Kenneth E Boulding

'The human race is now engaged in what I have called elsewhere "the Great Transition." I distinguish three major conditions of man: precivilized, civilized, and post-civilized. The Great Transition is that from civilization to post-civilized society, the beginnings of which we are seeing in the United States and some other countries. This is the real meaning of "economic development."
All transitions are based fundamental on an increase in knowledge. The transition from precivilized to civilized society rests on the acquisition of the knowledge of agriculture, which gives a food surplus, and of enough political organization to concentrate the food surplus in the cities. The transition to post-civilization is a result of the scientific revolution which got under way in the 17th and 18th centuries. We are still in the middle of this and the end is not in sight.'


'The twentieth century might be described as the crucial central period in the third great transition in the state of mankind. The first great transition was from the paleolithic to the neolithic about ten thousand years ago, which was characterized by the invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the development of a settled life in villages. The second great transition, sometimes called the urban revolution, about five thousand years ago, was characterized by the development of political power and the centralization of the food surplus from agriculture in cities. This is the transition from neolithic agriculture to civilizations. What is underway now is a third great transition, in which civilization is passing away and a new order of society altogether, which I have sometimes called post-civilized but which perhaps deserves the name of the Developed Society, is coming into being. The twentieth century is the crucial midstage of this transition which will determine very largely whether it will be made successful or not.
As agriculture was the great invention of the first transition, political power and cities of the second, so science is the great invention of the third transition. ...... As an organized social phenomenon, however, and as an immense acceleration in the rate of acquisition of knowledge, science begins in Europe and if we want to put a date on it, probably the founding of the Royal Society, 1660 in London, would be as good as any,... It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, that the rising volume of scientific knowledge began to effect a major acceleration of technical change. The theory of the steam engine (thermodynamics) was not developed till about 1840, almost a hundred years after the steam engine itself. ... We now face a similar upsurge in the biological industries as a result of the enormous advances in the science of biology. It may well be that in biology we are roughly where we were in nuclear energy about 1900, ... '



'I got very interested in the question as to why some conflicts were creative and some were not because if became very clear that conflict itself wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It could be very creative. But on the other hand, it could also be terribly destructive. Then what was the difference? And is was what got me into the theory of the integrative system. The general theory that I came up with was that if you had conflict within an integrative setting it could be creative.'


'A quarter, perhaps a third, of the human race has moved toward a kind of world superculture of skyscrapers, automobiles, airplanes, and intercontinential hotels. The rest of the human race still remains close to subsistence. ... The development of the superculture is the result of the knowledge explosion, which led not only to new theories and processes, but to new discoveries, especially of fossil fuels and rich ores. In 1859 the human race discovered a huge treasure chest in its basement. This was oil and gas, a fantastically cheap and easily available source of energy. We did, or at least some of us did, what anybody does who discovers a treasure in the basement -- live it up and we have been spending this treasure with great enjoyment.'


'All these mechanical models, like celestial mechanics, not evolutionary models, assum[e] constancy in the parameters of the system. ... This is why all these mechanical models whether Forresters' System_Dynamics or Jorgensen's Data Resources Inc model behave poorly when run backward. In evolutionary systems the parameters (constants) of the equations change constantly and unexpectedly.'


'We all agree that the existing process of rapid growth in world population and production cannot go on for very long, and is not sustainable, especially in so far as it is so dependent on fossil fuels and exhaustable high-grade ores. ... Evolutionary sustainability is the capacity of a system to continue evolution, as a process of increasing complexity and "value" in the genosphere or the nooshphere, know-how sphere, in spite of, or perhaps even because of, catastrophe. The first great evolutionary catastrophe was the creation of the present atmosphere though "oxygen pollution" by the first anaerobic organisms. They did not survive it, but evolution did, and developed the more efficient oxygen breathing organisms.'

'One should not be ashamed of a belief in progress. It is painfully slow and intermittent, interspersed with catastrophes and reversals, but there is a strong case for believing that in the long run it is built into the system, provided there is not an ultimate and irretrievable catastrophe.'


'There are processes, both in simple systems in folk learning and in complex systems in scientific learning, which tend towards the continual elimination of error as time goes on, so that people's images of the world are likely to have an increasing proportion of truth. ... It is the asymmetry between truth and error in the images of the human race that is perhaps the most basic source of societal and cultural evolution.'


'Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.'


“[Some of this, to be sure, feeds our appetite for the misfortune of others. We like to see other people stumble and fall. Slapstick, and for that matter a lot of comedy, depends on the principle. But loss can also open us up to things that winning, in its glandular, stimulating way, may not. It makes our own disappointments less stinging and stigmatizing. It invites humility, modesty, introspection and change.] Disappointment forces a learning process of some kind upon us, ... success does not.”