The New and Dangerous Period of Social History: Statement from the President of Pax Romana/Cmica-usa, 9 November 2016

It seems that Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, will promote greater fossil-fuel dependency, and weaken environmental regulation.

~Herman Greene, Center for Ecozoic Societies

We are now beginning a new, difficult, and dangerous period of social history for the people of the United States of America, for the entire human family, and for all the wondrous creatures across the vibrant Biosphere of our loving Creator’s beloved garden-planet Earth.

Drawing on insights from the investigative journalism of Jane Meyer in her groundbreaking book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, I suspect that the big winner for this new period is the global fossil-fuel industry. The global fossil-fuel industry today constitutes, I believe, the most ecologically destructive political-economic force on planet Earth. The big loser, therefore, is sustainability for the ecosystem of our loving Creator’s beloved garden-planet Earth, on which human civilization and human viability, as well as the viability of so many other wondrous creatures, all depend.

Though the fossil-fuel issue appeared only occasionally in the background of the recent Republican campaign for the presidency of the United States, I suspect that it constituted the core issue for the deep architects of that campaign. I also suspect that many of the campaign’s other negative issues, which stirred up so much fear and hatred, were largely political manipulations used instrumentally to construct a voting constituency that would then serve the core purpose of the fossil- fuel industry – namely, despite global climate-change, to perpetuate that industry’s vast global wealth and power.

As background to that proposed core issue, my own social analysis has elsewhere argued that we have been collapsing for some time into the ecological, social, and spiritual breakdown of what I have named the now-globalized stage of “Modern Western Industrial-Colonial Civilization,” which in the eighteenth century came to be based on fossil fuels. For approximately the past 50 years, as I have proposed elsewhere, Modern Western Industrial-Colonial Civilization –based for centuries on fossil fuels – has been collapsing into the gradual end of its 500-year cycle of emergence, triumph, and now decadence.

Today, that final phase of decadence has become acute. Tragically, in that now acute phase, the only philosophical ‘logic’ currently holding intellectual power across the global public forum is what the late and distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, called “Scientific Materialism.”

In addition, within its late phase, Western Modernity’s Scientific Materialism has itself been collapsing into Friedrich Nietzsche’s dangerous philosophy of Nihilism. In the title of a famous posthumous book of Nietzsche’s writings, that philosophy has been described as “The Will to Power.” Today, however, Nietzsche’s nihilistic doctrine is more widely known as the political-economic philosophy of “Neoliberalism.”

As an alternative to the late modern triumph of nihilist Neoliberalism, we now need to respond creatively by planting locally, and networking globally, regenerative seeds for what I have elsewhere called the future “Postmodern Global Electronic-Ecological Civilization”—based on abandoning fossil fuels and embracing renewable energy. Further, to become truly regenerative, that future civilization will need to draw for its intellectual foundations on the rich ecological, social, and spiritual wisdom of all ancient human cultural traditions.

The two most important human movements on planet Earth currently planting such seeds of postmodern regeneration are:

• the growing global network of “ecological villages,” or in shorthand “ecovillages,” which are explained by Jonathan Dawson in his visionary book, Ecovillages: New Frontiers for Sustainability;
• the growing global network of “local living economies,” which Anthony Flaccavento has celebrated in his visionary book, Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change.

In the near future, the Pacem in Terris Global Leadership Ecumenical Initiative plans to publish—through its Pacem in Terris Press—important studies to help our human family in discovering postmodern regenerative paths that will carry us beyond the late modern ecological, social, and spiritual breakdown of the now globalized phase of Modern Western Industrial-Colonial Civilization (again now based on fossil fuels), and toward a future and regenerative Postmodern Global Electronic-Ecological Civilization, based on renewable energy.