After graduating from Harvard summa cum laude in 1967, I earned my doctorate in a program specially created to accommodate my original theory of why civilization has developed in the problematic ways it has. Published as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution by the University of California Press (and still in print), that was the first piece in my life’s work-- an “integrative vision” of the forces at work in human civilization that must be understood and overcome for us to achieve a better human future, or indeed for human civilization to have much of a future at all. Believing this “integrative vision” has the potential to have beneficial effects, I am – at the age of 76 – playing like an NFL team, behind in the fourth quarter, determined to leave it all on the field. (Much of my life’s work is archived at A Better Human Story – Andrew Bard Schmookler.) Email: andybard [at] shentel.net
by Andrew Bard Schmookler I think a lot about the fate of human civilization these days. The subject worries me because, after a half-century of studying the destructive forces at work in the systems of civilization, my gut feeling is that it is no better than a toss-up whether, in the coming generations or centuries,…
