What Are We To Do With Our Lives?

WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I The Present Crisis in Human Affairs i II The Idea of the Open Conspiracy 9 III We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds 14 IV The Revolution in Education 23 V Religion in the New World 2 5 VI Modern Religion is Objective 34 VII What Mankind Has to Do 39 VIII Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal 45 IX No Stable Utopia Is Now Conceivable 60 X The Open Conspiracy Is Not to Be Thought of as a Single Organization It Is a Conception of Life ottt of which Efforts, Organizations, and new Orientations Will Arise 61 XI Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern Communities Now Preva lent, which Are Antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy. The War with Tradition 69 XII The Resistances of the Less Industrial ized Peoples to the Drive of the Open Conspiracy 86 C ONTENTS CHAPTER PAO1 XIII Resistances and Antagonistic Forces in Our Conscious and Unconscious Selves 97 XIV The Open Conspiracy Begins as a Movement of Discussion, Explana tion, and Propaganda 106 XV Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy 114 XVI Existing and Developing Movements which Are Contributory to the Open Conspiracy and which Must Develop a Common Consciousness. The Par able of Provinder Island 127 XVII The Creative Home, Social Group, and School the Present Waste of Ideal istic Will 136 XVIII Progressive Development of the Activi ties of the Open Conspiracy into a World Control and Commonweal The Hazards of the Attempt 140 XIX Human Life in the Coming World Community 146 The Present Crisis in Human Affairs THE world is undergoing immense changes. Never be fore have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years. We have been carried along with no means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the suc cession of events. We are only now beginning to realize the force and strength of the storm of change that has come upon us. These changes have not come upon our world from without. No huge meteorite from outer space has struck our planet there have been no overwhelming outbreaks of volcanic violence or strange epidemic diseases the sun has not flared up to excessive heat or suddenly shrunken to plunge us into Arctic winter. The changes have come through men themselves. Quite a small num ber of people, heedless of the ultimate consequences of what they did, one man here and a group there, have made discoveries and produced and adopted inventions that have changed all the conditions of social life. We are now just beginning to realize the nature of these changes, to find words and phrases for them and put them down. First they began to happen, and then we began to see that they were happening. And now we are beginning to see how these changes are con nected together and to get the measure of their conse quences. We are getting our minds so clear about4Eem What are we to do with our Lives that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and explain them to our children in our schools. We do not do so at present. We do not give our children a chance of discovering that they live in a world of universal change. What are the broad lines upon which these alterations of condition are proceeding It will be most convenient to deal with them in the order in which they came to be realized and seen clearly, rather than by the order in which they came about or by their logical order. They are more or less inter dependent changes they overlap and interact. It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century that people began to realize the real significance of that aspect of our changing conditions to which the phrase the abolition of distance has been applied. For a whole century before that there had been a continual increase in the speed and safety of travel and transport and the ease and swiftness with which messages could be transmitted, but this increase had not seemed to be a matter of primary importance...