Because I don’t think we are.
Consider this. Most of our cultural systems are modified versions of millennia-old relics that were most likely invented to ensure survival in a desert while explaining where the jungles went. After all, they were here just a century ago…
I believe the following (as applied to the European Caucasian-based society I live in):
Economically, we are still stuck in the 19th century – at the latest. The markets still assume that the world has infinite supplies of raw materials and and infinite supply of potential consumers with infinite cash reserves – not to mention an infinite capacity to deal with our wastes. In short, the markets still believe that infinite growth is always possible and desirable.
Spiritually, we are still wandering the deserts between Palestine and Egypt (as far as the Islamic, Judaic and Christian sky-god cults are concerned.) Seriously, it seems to me that all of our religious conceits emerged from a stretch of sand running from Egypt to Palestine. Thus our civilisation’s initial morals and ethics were based on the coping with a harsh reality of limited resources, hostile neighbours, and a landscape apparently out to kill you at every turn. And hence the invention of the Garden of Eden and the hyper-judgemental god. Not much room for cultural innovation when you’re fighting for survival every day.
Now of course we live in unimaginable luxury and often more welcoming climes. How long is it going to take before we finally shake those ancient sands off the soles of our souls?
Culturally, we are all 1950 Americans, which may explain why that decade is so revered by conservatives in the USA. Unfortunately, said culture isn’t viable any more.
The romance of that age is understandable. After a devastating war, effectively ended by American Science (in the forms of the Fat Man and Little Boy), it seemed to be an age of unparallelled peace and prosperity. It was an age of suburbs, of Billy and Timmy running with Spot through a world of lawns and white picket fences, where crime was unknown and everything was outlined in the style of Mary Blair. The future was a foregone conclusion of Scientific WONDERS! and MIRACLES! Oh, and condos on the Moon.
Which ignores the threat posed by the Cold War with the USSR, growing nuclear weapons stockpiles, the witchhunts conducted by J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, and increasing levels of neurosis (if the podcast Welcome to Mars is to be believed.)
We cannot go back. The 50s were a transitional time, a time of fragile happiness and pills, of infinite oil and naivete.
Politically, we are probably somewhere in the 19th century as well – what with our underclasses, increasingly insulated and aristocratic ruling classes, and the shrivelling middle classes. (Some think we’re going back in time.)
The United States of America is where the Western world tests the future. And the future, Occupy protests aside, appears to be Inverted Totalitarianism – where Big Business rules, the political parties obey, and everyone else suffers. Not that citizen suffering matters; the standard of human living is harder to qualify and quantify than the disposition of money.
How to do this, I know not. All I can suggest is the seeking of ‘balance’ or ‘equlibrium’ but I have little concrete notion of how to do so.
As such, we are complacently waddling towards the 22nd century, armed with obsolete mental tools – social, economic and spiritual – firm in our complacent delusion that we will overcome all obstacles – and I expect to see, before I finally die, firm evidence that we are, as a race, utterly screwed.
