While engaged in these scholarly pursuits, our variant of the pattern—­western civilization—­has been passing through the customary life cycle.  If we read the signs correctly, western civilization reached the high point in its cycle toward the end of the last century.  Since then, for seventy-five years, it has been on the decline.

If we accept the cycle of civilization as one of the facts or sequences presented to us by history, we may continue to pass submissively through the successive stages of decline until western civilization is liquidated by the same forces that wiped out preceding civilizations.  This would be the normal course of a cycle of civilization as it appears in recorded history.

Need we follow this course?  Must we follow it?

History answers “yes” and also “no.”

History answers “yes”—­the record to date reads that way.

But the record of history also shows that men have repeatedly interfered and intervened in the historical process by discovery and invention.  The historical record is subject to change.  Man is not entirely free.  Neither is he helplessly bound on the wheel of necessity, presently known as civilization.

In Chapter 10 we listed a number of discoveries and inventions which have greatly increased man’s control over his own destiny.  As these innovations are embodied in the life styles of planet-wide human society, there is every likelihood that men can deal with the future almost as comprehensibly as they now deal with the past.  Those who take this position argue that humanity has reached a point at which it may break out of the present cycle of civilization and begin a new cycle which will correspond with the possibilities brought to mankind during the great revolution of 1750-1970.

The idea is not new.  It has appeared repeatedly in various forms:  individual withdrawal from the world and its troubles to live solitary, perfected, sin-free existences; the formulation of plans for utopian or ideal communities; the establishment of such communities—­apart from the workday world; revolutionary mass movements away from the current time of social troubles into a more workable, more acceptable, more basically productive and fundamentally creative life style.

Hermits and reclusive monastic life need not concern us here.  They are to be found in many parts of the existing society.  They live their lives apart from the main currents of human life.  We may make the same comment, with slight modifications, on intentional communities organized within the bounds of surrounding civilizations.  They meet the needs of exceptional individuals who find the existing order intolerable and who wish to move at once into a more congenial community life.  Intentional communities founded to demonstrate particular social or economic theories usually are short-lived, covering, at best, one or two generations.