Where,in time, is this basic state to be found? The answer is straightforward: in the Late Paleolithic, some fifteen to forty thousand years ago. It is really that simple. We were fully formed modern Homo sapiens sapiens ; we had reached the top of the food chain — we were doing quite a bit better than the other carnivores. Then, with a frightening rapidity, it all began to go wrong—or to go ‘too far,’ as Bell would have it. Population was squeezed into the Middle East and southwestern Europe by the ice, and the unprecedented social density thus created led to a burst of self-conscious activity evidenced by the fantastic art of the period (Bell's ‘search for order in art'?). Hot on the heels of this came the warm interglacial in which we are still living (and which has almost run its course), and the first of the violent oscillations happened—the domestication of plants and animals. After that, the swings of the pendulum went on, sometimes at a leisurely pace, sometimes wildly. At the points between the wildest swings, we get the most terrible upheavals and carnage; and each huge swing has the effect of sending the pendulum wildly off in another direction. The only ’progress’ in this view is the cumulative ability to indulge in even wilder and more rapid swings, aided by technology and rationality.
 
These swings are roughly illustrated in the accompanying diagram. The ‘upward’ movement is merely chronological and does not imply progress, except as cumulative technological change. Also, the extremes of the swings are simply my own highly condensed judgements; other observers will stress different ways in which the swings went (or will go) too far. For example, under blanket headings like Feudalism and lndustrialism all the effects of these new systems of production have to be included. Thus, I have not included Industrial Capitalism or Socialism or Welfare Liberalism, and so forth under Industrialism, since these are all effects of the industrial revolution. Nor have I added refinements like Monopoly Capitalism or Multinational Corporations or Imperialism since these again are subdivisions of the more general headings. Again, the major wars I have indicated are those that have reflected or led to features of the major shifts. Thus the Fall of Rome and the Barbarian Invasions led to Feudalism; the Franco-Prussian War (see Michael Howard’s excellent description of it) and the American Civil War reflect the impact of Steam Power which led to railways, and the ‘nation in arms’: universal conscription in France; the dominance of Ideology in America. These were the first great modern wars.

On balance? Taking a hard look at the situation I am more pessimistic than optimistic. The brain is in some ways its own worst enemy. Its capacity for illusion and self delusion, while an evolutionary advantage to ‘primitive’ hunters (as Carveth Read saw in 1920), turns into a terrifying suicidal capacity in (post) industrial society. No wonder people turn again to cults, to astrology, to magic, to hedonistic forgetfulness, and to socialism. Socialism is, in its way, yet another cry for a return to the communal ethic. But it fails because like our other modern social philosophies it operates totally within the confines of history and even of industrial history. It has not—except in the insignificant agrarian and anarchistic versions—anything better to offer than more and more industrial progress, with a more equitable sharing of the products of the rape of the earth. It is a prisoner of the assumptions of progress and a leading example of the power of technological hubris. It holds out millenarian hope, and people will cling to this as they cling to the possibility of intervention by benevolent aliens. Both are about as likely to succeed in saving us from ourselves.

Since the beginnings of civilization we have known that something was wrong: since the Book of the Dead, since the Mahabharata, since Sophocles and Aeschylus, since the Book of Ecclesiastes. It has been variously diagnosed: the lust for knowledge of the Judaic first parents; the hubris of the Greeks; the Christian sin of pride; the Confucian disharmony with nature; the Hindu/Buddhist overvaluation of existence. Various remedies have been proposed: the Judaic obedience; the Greek stoicism; the Christian brotherhood of man in Christ; the Confucian cultivation of harmony; the Buddhist recognition of the oneness of existence, and eventual freedom from its determinacy. None of them has worked. (or as the cynic would have it, none of them has been tried.) The nineteenth century advanced the doctrine of inevitable progress allied to its eighteenth-century legacy of faith in reason and human perfectibility through education. We thought, for a brief period (‘recent history'!) that we could do anything. We can't. But it comes hard to our egos to accept limitations after centuries of ‘progress.’ Will we learn to read those centuries as mere blips on the evolutionary trajectory? As aberrantly wild swings of the pendulum? As going too far? Will we come to understand that consciousness can only exist out of context for so long before it rebels against its unnatural exile? We might, given some terrible shock to the body social of the species, as Marx envisioned in his way. (Thus returning us to our state of Gattungswesen—species-being—where we existed before the Greek invention of the polis cut us off from nature in the first great act of alienation.) But we might also never recover sufficiently from the shock to form the classless, nonindustrial communities that were the— albeit vague—Marxian dream of the communalistic future; a dream which is as embarrassing to his followers as Christ's egalitarian pacifist dream has been to the Christian nations.

Being on the side of man, unfortunately, requires more than just good will. And if man won't be on his own side, that's his privilege as an intelligent, rational, self conscious, culture-bearing creature, who has passed beyond the grubby necessities of natural selection to bigger and better things. For as so many well-meaning commentators have so proudly and earnestly proclaimed, he is unique."