Western civilization grew in and around its cities. Both in form and
function it was urban rather than rural.
Western civilization specialized its society, mechanized it and later
computerized it, making social relationships depend less and less on
personality and more on the position of the individual in a working team
or on an assembly line. Human beings ceased to have names. Instead they
acquired numbers on the payroll, on their homes, on their identity
cards.
Specialization and division of labor, plus power-driven machines
increase productivity, income, surplus. In the countryside goods and
services often are scarce. In the city they are likely to be
super-abundant.
Growth of wealth and income provide support for an increase in
population. Hence the population explosions in cities and in centers of
developing industry, trade and commerce. Countries passing through the
industrial revolution expanded their populations. Recently, the
population of some countries has doubled each twenty-five years.
Western civilization has been militarized as it was mechanized. Every
tool is a potential weapon. The truck becomes a tank, the airplane a
bomber. War making, like other aspects of western civilization, was
mechanized. Formerly war had pitted man against man. Mechanized war
pitted machines and their attendants against other machines and their
human attachments. The same mechanical forces that built cities,
factories and ships converted these agencies of production into
instruments of destruction.
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