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.
For two centuries, new ideas, institutions and practices have followed
discoveries and inventions as regularly as day follows night.
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