Where Are We?
A long view of human experience reveals two sweeping macro-transformations: the transition from the Stone Age to Early Civilization roughly 10,000 years ago and the transition from Early Civilization to the Modern Era over the last millennium.
Now we are in the midst of a third moment of holistic change. The fading Modern Era faces a deep structural crisis induced by its contradictions and limitations: perpetual growth on a finite planet, political fragmentation in an interdependent world, widening gaps between the privileged and the excluded, and a corrosive culture of consumerism.
With each shift, social complexity has increased. The unit of social organization has moved from the highly local to the global, and economic foundations have shifted from hunting and gathering to the highly diversified and far-reaching globalized commerce of this century. Communications innovations (language, writing, printing, information technology, social media) have quickened the pace of social evolution.
In recent decades, the long tentacles of commerce, communication, and culture have woven nations and regions into a single planetary fabric. Humanity’s footprint on nature has grown to the scale of the planet, compromising the capacity of the biosphere to sustain life. A world stage is forming as a critical arena for contending forms of consciousness and political engagement. This scaling up of cultural, political, and ecological dimensions signals an epochal transformation: history has entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization.
The Planetary Phase is fast transforming the earth and its inhabitants, a holistic shift in the structure of society and its relation to nature. Developments in many domains—values and knowledge, demography and social relations, economic and governance institutions, and technology and the environment—interact in an amplifying and accelerating global process.
The journey of planetary transition is underway, its destination still largely in human hands. Living in the interregnum between the world that was and what will be, we face ominous threats. Climate change, ecosystem impoverishment, and toxification threaten people and places. Financial crises have illuminated the volatility of ungoverned globalized economic and financial systems, while cryptocurrency-fueled bubbles and trade wars incubate future risks. A crowded planet is cleaved by cultural, social, and political fissures, with rising xenophobia in response to a world on the move. The COVID-19 pandemic vividly illustrated our interlinked fates and fragile coping systems. Ongoing wars and resultant famines threaten regional stability far beyond their immediate human toll, and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon forever lurks in the background. The world can undergo unprecedented change in a matter of weeks or months. As known dangers intensify, others, still unnamed and unknown, may germinate.
If we fail to mitigate destabilizing social and ecological stresses, we risk falling into a nightmare scenario: a grim, violent, and impoverished global future. While the hour grows late, we still have time to cultivate the values and take the actions necessary for a transition to the planetary civilization our children and grandchildren deserve.
