+STRATEGY FOR THE TRANSITION
by Kenneth E. Boulding
The fact of the great transition is not in dispute. Almost anyone in middle life today has simply to look back to his own childhood, or still more to the days of his grandparents, to realize that we are living in a world in which there is an enormous rate of change. If anyone in an advanced society today were to suddenly thrust back into the world of only a hundred years ago, he would feel utterly alien and strange. A considerable part of his vocabulary would be meaningless to the people around him. He would find it hard to adapt to the inconveniences and to the restricted life which would have to lead. He would feel indeed in an alien society.
It is the business of this final chapter to look at the attitudes which may be taken toward the transition and to outline the possible strategy for achieving the transition at the least cost in terms of human misery and degradation. Attitudes toward the transition can range from rejection, through a grudging acceptance, to a cautious and critical acceptance and to an enthusiastic and uncritical acceptance. It will become clear, I think, that I take my own stand somewhere about the third of these positions. I welcome the transition as an event of enormous evolutional potential, in line with the general development of the universe as we know it. On the other hand, it has great potential for evil as well as for good, and the transition itself involves the human race in dangers which are so great as to be almost unacceptable. All four attitudes outlined above should therefore be examined and none should be rejected out of hand.
It is frequently possible for a form of life or a form of society to reject a new evolutionary step. Indeed, to some extent this seems to be necessary. The world as we know it today contains innumerable examples of surviving forms and species which represent earlier stages of evolutionary development. Plenty of hydrogen, which may have been the first element to evolve, is still around. Inorganic material still dominates the universe in a quantitative sense. The virus, the amoeba, and a very large number of examples of lower forms of life are still with us. Paleolithic and Neolithic man still survives in remote corners of the world. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that civilized society could coexist for a very long time with post civilized society and that this might happen not only because of an inability to make the transition but because of an unwillingness to make it. Even within an advanced society like the United States there are small groups like the Amish who preserve an eighteenth-century culture. Spain and Portugal deliberately rejected modernization in the interest of a ''civilized" value system which they believe to be superior to anything which an advanced society can offer. In a different context, Thailand and Burma seem to have made the same choice. India is profoundly unwilling to give up certain aspects of her ancient civilized culture which are inconsistent with economic development. It may well be, therefore, that the option of rejecting the great transition is open to many societies and that the choice can deliberately be made one way or the other. In the light of a long historical perspective, we may even see the socialist countries become fixated on a nineteenth century social science and world view, so that they will therefore proceed through the transition only up to some halfway point. We cannot be sure of this, but it is at least something for the socialist society to worry about!
What we do not know are the exact conditions under which the option to reject the great transition and remain in the state of civilization is really open. The amoeba remains with us, after hundreds of millions of years or evolution, but innumerable older forms of life have not survived. Sometimes the choice between participating in an evolutionary development or not participating in it is not open. Those forms which do not participate in the development do not survive. This process is as evident in social evolution as it is in biological evolution. If indeed a successful new development is to be rejected, the species or the society which rejects the development must have some kind of niche in the system of ecological equilibrium which includes the developed species. Either this niche must be the result of geographical isolation, such as that which permitted the survival of marsupials and even Paleolithic man in Australia, or the older species must be able to find a place in the social or ecological equilibrium which will enable it to reproduce sufficiently for survival. This may require some adaptation on its part.
The isolation of a relatively small subculture in a modern world is possible, even though it may be difficult, as the examples of the Amish in the United States and the Baptists and Old Believers in the Soviet Union demonstrate. Similarly national societies which reject the great transition, or which find themselves incapable of achieving it, may likewise survive even in a post civilized world as long as they are neither a threat nor a temptation to the more developed societies around them. Furthermore, in a world in which there is a deadly fear of war, and fear, moreover, that even small wars may escalate into big ones, there will be a strong tendency to freeze existing national boundaries; and hence nations which are only conditionally viable in the military sense may remain undisturbed for a long period of time.
Nevertheless there are strong arguments on the other side, and it may well be that for many societies the choice between civilization and post civilization is not really open. The choice which is open may be a more grim one, between a painful and difficult advance into post civilization and an agonizing retreat into anarchy and numbing poverty. We have seen many instances in history of the impact of civilized on precivilized societies which has been in almost every case disastrous for the precivilized society unless it has been able to achieve a successful reorganization. That is, when civilization hits a precivilized society it cannot remain as it was. Either it must make an adjustment to civilization or it will disintegrate. The Plains Indians in the United States are an example of a total failure to adjust with consequent disintegration of the old society. Some of the Indians of the Southwest, such as the Hopi, represent cases of partial adjustment. Hawaii perhaps represents the case of total adjustment and absorption into advanced culture, with very little of the old society left. The cargo cults of Melanesia likewise represent the disintegration of an old precivilized society under contact with "civilization" in the Second World War, even civilization in its less agreeable aspects.
On the other hand there have been many examples in which precivilized or barbarian societies have overthrown civilizations. The tale of the destruction of cities and civilizations by barbarian invaders is an old one and a long one. It is not, however, the truly precivilized societies which overthrow civilization but what might be called semi-civilized societies which have acquired enough of the arts of civilization to advance their destructive power, but not enough to be constructive. One can therefore see that just as the interaction of civilized with pre-civilized societies carries great dangers to both of them and often indeed destroys both, so the interaction of post civilized and civilized societies involves great dangers, dangers indeed which are intensified by the increased powers of destruction involved in post civilized techniques. On the one side, as we have already seen, the introduction of public health measures into civilized societies almost inevitably involves them in disastrous population explosions if radical changes in the pattern of culture do not follow very rapidly. Indeed the probability is deplorably high that many of these societies in the next fifty years will sink into hopeless apathy or even into anarchy as the result of their failure to make the necessary demographic adjustments. On the other hand the nightmare of a new Tamerlane or Genghis Khan equipped with nuclear weapons also must be faced. Even if the developed countries of the world achieve a condition of peaceful coexistence, as seems not impossible, the pattern of previous history would seem to suggest a possibility of a ruthless conqueror arising in a less developed country - some Macedonia or Mongolia of the twenty-first century possessed of nuclear or biological weapons but not of the basic culture which produces them - who might then unleash a new fury of a destruction against the post civilized world.
The conclusion of all this argument is that the rejection of post-civilization is possible only under limited circumstances and that this rejection cannot be a simple rejection of the kind which refuses to make any adjustment but must in itself be a conscious adjustment to the new world situation. Even so, this option is not likely to be open to everybody. In the course of development there is a point of no return, after which the option of remaining merely civilized is no longer available. The society is caught up in a dynamic of change which no power can stop. The society is caught up in a dynamic of change which no power can stop. This, indeed is the significance of Rostow's concept of the "take-off." There are also societies which are so placed geographically that they cannot remain isolated. One wonders indeed whether in an age of air transportation and intercontinental missiles any society now has the option which was clearly open to Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century. Japan could isolate itself from the processes of development, at least from external pressure, because it was geographically remote from the centers in Europe where post civilization first got under way. This remoteness, however, ended by the middle of the nineteenth century, even before the age of air travel, and Japan made the choice for development. Japan decided in effect that it could not survive as a "merely" civilized country. But remoteness has utterly disappeared from the earth, and it seems probable that a "Tokugawa solution" is no longer available for any country, unless "social" distance can be established through the development of a framework of world security.
An attitude of outright rejection of the great transition is rare. What is much more common is an attitude of grudging acceptance. This, however, may be even more disastrous than an attitude of outright rejection, for it usually involves wanting the fruits of development without being prepared to incur the costs. The relative failure of development today in the tropical belt is perhaps more the result of the grudging and halfhearted acceptance of the idea of development than it is the result of any other single factor. Under these circumstances the probability may be tragically high that many of these societies will fail to make the adjustment and hence will actually go downhill in the next decades. There is a world of difference between poverty and destitution ­ between, say, the poverty of Jamaica and the destitution of Haiti, the poverty of Malaya and the destitution of parts of India. There is real danger that under the impact of isolation, population explosion, and political incompetence, many countries which are now poor wi1 become destitute and under this condition may be desperately hard to change. Therefore of all the attitudes toward the great transition a grudging and therefore probably unsuccessful acceptance of the idea, which implies a failure to realize it is the most disastrous.
Going now to the other extreme, we see in some cases an uncritical acceptance of any and all change provided that it has the appearance of being technological, progressive, or advanced. This attitude is particularly prevalent among the Communists, but it is by no means unknown in the West. It is probably not so dangerous an attitude as grudging acceptance or rejection, in the sense that it is less likely to lead to absolute failure or disaster, but it nevertheless is an attitude which has its own peculiar dangers, particularly when it is accompanied by a rigid ideological view on how the transition is to be achieved. Under these circumstances an attitude of this kind can easily result in what I call high cost development. It may indeed be argued that high cost development is better than no development at all and certainly better than development in the wrong direction. Still, it is clearly worse than low-cost development and it therefore needs to come under highly critical scrutiny. Where deve1opment has been attained at a higher cost than necessary­­ that is to say, in terms of human misery or degradation, social disorganization, and the loss of cherished values­­ this can usually be attributed either to a failure of organization or to failure of decision making because of false images of the social system. In the West, for instance, the transition has been accompanied by a good deal of potentially avoidable human misery in depressions and unemployment. There have often been inadequate provisions for education, old age, sickness, and an inadequate provision of those social goods which cannot be provided through markets. Those costs may be attributed partly to a lack of political organization, partly to lags in the transfer of political power to a wider base, and most of all perhaps to an inadequate conscious image of the nature of the process through which the society was passing, with consequent political decisions based not only on an inadequate information system but also on an inadequate theoretical framework. Nevertheless the enthusiasm for development in the West and the willingness of its culture to absorb new products, new techniques, and new ideas has enabled it to overcome many of these difficulties; and though many of the costs have been high the returns have unquestionably exceeded the costs. If we were to do it again, we no doubt could do it better, but in a sense it is a miracle to have done it at all.
Likewise in the socialist countries there has been a very high cost development, a cost which in my personal view exceeds even the high cost of the Western development in its early stages. For instance, the first collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1932 was a larger human disaster than the great depression in the West, almost by an order of magnitude. In the West there was massive unemployment, net investment declined almost to zero, poverty increased, and the process of development was interrupted though probably not reversed. The rate of development slowed down almost to zero but did not become negative. In the Soviet Union some six million people died, mainly of starvation, half the livestock was killed, a deliberately fanned class hatred disrupted the society, personal liberty was destroyed, and the arts stagnated. Out of this, it is true, emerged the heavy industry and the educational investment on which future growth could be built, and the Soviet citizens could well argue that the return has been greater than the cost. Nevertheless the cost was enormous and much of it was avoidable. Likewise in Communist China the costs of development are enormous, so high indeed that they may threaten the whole process and result in a desperately paranoid nation. Even in Cuba we see an enormously high cost development with a cost in terms of refugees, the militarization and dehumanization of the society, and economic failures which again could easily have been avoided if the revolution had not fallen into the hands of those guided by an obsolete ideology. On the other hand in Yugoslavia, in Poland, and perhaps in Rumania and Bulgaria we see processes of socialist development at much less cost, even though here one would like to see the cost lowered even further, especially the cost in terms of personal liberty.
It is clear that the distinction between high cost and low-cost development is something which cuts right across the cold war and the division of the world into East and West. I must confess that I think the socialist doctrine itself imposes a certain limit below which the cost of development cannot be reduced, but this limit may be tolerable and the costs of the least cost socialist development may be much less than that of the high cost capitalist development. When for instance we look at countries like Brazil, where development has been achieved at the high social cost of inflation, failure to provide social goods, and a certain moral disintegration of the society, and even more when we look at the many countries in the so-called free world where development has been unsuccessful, it is clear that we all live in glass houses and that no one can afford to throw stones. We all face the problem of developing realistic images of the dynamics of our particular social systems. In this task a dialogue between East and West may be or considerable value, but a dialectical confrontation is of little use. Still more, the passion, hatred, and propaganda which arise out of the cold war are no help at all.
I, therefore, have no hesitation in recommending the attitude toward the great transition which I have described as critical acceptance. There may be times when we wish nostalgically that it had never started, for then at least the danger that the evolutionary experiment in this part of the universe would be terminated would be more remote. Now that the transition is under way, however, there is no going back on it. We must learn to use its enormous potential for good rather than for evil, and we must learn to diminish and eventually eliminate the dangers which are inherent in it. If I had to sum up the situation in a sentence I would say that the situation has arisen because of the development of certain methods of reality testing applied to our images of nature. If we are to ride out the transition successfully we must apply these or similar methods for reality testing to our images of man and his society.
There is in the world today an "invisible college" of people in many different countries and many different cultures, who have this vision of the nature of the transition through which we are passing and who are determined to devote their lives to contributing toward its successful fulfillment. Membership in this college is consistent with many different philosophical, religious, and political positions. It is a college without a founder and without a president, without buildings and without organization. Its founding members might have included a Jesuit like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a humanist like Aldous Huxley, a writer of science fiction like H. G. Wells, and it might even have given honorary degrees to Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Pope John XXIII, and even Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy. Its living representatives are still a pretty small group of people. I think, however, that it is they who hold the future of the world in their hands or at least in their minds.
For this invisible college I am an unashamed propagandist and I confess without a blush that this book is a tract. Our precious little planet, this blue green cradle of life with its rosy mantle, is in one of the most critical stages of its whole existence. It is in a position of immense danger and immense potentiality. There are no doubt many experiments in evolution going on in different parts of this big universe. But this happens to be my planet and I am very much attached to it, and I am desperately anxious that this particular experiment should be a success. If this be ethnocentrism, then let me be ethnocentric! I am pretty sure, however, that it will not be a success unless something is done. There is danger both of the bang of nuclear detonation and of the whimper of exhausted overpopulation, and either would mean an end of the evolutionary process in these parts. If man were merely capable of destroying himself, one could perhaps bear the thought. One could at least console oneself with the thought of elementary justice, that if man does destroy himself it is his own silly fault. He is captain, however, of a frai1 and delicate vessel, and in the course of destroying himself he might easily destroy the vessel­­ that is, the planet which carries him, with its immense wealth and variety of evolutionary freight and evolutionary potential. This makes the dangers of the transition doubly intolerable, and demands a desperate effort to remove them.
But once we have joined this invisible college, what do we do? Do we join a political party? Picket the White House? Go on protest marches? Devote ourselves to research, education, and propaganda? Or do we go about the ordinary business of life much as we have previously done? Fortunately or unfortunately, according to taste there is no simple answer to this question. Like any other commitment, joining the invisible college of the transition implies a change from the unexamined 1ife to the examined life. What the results of this examination will be, however, and even what constitutes a good grade, is hard to predict for any particular person. What is certain is that we will see and do even old things in a new light and in a more examined manner.
In an earlier chapter we identified the essential problem as that of effecting the survival change in the noosphere. It is a useful question for each one of us to ask, ''What changes are taking place in the noosphere, the sphere of knowledge that envelops the globe, as a result of our own life?" We all affect the noosphere in three ways. The content of our own minds is a part of it, so that what happens to our own knowledge and our own images is that part of the noosphere which we can most immediately affect. It is good for all of us to stop occasionally and inquire in what direction the content of our mind is changing, and what the processes are by which this change takes place. We should ask also in what ways do we bring our supposed knowledge to a test­­ or do we not bother to do this? Do we indu1ge in any activity which might be described as research­­ by exposing ourselves, for instance, to unfamiliar sources of information and new points or view?
The second point at which we affect the noosphere is through the information outflow which we make toward others. In conversation, writing, and in the ordinary activity of daily life we are constantly communicating with others, and, as a result of these communications, their images of the world change. The teacher of course is professionally associated with such an activity, but all of us are teachers whether we like it or not, whether we get paid for it or not, or even whether we are conscious of it or not. 
The third process is perhaps only an extension of the first. This is the process by which we come to have new knowledge which nobody had before. This process is often regarded as the privilege of a few who are engaged in professional research. The process, however, is not sharply blocked off from the general process of the increase of knowledge in any mind, and a great many discoveries and inventions are still made by people who are amateurs. The more people there are engaged in a search of some kind, who are constantly on the lookout for new and better ways of doing things, the faster will be the general rate of development. The housewife who thinks of a new dish or a new method of resolving disputes in the family, the workman who drops a useful suggestion into the suggestion box, the businessman who pioneers in a new product or method, the government official or politician who develops a new line of policy are all engaged in a creation of new knowledge just as much as the white coated scientists in the laboratory. The unfinished tasks of the great transition are so enormous that there is hardly anyone who cannot find a role to play in the process.
In a great many areas of life today one sees a certain polarization of the role of the individua1, much of which is perhaps quite unconscious but which nevertheless rejects two profound1y different attitudes toward the great transition. On the one hand there are those who despair, give up hope, and who retreat into nihilism or into the commonplace performance of routine duties. These are the people for whom the pressures and dangers of the great transition are too much, who see so much of the dangers and so little of the potential that they have in effect abandoned the struggle. On the other side are those who still have hope for mankind, who see the enormous potential that lies ahead of us in spite of the dangers, and who therefore seek constantly to build up rather than to tear down, to create rather than to destroy, to diminish the dangers and guide the course. Even among the natural scientists we find some who are concerned with directing their work into significant channels and with playing roles as citizens, others who retreat into a sterile conformity and routine behavior. Among social scientists there are those who are stirred into lively activity both in the pure and applied fields, guided again by the sense of significance of what they are doing and the urgency of man's search for knowledge in this area. By contrast there are others who retreat into sterile methodological dispute or who seek to perform the rituals of science rather than to catch its spirit.
In philosophy, there are those who are concerned with new dimensions in the discipline of man's thought, even as they strive with questions that may have no answer, and there are others who relax into a shallow scientism or who erect existentialist despair into an atheistic God. In literature there are those who continue the great traditions by which man uses the exercise of his own imagination to lift himself and achieve self-knowledge ­ some of these, indeed, are found among the humble writers of science fiction -- where others exploit salaciousness in the name of realism and seek to belittle man's image of himself. In art there are those who strive after novelty at all costs and have lost all interest in beauty, and there are those who wrestle with the enormous problem of finding aesthetic standards in a technological age, and who seek to communicate in aesthetic form the enormous danger and potentiality of man’s present condition.
In religion there are those who are trying to awaken man to his condition and his modern environment and to develop the great phyla of religion in directions which are appropriate to the needs of a developed society. There are others who crudely exploit ignorance in the pursuit of their own power and who seek to give authority to their own prejudices by the invocation of the divine name. In politics there are men who see the necessity for world community and who are engaged within the limits imposed by their own official roles in increasing the probability or peace and the chances of development. There are others who exploit the inner tensions of the masses by projecting hatred on an enemy and who raise themselves to power at the costs of creating disorder and disunion in the world. There are businessmen, managers, and officials who are trying to create humane and workable organizations and to perform the role of the organizer with style and artistry; there are others who are concerned only with minimizing trouble or maximizing gain to themselves. There are housewives and mothers who are raising families of healthy and creative children capable of contributing to a developing world; there are others who are creating neurotics whose value to the society of the future will be negative. There are school­teachers who create in their pupils a sense of the preciousness of learning and who stimulate their creativity; there are others who use their pupils as outlets for their personal tensions and who kill the love of learning and stifle the creative urge.
One is tempted to end this litany by the good old evangelical hymn and labor song "Which Side Are You On?" This, however, is a dangerous question. It leads to dialectic rather than to dialogue, to preaching rather than to teaching, to self justification rather than to self-examination, to confirming one's previous prejudices rather than to learning new things. The truth is that each of us is on both sides. The problem is how to raise the one side in all of us and lower the other. I wish I knew an easy answer to this question. Unfortunately I do not. There are many partial answers, but I know no general answer.
The attempt to answer the previous question perhaps leads to another. Is there some point in the great transition at which the invisible college should become visible? Do we need a visible organization like the Jesuits, or the Communist party, dedicated to the ideology of the transition and committed to getting man through it? There is much that is tempting in the idea. It can be argued that the idea of the great transition contains all the necessary elements of an ideology. It has an interpretation of history and an image of the future, a critique of personal and political behavior, and a role for everyone. All that it seems to need is a professional priesthood who will symbolize the idea, propagate it, organize it, and so shepherd mankind into the post civilized fold. That this is a possible "scenario” as Herman Kahn would call it, I have no doubt. But I also have no doubt that it is not the only scenario and I have very great doubt that it is the best one. An elite and disciplined "visible college" looks like an attractive shortcut to the achievement of the ends of an ideology. I think, however, it is a shortcut which has led in the past almost inevitably if not to disaster at least to doing more harm than good or, even at best, to doing good at very high cost. This is an empirical generalization and so belongs to my own definition of folk knowledge rather than to science, and I have to confess that I have no logical proof that an elite organization dedicated to what seems a noble purpose always does more harm than good. Here is an area where genuinely scientific knowledge has not yet been achieved. I would therefore not rule out the possibility that in the future we may find ways of organizing a self-conscious society of those committed to the transition which will not be subject to those temptations, degenerations, and abuses of power which have characterized all such societies in the past. I furthermore suspect that such societies are most useful when the ideology which they propagate contains strong ambivalences. One needs neither a Jesuit nor a Communist to propagate the multiplication table. I would hope that the concept of the great transition is more like the multiplication table than it is like an ideological position. In that case it is better to propagate it by an invisible college, for the ideas will propagate themselves by their obvious usefulness. They will need very little of the arts of persuasion or of compulsion. Under these circumstances a visible society devoted to propagating this particular truth might well become more of an obstacle than a facility. For this reason, therefore, I have no desire to plant a standard other than the truth itself. It is to this that the wise and honest must repair.

The Great Transition (1964)
The twentieth century might be described as the crucial central period in the third great transition in the state of mankind. The first great transition was from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic about ten thousand years ago, which was characterized by the invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the development of a settled life in villages. The second great transition, sometimes called the urban revolution, about five thousand years ago, was characterized by the development of political power and the centralization of the food surplus from agriculture in cities. This is the transition from Neolithic agriculture to civilizations. What is underway now is a third great transition, in which civilization is passing away and a new order of society altogether, which I have sometimes called post-civilized but which perhaps deserves the name of the Developed Society, is coming into being. The twentieth century is the crucial midstage of this transition which will determine very largely whether it will be made successful or not. 
As agriculture was the great invention of the first transition, political power and cities of the second, so science is the great invention of the third transition. ...... As an organized social phenomenon, however, and as an immense acceleration in the rate of acquisition of knowledge, science begins in Europe and if we want to put a date on it, probably the founding of the Royal Society, 1660 in London, would be as good as any,... It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, that the rising volume of scientific knowledge began to effect a major acceleration of technical change. The theory of the steam engine (thermodynamics) was not developed till about 1840, almost a hundred years after the steam engine itself. ... We now face a similar upsurge in the biological industries as a result of the enormous advances in the science of biology. It may well be that in biology we are roughly where we were in nuclear energy about 1900, ... 
"Outline: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century," October, 22, 1964 (unpublished). Kenneth E. Boulding Papers, Archives (Box # 39), University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. 
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