The Fourth Age
AVAILABLE FALL OF 2008
INTRODUCTION
This book is about cultural evolution. Institutions of the civilized era are flawed, and this book shows the need to remove these flaws by accelerating movement toward a more humanized culture. The objective here is to change the way people think about our overrated civilized way of life.
War, conflict, and civil discord are so closely associated with civilized life and have been for so much of recorded history that a detached observer might suppose these abominations to be essential to human interactions. After all, it would be difficult to point to any historic era characterized by universal peace—not now and not for the last five thousand years—the kind of peace that extends to all peoples and to all nations. There are optimists who say that love is the answer. There are pessimists who believe nations of the world will never establish a permanent and enduring peace. Perhaps both are wrong. Peace, universal and everlasting, might be attainable, but universal fraternal love is not a necessary precondition to achieving it. Human amity might facilitate the push for peace, but peace can be achieved by way of a lesser facilitator.
The position taken in this book is that conflict and war exist for one purpose: to perpetrate and sustain the influence of political, religious, and financial power brokers. These power brokers rely on emotional responses more than reason to recruit popular support for their cause, and more often than not the emotion they exploit is intolerance—ethnic intolerance, religious intolerance, and racial intolerance. Men who are inflamed by fanatical hatred for the ways of others will fight blindly, and throughout history, power brokers have successfully exploited the discord of intolerance for political and economic gain.
Love is a more powerful emotion than is needed to facilitate universal accord. Cultural tolerance may be sufficient, and eliminating intolerance seems to be a more attainable goal than moving humanity toward universal love. What is more important, cultural tolerance may be the key to bringing about the next advance in human cultural evolution.
Religious and ethnic pride are not the focus here. It harms no one when a man holds strong ties to his religion; he becomes a danger when he becomes fanatically intolerant of those who have opposing religious views. One can maintain strong ethnic and racial identity, but not to the point where one seeks to destroy those of different ethnic or racial backgrounds.
This book proposes that the assumptions used to fan the flames of intolerance—claims of superiority of one group and inferiority of another—are flawed. Over the centuries, every racial, ethnic, and religious group has had interludes that evoke pride, and each has had incidents that evoke shame. There are jewels in the history of every tribe and nation that allow them to assert their superiority, and there are scandals in that same history that detractors use to demonstrate moral or intellectual decay. On balance, there is little evidence to support a pervasive intellectual, spiritual, or physiological advantage of any racial, ethnic, political, or religious group over any other. To the contrary, there is genetic evidence that all human beings—all members of the species homo sapiens—are essentially the same, that we are all of one family, all descendent from the same ancient parents.
This book shows that the early history of mankind—before the appearance of the political and religious power brokers of the civilized era—was characterized by mutual cooperation and sharing. It seeks to convince the reader that there is a theoretically achievable scenario in which universal peace, as may have existed in prehistory, can once more be attained, and it speaks to the institutions and rights of men in such a society.
This book harshly exposes weaknesses in social and spiritual paradigms that many people hold sacred. But notwithstanding the faults that prevail in the modern world, and notwithstanding the grim tone this text takes in dealing with modern cultural institutions, the writer is optimistic about the future of mankind and about the potential for the human race to set a course toward peace and survival.