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 24 Page 1
The first part of this paper was published in the September 1997 issue of these proceedings.
[See < https://canadiancor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1997_Series1Number23_p15_The-Present-Quantum-in-Societal-Evolution.pdf >. Ed.]
[See < Civilization Past and Present: Alastair M. Taylor: 9780673994356: Amazon.com: Books >. See also < Goals for Mankind – Club of Rome >. Ed.]
The subheadings in the paper were:
- Technological Innovations
- Environmental Control Capability
- Population Growth
- Societal Complexification
- Weltanschauung (Worldview) Shifts
- Aesthetic Indicators
The last few paragraphs of this paper read as follows.
We are all experiencing future shock, with traditional institutions and value systems being challenged at every turn. All parts of the globe are caught up in a “revolution of rising expectations” that generates new forces which, whether constructive or destructive, are serving as powerful catalysts for change. History warns against any dogmatic predictions about the future. This is because each new stage of society is unique in its worldview and functions—and hence in the forms which it creates to give effect to those activities. However, perhaps we are sufficiently far enough along in our transitional stage to dis turn some clues of the shape of things to come. New architectural styles have been created and new designs for cities are being developed. Composers have been experimenting with impressionism (as with Debussy), with polytonality (as with Stravinsky), or again with atonality (as in the case of Schoenberg). And [sic] writers such as Proust and Joyce have innovated in turn by means of the stream-of-consciousness technique to explore psychological time, as well as one’s own perceptions and mental processes.
We noted earlier that major societal paradigms have manifested unique forms of aesthetic expression. Thus, from the Renaissance to the first decade of our century, perspective constituted one of the most important constituent facts in painting. As Giedion points out, it remained a constant element through all changes of style. The three-dimensional space of the Renaissance was the space of Euclidean geometry, and for four centuries had “rooted itself so deeply in the human mind that no other form of perception could be imagined.” However, whereas the classic conceptions of space and volume are limited and one-sided, our centuries conception is many-sided, and its character changes from the point with the point from which it is viewed. “Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system of Newton. And [sic] in modern art, for the first time since the Renaissance, a new conception of space leads to a self-conscious enlargement of our ways of perceiving space. It was in Cubism that this was most fully achieved.” Breaking with renaissance perspective, the cubists viewed objects relatively (i.e., from several points of view, with none of them possessing exclusive authority). “The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life-simultaniety. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work Electrodynamik bewegter Körper, in 1905, with a careful definition of simultaneity.
If we add to this combination of science and art the flight made by Orville and Wilbur Wright two years previously to inaugurate space age, we might fairly describe our century as the temporal springboard for a new quantum shift in societal evolution.
Link to | The Present Quantum in Social Evolution (Part Two).
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