This was an essay by Dr. Alistair M Taylor, Professor Emeritus at Queens U. Dr. Taylor helped write the first world history university textbook in North America (Civilization, Past and Present), then in its 8th edition. He had served as a member of the secretariats of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the United Nations (UN). With Ervin Laszlo and others, he wrote the 5th report to the Club of Rome (Goals for Mankind).
1997 Series 1 Number 23 Page 15
The second part of this paper was published in the December 1997 issue of these proceedings.
[See < https://canadiancor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1997_Series1Number24_p1_The-Present-Quantum-In-Societal-Evolution-2.pdf >. Ed.]
[See < Civilization Past and Present: Alastair M. Taylor: 9780673994356: Amazon.com: Books >. See also < Goals for Mankind – Club of Rome >. Ed.]
Last paragraph of this paper read as follows.
This brief historical overview has, for its purpose, to underscore our contention that, while we agree with Heraclitus that change is always taking place, at various junctures in the man-environment nexus, a convergence of factors can quantize that changing relationship to the point of propelling him and society across the existing environmental threshold so as to create a new social cultural system, and can profoundly modify the terrestrial landscape. We have taken into account a number of factors which can be regarded as “transformational” common denominators that, from a geographical standpoint, have had a global impact on societal evolution. This global dimension is essential for the purposes of our thesis, which is emphasizing processes that have had a universal effect. Self-transformation may result from a quantum occurring in one or two apparently independent loci—as in the case of the Neolithic Revolution—but such quantization to a new level of systemic organization in time reorganizes our societies across a planetary horizon. Our résumé also demonstrates an acceleration in the tempo of societal quantization and a progressive environmental control capability—which at the beginning of our century, however, was still limited to two dimensions (i.e., to the surface of the Earth, and which was traditionally, and appropriately, conceptualized in cartography by the Mercator projection, with its parallels drawn as straight lines and intersecting right angles).
Link to | The Present Quantum in Social Evolution: An Analysis of Historical Indicators—Part One.
Leave a Reply