceeded the gains, there were no longer victors who won and
vanquished who lost. Instead, everybody lost as the entire social
structure was wrenched, dislocated, wracked and down-graded. Certainly
this seemed to be the plain-as-day lesson of the two general wars and
the flurry of minor wars which swept the earth after 1910.

Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way. It was the
obvious lesson stressed by J.A. Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their
respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916). It was the theme of
Norman Angel's _Great Illusion._ It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee's
_War and Civilization._

If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion
would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the
victors. Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival
struggles during the war years which began in 1911. I summarized the
experience in _The Twilight of Empire_(1929).

The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of
1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany
after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939,
followed immediately by the war devastations of 1939-45 were part and
parcel of the same picture. The same may be said for the revolt of the
colonial peoples, downgrading all European "victors" in the war of
1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the
planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist
forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.

Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth,
surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies. They
expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous
game of "Beggar My Neighbor". Politically and economically the struggle
reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent
years have revealed the aftermath--a down-graded Europe and an ascendant
Asia.

Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution
in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in
anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of
war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly
non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of
social relations.

Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social
objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a
planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the
center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.

Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of
exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment
would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and
poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written
record.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival
nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position,
expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor
power for the advantage of the few.

Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for
wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying
the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of
experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history.
Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding
and satisfying. The current revolution in science and technology has
rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.

The structure or pattern of civilization has divided western
civilization into separate parts that benefit by separateness and profit
from conflict. The result is a typical example of a self-destroying life
style struggling through an impasse from which there is no escape save
through a third fratricidal war.

Today civilization is a bad buy, especially for young people starting
out in life. Civilization still has its advantages for those who have
lived actively, achieved many of their material objectives and retired
to spend their declining years in a well-feathered nest. For some
privileged young people, willing to settle for comfort and conformity,
civilization offers the leisure to learn, and an opportunity to test
themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for
energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities
offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and
in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game is not worth the candle.

Today civilization is a bad buy for two reasons. The first is that
antisocial, predatory, exploitive and parasitic elements are
unfortunately and unnecessarily prominent in the lives of all civilized
peoples, including the present West. The second reason is the arrogant,
self-righteous, peremptory, bragging, bullying, dictatorial approaches
adopted by civilized people in their dealings with those who live on the
fringes or outside the pale of civilization. The first reason is an
inescapable consequence of the political, economic, ideological and
sociological assumptions of the civilizing process. The second reason is
inherent in the methods used by civilized peoples in their dealing with
the uncivilized majority of humanity.

_Part IV_

Steps Beyond Civilization

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