the naturalness of changes and attempted to explain why "blockages" occurred (Harrison 2). Progress was seen as inevitable and largely a social good. Even the radical thought of Karl Marx tended to conceptualize social life as progressing according to laws or "tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable resultsö (Harrison 2). The most highly industrialized nations were regarded as the model worthy of emulation. As the twenty-first century approach, this model of linear progress loosely modeled on Darwinian social evolution has now proven to be inadequate and even dangerous.
In Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and technology of the Twentieth Century O.B. Hardison Jr. charts the dramatic change which has occurred in modern culture since the start of this century. Hardison contends that radical shifts in the ways which the five basic areas of ônature, history, language, art, and human evolutionö have been interrelated, and have occurred during this century. The effects of these radical shifts in their concepts, vocabularies and images ôno longer seem to objectify a real world. It is as though progress were making the real world invisibleö (Hardison xi). Hardison is interesting in observing the drastic impact of science, technology, and cultural innovation upon modern consciousness. He indicates that once a cultural innovation becomes integrated within a society, it is actually helping to shape consciousness itself rather than merely contributing to its content (Hardison xii).
Analyzing the immense problems of pollution and resource allocation from a cultural perspective can help solve the immense challenge of environmental degradation. Hardison contends that despite the dominance of cultural fragmentation which seems to haunt modern times, culture must be understood as it is e
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