| |
INTRODUCTION
"
There are times of chaos in the life of nations when simply
creating understanding is the highest service."
-- Thomas Carlyle
In the winter of 1962 I found myself in Palm Springs, California,
discussing the future of America with President Eisenhower.
Ike had not yet moved to his Gettysburg farm, so he was staying
in one of Palm Springs' more comfortable hotels. I had recently
returned from working with a public information and education
program in South America, and Eisenhower was particularly
interested in knowing of developments in Brazil, Peru and
Chile.
|
Speeches
Speeches by World
Trends Research's Van Wishard
|
|
|
|
|
 |
After a discussion of the militant dock workers in Rio de
Janeiro, of the San Marcos University students in Lima who
had rioted against Vice President Nixon, and especially of
Chile's Eudocio Ravines, the Communist revolutionary who had
written a classic textbook for Communist infiltration and
insurrection in South America and a man I had come to know,
the conversation turned to the United States.
Eisenhower was deeply troubled. Not by political events,
but by what he felt was the weakening moral fiber of the country.
America was, after all, being introduced to Playboy, Marilyn
Monroe, and the erupting reality of Peyton Place, all of which,
for many Americans, represented a whiff of decadence.
Finally, Ike stood up, strode across the spacious living room,
waved his clenched fist through the air, and decried with
all the force of an Old Testament prophet, "We are living
through the final stages of the Roman Empire, we're living
through the final stages of the Roman Empire!"
Eisenhower's remarks struck a resonate chord in me, for I
had asked myself "Is America in decline?" six years
before meeting Ike, when I was working in South Africa. I
had been in South Africa as part of an international task
force asked to help develop some basis of unity that could
transcend not only the divisions between black and white,
but also between the English and Afrikaans, as well as between
the Africans and the Colored (mixed blood).
While in South Africa, I began reading de Tocqueville's Democracy
in America. Reading de Tocqueville, and seeing America from
the perspective of Africa, gave me a fresh assessment of the
country for which, only four years earlier, I had been wounded
in Korea.
For the next 25 years, long after I had returned home and
was working for the U.S. Department of Commerce, I chewed
on that question, "Is America in decline?" Finally,
I cannot remember exactly when, I came to a conclusion. I
was asking the wrong question! A more relevant question was,
What is happening to America and the world that is turning
our life so upside down? The question "Is America in
decline?" is a closed question; it forces one of two
answers. The question "What is happening to America?"
is an open question; it invites multiple insights and perceptions.
In a nutshell, my conclusion is this: America-and indeed,
the world-has entered a zone of possibility and uncertainty
that has no parallel in history. If one were forced to seek
the closest historical similarity, it would have to be what
happened when the ancient world was transformed into the early
beginnings of modern Europe. That was a process that took
place in a limited portion of the earth over centuries of
time. What's happening today is taking place worldwide, and
it's measured in decades, even years and months.
No one expressed America's current circumstance more clearly
than Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower's opponent for the presidency
in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson shared Eisenhower's perspective
on the American condition, but he expressed it somewhat differently.
"Are America's problems," asked Stevenson in 1954,
"but surface symptoms of something even deeper, of a
moral and human crisis in the Western world which might even
be compared to the fourth, fifth, and sixth-century crisis
where the Roman Empire was transformed into feudalism and
primitive Christianity? Are Americans," Stevenson queried,
"passing though one of the great crises of history when
man must make another mighty choice?"
The Most Decisive 30-year
Period in the History of Mankind
Despite the stratospheric heights of the Dow in recent years,
the allure of prosperity and the astounding possibilities
opening up for human fulfillment, the next three decades may
be the most decisive 30-year period in the history of mankind.
Thus you and I are living in the midst of perhaps the most
uncertain period America has ever known-more difficult than
World War II, the Depression or even the Civil War. With these
earlier crises, an immediately identifiable, focused emergency
existed, an emergency people could see and mobilize to combat.
But the crisis today is of a different character and order.
For America is at the vortex of a global cyclone of change
so vast and deep that it is uprooting established institutions,
altering centuries-old relationships, changing underlying
mores and attitudes, and now, so the experts tell us, even
threatening the continued existence of the human species.
It is not simply change at the margins; it is change at the
very core of life. Culture-smashing change. Identity-shattering
change. Soul-crushing change.
In earlier periods of great change, people tried to understand
its effects, adjust to its demands, and capitalize on its
promise just as we do today. But there was one major difference.
Prior generations faced change within a context of established
institutions. Earlier generations had a more stable-if less
comfortable-framework and clearly defined reference points.
Our era doesn't have such guides, for all of America's institutions,
from government to family, from business to religion, are
in upheaval. The past century saw civilized life increasingly
ripped from its moorings. The immutable certainties that anchored
our ancestors no longer seem to hold in a world where the
tectonic plates of life are clashing, where human antagonisms
obliterate tens of thousands of people in Africa, Bosnia or
Chechnya in a matter of a few days or weeks, where a stray
bullet ends the life of an elderly lady quietly walking home
from church in Washington, D.C. In so many ways, a life that
has lost its essential meaning has cut giant swaths across
humanity. What does all the confusion and carnage add up to?
Is this the end? Or, in some unknown way, could it be the
opening of an era of even greater awareness and possibility?
Standing at a Great Divide
In Peter Drucker's view, "No one born after the turn
of the [20th] century has ever known anything but a world
uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling
its idols." Clearly, we have been standing at a unique
historical dividing line-the end of the modern era, as well
as the Industrial Age, the end of the colonial period, the
end of the Atlantic-based economic, political and military
global hegemony, the end of America's culture being drawn
primarily from European sources, the end of the masculine
patriarchal/hierarchical epoch, and, as Joseph Campbell suggests,
the end of the Christian eon. Obviously, one era doesn't stop
and a new one start in a week. Years-even decades or generations-of
overlap sometimes take place.
The sense of an age ending and something new emerging was
evident during the earliest years of the 20th century. In
1913, George Santayana, one of the America's leading philosophers,
noted: "The civilization characteristic of Christendom
has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization has begun
to take its place." By 1929, Walter Lippmann saw Americans
"living in the midst of that vast dissolution of ancient
habits which the emancipators believed would restore our birthright
of happiness." Five decades later, Lippmann's concerns
were echoed by The Wall Street Journal, noting "our century
is a time of flux, an interstice between eras. Old beliefs
have decayed and the new beliefs have not sprung forward to
replace them."
The truth is that all the vast changes we are bringing-instant
global communication, control of plant, animal and human characteristics
through genetic engineering, our ability to build new structures
atom by atom, the doubling and even tripling of the human
life span thus creating social pressures never before experienced-these
and countless more developments point to one underlying reality:
We are in the midst of redefining the human experiment with
Life. We are asking ourselves questions no generation before
has had to ask: "As technology takes over ever more of
our work, what are humans for? What does it mean to be a human
being in a world of total technical possibility? Are the warnings
of technological extinction credible, and if so, what do we
do about them? In an age when information overwhelms us and
power is unlimited, what gives purpose and restraint to such
power?"
A New Civilization or an "Interregnum"?
Certainly new human capacities, scientific insights, forms
of wealth, modes of production and organization, and patterns
of social relationship, as well as expressions of individual
and collective belief, are taking the place of an earlier
America. But just what kind of "civilization" is
emerging is open to question.
The cultural concept of civilization has always been based
on more than just progress beyond "primitive" ways
and attitudes, more than just economic and technical betterment.
Civilization implies stable institutions-above all, a cohesive
family unit that trains the young for adult social responsibility.
Civilization represents a people's view of the meaning of
their collective association. Civilization manifests those
attitudes, beliefs, ethical standards and restraints a people
hold in common. At the core of every great civilization has
been some cohesive spiritual conviction. What was once known
as "Christendom" was just such a spiritual impulse
for America and the West.
But the Judeo-Christian impulse is no longer the inner dynamic
of Western culture or social life, it no longer interprets
our collective belief-especially among the "creative
minority." While Americans pay lip service to the convictions
underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,
the reality of our daily functional belief is more apt to
be expressed in the secular faith of materialism as defined
by science and technology, as well as in the civic religion
of "freedom" as characterized by absence of restraint.
In sum, despite the mind-boggling technology developed over
the past ten decades, despite the expansion of human awareness
and capability, despite the thousand-fold increase of wealth,
we have not yet achieved the central hallmark of a civilized
society-a core conviction about the meaning of the human journey,
a set of common purposes, convictions and meanings fused into
one framework of value and perception-a framework with its
own distinct character and worldview, with its unique spiritual
underpinning.
Broadly speaking, we are in the midst of what could be termed
a "crisis of meaning." Even as I write these words,
today's Washington Post carries an article that begins, "Everywhere
you look, people are searching for meaning in life."
Nor is this crisis limited to America. John Pomfret writes
in the International Herald Tribune from China, "Across
China people are struggling to redefine notions of success
and failure, right and wrong. The quest for something to believe
in is one of the unifying characteristics of China today."
The crisis of meaning is universal.
Until a new order of value and perception is achieved, we
shall be between two expressions of social organization, cultural
definition and spiritual experience-between two ages. We shall
be in what I choose to term an "Interregnum," which
Webster defines as "an interval; a break in a series
or in a continuity." How long this Interregnum will last
is anyone's guess. But it is the exploration of the Interregnum,
this "in between" period, as it has existed for
the past one hundred years-and continues to shape our life
today-that is the subject of this book.
Between Two Ages
These pages offer perspective on the meaning of our times.
Even more, they offer a few core thoughts on how one can make
sense out of the senseless, find stability in the midst of
upheaval, and find direction in the midst of uncertainty.
In sketching the Interregnum, I should note that this book
is not intended to be a history of our times; rather, it is
an assessment of some of the highlights, trends and events
that have been and are shaping the Interregnum. Nor is this
book intended as a forecast of tomorrow. I have sought to
find meaning in what has already happened, to understand how
science, psychology, technology and culture are reshaping
our daily activity, the content of our inner being, as well
as the global context in which all nations live. I have sought
to trace some of the events of the twentieth century in order
to comprehend the origins of the twenty-first century crisis
of meaning.
As this narrative encompasses a century of the Interregnum,
much is omitted that I wish might have been included; many
issues need a more complete treatment. For example, as I believe
the two major forces shaping the last hundred years have been
the development of technology and a spiritual/psychological
reorientation as expressed in our culture, these trends are
emphasized more than political events, which have been so
thoroughly treated elsewhere.
The first half of the book covers 1900 to 1950, while the
second half addresses the subsequent 50 years. While the period
from 1900 to 1950 is clearly a formative period of the Interregnum,
the first half of the century may not be of as much interest
to some readers as are the events since 1950. If that's the
case, you're encouraged to skip the first half and go directly
to "The Context," the chapter offering a standpoint
from which to view the restructuring of today's global landscape.
Indeed, some readers may wish to begin with the final chapter,
"The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning," which
may offer a deeper understanding of the rest of the book.
However you choose to approach this book, I am intensely interested
in how you see today's America, what you see as the promise
and the danger of the American future. To that end, you are
invited to send your thoughts, either by fax, e-mail or letter,
to the following address:
Van Wishard
WorldTrends Research
1805 Wainwright Drive
Reston, VA 20190
Tel./Fax: 703.437.9261
|
