he intensity and extent of the expansive survival
struggle, creating a series of crises along a path that leads to
self-destruction and the return of the experimenters to a condition of
pre-civilized self-containment.

We in the West, looking back on our own immediate history, refer to this
pre-civilized status as the Dark Ages. Actually, such Dark Ages are the
transition stages between two periods of experiments with the building
of civilizations. In view of this oft-repeated experience, modern man
must look upon an epoch of civilization not as a way of life, but an
adventure of suicidal self-degradation and ultimate self-destruction.

Each cycle of civilization has had its peculiarities, determined by the
geographical and historical factors surrounding its origin and
development. Yet all have had features in common. Among the common
features we would list:

1. A revolutionary movement within the societies under
consideration. In each experiment with civilization the culture pattern
was transformed from pastoral and/or agricultural to a culture based on
trade, commerce and finance; from rural to urban; from simple to
complex; from local toward universal.

2. In each case an independent, self-directing, expanding state was
built around an urban center.

3. In each experiment a simple, local, social structure was extended,
expanded, specialized, sub-divided, integrated, consolidated.

4. In each experiment a relatively static society passed into the
control of an emerging class of peddlers, merchants, traders,
speculators, business enterprisers and professionals who were not
directly involved in the conversion of nature's gifts into goods and
services ready for human use, but in political and cultural practices
which enabled the emerging bourgeois class to stabilize and extend its
wealth and power and build an economic structure that augmented unearned
income and laid the foundation for predation, exploitation and
parasitism.

5. In each experiment an amateur apparatus for defense and/or aggression
matured into a professional military means for enlarging the
geographical area and strengthening the economic and political authority
of the new trading-ruling classes. In each empire and each civilization
there was an evolution of "defense" forces from voluntary to
professional status, from subordinate to dominant status, from
participation in public life to political supremacy over all aspects of
public life.

6.