It is not the result of a vision or a plan, an idea or a philosophy. It is the unforeseen result of a combination of conflicts and forces and motives. This is not to say exceptional men can't have world-changing ideas, history is full of examples of that. Its just that the changes brought about by those exceptional men rarely have any resemblance to how they expected they would manifest themselves.

Every age sees itself differently. In the distant past, there was no change at all, it was inconceivable. The world would always be pretty much the way it was. To the ancients, who had some idea of recorded history, the past was a time of giants and supermen, myth and magic, but they had no concept of a future. By medieval times, history became a tale of decline and decay from an idealized past that never really existed, or was the dim memory of a time of greater sophistication and complexity. To medieval and rennaissance men, the surviving buildings and monuments of antiquity could not only not be duplicated, in some cases they could not even be dismantled for building material.

In the early 19th century, we invented the concept of "progress", one which was due to the quantum leap inspired by new technologies, particularly steam and electricity. This has now become so ingrained in us that it is inconceivable to us that it may be a totally temporary phenomenon, one that has existed for a scant two centuries, and is only propped up by a massive consumption of energy by over-organized and highly complex societies, highly vulnerable to any number of unforeseen and unexpected malfunctions--in addition to a host of others which are painfully obvious to us as very real possibilities.

Global human civilization is probably no different in kind from the smaller civilizations that arose, flourished and declined in our past. There is no reason why it MUST be so, but the only actual examples we have to draw on, to help us predict our future as a species, show a purely organic model, one of geographically localized and temporally limited social organisms which eventually dissolve, and are eventually replaced by something new. Whether this paradigm can continue in a world-wide, all encompassing culture is not really clear.

We have reached the lip of the Petri dish, the toxins are building up and there is no agar beyond it. I used to think space travel would allow us to extend the 19th century paradigm indefinitely, but unless we stumble on some new and highly effective technologies and new resources and energy, I suspect it doesn't necessarily have to happen that way.

I hope I'm mistaken.