5. The Search for Meaning

Abstract

It is possible to draw certain parallels between the West\u27s present predicament and similar periods of radical change and the dislocation of values, and so to suggest that this sort of thing has happened before, that man has always come our of such situations and landed on his feet, that history is basically cyclical, and that there is no need to be unduly alarmed about our contemporary situation. While it is possible to make a very convincing case for this argument, there are three major factors which are new today. Thanks to our past territorial expansion and new techniques of communication, there is no area of the Western World whose ideas and institutions have been unchanged, Today\u27s changes are immediately carried to all parts of the world. Thus there are no longer any isolated areas to which people can go to escape change and its consequences. Also, thanks to the same means no classes in society are immune from these changes. Whereas in earlier centuries such changes affected only minority groups and limited areas, now they affect all groups and all areas. And further, as we have already noted, this combination of factors, plus the size of our institutions and their competition with one another, have served to increase the rate of change. These three new factors have helped to make our contemporary crisis both more widespread and penetrating than the others which Western Civilization has experienced. [excerpt