Civilization and Beyond: Learning from HistoryNearing, Scott
History
Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History
Nearing, Scott
Civilization -- History
As a matter of practical experience, proponents of all seven approaches
to social problems and social change employ a wide range of techniques
from persuasion to coercion. To support their projects they advance
logical arguments, elaborate half-truths, make emotional appeal; employ
trickery, deceit, preferment, privilege, flattery, soft living, bribery,
coercion, physical and social violence--individual and collective
extermination.
Civilization as reported in history and in its current practice is based
on five faulty ideological assumptions:
1. _Competitive survival struggle results in social improvement._
Survival struggle has certainly played a role in stimulating
discovery, invention and the diffusion of culture traits. Its
end results have always included civil and inter-group war
with its unavoidable costs in destruction, dissolution and
death.
2. _The effort to grab and keep, with its accompanying competition,
is a chief source of social progress._ The game of
grab and keep is play for children. Mature human beings
should strive to create, produce, share.
3. _The accumulation of goods and services brings happiness._
At the out-set of life this may be true. But accumulation
for its own sake produces the miser. Misers are not happy
people. Riches yield happiness only as they are distributed.
Accumulation brings many headaches, and few abiding
satisfactions.
4. _Successful accumulators "have fun."_ Perhaps they do, for
a time, at the expense of others on whose backs they ride
and whose life blood they suck. But mature men and
women do not "have fun"; they shoulder and carry their
share of social responsibility.
5. _Progress can be measured by the multitude of personal
possessions._ Not so. True progress for humanity consists
in movement from having to doing; from the possessive to
the creative; from the material toward the spiritual.
Ideologies have played a role in determining the structure and function
of every civilization. As civilization grows up, matures, and declines,
ideologies change with the changing times. In its early history each
civilization seeks acceptance for its picture of reality and its
techniques for reaching individual and social goals. As each
civilization declines and disintegrates, a multitude of counselors
clamors for attention to a particular formula that will prove acceptable
and workable in the existing emergent circumstances.
_Part III_
Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete
CHAPTER TEN
WORLDWIDE REVOLUTION DISRUPTS CIVILIZATION
Every organism, mechanism or social construct reaches a point in its
life cycle at which its existing apparatus must be repaired, renovated
and updated or scrapped, redesigned and replaced. Today western
civilization in its totality faces that dilemma.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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