The Crisis in Man's Destiny

The Most Bewildering Characteristic of the present moment of history is that things are happening faster and faster. The pace of change in human affairs, originally so slow as to be unnoticed, has steadily accelerated, until today we can no longer measure it in terms of generations: Major changes now take place every few years, and human individuals have to make several drastic adjustments in the course of their working lives. Where are these breathless changes taking us? Is change synonymous with progress, as many technologists and developers would like us to believe? Is there any main direction to be discerned in present day human life and affairs? The answer at the moment is no. Change today is disruptive; its trends are diverging in various directions. What is more, many of them are self-limiting or even self-destructive--think of the trend to explosive population increase, to overgrown cities, to traffic congestion, to reckless exploitation of resources, to the widening gap between developed and underdeveloped countries, to the destruction of wild life and natural beauty, to cutthroat competition in economic growth, to Galbraith's private affluence and public squalor, to over-specialization and imbalance in science and technology, to monotony, boredom and conformity, and to the proliferation of increasingly expensive armaments.

What is to be done? Before attempting an answer, we must look at the problem in a long perspective--indeed in the longest perspective of all, the perspective of evolution. The process of evolution on this planet has been going on for five billion years or so. First of all, it was only physical and chemical--the formation of the continents and oceans and the production of increasingly complex chemical compounds. Then, nearly three billion years ago, this purely physicochemical phase of evolution was superseded by the biological phase--the evolution of living matter, or "life." The threshold to this was crossed when one of the numerous organic chemical compounds built up by ultraviolet radiation in the world's warm, soupy seas became capable of reproducing itself. This compound is a kind of nucleic acid, called DNA for short; its complex molecule is built in the form of a double helix, like a spirally twisted ladder whose complementary halves are joined by special chemical rungs. In favorable conditions, the two halves sooner or later break apart, and both build themselves into new wholes by incorporating organic compounds from the surrounding medium. DNA also has the capacity to build up special enzymes and many other proteins out of its chemical surroundings, with the final result of producing a primitive cell with DNA as its core.

DNA is thus self-reproducing and self-multiplying matter. It is also self-varying, since now and again it undergoes a small change in part of its structure as a result of radiation or some chemical agency (or sometimes spontaneously), and then reproduces itself in this changed form. In modern terms, it mutates, and the mutation is hereditary. And very soon, the sexual process multiplies the variation manyfold by recombining mutations in every possible way.

As a result of these two properties of self-multiplication and self-variation, there results a "struggle for existence" between the different variants, and this in turn results in what Darwin called natural selection--a shorthand phrase for the results of the differential death, survival and reproduction of variants.

Crossing the threshold must have been a relatively slow business, taking perhaps 10,000,000 years or more; but once it was crossed, the whole process of evolution was enormously speeded up, major changes taking place at intervals to be measured in hundred-million-year instead of billion-year units. And, as Darwin pointed out over a century ago, and as has become clearer ever since, major change was inevitably progressive, headed in the direction of improvement--improving the organization of plants and animals in relation to their environment, enabling them to surmount more of its dangers and make better use of its resources.

Each major change in biological evolution involved the step-by-step crossing of a critical threshold, leading to the formation of a new dominant type. This is followed by a rapid flowering of the new type and its further improvement along many divergent lines, usually at the expense of its parent and predecessor type. Sooner or later, the process reveals itself as self-limiting: The type as a whole comes up against a limit, and further progress can only be realized by one or two lines slowly achieving a new and improved pattern of organization, and stepping across the threshold barrier to give rise to quite new dominant types.

Thus the amphibians broke through the barrier from water to land, though they still had to live in water as tadpoles or larvae in the early stages of their development; but after about 100,000,000 years, they were succeeded by a new and fully terrestrial dominant type, with shelled eggs containing private ponds to develop in--the reptiles, which, as everyone knows, produced an astonishing variety of specialized lines--crocodiles and tortoises, marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, aerial pterosaurs and the splendid array of terrestrial dinosaurs.

But after nearly 150,000,000 years, they too reached their limit. A new type of organization was produced, involving hair, warm blood, milk and prolonged development within the mother, and broke through to dominance in the shape of the placental mammals, while most reptilian lines became extinct. This new type again radiated out, to produce all the familiar mammal groups--carnivores and ungulates, rats and bats, whales and primates. Once more, after 50,000,000 years or so, their evolution seems to have reached its limits and got stuck. Only one line among the primates took all the steps--to erect posture, tool-and weapon-making, increased brain size, and capacity for true speech--that led, a mere 100,000 or so years back, to the emergence of man as the new dominant type, and took life across the threshold from the biological to the psychosocial phase of evolution.

This works by cumulative tradition rather than by genetic variation, and is manifested in cultural and mental rather than in bodily and physical transformation. Yet evolving human life progresses in the same sort of way as animal life--by a succession of improved dominant types of organization. However, these are not organizations of flesh and blood and bodily structure but of ideas and institutions, of mental and social structure--systems of thought and knowledge, feeling and belief, with their social, economic and political accompaniments: We may call them psychosocial systems. With the emergence of each new system, man radically changes his ideas about his place, his role and his job in nature--how to utilize natural resources, how to organize his societies, how to understand and pursue his destiny.

Up to the present there have been five such dominant psychosocial systems, five major progressive stages, involving four crossings of a difficult threshold to a new way of thinking about nature and coping with existence. First the crossing from the stage of food gathering by small groups to that of organized hunting and tribal organization. Then the step, first taken some 10,000 years ago, across to the neolithic stage, based on the idea of growing crops and domesticating animals, associated with fertility rites and priest-kings, and leading to food storage and settled life in villages and small towns. Third, nearly 6000 years ago, the radical step to civilization, with organized cities and trading systems, castes and professions, including a learned priesthood, with writing or other means of nonvocal communication, and leading to large and powerful societies (and eventually to empires), always with a religious basis. And fourth, less than 500 years ago, the even more decisive step, marked by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the beginnings of organized objective inquiry, over the threshold to the stage of exploration--geographical, historical, religious and, above all, scientific: in a word, the stage of science. This was associated with increasingly secular representative government, with the idea of progress based on ever-increasing knowledge and wealth, and led to a profit-based economic system, industrialization and competitive nationalism.

What, you may ask, has all this to do with our present troubles? The answer is that they portend a new threshold to be crossed to a new dominant system and a new stage of human advance. During each previous dominant stage, mankind differentiated into competing groups, with divergent trends of thought and action. These were in the long run self-limiting, self-defeating, disruptive or just hampering. But they contained seeds of self-correction: As their unhelpful nature became obvious, this provoked new thinking and new action to reduce their harmful effects, and eventually to make clear the need to attempt (continued on page 212) Man's Destiny(continued from page 94) the difficult passage into a new stage based on a radically new system. To take but one case, abuses of ecclesiastical power provoked the Reformation, backward-looking and hairsplitting scholasticism helped on the new birth of the Renaissance and of modern science, and the reaction against the Church's ban on "usury" or charging interest on a loan, coupled with the urgent need for large-scale trade ventures, stimulated the birth of the capitalist system.

The same sort of thing is at work today. The population explosion is stimulating birth control, monolithic over-planning in the U. S. S. R. and its satellites is producing liberalizing reactions, while the doctrinaire freedom of enterprise and expression of the U.S.A. and its acolytes is forcing the acceptance of some degree of discipline and planning; the gap between rich and poor nations is stimulating increased aid and assistance; while racial injustice is stimulating campaigns for integration. The inadequacy of our educational systems has called forth efforts for their expansion and reform; the reckless exploitation and careless destruction of the world's varied resources is leading to a multitude of separate attempts to conserve them; traffic congestion and the other frustrations of city life are leading to transportation planning and schemes of urban renewal; in reaction against the conformity and boredom of modern mechanized existence, a whole crop of new outlets for life is sprouting, in sport and art, in adventure and dedicated projects; while to fill the vacuum caused by the enfeeblement of traditional religious belief and expression, new adventures of spiritual and mental exploration are being undertaken. And the giant wars of this most destructive of centuries have provoked a reaction against war itself and generated a general desire for peace and a crop of projects for preserving and fostering it.

But all this is not enough--all these are negative attempts, actions against something, instead of positive efforts for something. What is needed is a new over-all pattern of thinking and willing that will give us a new vision and a constructive purpose, providing meaning for our lives and incentives for our actions. Only this can bring together the separate reactions against the divergent threats that beset us, and harness them (and all our reserves of suppressed good will) in a single-minded team.

A new vision has been revealed by post-Darwinian science and learning. It gives us a new and an assured view of ourselves. Man is a highly peculiar organism. He is a single joint body-mind, not a body plus a separate mind or soul, but with mind on top, no longer subordinate to body, as in animals. By virtue of this, he has become the latest dominant type in the solar system, with three billion years of evolution behind him and (if he doesn't destroy himself) a comparably long period of evolution before him. Certainly no other organism could oust him from his position: He would quickly become aware of any challenge, whether from rat, termite or ape, and would be able to nip it in the bud. His role, whether he wants it or not, is to be the leader of the evolutionary process on earth, and his job is to guide and direct it in the general direction of improvement.

To do this, he must redefine his aims. In the past, most human groups and most human individuals have aimed at wealth or pleasure or pride of power, though with a sizable minority seeking salvation in a future life, and a smaller minority seeking spiritual satisfactions or creative outlets in this life. During the long march of prehuman evolution, dominant types have split into a multitude of separate biological organizations termed species. Dominant man has also split, but into separate psychosocial and often competing organizations that Konrad Lorenz calls pseudospecies--tribes and nations, empires and religions (though this tendency toward diversity and disunity has been partially offset by an increasing tendency toward convergence and unity).

Clearly, our first aim must be to demote these pseudospecies and recognize the unity of the real species Homo sapiens--in other words, the oneness of mankind. And, pari passn with that, to construct more effective organs of his unity, in the shape of really effective international (or preferably supranational) institutions, to think, plan and act on behalf of the human species as a whole. A supporting aim must be to increase man's understanding of this new vision of himself, of his destiny and responsibility, of the limitless possibilities of improvement. And to convert understanding into action, he must improve his instruments for actually getting on with the job--new knowledge and new skills, new technological achievements, new social and political mechanisms.

But his most important instrument is his mind; accordingly, one of his most urgent tasks is to improve his own mental and psychological organization. As anthropologist Loren Eiseley has said, ancestral man entered his own head; ever since, he has been trying to adapt to what he found there. What he found there, of course, was a lot of myths and mumbo jumbo, witchcraft and wish fulfillment, the results of primitive thinking trying to cope with his own profound ignorance, with the civil war of conflicting passions inside and with the constricting forces of nature outside.

Man's primitive or fantasy thinking is always projecting his own ideas, his own guilt and his own secret wishes, onto someone or something else; its unconscious cunning is always inventing justifications for his own passions--supernatural justification like shifting the blame for his actions onto God, moral justifications like ascribing wickedness to his enemies or proclaiming his own group as divinely inspired or chosen.

In the natural sciences, man has learned the technique of "reality thinking"--of accepting the facts and phenomena of external nature and trying to understand them objectively, without bias. But he still has to tackle the more difficult task of abandoning primitive for reality thinking in dealing with the facts of his own nature and his own psychosocial creations, like religions and arts, laws and customs, social organizations and political institutions, and all the myths and rationalizations concerning them. In a word, man must improve his mechanisms for thinking about himself.

An obvious aim is to find out further how best to avoid conflict by transcending or transforming it, both internally, within our heads, and externally, in the physical and social world. Another is to ensure that the new pattern of thought and belief (and therefore of potential action) shall not be self-destructive but capable of constructive growth, not self-limiting but open-ended. And the aim of aims must be to provide truly satisfying goals for human beings everywhere, so as to energize our species, to stimulate it to move and to ensure that it moves in the right direction. This involves planning for greater fulfillment for human individuals and greater achievement by human societies, and for fuller realization of man's varied possibilities, both personal and collective. It means aiming at quality rather than quantity--quality of life and personality instead of quantity of people, wealth and material goods. The time is ripe for a new approach to destiny, a new look at human life through the telescope of comprehensive vision of wholes instead of the microscope of analysis into separate parts.

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Now I want to take another brief look at some of the unpleasant and threatening trends I spoke of at the outset, to see how the countermeasures we obviously must take against them may help us in planning the practical steps needed to achieve these new integrated ends.

First, population. The world's population is increasing by over 60,000,000 a year--the equivalent of a good-sized town every day of the year, and of nearly 12 baseball teams (with coach) every minute of the day. Its compound interest rate of increase has also increased, from under 1/2 percent per annum to over 1 3/4 percent today, and is still increasing a good deal. This applies just as much to Western countries like Britain or Sweden with a slow increase rate or the U.S.A. with a medium rate as to Asian or Latin-American countries with a high rate.

Whatever we do, the world's population will double by the turn of the century. If we do nothing now, life for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be much more unpleasant than it is for us, which is saying a good deal. If we go on doing nothing, man will lose his chance of being the beneficent guide of evolution, and will become the cancer of the planet, ruining it and himself with it.

A prerequisite for further human progress is immediate and universal birth control as an instrument of national and international policy, with the immediate aim of reducing man's rate of increase to manageable proportions, well below one percent a year, and the ultimate aim of reducing the total number of human beings in the world.

This means publicizing the need for birth control, incorporating family planning in national health services, adjusting family allowances and taxation systems to discourage overlarge families, and providing birth-control appliances and trained personnel to fit them, in all programs of aid and technical assistance. This means rethinking the whole problem of population, in terms of higher quality of life instead of increasing quantity of people. It also means rethinking the problem of resources, in terms of long-term conservation based on scientific ecology instead of quick exploitation based on mechanized technology.

Next there is the problem of cities. In the last half century, more and more metropolitan areas have grown to monstrous size, up to 12,000.000, 14,000,000, even 16,000,000 in Tokyo. Greater London or Greater New York. If you take as your yardstick the city proper, the central area without its suburban tentacles, the number of cities with over a million inhabitants has grown from 30 at the end of World War Two to over 80 today, only 21 years later. And meanwhile, the population of automobiles is growing twice as fast as that of people. As a result, cities are suffering from traffic thrombosis and their inhabitants from severe vital frustration. We know from experiment that overcrowding in animals leads to distorted, neurotic and downright pathological behavior. We can be sure that the same is true in principle for people. City life today is definitely leading to mass mental disease, to growing vandalism and possible eruptions of mass violence.

Existence in cities must be made not merely tolerable but life-enhancing, as it has so often been in the past. To do this, we must forcibly restrict any further expansion of overbig cities, while undertaking planned and limited expansion of smaller ones; we must create new towns in strategic locations (as is already being done in Britain) to accommodate the overspill of the nation's population; and we must rigorously prevent the horrible unplanned spread of what is neither city nor suburb nor country town, but "slurb"--a compound of slum, suburbia and urban sprawl, which has already blighted Southern California and much of the Atlantic seaboard.

And we must be ready to devote a great deal of money and a great deal of skilled effort to something much bigger and more constructive than what often passes for urban renewal--the conversion of cities from being victims of their own size, ugly or infinitely dreary monuments of profiteering development and general unplanning, or even parasites of the automobile like Los Angeles, into what they should be by definition: organs for civilized existence; places in which their inhabitants enjoy living, instead of being turned into neurosis fodder; generators of fulfillment instead of frustration.

Science is exploding even more violently than population. Scientists (including technologists) are multiplying over three times as fast as ordinary people. The 1,000,000 or so scientists now at work constitute over 90 percent of all the scientists who have ever lived, and their numbers may well go up to 20,000,000 or even 30,000,000 by A.D. 1999. The number of scientific journals has increased from one in 1665--The Philosophical Translations of the Royal Society--to about 1000 in 1865, to over 50,000 in 1965, in which nearly 5,000,000 separate articles are published each year; and the rate of increase is itself increasing. If nothing is done about it, science itself runs the risk of drowning in this torrent of paper; specialization will make scientists in one field more ignorant of work in other fields; and man's advance will be stifled in the mounting mass of unassimilable knowledge that he himself has accumulated.

The situation is made worse by the gross lack of balance between different fields of research. Billions of dollars are spent every year on outer-space research--much of it merely for the sake of prestige, in an effort to get to the moon or Mars before somebody else--as against a few millions on exploring the "inner space" of the human mind; billions on weapons research as against a few millions on the sociology of peace; hundreds of millions on "death control" through medical science as against four or five millions on birth control and reproduction. Biological research has given us the tools for real eugenic improvement, in the shape of artificial insemination with the deep-frozen sperm of outstanding male donors, even after their death, and the speedy prospect of grafting ova from admired female donors--but nothing (except words) has been spent on any such project.

The situation is also made worse by the lack of balance between scientific progress in different countries and regions. There is a big scientific and technological "brain drain" from Britain and Europe to the U. S. A. and Canada, and this is producing an equally big one to Britain and Europe from underdeveloped countries like those of Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In consequence, the gap between rich and poor nations is widening scientifically as well as economically.

What is to be done? The torrential flow of scientific printed matter could be reduced if the scientific reputation of a man or a department did not depend so much on the number of scientific papers published. This leads, among other things, to postgraduate students being pushed to undertake researches where publishable results rather than scientific importance are the prime consideration. (This holds with even greater force in the humanities, which too often pretend to be "scientific," flooding the learned market with Ph.D. theses crammed with unimportant literary or historical details.)

But what is mainly necessary is a change in approach. Instead of all the separate sciences, like inorganic chemistry or astronomy or systematic botany, pushing on and on along their own divergent lines, and individual scientists competitively striving for new discoveries (or just for publishable facts), more and more scientific man power should be mobilized to converge on problems that can only be solved by cooperative teamwork between different branches of natural and human science--problems of land use and city planning, of resource use and conservation, of human behavior and health, of communication and education. Beyond all, we need a science of human possibilities, with professorships in the exploration of the future.

Tentative beginnings on a world basis are being made along these lines, like the very successful I. G. Y., or International Geophysical Year, and now the International Biological Program, or I. B. P.; and I am sure that they will increase and multiply in regional, national and professional affairs as well. At the same time we must do our best to get rid of the present imbalance between different branches of science and integrate them in a framework of common effort. This is a necessary step toward a greater goal--the integration of science with all other branches of learning into a single comprehensive and open-ended system of knowledge, ideas and values relevant to man's destiny. This might even lure professional philosophers out of their linguistic burrows and metaphysical towers to take part in rebuilding a genuine philosophy of existence. But before this can happen, we must repudiate our modern idolatry of science and technology, and dethrone them from the exaggerated pedestals on which we have set them. After all, "science" is only the name for a particular system of knowledge, awareness and understanding acquired by particular methods; it must come to terms with other systems acquired by other methods--aesthetic and historical, intuitive and subconscious, imaginative and visionary. A prerequisite for this is the creation of a real science of psychology in place of the array of conflicting heresies at present occupying the field. I venture to prophesy that this will find its root in ethology, the science dealing with the analysis and evolution of animal mind and behavior.

One of technology's most exciting but also alarming achievements is the computer, which is pushing technologically advanced countries like America into an era of computerized automation. I say alarming because computerized automation coupled with population increase must tend to split a country into two nations, to use Disraeli's phrase about mid-Victorian Britain. In late 20th Century America, the two nations will not be the rich and the poor but the employed and the nonemployed, the minority with assured jobs and high incomes, the majority with no jobs and only unemployment pay. Even though automation can ensure increased production of all kinds of goods, this would be a socially disastrous and politically intolerable situation. Somehow or other, the technologically advanced countries will have to rethink the whole concept of work and jobs. One kind of work that will certainly expand is teaching; another is learning--teaching and learning how to live.

The problems of adjustment will be formidable, and the methods for achieving it will need not only hard thinking but time to work out. Meanwhile, we may be driven to providing everyone, even if they have no job in the customary sense, with a really adequate income to tide them over the period of adjustment.

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In regions of dense population and rapid industrial growth, science and technology are producing an alarming increase in pollution and ecological degradation. The volume of solid matter discharged annually into the world's waters amounts to over 65 cubic miles--equivalent to a mountain with 20,000-foot vertical sides and a flat top of over 16 square miles. This includes so much sewage that bathing in many lakes, including even the Lake of Geneva, and on numerous sea beaches has become either disgusting, dangerous to health, or both. Our vaunted Affluent Society is rapidly turning into an Effluent Society. Meanwhile, rubbish dumps and used automobiles are polluting the land, automobile exhausts, domestic smoke and industrial fumes are polluting the air, and pesticides and herbicides are killing off our birds, our wild flowers and our butterflies. The net result is that nature is being wounded, man's environment desecrated, and the world's resources of enjoyment and interest demolished or destroyed.

Here is an obvious case where quality of life and living must take precedence over quantity of production and profit. Compulsory measures against pollution, whatever they may cost, are as necessary as are compulsory vaccination or compulsory quarantine against disease. Meanwhile, science can be set to find better methods of pest control, and technology put to work to reduce effluents, to render them innocuous (or even beneficial, as are some forms of sewage treatment) and to recover any valuable components for future use. Both science and technology must also be called in to reduce the really shocking gap in standards of living and quality of existence between rich and poor countries. If this goes on widening, it will split the world economically into two hostile halves. It will inevitably stir up "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness," as The Litany puts it, in the poor countries, all too probably combined with racial animosity and with a threat of violence lurking under the surface.

It is all too clear that our present methods of aid and assistance are pitifully inadequate to reduce the gap to below the danger point, let alone close it. To take a single example: The losses inflicted on the countries of Latin America by the falling prices of their primary export products during the Fifties were greater than all the aid they received in the same period. During the present so-called Development Decade, they may well become less instead of more developed.

We have to rethink the whole system. The very idea of aid and assistance, with its implications of charity, of a man satisfying his conscience by giving a beggar half a dollar, must be dropped; for it we must substitute the idea of cooperation in world development, with rich and poor in active though complementary partnership.

This will involve large changes, both in attitude and in practice. First, we must take into account the raw fact that an underdeveloped country cannot be industrialized if its rate of population increase is too high: Too much of the capital and skills required is used up in feeding, housing, educating and generally taking care of the excess crop of human infants; it goes down the drain--the baby drain. Thus expert inquiry has made it clear that unless the Indian birth-rate is halved within a generation, it will be impossible for India to break through to modernized economy. Accordingly, all plans for aid must take account of what may be called the recipient country's demographic credit worthiness; if this is too low, some of the aid must go to help the country control its rate of increase, by providing contraceptives and training personnel in their use, and by sending expert advisors.

Secondly, we must somehow transform our international economic system--trade and barter, loans and grants and technical assistance--from the outdated shackles of "free" enterprise and competitive profitability. It is not for a non-economist to suggest remedies, beyond obvious ones like making loan terms as easy as possible and stabilizing commodity prices. But clearly the job is urgent, and demands a high degree of economic and political statesmanship, in nations, foundations and international bodies.

Both science and automation link up with education. Dorothy Parker once acidly remarked that education consisted in casting sham pearls before real swine. Omitting all questions of the swinishness of its recipients or victims, we must admit that many of its pearls are false, flawed or misshapen and, to change the metaphor, that it often involves the forcible feeding of its pupils on unsuitable, unhealthy or even poisonous diets. Just as education in Hitler's Germany was based on stuffing children's brains with National Socialist dogma and anti-Jewish indoctrination, in many Roman Catholic countries it is based on Catholic dogma and anti-Communist and anti-humanist indoctrination; and in China, the U. S. S. R. and its satellites, it is based on Communist dogma and anticapitalist and antireligious indoctrination. Meanwhile, educational systems in the Western world, and I regret to say in India and most emergent nations in Africa and Southeast Asia, are suffering from the complaint that has been called examinotosis--cramming pupils with facts and ideas that are to be regurgitated at appropriate intervals, in subjects that can be marked or graded by the examination process, with the ultimate idea of awarding certificates, diplomas and degrees that will help the examinees in obtaining jobs.

In addition, the world's poor countries suffer grievously from undereducation at all levels. One result of this is that adult illiteracy is actually increasing. A Unesco survey has shown that between 1952 and 1962, 35,000,000 adults were added to the over one billion of the world's illiterates, and the figure is growing yearly. In many countries, only 25, 15, or even 10 percent of the male population is literate, and the illiteracy of women is considerably higher. Meanwhile, surveys have demonstrated that literacy is an indispensable basis for vigorous national life in the world of today, and that 40 percent literacy is the minimum needed for achieving appreciable economic, technological or cultural success. The Shah of Iran has suggested that all nations should contribute one percent of their annual military budgets to a world campaign against illiteracy, and there are numerous other projects for promoting literacy.

Many efforts are also being made to free the examination-ridden educational systems of developed countries from their restrictive practices and liberate them for their true goals--of transmitting human culture in all its aspects and enabling the new generation to lead fuller and more rewarding lives.

The first thing is to reform the curriculum so that, instead of separate "subjects" to be "taken" piecemeal, growing minds are offered a nutritious core of human knowledge, ideas, techniques and achievements, covering science and history as well as the arts and manual skills. The key subject must be ecology, both biological and human--the science of balanced interaction between organisms and their environment (which of course includes other organisms)--together with its practical applications in the conservation of the world's resources, animal, vegetable and mineral, and human. Education must prepare growing human beings for the future, not only their own future but that of their children, their nation and their planet. For this, it must aim at varied excellence (including the training of professional elites) and at the fullest realization of human possibilities.

This links up with the rethinking of religion--a vital task, but one I can only touch on in summary fashion. It is clear that the era of mutually exclusive and dogmatic religions, each claiming to be the sole repository of absolute and eternal truth, is rapidly ending. If mankind is to evolve as a whole, it must have a single set of beliefs in common; and if it is to progress, these beliefs must not be self-limiting but open-ended, not rigid barriers but flexible guidelines channeling men in the general direction of improvement and perfection. Already an effort is being made to find common ground between the world's various religions and churches, and we can be sure that necessity will drive them further in this direction. But this is not enough. In the light of our new and comprehensive vision, we must redefine religion itself. Religions are not necessarily concerned with the worship of a supernatural God or gods, or even with the supernatural at all; they are not mere superstition nor just self-seeking organizations exploiting the public's superstitions and its belief in the magical powers of priests and witch doctors.

The ultimate task will be to melt down the gods, and magic, and all supernatural entities, into their elements of transcendence and sacred power; and then, with the aid of our new knowledge, build up these raw materials into a new religious system that will help man to achieve the destiny that our new evolutionary vision has revealed. Meanwhile, we must encourage all constructive attempts at reformulating and rebuilding religion. My personal favorite is Evolutionary Humanism, but there are many others tending in the same general direction, like Yoga and Zen, ethical and meditative systems, and the cults of release through psychedelic drugs or bodily rituals.

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How does this all add up? It adds up to a meaningful whole, something greater than the sum of its parts. We need no longer be afflicted with a sense of our own insignificance and helplessness, or of the world's nonsignificance and meaninglessness. A purpose has been revealed to us--to steer the evolution of our planet toward improvement; and an encouragement has been given us, in the knowledge that steady evolutionary improvement has actually occurred in the past, and the assurance that it can continue into the future.

It is especially encouraging to know that biological improvement has been born of struggle, and that conflict has often been disinfected of open violence and sometimes even converted into co-operative bonding; and it is especially significant that the most vital of all improvements has been the improvement of mind--awareness, knowledge and understanding--coupled with ability to learn and profit from experience. What is more, improvements in the human lot, in man's ways of coping with the problems of existence, have always depended on improvements in his awareness, knowledge and understanding; and today the explosive increase of knowledge has given us a wholly new understanding of our role in the universe and wholly new hopes of human improvement. We are still imprisoned in a mental cage, whose walls are made of the forces of nature as we have experienced them, whose bars are the constructions of our-own primitive thinking--about destiny and salvation, enjoyment and ethics, guilt and propitiation, peace and war.

Today the individual man or woman need not feel himself a meaningless insect in the vast spaces of the cosmos, nor an insignificant cog in a huge, impersonal social machine. For one thing, the individual human is the highest and most wonderful organization we know of. In developing his own personality, he is making his own unique contribution to the evolution of the universe.

Secondly, he is a unit of mankind; and mankind is the highest type in the solar system, the only organism we know of in whom mind has broken through to dominate existence. Mankind is not only a product of past evolution but an active agent in its future course: The human individual can help mankind shoulder this responsibility.

Our first objective is to clarify the new vision of our evolution. The next is to define the tasks required to carry out our responsibilities. Our over-all aim is improvement. Our immediate tasks are to achieve the peaceful unity and cooperative development of mankind, to encourage varied excellence and greater achievement, to think in terms of ecology and to practice conservation, and to build a fulfillment society underpinned by some new system of beliefs. The final aim will be the eugenic transformation of man's genetic nature, coupled with the cultural transformation of his social environment. Meanwhile, all can help in understanding and spreading the new revelation of human destiny.