Book History Presentation

Page One.
To go back to the beginning, about 50 years ago in the 60s, when I was in Greenwich Village, a Time magazine cover story asked, “What would happen to our economy if those anti-materialist hippies converted everyone into less than enthusiastic consumers?”. That “what-would-happen if?” triggered a two-thousand-year-old parallel with Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which reported that Roman citizens, threatened by barbarians, asked, “What would happen to their great empire if the peace-loving Christians converted everyone to anti-violence pacifists?”
That parallel between Christian pacifism in army-dominated Rome and twentieth century anti-materialism in business-dominated America suggested a pattern connecting generational stages in past and future cultures. Somehow that idea led me to St. Augustine’s idea that history was the education of the human race in the generational stages of our own lives, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and maturity. That was the connection that started the book.
Next to hit me was the eighteen-hundred-year historical connection between Augustine’s idea of development in our five life stages and Abraham Maslow’s five levels of needs that drive our lives  starting with level 1—the basic caring and life sustaining needs, 2—safety and security needs, 3—needs for love, affection and belongingness, 4—need for esteem, and 5—need for self-actualization. (I remembered that from high school.)
So from my esteem-level 4 in Greenwich Village I looked for what happened to Maslow’s level 2 Roman Empire seeking safety from barbarians and Americans seeking esteem in wealth level 4  and I found level 3 in between actually contained the answer  England finding togetherness in self government. Growing up in history was the answer—pacifist Christians brought barbarians and Roman Empire people together in the Middle Ages and England—level 3.
So the history of Western civilization seemed to confirm St. Augustine’s view that history is “the education of the human race,” a process with continuity and purpose that moves in the same biographical sequence of stages as a person growing up and has some important lessons for people and nations.




Page Two
Questions?
Here is a foreign policy example of the application of the ideas in the book to our complex world::
Afghanistan President Karzai and his brother still think in tribal level terms, while they are being driven by Americans to govern a tribal level society with security level 2 and the level 3 political tools of democracy. Meanwhile, the Taliban tries to organize the tribal level society into a religious level 1 Muslim state under one god, using jihadist security level 2 warfare to protect it from the American modernity level 4 they hate.
Can we think of them as children with guns, just doing the bidding of their parental god and unable to understand what it’s like to be grown up?
The book explores the growth of our civilization, stage by stage, from from the kind of tribal chaos we find in religion-dominated Afghanistan to killing-dominated Rome seeking safety from barbarians, and then to togetherness in England’s self government. That made possible our level4 stage, driven to build wealth by investment in the hard work that brought escape from poverty and an American universe split between:
· Change-oriented people who try to tax wealth to support more public-sector jobs, infrastructure that increased productivity of investment in technology, and the “incremental entrenchment of new rights in law, as a mark of progress towards a better society.
· Status-quo-oriented people, represented in my time by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, who reduced progressive taxes on wealth, replaced lost consumer income with debt and led the nation to excessive wealth, instability, and the Great Depression.
FDRand public spending on the New Deal, and WWII took us out of the Depression, which were it not for regressive conservative reaction might have carried the nation into Maslow’s adulthood level 5.
In the vast sweep of history from tribalism to our time the book sees an important connection between Augustine’s education of the human race and Thomas Jefferson’s call for laws and institutions to keep pace with the development of the human mind. It sees the 1960s counter-culture as a rebellion against the excessive power of corporate wealth to constrain the growth of the human spirit.
And think about what our people could contribute to society if they did that instead of collectively spending 200 billion hours per year watching TV. (Clay Shirky book).
Page Three
Questions?
I came to realize that the human impulse to “make it better” that Paul McCartney expressed in “Hey, Jude” was the driving force in the monumental move, one step at a time, from the gods on Olympus to our democratic civilization.
The songs the Beatles brought to Greenwich Village in the 60s told the story of the next change that I was trying to understand. In the words of “Help”—
I'm not so self assured
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors—
That was a mind-opening look at the transformation to the new mature level 5 Western world that was beginning to value relationships of people over their ownership of things. The fact that Queen Elizabeth attended the Beatles' movie "Help" premiere and decorated the Beatles with the Order of the British Empire indicated their impact on people who had “opened up the doors”.
The flow of life in history gives our lives special meaning as we search for happiness and accept not old age but maturity and not just death but a necessary ending in thankfulness for the wonders and miracles of life we shared—and for the opportunity to ‘take a sad song and make it better”.
So Augustine asks
Why then joy they not in it? Why are they not happy? Because they are more strongly taken up with other things which have more power to make them miserable, than that which they so faintly remember to make them happy. For there is yet a little light in men; let them walk, let them walk, that the darkness overtake them not.
Or, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys.”
Philosopher and psychologist William James would agree. He hit upon the most important part when he wrote “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” He also said, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,” which confirms the spirit of the flow of history. Leo Tolstoy said it, too: “If you want to be happy, be”, and John Lennon’s lesson was, “Let it be.“.
I believe growing up in history is ultimately about the search for happiness.



Page Four
Questions?
In 2007 I used the core ideas in that book manuscript for a 13-week courses at the Academy. A course proposal for spring of 2009 was rejected and I took two semesters off to write the book, I found another connection in Giambattista Vico’s New Science. He explains how the development of peoples in history can be understood by comparing their experiences in different times—the idea that I explored in my manuscript. This is how he described it:
This New Science or metaphysic, studying the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence, discovers the origins of divine and human institutions among the gentile nations, and thereby establishes a system of the natural law of the gentes, which proceeds with the greatest equality and constancy through the three ages which the Egyptians handed down to us as the three periods through which the world has passed up to their time. These are (1) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under divine governments, and everything was commanded them by auspices and oracles, which are the oldest institutions in profane history. (2) The age of the heroes, in which they reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore there were established first the popular commonwealths and then the monarchies, both of which are forms of human government.
Vico lived in the stage of Maslow’s need level 3. when the monarchy was being reestablished in England and self-government was being still being defined. He described it beautifully in terms of a stage of development of the human mind,
The last type of jurisprudence was that of natural equity, which reigns naturally in the free commonwealths, in which the people, each for his own particular good (without understanding that it is the same for all), are led to command universal laws. They naturally desire these laws to bend benignly to the least details of matters calling for equal utility.




Page Five
Questions?
When I was finishing the book in 2009, for two decades America had been carefully ignoring the reality of a change that had already happened—change created by information technology that was replacing workers with robots and computers and cheap overseas jobs that demanded activist government to update physical and social infrastructure . Thousands of American workers were jobless (and still are)in an economy of excessive wealth and instability—the Great Recession.
In what I called the Phase of Persons in the American Age of Economics I came to see the creation of the European Union as representing a transformation to Maslow’s self-actualization level 5, which the book calls the European Age of Persons.
The change affects daily lives in countless ways. In the previous level of the transformation, Maslow’s adulthood level 4, “Consumer products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more”. Why? To maintain the demand for a profitable product, of course. They satisfy consumers’ need for esteem, the driving need of that level.
In the new level of human needs Maslow’s maturity level 5, ”feature fatigue” is the response of people who simply want things to work to satisfy their need for self-actualization. That need would be satisfied sooner if more people would realize that it is only one aspect of the far grander promise that is struggling to be realized in our lives and consciousness—a promise growing within the new level of human needs in the development of the human mind
It’s happening here in thousands of ways for people whose education and background make them open to the new level of need and less influenced by by special interests that resist unprofitable marketing changes Those people see the connection between a simpler life-style, smaller houses, and a healthy environment.
The core countries of the European Union adopted in varying ways what might be seen as a level 5 social infrastructure for the information age —easier access to higher education to meet the employee needs of our global businesses and technical innovation to give them a competitive advantage,
That kind of revolutionary, secular way forward, based on civic values and nurturing of people to meet the goal of a better society, seems to be the inevitable response to Maslow’s need for self-actualization, which is inherent in the education of the human race.