Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History

by Scott Nearing

If the institutions and practices of western civilization can be adjusted to meet the demands of the new situation created by the scientific, technological, political and cultural revolution, the reformed social apparatus may function in a new day that is dawning for the human family. If reform proves to be impossible, the apparatus of western civilization must be replaced by a social structure in keeping with the requirements of the new age inaugurated by the innovations introduced into the human culture pattern by the revolution of our time.

There is widespread recognition of the need to keep the structure of a society in harmony with necessary functions and updated to the consequences of probable or possible discovery and invention. This is no mean task as western experience during recent centuries has so clearly demonstrated. Power elites of feudal Europe neither anticipated nor prepared for the consequences of the industrial revolution. The result was the smash and clatter of the American and French Revolutions (1776 and 1789) and minor revolutionary shocks through the nineteenth century. Power elites in western Europe dealt with mass production and its consequent abundance of goods and services with mass marketing, social security and other crumbs of affluence scattered among the restless masses. But when the trade winds of the scientific and technological revolution blew in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Romanoff dictatorship was still ordering back the tide of social change and the dominant United States oligarchy cold-shouldered the Mexican Revolution, took sixteen years to recognize officially the Russian Soviets and waited twenty-three years after 1949 before they were even on speaking terms with the Chinese Communists.

For two centuries, new ideas, institutions and practices have followed discoveries and inventions as regularly as day follows night. The consequent flood of innovations that has swept through the West and across the planet in the past two generations has made drastic social change a matter of the utmost urgency. The only open questions concern the direction of the changes, their rapidity, and the success of the social system in adapting itself to the shattering effects of newly released social forces.

Social change can come with the rush and turmoil of revolution or the studied step-by-considered-step constancy of the conscious improvement of society by society. Two powerful social forces limit gradualness. One is human impatience. The other is the rapidity with which masses of people all over the planet are being informed of the good-life potential implicit in present-day western affluence.

Impatience is emotional rather than rational. It is a compound of human urges on one hand and on the other hand of the frustrations built up in individuals and populations attracted by new wants and frustrated by barriers of custom-habit; the carefully constructed apparatus of direction, division and restriction (the State, the Church, the communication media), and the potent class forces of the counter-revolution.

In every modern community the media of mass communication are broadcasting information regarding the widening consumer prospects created by the current revolution in science and technology. In every modern community there are eager, ambitious, hopeful individuals urging their fellow workers and fellow citizens to get moving toward the promised land of peace and plenty. In every community the bureaucracy, representing the more comfortable and secure elements of the population, is asking the less well placed class groups to "take it easy," take "one step at a time," and remember that "Rome was not built in a day."

Conservatives, urging law and order under the status quo, have reason on their side. The movement of a technologically oriented community from monopoly capitalism into socialism-communism is without historical precedent and therefore largely experimental. Plans are tentative; there are shortages of materials and particularly of skills based on experience. Costly mistakes are made leading to delay until they can be corrected. The counter-revolution, abundantly financed by the forces of reaction, operates constantly, in critical situations almost always through the military, to preserve the "law and order" which are the prime forces behind its wealth and its power. In an untrod, untested area ignorance is a blank wall until it is pierced by ingenuity and innovation. There are many ways to miss a defined objective and only a few ways to reach it.

Cautious, experienced people, living comfortably, are inclined to let well enough alone. Restless, hopeful idealists are eager to reject, modify, improvise and replace.

Conservatives try to preserve both the structure and the traditional activities of a community on the plea that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Liberals (moderates) would preserve the structure but bring its activities up to date. Radicals would scrap the old and replace it with a new structure and new activities geared to the new possibilities and the new requirements.

Survival wars from 1914 to 1945 marked not only the end of Britain's planetary domination but the termination of Europe's planetary regency. The events of the period also loosened the bonds that had held western civilization together.