Los valores y la educación

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populations, victorious groups imposed their institutions on others. Many people became Christian for example, through ―conversion by the word.‖ Conquest and coercion have had as much to do with the establishment of social institutions as have consensus.

134 3.8 The Master Trends

But modern society is more than an industrial structure; it is the outcome of a number of master trends that have been going on for several hundred years. They include the following:

Capitalism

The emergence of capitalism began as far back as the thirteenth century in medieval Europe. It developed into powerful tradition destroying system of privately owned production for profit, which enormously increased material productivity, reshaped the class structure and fundamentally altered the basic institutions of society.

Industrial Technology

The development of mechanized processes vastly increased the production of goods, shifted the base of work from agriculture to industry and raised the material level of the population. Capitalism exploited technology to create wholly new factory systems of industrial manufacturing and many new specialized occupations. The development of this industrial system is what is meant by the Industrial Revolution. It is this system that makes a society into an industrial society.

Urbanization

The transformation of society by capitalism and industrialism then shifted the population from predominantly rural to predominantly urban locations. While cities are not new, only in modern society has most of the population lived in urban areas.

135 The Nation State

The ecological expansion created by industrial capitalism brought the nation state into being as the politically controlling unit, extending national loyalties into more diverse human populations than ever before.

Bureaucracy

The need to administer larger units of population brought about by ecological expansion, particularly with people from diverse cultural origins, brought into common use the bureaucratic form of organization, particularly in the economic and political spheres. Again, modern society did not invent bureaucracy, but it has made it a basic feature of its structure.

Science

Scientific knowledge is the most valued knowledge in modern society. It makes possible the control and exploitation of nature and the harnessing of varied forms of energy. From such knowledge, technological advance is assured.

Mass Education

Modern society requires, at a minimum, the literacy of all its population. Beyond that, it requires mass education to train the population in industrial techniques and skills, to build commitment and loyalty to the nation-state and its institutions, and to produce a highly trained scientific and technological class. In modern society, by contrast, the realm of the sacred shrinks.

Modern society maximizes the practical and useful. Furthermore, the rational mind of science encourages skepticism about practices not based on tested procedures. Science also develops attitudes that welcome new practical ideas and new technical knowledge. In modern society, in short, the dominant place once accorded religion is replaced by the primacy given to science, its methods and its practical application.

136 3.9 The Good Society

Communal

The good society is communal. It is a community, rather than a bureaucracy or an aggregate of unrelated people. This means that social life is based upon a consensus of values and ideals about how society should be organized and how we should live our lives. Each of us feels that we belong and are bound to enduring social relations with people we love and respect.

People care and cooperate.

Controllable

In the past, people felt that the conditions of their existence were largely beyond their control. Limited knowledge and a limited technology gave but a limited control over nature and human existence was necessarily one of scarcity and unending labour. The poverty and suffering of most human beings was accepted as inevitable. The fear of the unknown, the uses of magic, the ever present threat of disaster, even the concept of punishing gods for God in religion were expressions of this experience of limited control. Now, in modern society, science and technology have much diminished these fears of uncontrollable natural forces, yet modern people still do not feel they control the conditions of their lives. Now, it is not nature but society that seems uncontrolled, or even in control.

For modern people, a utopian image of a good society tends to emphasize the capacity of human beings to have a rational control over the circumstances of their lives. Bell warned that conflict between professionals as experts and the populace would be common in postindustrial society. Decentralization and self government become goals for social change, designed to bring the social world down to human scale and within the reasonable control of those who must live in it. But it is a goal ridiculed or even denounced in turn by those committed to the continuity of trends in modern society which will make post-industrial society seem even more uncontrollable by the majority of people.

137 Self Fulfillment

More and more in modern society increasing numbers of individuals demand the opportunity for a fulfilling and rewarding life, free of demeaning drudgery and boring routine.

They expect to be able to realize their full potential of abilities and skills. Once it was common to think that only the elite, a naturally gifted minority could achieve such self-fulfillment and personal self-development. But in the modern world, it is no longer easy to sustain such notions of a few who deserve the privilege of self realization while the rest labour in drudgery to make that possible.

The Ideal and the Possible

The concept of the good society operates at two levels, the ideal and the historical. The ideal is simply a statement of what human society is at its best, a community ordered by the values of justice, equality and liberty. At the historical level, the good society is the historically possible approximation, the nearest and best given the limitations of knowledge and technology.