Previous civilizations have been harried, hectored and undermined by migrating “barbarians” who had heard of accumulated wealth and had come to share or perhaps to take over the “honey-pot” and lick up the honey.  Western civilization has faced the problem of migration, intensified by population explosion.  But the “barbarians” who are tearing the social body of western civilization limb from limb are not outsiders, invading a civilization in order to plunder and sack it, but the offspring of well-to-do civilized affluent communities who have repudiated the acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services, turning, instead to the satiation of body hungers and the freedom of social irresponsibility.

Western man has spent ten centuries in building a civilization aimed at economic stability and social security for the privileged.  The “new barbarian” progeny have rejected this civilization of affluence and are busily engaged in fragmenting the social apparatus that has made affluence possible.  In a word, western civilization has organized and coordinated, but in the process it has sowed the seeds of disorganization and chaos.

One last word about the effect of western civilization on human society.  The West has littered and cluttered the planet with an immense variety and with enormous quantities of gimmicks and gadgets from tin cans to airplanes that fly faster than sound, and rockets that carry their occupants to the moon.  Western productivity has multiplied greatly.  Too often it has by-passed utility, ignored quality and outraged beauty.  More often than not its goods, services, institutions, practices and ideas have remained at the surface without reaching down to life’s essentials.

If life can be fragmented into “physical,” “mental,” “emotional,” “energetic,” “spiritual,” and “creative” it must be evident that the western way has smothered life’s more significant aspects under a blanket of trivialities, non-essentials and inconsequentials.

Western civilization has stressed competition, aimed at the acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services.  The competitive struggle, in its civilian and military aspects, has played fast and loose with the contents of nature’s storehouse.

Through uncounted ages Mother Nature has set up a knife-edge balance among the multitude of aspects and differentiated forms that have existed and still exist on the planet.  Humanity has increasingly upset this balance of nature, ignorantly and often stupidly, without pausing to determine the resultant changes.  Nowhere is this upset more in evidence than the changes in climate and animal life and their possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil.  Paul Sears, in his Deserts on the March, has told the story.  It can be summed up in four words:  deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting sands.

Another aspect of man’s aggressions against nature is the wanton destruction of wildlife—­like the American bison and the wood pigeon.