THE THIRD WAVE
Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and countless lesser thinkers all found reasons for cosmic optimism. They argued over whether progress was truly inevitable or whether it needed a helping hand from the human race; over what constituted a better life; over whether progress would or could continue ad infi-nitum. But they all nodded in agreement at the notion of progress itself.
Atheists and divines, students and professors, politicians and scientists preached the new faith. Businessmen and commissars alike heralded each new factory, each new product, each new housing development, highway, or dam as evidence of this irresistible advance from bad to good or good to better. Poets, playwrights, and painters took progress for granted. Progress justified the degradation of nature and the conquest of “less advanced” civilizations.
And once more the same idea ran parallel through the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. As Robert Heil-broner has noted, “Smith was a believer hi progress. In The Wealth of Nations progress was no longer an idealistic goal of mankind, but….. a destination to which it was driven…. a by-product of private economic aims.” For Marx, of course, these private aims produced only capitalism and the seeds of its own destruction. But this event in itself was part of the long historical sweep carrying humanity forward to socialism, communism, and an even better beyond. Throughout Second Wave civilization, therefore, three key concepts—the war with nature, the importance of evolution, and the progress principle—provided the ammunition used by the agents of industrialism as they explained and justified it to the world.
Beneath these convictions lay still deeper assumptions about reality—a set of unspoken beliefs about the very elementals of human experience. Every human being must deal with these elementals, and every civilization describes them in a different way.
Every civilization must teach its children to grapple with tune and space. It must explain—whether through myth, metaphor, or scientific theory—how nature works. And it must offer some clue to why things happen as they do.
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