The Fourth Age: Fifth Edition
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Peace is advanced as a condition to be desired, yet human social orders around the world are structured in a way that peace is nearly impossible to achieve within them. The Fourth Age proposes that we can move beyond the short-term, localized periods of peace seen in the Civilized Age and advance toward a period of universal and perpetual peace. This book establishes a philosophy of life and a system of morality that have the potential to eliminate conflict at its source, but only in those associations of men that commit to the philosophy and that embrace the moral code. The book promotes principles of social interaction that flow from our humanness that will allow us to move away from faulty social paradigms of civilized cultures and advance toward an Age of Humanity. It draws upon archaeological and historical data to show how world conflict came to permeate the civilized era, and it shows how conflict can be made to subside.
John Williams
John Williams was born in Cardiff in 1961.He wrote a punk fanzine and played in bands before moving to London and becoming a journalist , writing for everyone for The Face to the Financial Times. He wrote his first book, an American crime fiction travelogue called Into The Badlands (Paladin) in 1991. His next book, Bloody Valentine (HarperCollins), written around the Lynette White murder case in the Cardiff docks, came out in 1994. Following a subsequent libel action from the police, he turned to fiction. His first novel the London-set Faithless (Serpent's Tail) came out in 1997. Shortly afterward he moved back to Cardiff, with his family, and has now written four novels set in his hometown - Five Pubs, Two Bars And A Nightclub (Bloomsbury 1999); Cardiff Dead (Bloomsbury 2000); The Prince Of Wales (Bloomsbury 2003) and Temperance Town (Bloomsbury 2004). He has edited an anthology of new Welsh fiction, Wales Half Welsh (Bloomsbury 2004). He also writes screenplays (his ninety-minute drama, A Light In The City, was shown by BBC Wales in 2001). An omnibus edition of his Cardiff novels, The Cardiff Trilogy, is to be published by Bloomsbury in summer 2006.
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The Fourth Age - John Williams
PREFACE
Peace is advanced as a condition to be desired, yet human social orders around the world are structured in a way that peace is nearly impossible to achieve within them. The Fourth Age proposes that we can move beyond the short-term, localized periods of peace seen in the Civilized Age and advance toward a period of universal and perpetual peace. This book establishes a philosophy of life and a system of morality that have the potential to eliminate conflict at its source, but only in those associations of men that commit to the philosophy and that embrace the moral code. The book promotes principles of social interaction that flow from our humanness that will allow us to move away from faulty social paradigms of civilized cultures and advance toward an Age of Humanity. It draws upon archaeological and historical data to show how world conflict came to permeate the civilized era, and it shows how conflict can be made to subside.
The crowning achievement of this book is its philosophy of humanity that is derived from qualities that define us as human and that transcend the political, religious, and economic dogmas of civilized cultures. The book establishes confidently the moral and ethical basis for conflict and war without relying on any of the prevailing belief systems. In doing so, it refutes the popular notion that love is the answer to human conflict; it suggests that something as simple as cultural tolerance and non-interference in the affairs of others might suffice.
The Fourth Age demonstrates that political, religious, and economic subjugation are the principle sources of conflict in the civilized age, and it establishes guidelines that men need to agree upon in order to eradicate conflict. The substance of such an agreement must be that all men have a natural inheritance consisting of a ration of political sovereignty, a share of the fruits of the earth, and a spiritual portion of the divinity of god, which gives them the right to govern, the right to subsist, and the obligation to maintain the balance of goodness and rightness in society.
People tend to resist being subjugated, and that is the source of conflict.
INTRODUCTION
The Fourth Age traces human cultural evolution from savage, barbarian, and civilized, toward an Age of Humanity in which peace is a condition to be desired above all else. The book proposes that men can coexist peacefully if they are willing to agree on three ideas: the shared sovereignty of mankind, the shared divinity of mankind, and the common ancestry of mankind. To see how credible and logical these ideas are, consider how they mirror and improve upon the tripartite motto that inspired the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment: "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité."
Shared Sovereignty: Liberté (Liberty)
The idea of a shared sovereignty calls for an agreement that either all people are sovereign, or that no person is sovereign. The optimistic approach—that the glass is half full instead of half empty—is that all people share sovereignty in an atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration. This idea is akin to ideas that advocate personal freedom and liberty, except that sovereignty is a more powerful concept with substantial consequences. The idea of shared sovereignty is offered as axiomatic, for acceptance by agreement, not offered for proof. It will govern social interactions when it is agreed upon by communities and associations of men.
Shared Divinity: Égalité (Equality)
The idea of shared divinity acknowledges that all people share in the divinity of god and are therefore equal in the sight of god. This is the essence of equality; if people fully embrace the idea of shared divinity, the spirit of equality will cross all boundaries of social or economic status. The idea of a shared divinity can be expressed in a variety of ways, perhaps that god is the father of all mankind, or that if any one person is divine, all people are equally divine.
Shared divinity is less about privilege and power as it is about duty and morality. People who share in a common divinity have a duty to maintain the balance of goodness and rightness in social dealings. The idea of shared divinity is not offered for proof. It becomes a common guide to social interactions when it is agreed upon.
Common Ancestry: Fraternité (Brotherhood)
The brotherhood of mankind is not an idealistic dream, but is a fact that is subject to scientific proof. Aside from theological and philosophical assertions about the shared divinity and shared sovereignty of mankind, there is genetic evidence that all humans are descendants of common ancestors who lived in Ethiopia some 160,000 years ago.¹ People everywhere can be traced by their DNA to these Ethiopians. The road to universal peace will call for people to concede to this common ancestry: to accept the evidence and to adjust to the implications.
A Philosophy for Peaceful Coexistence
Two opposing philosophies govern the interactions between men, only one of which is consistent with peaceful coexistence. The philosophy of subjugation influences the era in which we now live; this philosophy has kept the world at odds for ten millennia. The top values in its value system are wealth and prosperity above all else. The Fourth Age asserts that the converse philosophy, the philosophy of cooperation, is the one that will lead to sustained, universal, peaceful coexistence among people.
The Philosophy of Subjugation
The invention and enforcement of social institutions that perpetuate human subjugation has been the principle reason for conflict and suffering in the civilized age. Political subjugation, religious subjugation, and economic subjugation allow a small minority of people to create circumstances wherein they can exploit large masses of people in order to achieve economic and social advantage for themselves. Immense human suffering and strife have come about because of such subjugation.
We define subjugation as a pattern of social interaction in which people elevate themselves so that they can exploit others, or place others into service, in order to gain social advantage. Subjugators often resort to dominance or deception, force or fraud, to achieve their goal, and the goal is typically to accumulate or retain valuable resources and economic advantage.
People tend to resist being subjugated, and that is the source of conflict. Subjugation is the pre-eminent problem in human associations where peace is a desired outcome: it is the social evil at the root of virtually all human conflict. The world has had brief, localized periods of peace under civilized systems of subjugation, but the philosophy of subjugation and hoarding is incompatible with sustained peaceful coexistence.
The ancient Pharaohs used religion to subjugate the Egyptians. Historical warriors like Hannibal and Alexander (The Great
) were more direct and used the threat of death to help them subjugate populations with greater dispatch. The defining genius of these men and of conquerors like them was their willingness to suppress their moral consciousness about spilling human blood in order to subjugate those whom they did not kill. Existing governments use their own methods of coercion, but with rare exceptions, governments throughout the civilized age, including those today, have sustained themselves by using police or militia to impose some degree of subjugation. Human subjugation is central to virtually all prevailing modes of political, religious, and economic interaction. Nearly everything we do and much of what we believe is influenced by dangerous cultural paradigms that have no social value except to allow systems of human subjugation to be enforced.
The Philosophy of Cooperation
Humanized social interactions will be governed by a philosophy of cooperation and will be conducted in an atmosphere of collaboration and mutual consent, usually with the goal being mutual protection and the sharing of resources. The philosophy of cooperation and sharing considers the needs of the many in contrast with the philosophy of subjugation and hoarding, which caters to the greed of the few. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive and contrary to one another.² The chief value in the philosophy of humanity is peace. Although wealth and prosperity can be part of a humanized value system, they cannot be valued above peaceful coexistence.
Imagine
A society that governs itself by cooperation and sharing will seek to eliminate subjugation, the major forms of which arise from political, religious, or economic institutions of the civilized age. The John Lennon song, Imagine, from the year 1971, suggests the kind of society described in The Fourth Age. Lennon offers ideas that are quite unexpected: no countries, no religion, and no possessions. But his unexpected ideas run parallel to the goal expressed at the beginning of this paragraph.
Political Subjugation. Lennon’s call for no countries
is akin to calling for the end of political subjugation. In the humanized society described in The Fourth Age,