Extract

The fundamental question that any national or international plan for humankind must answer is the issue of human progress. How can we maintain the pulsations of the symbolic energies of the human mind while at the same time keeping the world from falling into violence and turmoil? This has to involve social planning on the international level with the hope for continued rational democratic governance.

The history of the human rush to growth and expansion from c. 1400–1500 onward to the twenty-first century is the modern context for our study. Was there even a hint from the mid-twentieth century that we were in trouble? Take the decline of the arts as an indication.

The West was bursting forth with a whole variety of institutional energies during this approximately 500-year period. The growth in power and population was paralleled by a vast unleashing of human creativity. Here, art pulsed with innovation alongside the material and economic.

Never in the history of this human species have we seen so many social, physical, technological and medical changes in our way of life. True, along with this seeming progress blood poured forth from the human corpus. In the ← 145 | 146 →end we had never seen the descendants of Cro-Magnon engaged in such terrible wars, many of annihilation and genocide. And these were moderns, Hss.

Up until the end the arts poured out, painting, sculpture, literature, the arts of fabric and style, cuisine, instrumental music and...