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.