THE METAINDUSTRIAL VILLAGE

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The fourth societal force is the interiorization of consciousness. In the emergence of the modern world in the sixteenth century, there was a shift from the centripetal orientation of medieval Christendom to the centrifugal expansions in the age of humanism, exploration, and science. This orientation still continues in the exploration of space. The externalization of consciousness leads the individual to look for all values outside: The next frontier contains the solution to all the disappointments of the last frontier. You move to the New World, cut down its forests, pollute its great lakes, and then look to Australia, Brazil, or outer space. Now, however, we can sense the beginning of the end of externalization.

The interiorization of consciousness is a change in values in which we begin to look for the source of the good life within rather than without.

I believe that the population of the earth will actually decline over the next century. Meteorologists have indicated that we are entering a new period of cold weather, and that the last cycle has been an unusually warm spell. This period of planetary good weather has been associated with the population increases that preceded the Industrial Revolution.

If we are entering a new cold period, and this climatic change is occurring right at the time of a fuel crisis, then the new demands of heating, coming at a time of increased demands for fossil-fuel fertilizers, insecticides, and oil for tractors, trucks, and combines, will create a global crisis for agribusiness, the balance of trade payments, and currency values.

Since we have just twenty-odd days' worth of food stored on the planet, it would only take a few cold winters coupled with a few summer droughts to devastate the industrial civilization of planet earth. In America we would then discover to our grief just what it means to live in an oil-based postindustrial society in which 98 percent of the population is not involved in food production.

We can see how unnatural postindustrial civilization is if we look back at a few historical figures. In 1800 more than 90 percent of the American population lived in rural areas, and even as late as 1880 two-thirds of the people lived in the country. But by 1950 twothirds of the population lived in cities. If you don't believe in the possibilities of change, just stop to consider the dramatic move from the country to the city.

Well, if a social movement can go in one direction, it can also go in the other. I believe that by the year 2000 we are going to have to have one-half of our population living in rural areas. Assuming that we do not experience a catastrophic return to the Dark Ages, I see the return to the country as the creation of a new metaindustrial culture and not a return to preindustrial agrarian society.

But perhaps I had better define my terms. Using only a single parameter, namely, the distribution of population in sections of the economy, we can get a good idea of the meaning of the terms preindustrial, postindustrial, and metaindustrial.

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