Before our era, the chorus of distress that had assembled over the 10,000 years of our cultural life consisted of 9 voices: war, crime, corruption, rebellion, famine, plague, slavery, genocide, and economic collapse. Beginning in 1960, our own era found a 10th voice to add to the chorus, a voice never heard before, and this is the voice of cultural catastrophe -- a voice that wails of loss of vision, failure of purpose, and the collapse of values. Every culture has a defining place in the scheme of things, a vision of where it fits in the universe. There's no need for people to articulate this vision in words (for example, to their children) because it's articulated in their lives -- in their history, their legends, their customs, their laws, their rituals, their arts, their dances, their stories and songs. Indeed, if you ask them to explain this vision, they won't know how to begin and may not even now what you're talking about. You might say that it's a kind of low, murmurous song that's in their ears from birth, heard so constantly throughout their lives that it's never consciously heard at all. Nowadays it comes to us from the pulpits of our churches, from film screens and television screens, from the mouths of clergy, schoolteachers, news commentators, novelists, pundits. It's not a mythology of quaint tales but a mythology that tells us what the gods had in mind when they made the universe and what our role in that universe is. A people can no more function without this sort of mythology than an individual can function without a nervous system. It's the organizing principle of all our activities. It explains to us the meaning of everything we do. It can happen that circumstances may shatter a culture's vision of its place in the scheme of things, may render its mythology meaningless, may strangle its song. When this happens (and it's happened many times),things fall apart in this culture. Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment. People lose the will to live, become listless, become violent, become suicidal, and take to drink, drugs, and crime. The matrix that once held all in place is now shattered, and laws, customs, and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young, who see that even their elders can no longer make sense of them. If you'd like to study some peoples who have been destroyed in this way, there's no shortage of sites to visit in the United States and Canada, Africa, South America, Australia -- wherever, in fact, aboriginal peoples have been crushed under the wheels of our cultural juggernaut. Or you can just stay at home. You no longer need to travel to the ends of the earth to find people who have become listless, violent, and suicidal, who have taken to drink, drugs, and crime, whose laws, customs, and institutions have fallen into disuse and disrespect. We ourselves have fallen under the wheels of our juggernaut, and our own vision of our place in the scheme of things has been shattered, our own mythology has been rendered meaningless, and our own song has been strangled in out throats. I'm just old enough to remember a time when it wasn't so, and certainly my parents remember that time, as do yours. I'm certainly not talking about "the good old days" here. The chorus of distress was in full voice -- heaven knows it was, since I'm talking about the decades following the most destructive and murderous war in human history. Even so, in the late 40s and 50s, the people of our culture still knew where they were going, were still confident that a glorious future lay just ahead of us. All we had to do was to hold on to the vision and keep doing all the things that got us herein the first place. What's more, the things that got us here were good things. In 1950 there wasn't the slightest whisper of a doubt about this anywhere in our culture, East or West, capitalist or communist. In 1950 this was something everyone could agree on: Exploiting the world was our God-given right. The world was created for us to exploit. Exploiting the world actually improved it! There was no limit to what we could do. Cut as much down as you like, dig up as much as you like. Scrape away the forests, fill in the wetlands, dam the rivers, dump poisons anywhere you want, as much as you want. None of this was regarded as wicked or dangerous. Good heavens, why would it be? The earth was created specifically to be used in this way. It was a limitless, indestructible playroom for humans. You simply didn't have to consider the possibility of running out of something or of damaging something. The earth was designed to take any punishment, to absorb and sweeten any toxin, in any quantity. Explode nuclear weapons! Good heavens, yes -- as many as you want! Thousands, if you like. Radioactive material generated while trying to achieve our God-given destiny can't harm us. Wipe out whole species? Absolutely! Why ever not? If people don't need these creatures, then obviously they're superfluous! To exercise such control over the world is to humanize it, is to take us a step closer to our destiny. The earth would always and forever swallow all the radioactive wastes, all the industrial wastes, all the poisons we could generate, and give us back sweet water, sweet land, and sweet air. This was the contract, this was the vision itself: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. This is what we'd been about from the beginning: conquering and ruling, taking the world as if it had been fashioned for our exclusive use, using what we wanted and discarding the rest -- destroying the rest as superfluous. This was not wicked work, this was holy work! This is what God created us to do! And please don't imagine that this was something we learned from Genesis, where God told Adam to fill the earth and subdue it. This is something we knew before Jerusalem. This isn't something the authors of Genesis taught us, this is something we taught them. The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. This manifesto wasn't doubted by the hundreds of millions of people who in the postwar years dreamed of a coming utopia where people would rest and all labour would be performed by robots, where atomic power would be limitless and free, where poverty, hunger, and crime would be obsolete. But that manifesto is doubted now, ladies and gentlemen . . . almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and the old, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become ever sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, decade after decade, century after century, has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. They know in large part because you know better. Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they must assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us -- provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They reassure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the polls.

Silent Spring and beyond I've said that this new era of the collapse of values began in 1960. Strictly speaking, it should be dated to 1962, the year of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the first substantive challenge ever issued to the motivating vision of our culture. The facts Carson brought forward to detail the devastating environmental effects of DDT and other pesticides were astounding: DDT didn't just do its intended job of killing unwanted insects; it had entered the avian food chain, disrupting reproductive processes and breaking down egg structures, with the result that many species had already been destroyed and many more were threatened, making it not unthinkable that the world might someday wake to a silent spring -- a spring without birds. But Silent Spring wasn't just another sensational exposŽ, welcome in any publishing season. With a single powerful blow, it shattered for all time a complex of fundamental articles of our cultural faith: that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do precisely this; that the world was "on our side" in our aggrandizement, would always tolerate and facilitate our efforts; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it. The facts in Silent Spring plainly contradicted all these ideas. Something presumably beneficial to us was not being tolerated and facilitated by the world. The world was not supporting our cultural vision. God was not supporting our cultural vision. The world was not unequivocally on our side. God was not unequivocally on our side. If the matter had ended with Rachel Carson and DDT, our cultural vision would surely have cleared up and recovered, but as we all know, Rachel Carson and DDT were only the barest beginning. Carson was just the first to look, the first to show us that there was something new here to be seen. Dozens, hundreds, thousands have looked since ten, and the more they've looked, the more they've shattered our cultural faith. I won't review it for you. In an evening I could barely scratch the surface, and I'd only be telling you things discoverable in any encyclopedia. It comes down to this: In our present numbers and enacting our present dreams, the human race is having a lethal impact upon the world. Lakes are dying, seas are dying, forests are dying, the land itself is dying -- for reasons directly traceable to our activities. As many as a hundred and forty species are vanishing every day -- for reasons directly traceable to our activities. I'm not saying these things to make you feel guilty. I'm saying them to figure out . . . what gone wrong here. Theories: What's gone wrong here? Figuring out what's wrong has become a global preoccupation. People of all ages are working on it -- people of every social and economic class, every political persuasion. Ten-year-old kids are trying to work it out. Every year more and more people are afraid to walk the streets at night. Every year more and more people commit suicide. Every year more and more people become addicted to drugs and alcohol. Every year more and more people are imprisoned as criminals. The theories that are advanced to explain these things are for the most part commonplace generalities, truisms, and platitudes. They are the received wisdoms of the ages. You hear, for example, that the human race is fatally and irremediably flawed. You hear that the human race is a sort of planetary disease that Gaia will eventually shake off. You hear that insatiable capitalist greed is to blame or that technology is to blame. You hear that parents are to blame or the schools are to blame or rock and roll is to blame. Sometimes you hear that the symptoms themselves are to blame: things like poverty, oppression, and injustice, things like overcrowding, bureaucratic indifference, and political corruption. There are some of the common theories advanced to explain what's gone wrong here. I'm proposing a new theory to explain what's gone wrong. Here it is: We're experiencing cultural collapse. The very same collapse that was experienced by the Plains Indians when their way of life was destroyed and they were herded onto reservations. The very same collapse that was experienced by countless aboriginal peoples overrun by us in Africa, South America, Australia, and elsewhere. It matters not that the circumstances of the collapse were different for them and for us, the results were the same. For both of us, in just a few decades, shocking realities invalidated our vision of the world and made nonsense of a destiny that had always seemed self-evident. For both of us, the song we'd been singing from the beginning of time suddenly died in our throats. The outcome was the same for both of us: Things fell apart. It doesn't matter whether you live in tipis or skyscrapers, things fall apart. Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment. People lose the will to live, become listless, become violent, become suicidal, and take to drink, drugs, and crime. The matrix that once held all in place is shattered, and laws, customs, and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young. Circumstances have at last shattered our mad cultural vision, have at last rendered our self-aggrandizing mythology meaningless, have at last strangled our arrogant song. We've lost our ability to believe that the world was made for Man and that Man was made to conquer and rule it. We've lost our ability to believe that the world will automatically and inevitably support us in our conquest, will swallow all the poison we can generate without coming to harm. We've lost our ability to believe that God is unequivocally on our side against the rest of creation. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we're . . . going to pieces. At last, good news He is my good news: We are not humanity. All the intellectual and spiritual foundations of our culture were laid by people who believed absolutely that we are humanity itself. We forgot that we're only a single culture and came to think of ourselves as humanity itself. But why would it be such bad news if we were humanity? If we were humanity itself, then all the terrible things we say about humanity would be true -- and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, than all our destructiveness would belong not to one misguided culture but to humanity itself -- and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is doomed would mean that humanity itself is doomed -- and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is the enemy of life on this planet would mean that humanity itself is the enemy of life on this planet -- and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is hideous and misshapen -- very bad news indeed. But we're not humanity, we're just one culture -- one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision on this planet and sung their song -- and that's wonderful news, even for us! If it were humanity that needed changing, then we'd be out of luck. But it isn't humanity that needs changing, it's just . . . us. And that's very good news.