All good things,
they say, must come to an end. The
history of our planet is about a lot of beginnings, endings and new
beginnings. Living things are mortal. Are societies living things? Must they too come to a natural end? Human history has in fact been about a lot of
beginnings, endings and new beginnings.
Civilizations came and went. And
now we are part of a civilization that encircles the world. It’s by far the grandest thing human beings
have created. Will it last?
The great
majority of people do not think this civilization will end in their lifetime
but we are nonetheless concerned about a lot of issues that define life for a
steadily growing number of people. We
invest a lot of time and money into mitigating risks. The twenty-first century brought us a new
department of government: Homeland
Security, or Emergency Management as it is often called at the state
level. It came out of global terrorism
but also embraces natural disasters like extreme weather, floods, droughts and
fires, earthquakes and such. It includes
global warming and sea-level rise. It
also embraces potential human-caused disasters such as nuclear power plants and
chemical spills. It acknowledges the
increasing risk and instability of modern civilization. It seeks to mitigate the effects if not identifying
and fixing the root causes.
The US insurance
industry is worth over a trillion dollars. US health care spending is in the range of
$3.5 trillion. Do we need to think about
an insurance policy on our children’s and our community’s future?
Spengler, 1918
Over the last
century a lot of sages have tried to understand the future. Some were science fiction writers, others
university professors, some journalists.
Many, but by no means all, were optimistic. At the root of doubtful writers you usually
find Oswald Spengler.
A century ago,
Oswald Spengler painted a depressing vision of the future of western
civilization. His best seller, Decline of the West, came out at the end
of World War I (1918). That war
certainly had an effect on Spengler’s popularity. The then called Great War had been a
horror. Nearly 16 million had died,
nearly half civilians. It decimated the
youth of Europe. The war was driven by
industry: Battleships, airplanes, tanks,
massive artillery, machine guns, poison gas.
This war made it clear that industry could produce horrific destructive
power. As the war came to an end, a flu
epidemic took the lives of another 20 million people.
The massive slaughter
of that conflict deeply affected a generation of writers and their
readers. A revised and expanded (two
volumes) edition of Spengler’s book was published in English in 1926. In 1929 came the Wall Street Crash and the
start of the Great Depression. Then came
World War II – industrial war on steroids.
It produced jet airplanes, the atomic bomb and long-range rockets. Following World War II, the Cold War cast a
deep shadow of doubt about the future. An
abridged edition of Spengler’s book was published in 1959. Spengler has been widely read and while often
criticized remains a classic for those trying to understand our future
prospects
A century has
passed since Spengler first published his classic book and history continues to
progress, indeed at a breathtaking rate.
I believe continued interest in Spengler is because there is more to his
massive work than merely an apocalypse.
Spengler was more of a philosopher than historian. He sought to understand essential patterns in
history. After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776), historians became acutely interested in the fact that civilizations
rise and fall. They began to speculate
about the cause of the decline of great cultures. A dark mood lay over Europe towards the end
of the nineteenth century with the curious name “fin de siecle” – suggesting an
ending: A worldview of despair and
exhaustion. It was Spengler’s time. It shaped the gloomy existentialist
philosophy, developed largely in France, and the post-modernist view that
continues to influence both Europe and America.
It’s a cynical, despairing and often a barbaric philosophy. Its influence lingers.
The late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were unprecedented in the course of history. The rapid, accelerating and overwhelming changes
in industry and technology created mounting anxiety. Darwin, Marx and Freud did not paint
encouraging pictures of human nature.
Neither did Nietzsche. Novels
took on a dark and troubling cast.
Modern art and music grated the senses.
The war merely confirmed that something was amiss with modern
civilization.
The apocalyptic
tone also appeals to the millennial Christian movements that sprung up during
the mid-nineteenth century and that movement has a strong following today. The Bible,
The Revelation of St. John, predicts the inevitable end of times.
For all this
gloom, Spengler’s classic has had an enduring influence in many different
academic fields and among the lay public for a variety of reasons. That the book, in one (abridged) or two
volumes, continues to attract readers is in no small measure due to the depth
of the anxiety that haunts the world in the twenty-first century. The list of seemingly irresoluble problems
just keeps growing.
Spengler Biography
Spengler was born
in 1880 in northern Germany to a comfortable middle class family. His father was a minor public official. His mother inherited a considerable fortune. Young Oswald was frail and withdrawn and
given to daydreaming about German armies gaining victory throughout the
world. Germany’s empire was at its apex
and its industry and science unexcelled.
German universities were a mecca to scholars, particularly American’s,
who brought home the idea of the German research university. Oswald did well in Latin and Greek and
excelled in mathematics. He loved
poetry, music and drama. He developed a
great interest in Goethe and Nietzsche.
He developed a strong aversion to orthodox Christianity.
At university,
Spengler studied Greece, Rome, mathematics and the physical sciences and wrote
his doctoral dissertation on Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher. Heraclitus is famous for the line: “War is
the creator of all things.” Heraclitus developed
a metaphysics based on the fundamental unity of all nature with fire as the
primary substance, an idea that deeply influenced Spengler.
After receiving
his degree, Spengler taught mathematics and physical sciences in high
schools. He added history and German
literature to his teaching subjects. He
is reputed to have been a good teacher but was rather humorless. His mother died in 1910 and left him
moderately independent. He decided to
move to Munich the following year and pursue a career as a writer. Drawn by the heightening tensions in Europe,
he became immersed in the fields of politics and history. By 1911 he was already convinced Europe was
on the road to a global war.
Spengler was
twice passed over for military service because of his health. Despite considerable privation during the war he worked steadily on
the first volume of The Decline. Following
publication he quickly gained fame. Some
100,000 copies were sold before the release of the second volume. While he received widespread public acclaim,
he was rejected by academia. Spengler was
an independent scholar (albeit he lacked nothing in terms of scholarly
credentials) and an amateur historian.
As such he was intensely criticized by university scholars but in final
analysis his reputation and work far outlived most of his critics.
Hit by disastrous
inflation in 1923 the German people embraced Spengler’s prophecy of doom. They found parallels between the disaster of
the war for Germany and the thesis of the general decline of western
civilization. They took some satisfaction
from the fact that in defeat they were really in no worse shape than much of
humanity. In 1927 Spengler suffered a
stroke from which he never fully recovered.
He continued to write and speak on political and historical issues. He refused to join the Nazi Party and
strongly criticized them. They in turn
forbid the mention of Spengler’s name in the public media. Spengler died on May 14, 1936 of a heart
attack.
The Rise of Civilizations
Human
civilization emerged some 5,000 years ago in places like Egypt, Mesopotamia,
India and China. It was an outgrowth of
the development of agriculture. Early
farmers settled into villages and villages eventually became city-states.
The first
civilizations are now dusty heaps of ruins.
Others followed, also now in ruins. The two-dozen major cultures (and hundreds of
lesser ones) came and went. While some
had disastrous endings, the others more or less followed Spengler’s pattern
into inevitable decline.
For the West, the
foundation of our culture is ancient Greece and Rome. Alexander created a vast Greek empire. Rome swallowed Greece and dominated the
Mediterranean world for a millennium.
With the fall of Rome came the so-called Dark Ages and then modern
European civilization emerged. Now it
has become a global phenomenon.
Society as an Organism
Spengler’s main thesis
is that civilizations, like biological organisms, are born, grow, decay and die
and that they do so within a fixed and predictable life cycle. Spengler, in brief, pointed out that
civilizations, like all living entities, must come to an end. The decline of our present civilization is
natural and inevitable. Spengler wasn’t
alone in his prediction. Historian
Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of History,
while having his own theory about the rise and fall of civilizations,
documented two-dozen now extinct civilizations.
He lamented the poor state of our current one. Lewis Mumford wrote an extensive critique of
modern urban society. Ralph Borsodi
wrote This Ugly Civilization (1929)
and other books critical of urban-industrial society. He promoted an alternate, more humane,
culture. Today bestselling writers such
as Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of
Complex Societies, 1988) and Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed, 2005) echo this pessimism.
Spengler’s
historic social process involves two major phases. First is Culture, the creative period during which
“a great soul awakens.” This is the
creative, spiritual, phase of the society.
Eventual Culture declines into Civilization during which genuine
creativity disappears and it subsides into “cold, abstract reason.” He did not divide history into epochs, i.e.
Ancient, Medieval and Modern, but rather into eight separate High
Cultures: Babylonian, Indian, Chinese,
Egyptian, Arabian, Mayan-Aztec, Classical Greece and Rome and Classical and now
Western European.
Spengler recognized
that the modern European personality emerged during the Classical period. With the Greeks, biography (ego) begins to appear
for the first time and with it a sense of history. The Hellenic dramatic hero struggled with
alien forces, forces so great he is often defeated by them. This is fate.
Ultimately, in Western Europe, the Faustian personality emerged where we
find a soul possessed of a limitless will-to-power. We begin to think that we can determine our
own fate.
Where Classical
civilization is static and bounded by a narrow horizon, modern society is
dynamic, innovative and boundless. It
opened the world to exploration. It produced
the calculus, a mathematics of motion and of functions rather than concrete
numbers. It produced non-Euclidian
geometry – culminating in multi-dimensional space and the theory of
Relativity. Its architecture was defined
by the gothic, the great cathedrals, which viewed from within expressing a
straining, a thrusting upward towards the light, given an ethereal,
otherworldly quality by stained glass.
Its music is also uplifting, stirring and inspiring. Faustian empires spread across the globe.
Faust and the West
The archetype character
Spengler used to define Western civilization and the modern era was Goethe’s Faust. Goethe’s story (as is Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is tragic. Faustian (wo)man
is lead to destruction not by fate, as with the classics, but by his/her own
deeds, by the pursuit of the will-to-power.
Faustian Man emerges independent of the church, but in Goethe’s
rendition, falls victim to Satan, or Mephistopheles (actually a German folk
demon). Faust made a deal with the Mephistopheles,
sold his soul, to extend his knowledge and power.
Our Faustian
Culture emerged about 900 CE. The
monarchal nation states began to emerge then.
As Faustian Culture begins, two estates form, the nobility and the priesthood. The former are doers and warriors acting from
instinct. The latter are rationalizers
and systematizers. These two estates
continually struggled with each other.
At the base of society is the peasantry who lead a plant-like existence
with close ties to the soil and cycles of the seasons, of birth and death.
After a
millennium, Faustian culture has run its course. The priests created an intellectual culture,
the height of which is Aquinas’ Summa Theologia (1485), a system of exacting rules for the salvation of the
soul. This rigid order was briefly broken
by the Protestant Reformation, which seeks to return religion to its original
roots. The Protestants displayed a
joyless and humorless “Hell on earth” attitude. But they were earnest and sober and soon, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, produced science – a new dogma based
upon the Laws of Nature. As the scientists,
the new fact men, replaced the priests, the nobles are replaced by the business
entrepreneur and by professional military leaders. The industrial revolution emerged in the late
eighteenth century and with it the philosophy of Hume and Smith and the idea of
the power of money. At this stage, the
end is coming.
According to
Spengler, “Caesars” would emerge out of the era of contending states, reaching
their Faustian apogee with the wars of the twentieth century. Spengler was not, however, impressed by the
likes of Hitler and Stalin. The despots
of the twentieth century didn’t make the grade Spengler defined as
Caesars. It is clear that Spengler,
while impressed by the potential of America and Russia, had a limited
understanding of the future of these two great powers, let alone the Cold War. They created a dynamic during the twentieth century
that shaped our history in ways Spengler perhaps did not anticipate.
In the later
stages, Spengler wrote, great cities emerge that dominate society. That has happened. The inhabitant of the megalopolis is
“rootless, atheistic, and thoroughly materialistic.” They are busy but show relatively little in
the way of original creativity. The
vigor of the people declines and stoicism sets in as the dominant
philosophy. The family declines. A new, superficial, spirituality
emerges. History comes to an end. The entire civilization collapses into the
state of the “Fellaheen” mass of people “without vitality, direction or
destiny.”
Much of Spengler
is, without question, personal biases.
His influence is more in terms of his literary imagination than history
but that does not diminish his importance. It rather adds to it. If he awakens something in our imagination he
is speaking to that in us that is like the demon that haunted him. As we journey through our own bewildering
world we must become acutely sensitive to the signs it offers us – for we are
part of it and it is part of us. We have
learned that there are patterns even in chaos and that our most disturbing
dreams are redolent with unexpressed ideas and feelings.
A century has
passed and we are still here. The
twentieth century was a profoundly historical period with unprecedented changes
and attention grabbing events. Since
1918 we have had a global economic collapse, an even more horrendous global war
that spawned the atomic bomb, the cold war and arms race, and a globalized
economy. In the twenty-first century we have
political and economic instability, global terrorism, continued rising population,
accelerating resource depletion and climate change. For all that, only about one in seven people
believe the world will end in their lifetime.
(It’s closer to one in five for those below 35.) It is still an age of optimism, albeit an
anxious one.
The Spirit of Societies
More than the
inevitable cycle of civilizations, what most attracted me to Spengler was his
claim that each culture has its own “spirit,” its own way of engaging with its
world. That underlying essence defines
art, architecture, literature and polity. As Goethe suggested and Jung later described,
there is always the dark side to the soul.
The West is bound to succumb to the dark side. The Star Wars series seems to take us into
this myth.
Spengler
elaborated the Faustian model in some detail and used it to describe the emergence
of western culture. We are unique in the
history of the world. The spirit of our
era is defined by the opening of the world, following Columbus and others, and
the massive expansion of knowledge with printing and the emergence of science
and technology and then the industrial revolution. These events were an expression of the soul
of this era – the energy and creativity of Culture. The Columbian era was the peak. We got greedy.
Spengler believed that we sold our collective soul for knowledge and
dominance of nature, human society and an entire world to play with. As with all civilization, we ran our course and
are now in inevitable decline. As noted,
a pessimistic philosophy had in fact already taken root in Europe in the late
nineteenth century. Nietzsche was its
iconic expression. This trend continued
into the twentieth century with existentialism and post-modernism. We find it today in movies and the digital
media.
Toynbee and prominent
Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (below) concurred with this decline motif,
albeit both believed a new civilization would form. Throughout history there has always been
another people waiting in the wings – waiting for their chance. Now we are a single, all-encompassing, global
civilization. We have also consumed the
lion’s share of the more readily available nonrenewable resources. Should our current economic system breakdown;
it would be incredibly difficult to build another industrial society. There are those who consider industrial
history an anomaly, that perhaps agrarian society is our natural form. Followers of Jefferson and Emerson might find
that a good idea.
Following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, globalization of the economy dramatically
restructured the way we live. And then came
the Internet. Material progress has been
astonishing over the last decades. It
brought emerging economies into the western cultural arena.
This unrelenting
massive change has been a great strain on our collective nervous system. The twenty-first century witnesses a growing
gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, the decay of institutions, confidence
in governments and a deepening social malaise.
We are increasingly bound by rules and regulations, in effect a
hardening of the arteries. It brought
what many see as a decline in moral fiber. These are characteristics predicted by
cyclical historians that mark the end times.
Did Spengler
anticipate the twenty-first century?
Metaphorically, I believe he did.
While he would not have imagined our digital world, he did anticipate a
decline in social vitality, creative energy, the rise of vast cities, the
centralization of authority (both political and economic), the depletion of
non-renewable resources and human impact on the health of the natural world
upon which we depend. That this is a
transitional stage of history cannot be doubted. The great majority hopes for continued progress
– a Star Trek future – an unending frontier.
This is an echo of the Faustian spirit.
Nonetheless, it should be noted that we also seem to have lost that
compelling vision of an infinite, pioneering, future. We no longer have a collective sense of
destiny. For Spengler, “civilization”
was but a ghost of the spirit that created the society.
Toynbee and Sorokin
Spengler might
have faded from history had it not been for the works of two other cyclical
historians who, starting in the 1930s, attracted wide public, and academic,
recognition. The first was the renowned
British historian Arnold Toynbee who published A Study of History in ten
volumes (1934 - 61), along with a host of other books. A two-volume condensed edition was published
in 1946. Toynbee was a professional
historian and added considerably to the number of civilizations, tripling the
number Spengler defined, and developing a much more elaborate theory of
historical development.
Somewhat more
radical was the four volume Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937 -41) by
Russian expatriate, Harvard founding sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin. Sorokin examined the culture and values of
civilizations in thin slices of time since the first. He defined two stages of a civilization: 1) Ideational, or the rise, and 2) Sensate,
or the decline. An ideational society is
vigorous, moral and creative. Sensate is
materialist, hedonistic, alienated and unfocused. History is an oscillation between the two
states. While this differs somewhat from
Spengler’s Culture and Civilization phases, the outcome is much the same. Sensate marks the decline of a once great
society.
Both remarked on
Spengler, both reject much of his romantic drama, but they also suggested
scenarios in which western civilization declines and falls, albeit not with the
finality of Spengler’s prophecy. Toynbee
and Sorokin had a more optimistic sense of the qualities of our human
species. A new civilization has always
emerged. It is the product of a creative
minority and a powerful new idea – a potent new expression of spirit. Can we find evidence of that new spirit in
the world today?
The future isn’t what it used to be
It was, not so
long ago, popular to predict the future.
Science fiction writers, going back to Verne and Wells, had been doing
it long before Spengler’s book and a horde of popular writers stayed busy at it
during the twentieth century. Futurist
brought in statistics to try to make a science of it. It didn’t work. Many things predicted didn’t happen. Many things that happened were totally
unpredicted.
A lot of people
think that trying to influence the future is futile. Nonetheless we have hopes, dreams, fears and
worries. There are certain new trends
that are of concern, albeit not universally, like climate change, running out
of oil, economic instability. But there is
always hope.
I believe that history
can be affected by individual or group behavior. Gandhi, Churchill, King, the American
Founders, and many others, had an impact on history. We can tell such stories about business from
Carnegie and Rockefeller to Gates and Jobs and Musk. They were visionary leaders and had creative associates. They all achieved certain goals. They also made compromises. They experienced setbacks and failures. Every business and nonprofit, many groups and
associations, are started with the intent of making a dent in the world. Some do that.
There are a lot
of factions, beliefs and biases involved in daily life and politics. We have to learn to realistically understand
the dynamics of our stage of history. We
need to question our pet assumptions, dogmas and ideology. As Mark Twain once remarked, it isn’t so much
what we don’t know that causes our problems, as it is all the things we are
certain about that just aren’t true.
Spengler 2018
Broadly speaking
there are three possible future scenarios:
1.
A Star Trek future of unlimited progress and
potential.
2.
A collapse of global civilization and a
Spenglerian future.
3.
Something in between.
The reality of
life on Earth today is that it is highly stressed. Global society is vast and economically
interdependent. It is unimaginably
complex. The rate of change, already
stunning, accelerates. The term
“disequilibrium” is used. Call that
“chaotic” if you will.
A lot has
happened in living memory, since World War II.
There was the Great Society period; Civil Rights, student protest on
campus, civil unrest and riots in major cities, the war in Vietnam, the
Counterculture and Human Potential Movement, continued escalation of the Cold
War, the hydrogen bomb and ICBM, landing on the moon. The digital era brought the personal
computer, the Internet, cable TV, the cell phone and mobile devices. It brought Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Wikipedia and a host of cyber services. Things have changed – for the better or worse. For all its benefits, digital technology has increased
the level of complexity by a quantum leap at least.
As the
twenty-first century begins to unfold, it has become increasingly clear that we,
and this includes our leaders and their institutions, have neither a clear
vision nor a plan for the future.
Optimists can happily stand on unfounded assumptions. For the gloomy fatalist, there is no future
at all worth having.
There is no doubt
we are in a high-risk environment. We
all feel it. That feeling, Spengler
might say, is a loss of spirit, a loss of confidence. It dulls our perception. Anticipation is an important part of our
thinking process. We need to look
ahead. We need to think about the consequences
of our acts. We need a plan.
We know that to
achieve a goal we have to constantly adapt to the unexpected. Most of all, we need to have the attitude
that we can handle it. Nature, after
all, designed the human brain to solve problems. It is more a matter of spirit, of
self-confidence, of clarity and certainty that allows us to choose to create a
good future. The future is not ten years
from now. It is what unfolds in the next
minute, hour or day.
Do we have the
right to suggest that we might create a new and compelling vision and that the
visionaries might work for an alternative future, at least on a limited
scale? If all goes well, nothing is
lost. If the world goes to hell there
might just be islands of hope to guide the next stage of human history. Such islands will be the product of a vision,
a spirit, and the will to determine our own destiny.
Cove Institute
During the period
following World War II a new and transformational vision of human destiny
emerged. It was called the Human
Potential Movement. Among its leaders
was a sense that we had reached the threshold of a new, more enlightened
civilization. That didn’t happen but a
lot of new ideas were introduced into the general culture about personal wellbeing. That, however, is a mixed blessing. In an important sense, the twenty-first
century represents a ripening of Sorokin’s sensate culture. The focus is on the Facebook self. We live in the present moment, eyes fixed to
a tiny screen, an attention span of mere seconds. We crave personal affirmation. This is a long way down from the Faustian
sense of limitless space, of power.
The Cove
Institute[1]
was formed (informally) just a few months after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The Cove vision, however, had been slowly
forming for nearly two decades. It began
as the transformational vision of the Human Potential Movement faded. Five leaders in the Human Potential Movement,
including the man who named it, mentored this process. They brought nearly 200 years of experience
to the table. We did an after-action
exercise: What happened? What have we learned? What went wrong? What did we gain from the experience?
The cornerstone
of the Cove Institute framework is the question: Can we control our own destiny? By virtue of reason and/or faith we have to
decide that we will. Our core principle
is that we were formed by nature to solve problems, to adapt, and indeed to
improve our lot. We must exercise our
natural talents to create a broader understanding of the conditions of the
world, to define the root problems that must be addressed in order to change
the course of events, and to devise solutions to achieve desired objectives.
In effect this is
how we form a business or nonprofit organization: Vision, plan, action. In reality it requires a deep understanding
of the world we live in, an ability to grasp complexity, to see the whole
picture, to perceive patterns of interaction.
And it requires the skill to intervene, to make adjustments, to adapt. These tools are available but rarely part of
a university curriculum. We need a new
school that teaches the knowledge and skills needed to master our time.
This approach
does not propose to save the world. The
dynamics, the energy, of the global political and economic system are
inconceivable in power and scope. This
old order can’t be reformed. History
suggests that the old must die so the new can be born. Rebirth is a powerful metaphor. New beginnings often suggest an alternative
approach to life. This process is not
causal, not passive, but active. It a
real sense it requires a reboot of the Faustian vision but we must become aware
of where we have been and what needs to be changed. The Faustian spirit has run its course. We must understand what is emerging now and
nurture a new spirit.
We must ask at
what scale can we affect positive change?
The Cove Institute vision started with the idea of resilient learning
communities – small communities dedicated to the mission of learning how adapt
to what we believe are inevitable challenges.
It has been said that we cannot predict the future, but we can create
it. From Toynbee to Mead we are told
that small groups can change the world.
Yes, that takes hard work and a bit of luck but we have the tools to do
the job. We know how. We need to will.
We have learned a
great deal about how nature works – a great deal about ecosystems. We understand that a community is an
ecosystem just as a forest or lake is an ecosystem. Yet our economy does not function as an
ecosystem. We have learned a great deal about
complex and high-energy systems.
Increasing complexity requires increasing energy to maintain order. It’s an uphill struggle. Spengler perhaps knew about entropy – the
lost of order in increasingly complex systems.
The more energy you pump into a system the more unstable it becomes. The more unstable it becomes, the more energy
we pump into it to try to keep it going.
The smaller the scale of the system and the better you understand its
ecosystem, the better chance you have of managing it. Or more importantly, the better chance you
have of forming it into a more resilient organism that can withstand extreme
stresses.
Where do we
start? A cornerstone of the Cove
Institute framework for achieving an alternative future is in my book Self-Reliance: Achieving Personal Resiliency and
Independence (Link). We must developing and mobilizing leadership
potential. This book is a major step in that
process.
Leadership is the
foundation of community. Self-Reliance proposes that healthy
people are required to form healthy communities. We need people who can comprehend the vast
complexity of life. That capacity defines
this new leadership. We need people who
are attuned to nature and to human nature.
In short, we need a new idea of what leadership means. That idea is an expression of the spirit that
could define the next phase of our history.
It should be
clear that I do not embrace Spengler’s endless dark age. But I do find merit in his speculations about
the inevitable and tragic end to modern society. We don’t know if, when or how such an end
might come. Whatever happens, we need to
work on the problems this era of history mandates us to solve. That could mitigate the impact, turn the
course, or give us workable options to adapt to what is going to be the
consequences of a rising scale of change.
And it could lay the foundation for a new, more humane society.
Bill Sharp
Transition
Centre/Cove Institute
