An excellent summary of this entire field is appearing in a six volume History of Mankind, sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  Volume six of the history is titled The Twentieth Century.  Particularly noteworthy is an Introduction of more than a hundred printed pages, Part I, The Development and Application of Scientific Knowledge, and Part II on The Transformation of Societies.  Events surrounding the war of 1914-18 are correctly described as “a turning point in world history.” (Vol.  VI p. 11)

World revolution is one aspect of present-day society.  From our present vantage point we cannot tell how far it will go or what it will do to humanity and its present habitat.

Advances in science and technology have provided mankind with a new stage on which to go through a new act and speak a new piece.  What effect will they have on the institutions and practices of western civilization?  Have they rendered the forms and functions of civilization obsolete?  Or can western civilization adapt itself or be adapted to the very difficult situation created by the revolution through which human society is presently passing?  Can western civilization be reformed to meet the new historical situation created by the great revolution or must it be rejected and replaced?

If the institutions and practices of western civilization can be adjusted to meet the demands of the new situation created by the scientific, technological, political and cultural revolution, the reformed social apparatus may function in a new day that is dawning for the human family.  If reform proves to be impossible, the apparatus of western civilization must be replaced by a social structure in keeping with the requirements of the new age inaugurated by the innovations introduced into the human culture pattern by the revolution of our time.

There is widespread recognition of the need to keep the structure of a society in harmony with necessary functions and updated to the consequences of probable or possible discovery and invention.  This is no mean task as western experience during recent centuries has so clearly demonstrated.  Power elites of feudal Europe neither anticipated nor prepared for the consequences of the industrial revolution.  The result was the smash and clatter of the American and French Revolutions (1776 and 1789) and minor revolutionary shocks through the nineteenth century.  Power elites in western Europe dealt with mass production and its consequent abundance of goods and services with mass marketing, social security and other crumbs of affluence scattered among the restless masses.  But when the trade winds of the scientific and technological revolution blew in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Romanoff dictatorship was still ordering back the tide of social change and the dominant United States oligarchy cold-shouldered the Mexican Revolution, took sixteen years to recognize officially the Russian Soviets and waited twenty-three years after 1949 before they were even on speaking terms with the Chinese Communists.