=1 "All roads lead to the city =1"

All roads lead to the city =1

Neither the isolated hermit nor the brutal man-heap seems to be the aim of evolution. Both possibilities have been tried out by nature and have either been found wanting or have been superseded by her other experiments.

The ideal mass society reached its zenith in insect societies almost two billion years ago. Since then the ants and the bees have remained unchanged. These societies operate at a maximum cost to individuality: there is none in the ant-heap. There are no mammal societies comparable in totalitarianism to those of the insects. Mass organization is relatively weak and timid at the primate level. Though we have the tribe, the 'nation', among monkeys, there are no monkey towns or monkey cities. The human megapolis of today approximates an ant-hill. It swarms and it warns.

Why should nature have taken pains to develop the individual through countless millennia? Why should the human race have been squeezed and tormented into becoming individualistic if the intention of evolution was mass man? The possibilities of a balance between man, the individual, and man, the society, have not yet been exhausted. Even if history were nothing but a long-drawn-out conflict between these two extremes – the lonely individual resisting the totalitarian clutch – that very conflict would imply possibilities still slumbering undiscovered in man. Can he become a fully evolved individual and at the same time a fully integrated member of a planetary society? A conscious cell aware of the whole biosphere of its planet and yet a powerfully individualized and unique being? Perhaps to be the latter fully, means to be both.

The time to find a solution is now. We have to try again and again, to succeed or perish in the attempt. Our past failures should not discourage us from organizing ourselves in new ways. The old attempts were based on a common culture, a common religion, a common philosophy which gave the tribe, village or nation a cohesive force. But this force was limited and not something involving the being in its totality. Even when the feelings of belonging together were very strong, as after a revolution or a civil war or at the birth of a new religion or social philosophy, their cohesive tendencies disintegrated as soon as different classes or interest groups arose in the midst of the old. One discredited image was replaced by another evanescent ideal.

If the cohesive forces of the city =1 were based only on a new philosophy, we could expect, at best, a short success and a long decline. But it will have not only a philosophy but also the forces of evolution behind it. The city =1 will succeed, not because of its philosophy or its faith in man and the divine in man, but because the planetary age has come and the planetary society is something which has to start with the city. We already have planetary man, a man who considers himself a member of the human race and not of a single tribe or a nation, a new man who knows that he is a living cell in an organic ocean of life. Because of his awareness of the whole he is the whole, and because of his awareness of himself as being alive without limitation of time or space, he is not only a representative of planetary life but he is planetary life. Such men are rapidly becoming more numerous on earth. It remains only for them to join with others of like kind, with all who have the same will to build a new society, a life of new awareness.