"Be Vigilant" - THE AGE OF TURBULENCE BEGAN

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World is the title of a 2007 book by Alan Greenspan.  For almost 20 years, he was chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board, which oversees the entire banking system. Greenspan highlights the marked contrast between the world situation before 1914 and what followed: 

"By all contemporaneous accounts, the world prior to 1914 seemed to be moving irreversibly toward higher levels of civility and civilization; human society seemed perfectible.  The nineteenth century had brought an end to the wretched slave trade. Dehumanizing violence seemed on the decline. . . . The pace of global invention had advanced throughout the nineteenth century, bringing railroads, the telephone, the electric light, cinema, the motor care, and household conveniences to numerous to mention.  Medical science, improved nutrition, and the mass distribution of potable water had elevated the live expectancy . . . The sense of the irreversibility of such progress was universal.

But . . . "World War I was more devastating to civility and civilization than the physically far more destructive World War II: the earlier conflict destroyed an idea.  I cannot erase the thought of those World War I years, when the future of mankind appeared unencumbered and without limit. Today our outlook is starkly different from a century ago but perhaps a bit ore consonant with reality. Will terror, globlal warning, or resurgent populism do to the current  of life-advance globalization  what World War I did to the previous one? No one can be confident of the answer.

Next time: "Be Vigilant" - Conclusion of THE AGE OF TURBULENCE BEGAN

From the jw.org publications