Nowhere is the need for social planning more in evidence than in the
sphere of human population. In the early years of the present twentieth
century, the human population was doubling in about 50 years (from 1500
million in 1900 to 2500 million in 1950, from 1,900 million in 1925 to
3,800 million in 1975). Had this rate of growth continued for another
hundred years the planet's fertile acres would have been fully occupied
by jostling crowds with _standing-room only_ signs in the more desirable
living spaces. Japan, the United States, several countries of West
Europe and China have launched campaigns to reduce net population
increase to one percent per year or less.
A culture level, to be effective in the present predicament of a human
race (oscillating uneasily between the possibility of social advance and
the probability of recession into another Dark Age of ignorance,
superstition and social stagnation), must include certain essential
elements. First and foremost, it must be planet-wide. Given planetary
unification by communication, transportation, travel, migration, trade
and commerce, and cultural interchange, one world has become a factual
reality. World oneness is laced by contradictions, confrontations,
conflicts; by traditional, customary, habitual, ideological, legal, and
national barriers of greater or lesser rigidity. Despite these divisive
forces, our need to function in terms of planetary oneness is so great
that the term "citizens of the world" not only makes sense, but is
accepted and even flaunted in the face of tough restrictions and hard
nosed nationalism.
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