A haunting theme of the present suggests that the rapid transformation of the West's social, scientific, and institutional orderings is shattering yesterday's assumptions about and standards of human belief and action. Furthermore, this transformation is offering little direction that guarantees qualitatively worthwhile human survival.
Robert Nisbet (1975) suggests that the West is in a 'twilight age' and describes such an age as one in which, Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development. Something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people. Human loyalties, uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tumbling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them... There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is strong (p. 111 f.).
Three decades earlier Simone de Beauvoir (1948) had claimed that, Men today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force themselves to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces... Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth (p. 9).
While knowledge has exploded, while we have come to know more, in the senses in which the physical and social sciences have developed knowledge, we know more in particular through the multiplicity of our various modes of 'coming to know'. We have a wealth of data, of fact, of information; yet, man has become ever more problematic to himself.
Into the vacuum of the twilight and the particularities creeps power, centralized in nature, corporate in scope. It is against a background of such an implied assessment that this paper has been conceived.