This is a very interesting time in which we live. So I've decided to offer my take on it. But first, make sure you get clearance from your physician, and then, buckle your seat belts.....
The word "civilization" jumps out at me in the article's title, above. It used to represent something, well, civilized. According to the text books, it started at several places around the globe on rich river deltas. Humans up until then had been nomadic hunters and gatherers; but when agriculture was discovered we were able to lay down roots, especially in places where seasonal floodings obviated the need for sophisticated irrigation systems. These locations, such as the fertile crescent, which straddles the Tigris and Euphrates and Mohenjo-daro, in India, were the seeding grounds of a system that was to dominate the earth for millennia afterwards. It is this system that currently thwarts the biosphere's need to increase thermodynamic efficiency and liberate human energy.
So let's start by describing this system--and describing it in it's beatific wisdom. It's very simple: the large stores of grain that were obtained through farming the fertile deltas provided for the support of higher level social classes which never could have existed before. Thus, a hierarchal template emerged with the King at the top, to be followed by the priest, the soldier, the mercantile, and then the farming, feudal classes. Anyway, it went something like that. But the fact that everything rested on the farming class foreshadows what, many, many centuries later, was to prove to be a problematic schema.
To its credit, what was achieved was order; and this was no small feat when thousands of people and numerous functions all needed to be integrated to serve the society as a whole. But the patriarchal order that emerged came at a cost. The cost was the devaluation of those at the bottom for the benefit of those at the top. But, all in all, you could say that this system was battery operated; both poles needing the other to drive it. The fact that the lower tier was oppressed, with very few degrees of freedom, was pretty inconsequential in relation to the value of the system as a whole.
Things have changed since then, and the changor, is energy. I don't know if you've noticed it but energy has been increasing on planet Earth. All the evolution that's been going on since the first single cell broke stride has been, by definition, the increasing ability of life to capture more of it. That can be discussed later, but in terms of civilization, the various rungs of the patriarchal ladder have been growing at different paces. To make a long story short, the king has been dethroned, i.e., wears no clothes and everybody knows it; likewise the priest class and all the other, so-called, leaders of the upper class.
Why? Because the control function, which they represented, has moved away, somewhere else. No one seems to know where it went but I'm here to tell you that it didn't go far. (I hope the religious right folks are listening because they're the ones that truly think the world has gone to hell in a hand basket--having lost their privilege). But do you think they really want to know that it hasn't? A long time ago, our reptilian brothers and sisters needed to roast on hot rocks a bit to get their morning blood moving. Later on, in just one heartbeat of the Universe, that heat function moved from the rocks to the brain. It didn't go far. But, the energy quotient did increase in the litter critter that solved that problem.
Energy is a slippery thing--here one day, gone tomorrow--goodbye Swiss watch. For eons, the kings of yesteryear were sitting pretty with all their fiefdoms and holdings. But something happened on the way to the 21st century. The battery was no longer charging. Energy didn't circle around any more. Kings lost out to monarchies, and monarchies to nasty democratic parliaments. The managerial class then became one of the biggest holdouts, stifling productivity in it's phony claim of being able to manage anything.
The deal is that energy is a democratic investor. It chooses the product that shows the most bang for its buck. Such is nature on its forward march toward condensed power--which follows a pendulum that forever vacillates between the one and the many. The one, as historically defined as the leader; i.e., the king, priest, monarch, CEO, father figure and various and sundry others, has moved to the other end of the spectrum, i.e., the underdog. And instead of the underdog being a myriad of stragglers, it's now the leaders that hold that distinction. Nature is in the process of turning over the reigns of power to the underdog. Not because of any inherent, moral superiority, but simply because that is the group that has the capacity to absorb energy. The lightening rod of absorption that the underdog represents is the principle of the universal human.
