When we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you,sir,to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.1
Yet wrongs are to be righted wherever they are confronted.
In the midst of abuses,in the heart of cities,in the aisles of false churches,alike in one place and in another, wherever namely a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition,law,or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.2
Imagine the world as a wheel. Its hub is the Kalotic Revolution.3 From the hub, every way to the rim of the wheel is the fastest way. We can move in from every point on the circle. The move can be personal, or of a group, a church, a state, or an army. Who begins, begins Year One. We shall know it has begun when, looking back, we say "It was then that the movement started."
Year One begins in retrospect. A victory, miracle,or discovery that is salient to the history of a group is so designated; a new era begins. If the group is influential, its "Year One" becomes that of others. A million and a half years ago,perhaps a blast of self-awareness marked the first "Year One" of anthropus. It is the year 1806 for Chinese, the year 5730 for Judaism. "Year One" of the Roman Empire was 2714 years ago. The year of the French Revolutionaries is 181 and of the Bolsheviki is 51. The Christian year is 1969, as we write.
The year 1919 saw the first universal League of Nations, which gave general equality to non-European nations and foresaw an age of free nations with representative governments. Hence the new Year One of Cosmarchy may be 1919,for the system to be advocated is founded upon the creation of a true world order embracing all of the major sub-communities of the world. This date, or another, may be taken up when the critical moves have been taken towards a new Revolution.
Still, this date, already passed into history, has faults, for the League was discredited by subsequent errors, recantations, and treasons of the principals. It is better to look forward to a new Year One. That, to repeat, would be the date on which the next universal movement would begin, the year in which a considerable set of policies for a new kalotic society is promulgated.
To be honest and right,any promises of change must be registered on the scale of time. So must any change itself. A science without command of time is an absurdity.1 Time is the fourth dimension of politics as of all other reality. The plans of the present generation are obligations of everyday politics, and, for the next couple of decades, of political planning. What is possible for the next generation is educational planning. What is possible for the next century is centennial planning. The work of the next thousand years is speculative planning. Afterwards comes the neoterium. Neotic planning is so remote and difficult as to erase the ordinary meanings of the word "plan". It actually runs into the ultimate base and residue of human nature, and therefore is a kind of minister without portfolio in our daily lives. It merges into philosophical planning, which pervades all phases of planning and defines what is possible for man in his nature regardless of time.
O Friend,End of all endless movement, How many bends of the river are still before me? And with what wilt thou reveal Thyself to me?5
We assert from the start that all must be in the spirit of each other: contradiction and confusion are to be avoided. A person who is immersed solely in the spirit of the moment is good only if a servant of the total view and drive; if separated from them he is useless, or even dangerous. A new toparchy or cosmarchy needs to be introduced not too soon, else it will be opposed and destroyed, yet not too late, else the possibilities of an adverse order will be promoted.
This present statement of the new public order is aimed at the next ten years and the generation to come. It is political and educational planning. From it stem implications of the philosophy underlying it, implications for actions today, and implications for a long time to come. When those values are stated which have their application in the future but their beginnings today, we propose the initial steps of intelligent long range policy : research; planning.
We wish that we might benefit the present and the full range of futures. But we are constrained by the heavy difficulties of organizing ourselves now and in the near future: we are made innocuous too by the increasing rate of human indifference as the mind moves into the prolonging future. Therefore, we are forced to take care of the present better than we take care of the future.
Still a certain futurism is both necessary and desirable. An orientation to the immediate causes the greatest confusion and misery; it is deluding and thus confusing, subject to every force and thus miserable. Only the simplest things may be enjoyed without prospect. Even these are shaped by retrospect, which is itself a kind of mirrored - futurism of the mind, inasmuch as we only remember what we are structured to reenact. For such reasons, we take on the next or second generation as the target that is possible. We can amply schedule it and yet can feel it coming. We shall base it upon the far future, or the nature of man as we know him.
Desperation cannot tolerate humility. It is acknowledged that the future is difficult to program. But everyone of competence in this world has to face the challenge, so aptly put by the Black Power revolutionaries: "If you don't have a solution, you are part of the problem."
Among the human values, shifting like cloud shapes in our time, it may be that earth and its preservation stand as a great solid mountain -- a primal value in which we can root ourselves.
If fact, human values spring from earth values and must be supported by them. But to have earth values we must extend our vision and see the earth whole, as the astronauts saw it and as the ecologists have begun to see it.
Ann Morrow Lindbergh has spoken well.6
Suppose a pilot were to reconnoiter the world from the stratosphere, with the peaceful intent of discovering the condition of mankind quickly and overall. He would observe some basic facts about the political order.
He would be greatly impressed by the barrenness of the world. its vast empty spaces where rare specks denote fishing and mineral exploitation, or oases.7 Water would cover most of the globe, while inhospitable mountains, deserts arctic ice, tundra, and jungle would be amply displayed. His X-ray cameras would indicate in many desolate places the presence of buried civilizations; there settlements once flourished, only to be covered over by the dusts of catastrophes humanly or naturally caused.
He would see the concentration of peoples on the temperate and sub-tropical plains of Europe, China, India, and America. He would see traffic moving in great part along a few river arteries, several ocean channels, and a couple of dozens of major railroad lines.
Suppose that he had made the flight a few years earlier. In several places, such as between Vietnam on the one hand and United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Poland on the other, he would observe abnormal traffic diversions, that is, unusually high and temporary flows of material and people. These he might rightly adjudge to indicate human emergencies of some kind.
In other places he would observe traffic to discontinue between some points between which no natural barrier appears to exist. He would note, for example, that between Cuba and the United State of America, between China and Japan, between East Germany and West Germany, between Greece and Turkey, and around Israel, that masses of people are not visibly represented by arteries of commerce. And checking back on maps prepared by previous reconnaissances, if such had ever been drawn, he would conclude that these peoples were barred from each other, or that they were so deprived of the essentials of commerce that they could not connect with one another.
The first hypothesis, that they are hostile, would seem correct in some cases. But he would have to know also about invisible causes. such as national boundaries, to understand why in large areas in India, China, Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia, where people were abundantly registered in his scope, people appeared to be scarcely in touch with each other, or if so, at a rate too slow for the shutters of his cameras. These are the "immobile poor masses"
He would notice, if he could penetrate their palls, a couple of dozen megalopolises of the earth in which were tightly gathered a quarter-billion of mankind, and from these would shoot most of the lines of commerce and communications.
The pilot has already begun to exhaust his discoveries, or at least his store of explanations. He has reported, and we are duly impressed, that man today is an agglomerative being, who shuns or cannot tolerate most of his physical environment. His agglomerations are selectively connected, the level of activity varies from one place to another, and the volume of commerce and communications among them bears little relation to the size of the concentrations. Everything else is to be more closely explained on the ground.
The pilot should now descend. The gross physical world of man, falling into the proportions he has described, is a highly differentiated world. Now from a low altitude using sensors that detect heat, and taking climatic and population norms as constants, he discovers the energy concentrations of the world and he finds again several answers, but even more questions.
In what we know to be Central North America, Western Europe, and various spots of the Soviet Union, vast amounts of Industrial and vehicular heat are being dissipated. Could his instruments distinguish so sharply, the pilot would preceive a three-to-one ratio even of bodily heat dissipation, so caloric is the human diet in these places of industrial heat. But he also notices strange heat vacuums in the core of some highly concentrated heat-giving places. He might not guess that these are the bureaucratic, white collar centers of Peking, Washington and Moscow and the office and slum central sections of western cities.
He might as well come down completely to earth, for it is in the loading of all these building boxes and communication lines, in the electric waves, in their hearts and minds, and in their ways of life, that men are to be discovered.
Here on earth, the law of skewed distribution which can be seen from the heavens prevails with everything and everyone. The industries of the world are concentrated steel in several western places, oil in many places but in few hands, electric power in a number of places but used in great amounts in a few. Wealth is accumulated in great disproportions among certain persons and peoples. If just India were to begin consuming resources at the rate of the United States, the total conventionally defined basic resources of the world would be used up within twenty years. Coercive force is controlled by a few persons and people. Three out of four billion people live in extremely modest circumstances about which some of them complain and most do not, and, strangely, those who do complain are likely to be better off than those who do not.
The United States of America with under five per cent of the people, occupies the peak of most distributions-force, production, consumption, and ownership. In the case of many specific indicators-oil, income, computers, for example-it holds half of the world value. And within the U.S.A.. the goods of life are peaked too. One per cent command as much as all the rest of industry, property, and force. Obviously the U.S.A. is a critical factor in the status quo and hence in any revolution.
Our pilot's work is unless now, for the problems of Earth become overwhelmingly psychological. This Earth is in sore trouble. Its collective mind is dominated by uncertain subjectivists commonly called liberals and dogmatic realists, communists and "red baiters." It is neither free not secure, but merely drifts. Illusions of many types generate in the people, which, being contradictory, create confusion in many ways, the most fundamental of which is general unbelief in any specific prospect for mankind.
Unbelief is an epidemic destroyer of both freedom and order, of psychic and material creativity. The people become a great disturbed and heap, moving in every direction, each picking up what lies before him and dropping what he is carrying, not enjoying the past, not relishing the present, not shaping the future.
Yet this Earth has a material resource, though it cannot appreciate it. It has a consensus, though it cannot comprehend it. It has a leadership that stands unrealized. It knows forms of government that are adequate to its needs and therefore has a possibility of a free order that it has not captured. What is, need not be; what may be, can be better that what is.
| 1. | Essays (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1876), p.263 |
| 2. | Ibid., p.263 |
| 3. | The Cosmic Dance of Shiva has been represented for 5,000 years as occupying the centre of the universe. The wheel of time flowing continuously and eternally in cycles is Hindu and Buddhist. Cf. Grace E. Cairns, Philosophies of History (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962) pp. 69,89 |
| 4. | Behavioral scientists are tooling up for the challenge. See, for some of their methods and projections, Herman Kahn and Anthony J.Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1967). The early work on William Ogburn was important, e.g., on Culture and Social Change (selected papers, O.D. Duncan,ed.,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). |
| 5. | In the encounter with Absolute Being. as recited by Radhakamal, Mukerjee, in The Density of Civilization (New York: Asia Publishing House 196), p. 12. |
| 6. | New York Times, February 21, 1970, p. 12. |
| 7. | The Astronaut's companion may wish to journey with a textbook in hand; see, for example, NASA, Ecological surveys from space (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1970); Scientific American, The Biosphere(San Francisco: Freeman, 1970). |