Human Development/Consciousness Evolution Record Type: Review   ID: 548
The Inner Limits of Mankind: Heretical Reflections on Today's Values, Culture and Politics Laszlo, Ervin
Laszlo's thesis is that although we are rapidly reaching the outer limits of the capacity of this planet to maintain human life, the truly decisive limits are not physical or outer: they are within us. What is limiting the planet are the "psychological, cultural and, above all, political limits inner to people and societies, manifested by individual and collective mismanagement, irresponsibility and myopia . . . . There are hardly any world problems that cannot be traced to human agency and which could not be overcome by appropriate changes in behavior. The root causes even of physical and ecological problems are the inner constraints on our vision and values" (p. 26). In the second chapter he argues that "on the personal level inner limits are constituted by the `hardening of the categories' of an age that is now behind us--the age of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modernism" (p. 27). In the third chapter he points out that at the cultural level, "inner limits reside in the atrophy of positive images and visions" (p. 27) of society's future, and in people's reluctance to allow new realities to alter traditional notions of how to realize three ideals that still compel. The political level is dealt with in the fourth chapter, where he criticizes the majority of the governments of the world for failure to implement the required policies, although they may pay them lip-service. Beginning with chapter 5, he discusses what can be done. First, if we would "succeed in recognizing that what is wrong has to do with our values and behaviors, and that nothing need prevent us from righting it" (p. 28), then the primary battle would have been won. This recognition would usher us into the new age, "a global age marking the next stage" in the social and cultural evolution of humankind. Humans must come to realize that ours is a growth problem--"not of limbs but of mind and spirit" (p. 28).
Publisher Information:	London, England: Oneworld Publications, 1989. 146p. Bibl notes: 145-146

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