Today questions of our demise or our survival and advance are
pressing and urgent.
Civilization has played an important role in the social history of
mankind during the several thousand years when segments of the human
family have turned their backs on barbarism, regrouped their forces,
revamped their patterns of association and experimented with the more
complicated, specialized and integrated life pattern of civilization.
These experiments have paralleled or followed one another, separated by
shorter or longer ages of rest and recuperation. Each epoch of
civilization has contributed ideas, artifacts and institutions to the
sum total of human culture. This has been the case with past
civilizations. It is true of western civilization.
Civilization, like other aspects of human culture, is never static but
always dynamic. It changes constantly, waxing and waning. It develops,
expands and contracts. It reaches out toward universality, then breaks
down and dissolves into a welter of conflicting regional and local
interest groups. These changes are the outcome of hard-nosed experience.
They are related to alterations in ideas, outlooks and purposes. They
are often associated with technical discoveries and inventions. They
come and go in more or less clearly defined cycles. They are influenced
by deep running political, economic and social forces and trends.
Each civilization matures into forms and develops functions and
institutions that tend to consolidate and crystallize in well defined
social patterns and habit grooves in which two forces oppose each other:
one force is status--preserving that which is; the other force is
change--that which tends to become or is becoming.
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