Page 151 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

The Sweep of History … and Krishnamurti’s Challenge

transformed society. It soon replaced animal powered transport.
Engines powered by coal and later by oil fuel soon overtook energy
derived from renewables—wind- and river-powered mills—to
drive a new economy which again ushered in new values.
In cities in rapidly developing countries, you can still witness
the great migration as people leave the countryside to find work in
factories—an echo of what happened at the start of the Industrial
Revolution in Britain toward the end of the 1700s.
Its beginnings were brutal. It came at a terrible human cost.
Workers were essentially slaves to factory owners who focused on
meeting a new impulse—consumer demand.
So, what has the Industrial Revolution done for those of us
seated at the best tables? Alright, clean hot and cold water, light
and power at the touch of a switch obviously, ample food, health
care, travel—we can point to a long list of things we could no lon-
ger do without. But this progress puts us in headlong collision with
nature and with human nature.
It takes the earth one year and four months to regenerate what
humans use in a year. If we go on as we are, projections show that
we will need two earths to support us by the mid-2030s. Annoy-
ingly we have only one.
Has our shopping spree made us happy? An immense and ever
accelerating technological development has in principle brought about
enormous new possibilities for a creative and happy life. But many of
us in the modern world have felt a sense of loss, of missing something,
in spite of our great technological gains, which should have made us
feel that life has been enriched rather than impoverished.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the
ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I sug-
gest these—the world is registering important progress, but it also
faces mortal threats which result from that progress. The first
observation should empower us to act on the second. It doesn’t,
because we don’t see the deeper cause of our problems.

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