The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and Caste Move the Future

By Lawrence H. Taub

Copernicus and Galileos sun-centered model of the solar system gave us our view of space. Newton and Einsteins mechanical and electromagnetic models of the universe gave us our view of nature. Can the human condition be captured with a similarly universal model? Author Lawrence H. Taub believes so, and he develops three of themage, sex, and casteto reveal the deeper currents of history.

The models presented in The Spiritual Imperative clarify the past, explain the present, and help anticipate the future. Taub uses these models to make insightful forecasts of future discontinuities that answer the major questions facing us today. Some of his predictions include:

a regional political-economic block formed in the Far East and what this will mean to the world
an alliance between the U.S. and Russia and how this will develop
Israeli-Palestinian peace leading to a Pan-Semitic Union that will make the Middle East one of two main world centers of economic, political, and spiritual power in the mid-twenty-first century
the replacement of technology with religion and spirituality as the main growth market in the twenty-first century

The Spiritual Imperative provides insight into where human civilization has been and where its going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450297516

Lawrence H. Taub

Lawrence H. Taub earned a BA at New York University and a French teaching certificate at the University of Paris. He lived in Tokyo for thirty years and was an ESL instructor, freelance translator, and narrator of commercial films. Taub now lives in Jerusalem, Israel.

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Acknowledgments

PART 1

The Models

Chapter One

The Caste Model

Chapter Two

The Sex Model

Chapter Three

The Age Model

Chapter Four

Feminist Revolution and the Spiritual Age

PART 2

The Ages

Chapter Five

The Spiritual-Religious Age No. 1

Chapter Six

The Warrior Age

Chapter Seven

The Merchant Age

Chapter Eight

The Worker Age

PART 3

The Near Future

Chapter Nine

Tomorrow’s Great Powers

Chapter Ten

Ranking the Three Northern Blocs

Chapter Eleven

The East is Still Red

Chapter Twelve

Two Embarrassing Questions for the Worker Age: Should the World Imitate Japan? Does Capitalism Really Go Together with Democracy and Freedom?

PART 4

The Last Caste

Chapter Thirteen

The Last Caste Age: Spiritual-Religious Age No. 2

Chapter Fourteen

The Religious Belt: Israel, India, and Islam

Chapter Fifteen

The Great 21st Century Exodus

Chapter Sixteen

Spiritualizing the Economic System

Chapter Seventeen

The Spiritual Economy Shifts World Power to the Religious Belt

Chapter Eighteen

Africa, Indigenous Peoples, and the Peak Stage of the Spiritual Age

In memory of Ken Woodroofe

1909-1993

Foreword

Out of all the available books that tell us where human civilization has been and where it is going, what makes The Spiritual Imperative stand out? What makes Larry Taub worth listening to in preference to other futurologists and historians? Well, he makes highly accurate predictions that are very concrete. No other person I have ever read or run across has this ability to not only understand the historical process, but also to predict in considerable detail the contours of the next periods of history, including the shifts in the relations among nations. His historical vision is also extremely wide-ranging. He combines a focus on the inner and outer life, religion and political economy, that encompasses all aspects of social life from markets and production to the most august spiritual concerns.

Larry doesn’t limit himself to generalizations such as the coming of a new spiritual age in which inner knowledge and technologies of the spirit will be valued above all. After all, such predictions can be found in Aurobindo and Ken Wilber, among others. What he tells us is that this new age will have its center in the Arab world, Iran, Israel, and India. His description of the spiritual forces that will bring this new era into being is not only concrete but surprising. Women will become important leaders within the traditional religions that have been heavily patriarchal. Furthermore, liberal and fundamentalist streams within the world religions will come together as these religions undergo significant transformations. There will be both a return to the highest traditional wisdom and a greater tolerance of other religions as valid expressions of human understanding of the divine.

At a more mundane level, the spiritual economy will be supported by appropriate technology permitting sufficient consumption of necessities as well as connection with other parts of the world. Trade in religious services will flourish. In other words, Schumacher’s Buddhist economics, the communications revolution, and the religion market will have the greatest influence on economic life. Concerning international affairs, materially and militarily powerful regions will not be in confrontation with enemies and rivals, inasmuch as Gandhian non-violence will replace realpolitik as our guiding philosophy of foreign policy. This vision of a new spiritual era is highly optimistic, but the possibility of grave conflict during the transition period is not denied. For Larry, this is where human agency is a factor, since it is the response to material conditions that will determine the amount of suffering that the human race will experience in its evolution to a higher level of consciousness.

Larry also tells us why spirituality will have its greatest flowering in certain parts of the globe and not others. It is part of a developmental logic whereby one caste succeeds another in playing the leadership role within history. In addition to this caste model, Larry employs a sex model to predict that yin and yang worldviews will harmonize and the power of men and women will equalize in an androgynous society. Androgyny will emerge at the same time as the new spirituality, which Larry envisions as a turning inward leading to the experience of unity consciousness (yin aspect) plus the higher realization and development of the individual (yang aspect).

I have mentioned the caste and sex models, and such models are part of Larry’s big-picture account that resembles that of modern philosophers of history. He specializes in sweeping generalizations, but his theory contains many elements that take us far beyond a modernist outlook. The narrative of history he offers is not the Hegelian one of the advance of reason culminating in the Western intellectual tradition. Nor does he provide a typically modernist narrative of progress defined in material or intellectual terms. For him, genuine progress is defined as spiritual evolution, not greater sophistication of tools, increased consumption of energy, or differentiation of social spheres.

Equally important is that Larry does not frame his story in a Eurocentric manner. His standpoint is postmodern in that he presents a universal history that does not reflect a white male perspective. On the one hand, he foresees a coming androgynous period. On the other, his theory postulates distinctive castes with world-historical tasks whose greatest blossoming occurs in many different areas of the world. In his view, history does not allot the non-European civilizations the role of followers, condemned to sounding the same notes that the West has already played. Instead, the major civilizations are equally creative as actors on the historical stage, and each gets its day in the sun.

Larry explains the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of whether historical conditions are favorable or unfavorable for the development of a civilization’s particular genius. Different civilizations flourish in different caste ages. When the ability to raise capital is the historical requirement for success, Europe, and then the United States, are preeminent. When organizational skills in the workplace are the basis of economic effectiveness, East Asia takes the lead. And when spiritual insight becomes what is most ardently sought, India and the Middle Eastern region are the major players in the period drama.

Despite serving us a comprehensive account of human history, The Spiritual Imperative does not inhabit the rarefied world of pure theory. The writing is down to earth, humorous, and never dogmatic. Although the worldview could be labeled anarchist, feminist, and spiritual, it is a highly eclectic and inclusive vision. Much more pragmatic than ideological, this book was written so that people can anticipate future trends, thereby enabling them to tailor their actions accordingly. Communicating with an intellectual elite is clearly not the aim.

Larry’s preferred method of understanding is through both logic and intuition. Starting with the deciphering of historical patterns through the ordering of facts, he then intuits shifts and unexpected developments within history that cannot be deduced from general patterns. The predictions that have emerged are very daring and specific. For example, he accurately predicted that an Arab leader would make a trip to Israel for peace and that there would be a revolution in the Middle East in the name of religious values that rejected modern materialism.

Since my main area of interest has been U.S.-East Asia relations, I have been most impressed by Larry’s predictions about these parts of the world. He predicted a split between Japan and the United States at the end of the 1970s when nobody thought Japan would ever emerge politically from the U.S. shadow. His idea of East Asian predominance during the worker era is premised on the formation of cultural-economic blocs, which seemed very unlikely during the period of capitalist-communist confrontation in the early 1980s. But since that time, the idea of Asian values has become popular in Singapore and Malaysia, and the new Asianism has taken root in Japan. Of course, cultural-economic rivalry between the United States and East Asia has not yet taken definitive shape. But we did get a taste of what such rivalry might be like during the late 1980s when the Japanese threat became a war cry for some policy intellectuals in the United States.

Needless to say, grand theories of history and predictions of historical trends are out of fashion in our postmodern intellectual climate. They have little credibility among thinkers today, given the tendency to focus on particular cases, local perspectives, and the inseparability of power and knowledge. But Larry’s work is neither sexist nor Eurocentric, which makes his grand historical narrative rather benign. By positing equality among peoples as an axiom of his universal history, he is able to evade the pitfalls of partisanship. Therefore the appearance of objectivism and universalism in his work can be deceiving, since he has considered and incorporated a wide variety of views and subjectivities into his comprehensive take on history. He cannot be accused of imposing a limited perspective on diverse and complex phenomena.

Larry’s work also escapes orientalism in the negative sense that Said attached to it. He does not perceive the Orient as an essence whose characteristics are opposite to those of the West. It is not his purpose either to assert Western superiority over the Orient or to use the East as a vehicle for cultural criticism of the West. Despite his great respect for and understanding of traditional Eastern religions, his focus is on the premodern Orient only to the extent that it influences East Asia today. In the present worker age, he sees East Asia as having more to offer the world than Western nations; unlike most orientalists, he perceives the luminosity of the East in the future rather than the past.

What accounts for Larry’s ability to largely overcome ethnocentrism? A partial response is to point out that Larry has lived several years in India and many years in Japan. He speaks non-Western languages, has lived in Asia for long periods of time, and feels quite comfortable among non-European peoples. His departure from the United States while in his early twenties and his nomadic lifestyle ever since have made him a person who has little stake in the success of any particular group. Likewise he is quite free from the need for personal success and has never compromised his ideas or vision for the sake of patronage, popularity, money, or status.

The most fascinating issue for me concerns the source of Larry’s ability to make predictions. Perhaps it comes from the avidity and intensity of his quest to understand what he has seen and heard. Then there is also his talent for tasting life in its many and varied forms so that his logical and intuitive powers have sufficient raw material upon which to operate. But ultimately it is a mysterious gift.

Are there any areas where Larry’s ideas fall short? From my perspective, his age model suggests Eurocentrism, since he thinks that maturity is found more often in Europe than in the more yin-oriented parts of the globe. I would agree that many parts of the world are adolescent in their approach to life, but I think that different cultures are adolescent in different ways; that is, there is no single royal road to maturity upon which Dutch and Scandinavian people are farthest advanced.

Such criticism is not meant to detract from the overall value of this book. Larry’s ideas are uniquely his own, and I have been lucky enough to benefit from his understanding of history and the future so that my own vision has been broadened. Now the reader can partake of this same opportunity, and I believe your understanding of history and the future will expand in ways you cannot anticipate now. It will become a lot easier to make connections between your own life and present and future historical periods.

William Kelly

Albuquerque, New Mexico

May, 2001

Introduction

In the last decades, future forecasting, popularly called futurology, has engaged the public’s imagination. Writers like Herman Kahn, the authors of the Club of Rome report, Alvin Toffler, and John Naisbitt have written best-selling books depicting what lies or may lie ahead for the human race. The reason for futurology’s popularity, no doubt, is that events seem to move faster than ever before, people cannot make connections between them, and so the world often seems out of control. People are confused about what personal decisions to make, and governments, also confused, operate without plan, direction, or vision, simply reacting to crisis after crisis. People sense that this lack of direction and control could soon lead us to common doom through nuclear, ecological, or population explosion.

Futurists and future forecasters try to meet this need for vision and direction. Their task is urgent. But most public attention to future forecasting seems to focus on visions of scientific and technological breakthroughs that will make the world a paradise or hell, on analyses of single issues like the impact of development on the environment, on tendencies in a single country or region, or on forecasts of business and economic trends. It shows little interest in future religious, social, spiritual, sexual, and political patterns, assuming, perhaps, that these will be no different from today’s, or will change merely to conform to the presumably more important sci-tech and economic changes.

In this book I try to meet the urgent need to know the future by advancing a different perception. Of course sci-tech and business trends, like eating, sleeping, and eliminating, will remain important. But the future which this book sees is one of religious-spiritual growth, decreasing interest in business and economics, a post-capitalist economic system, an androgynous — that is, sexually-balanced — society, and the rise of new great powers whose power will be based not on military, economic, or technological strength, as hitherto, but on their religious and spiritual strength and on the newly disencumbered strength of women.

Big Pictures

Why do futurists tend to lose themselves in superficial or limited visions of sci-tech and business and fail to foresee the more profoundly relevant trends? Because they often lack or reject a big-picture approach — a comprehensive, holistic, synthetic view of history and the future that shows us how the seemingly random events of past, present, and future are linked together. That is the approach I try to apply in this book.

Instead, what have we most often seen? Early in the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler, the German historian, predicted the decline of the West. In more recent decades, Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alvin Toffler have shown that the second-wave industrial system we had been living under since the Industrial Revolution was changing into a new system, which the three authors respectively called the post-industrial society, the new industrial state, and the third wave.

More recently, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Professor Paul Kennedy showed how all great powers eventually lose their military and political strength if they fail to keep their economies healthy — a warning to the United States to deal with its economic problems or lose its political and military superiority relative to the newly-rising economic powers of the Far East and elsewhere.

Meanwhile scholars and writers signal new trends such as the rebirth of Japan, Islam, anti-Semitism, and Nazism; the rise of women, animal rights, China, and the New Age; the mass return to religion; and the downsizing of human employment, which will lead to machines, robots, and computers taking over most physical and mental work, while humans — most at least of the projected 10 billion of us — will confront lives of enforced leisure.

And two theorists have recently ignited raging debates. One, Francis Fukuyama, in a 1989 essay entitled The End of History, argued that with the collapse of communism history itself has ended: sooner or later all countries will have to adopt the only system that works, American Western-style liberal democratic capitalism. The other, Professor Samuel P. Huntington, in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, argued that with the end of the Cold War, conflicts between ideologies — liberal democracy vs. fascism vs. communism — were giving way to clashes between cultures: the West vs. Islam, Muslims vs. Hindus, the West vs. Greater China, and so on.

Of these ideas, only the ones of Spengler and Toffler are based on a big-picture approach. The other formulations I have mentioned seem to be presented (and are usually perceived) as if each were isolated and disconnected from the others and alone held the key to understanding the present and future. By contrast, the big-picture approach of this book is so spacious that it both includes and reinforces the truth (to the extent they are true) of all these conceptions, as it subordinates each to the Big Picture and puts them all in a comprehensive framework that shows how they interconnect. No single one stands out as more of a panacea or threat than it really is.

The book tries to show, for instance, not only that Professor Kennedy’s insight — that military and political power depend on economic strength — is true and urgent for the United States, but also how this truth relates to the coming post-industrial society, the decline of the West, the rise of Japan, Islam, China, anti-Semitism, women, animal rights, religious fundamentalism, the shrinkage of human employment, and so forth. It tries to answer questions raised by the debates about the end of history and the clash of cultures by showing that humanity still has three economic systems to experience before the end of history, and that the main struggles in the past and into the future were and will be neither clashes of culture nor of ideology, but clashes between the male and female principles and between castes.

The Three Dimensions of History — Age, Sex, and Caste

This book offers, to be precise, not one but three big pictures, which I call models: the Age, the Sex, and the Caste Models. Each model describes history and the future from a different perspective. Each provides a framework that explains, I believe, the seemingly random, incomprehensible, and disconnected events of history more easily and elegantly than other explanations. The models thus enable us to understand and re-evaluate the past, act and make personal and national decisions in the present, and forecast and prepare for the future in the most accurate, effective way.

Up through the nineteenth century, the big-picture approach to past and future was the normal approach, first in the form of religious grand narratives. That was because practically everyone was religious, or professed to be. God had not yet died. And every religion had its own built-in grand narrative. The Western religious grand narratives — Christian, Jewish, Islamic — explain history as divine plan, moving toward a culmination. (Eastern religious grand narratives, by contrast, envision history and future as endlessly repeated cycles.) Every individual must choose whether to participate in this divine plan and thus attain eternity, or to reject it. The Christian grand narrative predicts that one day Jesus will return and there will be a Day of Judgment. The good and the believers will be rewarded in heaven; the bad and the unbelievers will be punished in hell.

In modern times, as God died for many people and science replaced religion as their prime source of truth, secular grand narratives — often called macrohistories — gained popularity, especially in the 19th century. Auguste Comte’s positivist Law of the Three Stages is an example. That macrohistory saw world society as passing from a prehistoric theological stage to a metaphysical stage to a final positivist or scientific stage. Later in that century, Marx and Engels presented their model of history and the future as a series of socio-economic stages: Starting out with primitive communism, humanity progressed through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, and will experience worker revolution and dictatorship, the withering away of the state, and finally a worldwide socialist-anarchist classless society.

Attention Marxists and Ex-Marxists: Marxism Failed Politically Because of its Defects as a Theory of Revolution. The Idea that Corrects Them Comes from India.

This Marxist macrohistory is the most well-known, influential, and enduring in popularity and unpopularity. Right now it is out of favor. But I think that its description of the stages of history and its projection of the future are basically correct, and in fact they roughly correspond to stages in my Caste Model. (This may seem odd, since the Caste Model, as Chapter 1 will explain, is derived from the ancient Hindu philosophy of history. Why, one may ask, is the Marxist philosophy of history so similar to the Hindu one? Marx and Engels are not known to have spent time in an Indian ashram.)

However, the Marxist model has at least four distorting defects that threw its predictions and politics off and helped assure the later failures of communist systems. The Caste Model, though based on a philosophy 3,000 years older than the Marxist one, does not have these defects. (Had the many disillusioned ex-Marxists of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and later known about the Caste Model, they would have been able to turn to it as an alternative theory and philosophy of history and revolution.)

The first defect of the Marxist model was faulty defining of terms, especially the term working class. Defined too narrowly, it refers mainly to blue-collar wage labor. It should have included, like the Caste Model’s equivalent term, worker caste, anyone working for a wage, salary, fee, or nothing, such as most peasants, farmers, and professionals, and all white-collar workers, serfs, slaves, and women doing housework and childcare.

Defect number two was that the model interpreted the movement from stage to stage too rigidly and mechanically. True, worker revolution overthrows what I shall call merchant-caste capitalism, the stage that precedes it. But the model then mistakenly assumed that every country would experience the two stages in the same strict order: every country in which capitalism had fully developed would be ripe for and thus experience a worker revolution. This defect caused the Marxist model to wrongly predict worker revolutions in countries where they could not happen, such as France, Britain, and Germany, and to fail to predict them in countries where they actually would happen — Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Chapter 1 shows, I feel, how the Caste Model corrects this defect because its view of the nature of revolution — not just of worker-caste but of all caste revolution — is deeper, more subtle, and less mechanical than that of the Marxist model.

The third defect in the Marxist model is its economic determinism, the belief that economics is the determining factor in history. The model shows this bent by naming all of its stages of history by their socio-economic systems: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, etc. This defect leads to faulty prediction simply because there are deeper determining forces in history than economic ones. Here is an example from everyday life to illustrate the point: Economics cannot determine our age, sex, or caste. But all three of these significantly determine what our economic situation will be. For example, if you are old, female, and not money-oriented (i.e., not in the merchant caste), lots of money or a good job will not make you young, male, and money-oriented. But being young, male, and money-oriented will give you a much better chance at money and high-salaried jobs than being old, female, and not money-oriented.

The reason for this defect is easy to understand once one is familiar with the Caste Model. Marx, Engels, and their followers lived in one of the two most economically-determined and economically-focused of the five caste ages: the Merchant Age. Moreover, they pioneered the development of the other: the Worker Age. So they easily fell into the trap of thinking that all ages were and must be equally economically-determined.

This defect, too, distorted the Marxist model’s predictions. Like the first defect, it led Marxists into putting too much hope in the revolutionary role of blue-collar wage labor, an economic force. Second, it led them to shrug off the importance — in history, in the future, and with respect to revolution — of the non-economic factors and forces of history, especially of the warrior mentality, spirituality, religion, ethnicity and culture, and women and the female principle.

The fourth defect of the Marxist model is its arbitrariness. That is, if you were living in any one of its stages of history, you would not be able to guess what the next or later stages would be, unless you had studied the model and taken Marx’ and Engels’ word for it. If you had lived, for example, in the stage of slavery, you would have had to be clairvoyant to know that feudalism would be the next stage, then capitalism, and so forth. This is because the model was essentially devised by two persons who, in turn, had adapted ideas devised by earlier thinkers such as Hegel. It has no easily traceable deep roots in ancient collective human wisdom, culture, and experience.

The three models of this book, by contrast, seem to have predictability built into them. Whatever stage of history you happen to be in, once your attention is drawn to the ancient wisdom or everyday collective experience behind the model’s basic concept, you can easily deduce all the later stages and the broad trends which are likely to occur within them.

Subversive Macrohistories

In the twentieth century, except for the Marxist model of history in its heyday, grand narratives and macrohistories — and the big-picture holistic approach to history and the future in general — have gone out of fashion. Scholars, media commentators, historians, and futures researchers reject them outright. One reason has been that grand narratives resemble the so-called grand theories that seem to explain history too neatly and rigidly, in a scientistic rather than scientific way. Grand theorists made predictions based on their theory as if it were a flawless, scientific formula. Such theories oversimplified and overgeneralized. A second reason has been that past grand narratives/macrohistories seemed simply to no longer ring true, or had too many obvious flaws, or were too masculine in tone. A third reason has been the recent postmodern criticism. Postmodernists see macrohistory as part of the outdated modern Western tradition. They reject it along with everything modern and Western.

Politics has also played a role in the rejection. The most widely accepted macrohistory has of course been the Marxist one. It was the basis for the worldwide Marxist movement and for the communist states. The collapse of those states in Europe has left the Marxist macrohistory widely discredited, but until that collapse, it was the most popular challenge to our current capitalist system. The Marxist model sees capitalism as an outdated transition system to be replaced through revolution by communism. So naturally, long before the defects of the Marxist model became obvious, the influential elites felt threatened by its political directions. They used their influence in politics and the media to make the Marxist theory even more unfashionable and unpopular than it deserved to be.

But even apart from the Marxist one, any macrohistory worth its salt is bound to see our present political-economic system as far from what humanity is capable of and will create in the future. So in the eyes of our present elites, all salt-worthy macrohistories are subversive.

However, I suspect that the profound reason for the twentieth century’s rejection of grand narratives, macrohistories, and big pictures of history and the future is simply that, within the mainstream of scholars, media commentators, historians, and futurists, the male principle, which delights in specializing, analyzing, compartmentalizing, and fragmenting, reigned (as it still reigns) supreme. As Chapter 2 (The Sex Model) points out, the holistic, big-picture approach to things is an expression of the female principle, and in the twentieth century the Western and Westernized establishment tended to repress and reject this female principle, for reasons which will become clear in