Extract 1 – Preface

It is ominous when a civilization predicated on economic growth loses its impetus, as ours has done since its heroic days in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The causes run deep, external as when growth collides with the civilization’s inherited constraints (‘environment’ and ‘human nature’), and internal (when it veers away from society’s deepest interests, and loses its power to preserve order, cognitive and moral).

It is as ominous when a civilization based on the coherence and sovereignty of its individual members experiences a widespread sundering of the self.

Our civilization suffers from both. Its expansion is getting slower, and its members are losing the confidence, personal integrity, and self-assurance that go with them.

There is a smell of decay about. There is also a justified fear that the decay will be punctuated by paroxysms of such intensity that most of the world’s people will be consumed and the pillars of life put at risk.

These are unhappy times, and solutions are not knocking at the door. Of those proffering an escape, the socialist revolutionaries seem to forget that the weight of their traditional constituency in the labour force – industrial workers – is declining, and that its concentration in large, solidarity-forcing units is falling even faster. The Greens have no clear constituency, have little record as agents of change, and are easily corrupted by the norms of mainstream politics. There are few others who can pretend to offer a vision of an alternative civilization, let alone a road-map to it.

Yet the goal is clear: a civilization in which sharing, not competitive struggle, is the ruling ethos – between humans, and with other forms of life.

Such a civilization is not about to form of itself, nor will its birth be painless. It will come about, if at all, only when the traumatized survivors of our civilization’s self-destruction tap into their collective consciousness and conclude decisively that life cannot continue without a fundamental change in our attitudes, behaviour and social arrangements.

This book is about that transition. It is in two parts. The first, foreboding, presents the logic and limitations of our current civilization in seven chapters: 1 – The market system; its bruising encounters with its heritage (2 – Nature, and 3 – Human Nature); its growing entanglement in cloying internal arrangements (4 – Society; 5 – Politics; 6 – Culture) and its decline in consequence (7 – The Bottom Line). The second part, deliverance (8 – The Leap to Eternity), stresses the importance of ideas, and of consciousness, and draws some political/activist conclusions.

A coda (The Evolution Game) summarizes the book in the form of a playable table game.

This extract is the Preface to the book.

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Last updated on 13 November 2019