For the past 18 months I've been writing a book entitled Between Two Ages: The Meaning of Our Times. It's an eagle's–eye view of some of the trends that have been reshaping the global landscape throughout the 20th century. I'd like to share a few of the thoughts that have resulted from this work.

Some developments of the century are self–evident. We altered the status of women more fundamentally than it has been altered in any comparable length of time in the past two thousand years. We gave our people a level of affluence and comfort probably not even enjoyed by most royalty in past ages. The base of our economy moved from agriculture to industry to information. We explored parts of the universe, discovered trillions of galaxies, and made contact with the beginnings of time, space and matter. We have redefined gender roles more basically than they have been reshaped in any corresponding period in the past twenty centuries. We saved Europe and Asia from domination by Germany (twice) and Japan. We opened unexplored worlds in the micro of the atom and cell. We consumed more natural resources than were used by all people throughout all history prior to this century. We absorbed more people (20,203,879 –– larger than the population of Scandinavia) from more parts of the world, giving them fresh opportunities in life, than has any other nation in history. In short, more people experienced greater change in their attitudes and habits of living in a shorter space of time than had any people on the face of the planet up to the 20th century.

Other developments may not be so apparent.

Historical perspective suggests there are times in human affairs when one way of organizing life gives way to a new way. There are also times when the manner by which man relates to the deity yields to a new way. The most dramatic example of these simultaneous transformations was the shift from the ancient era to an emergent Christian Europe.

In my view, the 20th century has been a process of similar magnitude and consequence. Where the earlier transition took centuries to effect, the shift we're experiencing is happening in decades, although some aspects of it must be measured in centuries. During the fifth–sixth–seventh century transformation, the world population was in the range of one million. Now, as we know, it's approaching six billion. Where they could demolish a city, we can destroy the planet.

I suggest the twentieth century is best viewed in this context.

This is not some new insight only now evident. It's a fact grasped by various individuals throughout the century. In 1913, Harvard University's George Santayana noted, "The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization had begun to take its place." In 1928, the historian Will Durant wrote, "Human conduct and belief are now undergoing transformations profounder and more disturbing than any since the appearance of wealth and philosophy put an end to the traditional religion of the Greeks." In 1954 Adlai Stevenson, twice the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, asked, "Are America's problems 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 through one of the great crises of history when man must make another mighty choice?" In 1962 President Eisenhower forcefully stated, "We are living through the final stages of the Roman Empire."

Such periods are times of abundant creativity as new forms and ways of coping with life emerge. They are also times of discontinuity and anxiety as familiar ways lose their force. It's what the Greeks termed kairos –– the "right moment" for a fundamental change in the principles and symbols that sustain civilization. At such a time in the ancient world, the poet Lucretius wrote about "aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage." Sounds familiar.

This seismic shift affects every area of life. I would mention four –– the World as a whole, Technology, Culture and the Spiritual/Psychological realm.

Global. The trendy new word is "globalization." Enhanced communication and transportation have given us a global age.

This is not necessarily a new insight. Writing in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Karl Marx was one of the earliest to comment on the global nature of economic events. In 1903, the Austrian physicist, Ernst Mach, wrote, "The world is more than ever before one great unit in which everything interacts and affects everything else."

What's new is the degree, the extent. The miniaturization of electronics so that a computer is on a chip has accelerated globalization to a degree Marks or Mach could not have foreseen.

What does it mean? As has been suggested, it probably means the end of the nation–state as it has been known since 1648. We've entered a gigantic process of fragmentation, which will last several decades before it's run its course.

Again, this is something that's been happening throughout the century. In the first quarter of the century, three giant empires––German, Austro–Hungarian and Ottoman–-dissolved. In the next twenty–five years another three empires––France, Holland and Belgium––disappeared. Shortly thereafter, the British Empire unwound.

In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed. Since then, Russia, with its two hundred ethnic groups, is unwinding and will most likely continue to do so over the coming decades. Already various regions are imposing their own price controls, conducting their own foreign policy and even openly talking about "Russia's dissolution." In neighboring Yugoslavia, the past few years have witnessed just such a dissolution.

In my judgment, we will see this fragmentation process affect India, which consisted of over five hundred independent states before British colonization. China, where part of the country uses cell phones, satellites and lasers while other regions grow rice as their ancestors did centuries ago, will also probably spin apart.

The United States is not immune to the fragmenting process. Public opinion polls show that Californians feel a greater affinity with the people of the Pacific Basin than with the East Coast. The state legislature is considering two proposals to divide California into two new states. Already some twenty–five counties have voted to secede from California. Such initiatives are harbingers of what we can expect to see happen in North America in the first half of the next century.

The basic impulse at work here is that as nations adopt new ways of communicating, of producing goods, and of seeing their place in the world, so will people adopt modes of organization and administration that enable greater local control.

Technology. There have been roughly four stages of the Scientific Revolution and its resulting technology. First, 1660 to 1760. Scientific research during this period was primarily of a speculative nature. Second, 1760 to 1880 when scientists experimented with control of practical activities. Third, 1880 to 1900. This marks a leap into a new order where science begins to seek the development of radically new inventions exemplified by the emergence of industries such as steel, electricity, automobiles and pharmaceuticals. This third stage didn't simply improve life; it transformed it.

The basis of the fourth stage was laid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of this century. This stage was the exploration of pure theoretical science –– penetration of the micro of the atom and cell, and the macro of the universe. The result is all the marvels of technology that we use every day. Let me say parenthetically that while writing this book, I underwent open–heart surgery using the most sophisticated medical technology in existence. So I am a dedicated supporter of what technology can do for us.

The question is whether we have entered a fifth stage, a stage that is unique in the pursuit of science. Throughout history, science and technology have been viewed as an aid to man, as an extension of human capability. The question is whether we've entered a period in which certain technologies exist in their own right, under their own laws, and for purposes that have little to do with extending human capabilities. Rather, their purpose is to supplant human effort and meaning altogether.

Example. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute claim to be developing a robot that, by 2020, will do any job humans can, only do it better. By 2030, we're told, this robot will be the "most intelligent life form on earth." Supposedly it will "love us," and "allow us to continue as a specie." Whether such a robot can ultimately be developed is a question. But an even more important question is, why would any institution want to fund development of such a robot?

Example. John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that cyberspace is "the new home of the Mind," a separate reality fashioned from "thought itself." Barlow further says, "I think the overriding flavor of being human ultimately will be the disappearance of the self altogether; right into the collective organism of the mind."

Example. Jaron Lanier is founder of the world's first virtual reality company and the person who coined the term "virtual reality." Lanier talks about what's happening in the computer–science community. He says, "There's a perception that things are going to change at such a rapid rate that at some point something very dramatic will change about the fundamental situation of people in the universe." In the mythology of computer–science, Lanier continues, "it is believed that as we hurtle toward more and more powerful computers, eventually there will be some sort of very dramatic Omega Point at which everything changes –– not just in terms of technology, but in terms of our basic nature."

Many more possibilities are expressed by various technological visionaries –– artificial life creating its own civilization, the reconfiguration of machines as psychological objects and the reconfiguration of people as living machines, "designer children," machines acquiring the traits of humans, creating a race of disembodied intellects, to mention just a few.

I'm not an authority on technology. It seems to me, however, that we're in danger of subordinating the human being and mortal requirements to the dictates of the computer. We are forcing humans to accelerate our tempo of life in order to satisfy the demands of the electronic pulse that courses through the entire fabricated world we've created. In essence, we're abdicating our own center of being as individual human beings and we're handing it over to the computer.

I'm no Luddite. I just happen to see human beings––not the abstracted intelligence of computers––as the pinnacle of creation. In my view, rational intelligence is not life's highest value. That place goes to a consciousness that is the fusion of our quest for knowledge with the unknown prompting that emanates from the innermost recesses of the soul. As we hurtle into a new century, our greatest need is not for faster computers, but a greater degree of such consciousness, which the ancients called "wisdom." Computers may have a limited type of intelligence, but in my judgment, only the human link with the transcendent realm creates wisdom.

Culture. In terms of culture, the century really began in 1913 with America's first modern art exhibit at Manhattan's 69th Infantry Regiment Armory. Gone were the expression of harmony and the monumental interpretation of a Raphael, the richness and humanity of Rembrandt, or the transcendent themes of a Cole or Church. In their place were more than thirteen hundred paintings of Matisse, Picasso and many other European artists who fought to free art from the world of human affairs and, eventually, from visual reality itself.

Two of modern art's pioneers described the new art succinctly: Wrote Paul Klee in 1915 just as the battles of the Marne and Gallipoli were introducing the terror of a new mechanized warfare, "The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art." Klee's contemporary, Wassily Kandinsky, later observed, "It was as if I saw art steadily disengaging itself from nature." Thus was modernism introduced to America.

What was modernism? As I understand it, at its core, modernism was the belief in rationalism as life's highest authority. It was the cultural expression of the view that life had lost its mystery, that men, not gods, can rule the world, that tradition must yield to experimentation in every aspect of life, and that at the core of life there is nothing, just the void of nihilism. Modernism, wrote the literary critic Irving Howe, is "an unyielding rage against the existing order." The emphasis of modernism was a repudiation of the past, the belief that only the present has authority. Modernism's instrument in philosophy was criticism, its instrument in politics was revolution, and in art its instrument was the avant–garde.

Twelve years after the Armory show, The Great Gatsby was published. Gatsby was the first celebrated statement of disenchantment with the hope and possibility that had drawn millions to America in search of what Walt Whitman had described as "the promise of thousands of years, till now deferred." As Fitzgerald's biographer, Andrew Le Vot, argued, the meaning of The Great Gatsby is clear, "that it is not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabited, absurd material universe."

In point of fact, when Gatsby was first published, it was not much of a success. Critics called it "second rate," and when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was out of print. It was only in the 1950s that it became the classic it is today.

Let's take a quick––admittedly simplified––glance at the other major cultural theme of 20th century America, Postmodernism. The word "postmodernism" was first used in 1917 in Germany to describe the nihilism of 20th century culture. This feeling of a void at the core of existence has characterized postmodernism ever since. A distinctive feature of postmodernism is its acceptance of reality as unordered in any objective way the human mind can discern. As author Houston Smith noted, this acceptance "separates the Postmodern mind from the Modern Mind, which assumed that reality is objectively ordered, and the Christian mind, which assumed it to be ordered by an inscrutable but beneficent will."

Daniel Bell, probably America's foremost sociologist, cites several dimensions of the late 20th century postmodernist mood. Impulse and pleasure, Bell says, are alone real and life–affirming in postmodernism. Reason is the enemy, and the desires of the body constitute truth. Postmodernism eliminates the boundaries of art and insists that acting out, rather than making distinctions, is the path to knowledge. According to Bell, postmodernism carries modernist intensities to their "culmination in the porno–pop culture that is played out in the world of drugs, rock music and oral sexuality."

Where Bell sees postmodernism eliminating boundaries, Douglas Rushkoff, author of a book on cyberspace, is more likely to say everything is connected to everything else. For Rushkoff, postmodernists design their own reality, whether in games, computers, philosophy, sex, drugs or art.

Drugs and altered states of consciousness are critical aspects of Rushkoff's postmodernism. As he puts it, "For today's users, drugs are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy and awareness."

If one wants a visual example of postmodernism, watch MTV's rock videos. These videos contain no beginning or end, no theme, no continuity, no context, no past or future, no apparent relationship between images –– not even any essence or focused meaning.

On TV, a show such as "Hill Street Blues" pulls the viewer through a multiplicity of crime, friendship, love competition and race relations all in a half–hour. Many scenes may be left unfinished, with the viewer lost as to their relationship to any central theme or plot.

In art, Robert Rauchenberg readily incorporates into a single work images of Rubens, Valezquez, a truck, a helicopter, a Coke bottle or an eyeball.

Philosophical postmodernism is perhaps too lengthy to attempt in this commentary. Suffice to listen to Lawrence Cahoone, professor of philosophy at Boston University and editor of a compendium on postmodernism. Cahoone sees postmodernists as announcing "the end of rational inquiry into truth, the illusory nature of any unified self, the impossibility of clear and unequivocal meaning, the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the oppressive nature of all modern institutions."

The ultimate effect of postmodernism on the individual was described by Kenneth Gergen, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. Gergen uses such phrases as "the fullscale abandonment of the concept of objective truth," "the erasure of the category of self," and "as the distinction between the real and the contrived, style and substance, is eroded, the concept of the individual self ceases to be intelligible."

So this is a brief––admittedly incomplete––look at modernism and postmodernism –– the two major cultural and philosophical themes of 20th century America. Taken together in their depth and fullness, modernism and postmodernism have encouraged the annihilation of Rational Discourse, Tradition, Truth and Identity, four foundational building blocks without which ordered civilized society cannot exist. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, pointed out, our culture has now become a major threat to our national security.

Why is it important to understand this? Because culture is to a people what dreams are to an individual. Culture is the outward expression of an inward condition of the psyche. Put in spiritual terms, culture is a far better indicator of a people's spiritual condition than are public opinion polls telling us what percentage of respondents say they believe in God. Nor should we forget that culture is an expression of the state of mind of the creative minority of a society.

The spiritual/Psychological Reorientation. Modernism and postmodernism didn't simply materialize out of thin air. They were the products of a deeper process at work within Europe's and America's creative minority, a process that suggests some sort of spiritual and psychological reorientation taking place.

One of the arresting facts of the twentieth century is the rise of psychology, and the simultaneous diminishing of Christianity as the inner dynamic of Western culture. There seems to be a correlation between these two developments. It was especially noticeable in the first half of the century when people with personal problems stopped seeking counsel from the priest and instead started going to the psychotherapist. This shift in the relative roles of priest and psychotherapist tells us much about 20th century America.

Another expression of this reorientation was the emergence of a scientific structure that is an immense complex of technique and specializations without any internal guiding ethic or compass. Efficiency became the dominant principle and measure. Under such circumstances, a technological civilization becomes purely an external order; it offers no inner moral gauge to the individual. We developed a rationalized scientific world culture, which is a body without a soul.

At the same time, religion increasingly maintained its separate existence as a personal comfort without any social force. America experienced a schizophrenia which divided the individual between a scientific will to power served by techniques devoid of guiding ethical principles, and a religious faith and moral idealism which may have comforted the individual, but had minimal power to influence the course of events. The result has been that absent any commonly accepted spiritual orientation, America's new scientific powers were shaped to serve an economic consumerism, which people increasingly turned to in an attempt to fill an inner emptiness. In its baldest terms, America accepted a scientific rationalized belief, coupled with a subordination of man to economic ends. While the Russians may have embraced dialectical materialism, we embraced consumer materialism. Consumer materialism certainly produced a higher standard of living, but neither type seems to have satisfied the deeper needs of the human soul.

A third manifestation of this reorientation is the breakup of our collective inner images of wholeness. For example, we used to talk of Mother Earth with all its vital emotional connotation. Now we speak of "matter," which is totally devoid of emotional meaning. We once talked of "heaven," which denoted the transcendent realm, eternity, the dwelling place of the gods, the place we hoped our souls would go when we die. Now we just speak of space and the universe. The transcendent dimension has vanished.

Thus the meaning that unconsciously used to sustain the inner life of the individual in earlier times is virtually gone. Few are fed by any primal source of life's highest value. What this means in psychological terms is that the ego has been separated from the nourishing source of the collective unconscious, which is the vital fountainhead of transpersonal significance. Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, put it well: "Humanity appears to be irrevocably losing what various civilizations previously have had––a link with the eternal and infinite, and a resultant sense of humility and responsibility, a relationship to the world as a whole, to its metaphysical order, to the miracle of creation."

This breakup of inner images of wholeness has given rise to widespread anxiety and alienation. Our inner moorings have been loosened. As a result, we now have a vocabulary of dysfunction that has entered the language only since the beginning of this century. "Stressed," "paranoid," "repressed," "burned out," "inferiority complex," "mid–life crisis," "identity crisis" –– they're all terms we think of as individual problems, but in fact they represent a deeper condition of our times.

Unfortunately, it's more than just a vocabulary. We have a culture of dysfunction. A culture that becomes disconnected from its transcendent roots becomes dysfunctional. Dysfunction is now a style of life in America, with its own music, media, dress code and philosophy.

This whole process is being accelerated by information technologies which transmit images and psychic states in a matter of nanoseconds rather than the years, generations or even centuries that was the case in early times. Images are projected globally, not just within a single culture. So we are confronted with a psychic epidemic that is gathering momentum.

What we're talking about is the loss of a viable, all-encompassing collective myth that, historically, has provided the individual and society with defined values and offered answers to the ultimate questions of existence. When a prevailing symbol–system loses its power as the informing force of a culture, people search for meaning in numerous other ways.

Such a search is seen in countless expressions in today's America –– in New Age spirituality, in the proliferation of cults such as "Heaven's Gate," in fundamentalism, in the explosion of self–help therapies over the past decades, in exploration of the paranormal, in interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, in new religions springing up literally every week, and last but certainly not least, in terrorism. On the spiritual level, such expressions represent the fragmentation of a people's original collective religious experience and the search for something new. On a psychological level, it means that the archetype of inner wholeness and totality, that archetype that is life's highest ordering and directing principle, is also seeking fresh expression.

Throughout all this it's clear the human soul is searching for a greater manifestation of life in light of vastly new conditions and possibilities. It's part of the evolutionary process of continuous creation and re–creation. For the spiritual process is an integral part of the human makeup, of individual psychology. Our conscious life, our ego, in order to be healthy and balanced, needs to have a living, organic connection to a larger whole, to something that transcends the ego. This is why every civilization throughout history has had some form of spiritual expression. Through symbol, ceremony and image, religions have expressed and reinforced the link with the Divine, which, in psychological terms, is an expression of the archetype of wholeness and completeness.

Part of this reorientation is the individual search for direct experience of the Divine. People no longer want secondhand experience mediated by a church or priest. People want to get past theology. We want direct experience of the Eternal.

 

Conclusion.

What does all this mean for us? My personal view is that we're headed into a time of severe trial, of difficulty and danger over the coming decade. Technological, economic, social and psychological forces, about which we know very little and over which we have minimal control, have been unleashed on a global scale. Thus this is a time for considered thought and inward reflection.

In terms of the world, two needs seem obvious. First, how do we maintain the best possible framework of stability and security that enables the world to uphold public order and to get a grip on continued economic growth and social development? One would wish the UN would provide such stability and security, but that clearly isn't going to happen. So, absent leadership by other nations, it's left to the United States to take the lead. It must be a leadership that projects a realistic vision of possibility geared to a global era. It cannot be limited to an expression of American "national interest." In fact, our national interest must draw part of its rationale from the vision of possibility we offer. Such leadership is difficult, unrewarding and open to misinterpretation. But there's no alternative if we're successfully to navigate the rapids ahead.

Second, recent global economic turbulence should not make us withdraw from encouraging the growth of free markets around the world. That said, perhaps we need a broader look at how free markets develop. As Thorsten Veblen pointed out earlier in the century, "an economy is a reflection of the culture in which it is embedded." Free markets in the West were the outgrowth of a unique historical experience, a specific religious orientation and a psychology characteristic of Europe or European descendants. It took centuries to develop the attitudes, conditions and mechanisms supportive of free markets in the West. Even at their best they're far from perfect.

Thus we need a little understanding of the unique cultures and psychologies of other nations who are trying to graft an alien economic system onto an indigenous social structure. Whatever form of capitalism emerges in other nations must be rooted in their unique psychology and historical experience or else it will not withstand the storm winds of global economics.

At home we must work on two levels. There's the practical level of redefining and restructuring all our institutions, a work well under way. In education we're trying countless new experiments. Corporations are redefining their mission, structure and modus operandi. We're seeking new ways to connect citizens to the political process. We're rethinking the role and conduct of self–government in an era when everyone has access to all information. Alternative dispute resolution is helping lift the burden off the back of our legal system. Civic and charitable organizations are assuming functions formerly undertaken by local governments. Neighborhoods are instituting their own security watch, not relying on police. More people are involved in efforts to help the elderly and those in poverty. In fact, it's estimated that well over fifty percent of all adult Americans donate a portion of their time to nonprofit social efforts. So that's one level.

The second level is the individual, each one of us. In the end, it is the individual that is the carrier of civilization –– not the state, not institutions, not technology. The individual person alone carries civilization forward. And at root, the most basic change taking place in today's America is taking place inside you and me.

It's painful for a people to stand between two ages, for the very notion of change implies the acceptance of loss. We can see what is disappearing, but we cannot see what is emerging. It's a time of building the New. Such times are always uncertain. The people who crossed from Europe to start a new life in an unknown land, the Americans who plunged westward into the unexplored wilderness to settle and build, the astronauts who landed on the moon, all faced almost nothing but uncertainty. America's future has always been uncertain, because life is uncertain. Life never offers security; it offers only purpose and the effort to manifest its possibilities.

And what of the age to come? It has both its trials and wonders, some of which we can now only dimly perceive. Yes, we know the potential dangers, from terrorism to environmental catastrophe, from regional conflicts to social disasters triggered by the complexities of an electronically interconnected world. We know the snares waiting to entangle a people whose underlying beliefs are in flux. And it will require all the wisdom and restraint we can summon to avert the consequences of such possibilities.

But the excitement is in what we don' t know. The adventure is in what we can create that has never before been created. The wonder is in our capacity to explore reaches of nature and the universe that no humans before our time have been able to explore. The miracle is in our ability to provide the basic necessities of life for the entire human community, needs that have been denied their ancestors. The satisfaction is in what each of us can become, in terms of both mind and spirit.

We all know this. We all know that something fresh is entering human existence, something no people before us has experienced. Yet, as we cross the threshold of a new century, it is not the expectancy of a new epoch that is setting the national mood. Rather, it's a sense of foreboding, a debilitating angst. For something in the collective soul is telling us that, despite the marvels of technology, a new age can only be fulfilled if, somehow, we become new people; if the shadows that bedevil us are brought to light and become part of our wholeness rather than shadows projected onto other ethnic groups and nations.

I would end with a thought from the conclusion of my book. To a certain degree, the future depends on our quality of hope. Hope is not dependent on some wished–for outcome. It doesn't rise or fall with the Dow Jones. Hope is the commitment that, whatever the outcome, my life is given to realizing a larger enduring purpose, something greater than myself and my personal concerns. Hope is an orientation of the spirit that transcends the world of immediate experience. Some of the 20th century's most sublime expressions of hope came not from affluent America, but from men living in the gulag of existence. Bonhoffer, Djilas, Solzhenitsyn, Frankl, Mihajlov, Havel and countless others, facing the darkness of extinction, gave voice to expressions of hope that is rooted in eternity. They voiced man's ultimate freedom –– the freedom to decide in what manner I will respond to how I am treated by life, how I am treated by other people. It's such hope that roots us in the everlasting heart of existence. It is such a hope all of us can claim as we move into a new century.

Thank you.

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