For two centuries, new ideas, institutions and practices have followed discoveries and inventions as regularly as day follows night.  The consequent flood of innovations that has swept through the West and across the planet in the past two generations has made drastic social change a matter of the utmost urgency.  The only open questions concern the direction of the changes, their rapidity, and the success of the social system in adapting itself to the shattering effects of newly released social forces.

Social change can come with the rush and turmoil of revolution or the studied step-by-considered-step constancy of the conscious improvement of society by society.  Two powerful social forces limit gradualness.  One is human impatience.  The other is the rapidity with which masses of people all over the planet are being informed of the good-life potential implicit in present-day western affluence.

Impatience is emotional rather than rational.  It is a compound of human urges on one hand and on the other hand of the frustrations built up in individuals and populations attracted by new wants and frustrated by barriers of custom-habit; the carefully constructed apparatus of direction, division and restriction (the State, the Church, the communication media), and the potent class forces of the counter-revolution.

In every modern community the media of mass communication are broadcasting information regarding the widening consumer prospects created by the current revolution in science and technology.  In every modern community there are eager, ambitious, hopeful individuals urging their fellow workers and fellow citizens to get moving toward the promised land of peace and plenty.  In every community the bureaucracy, representing the more comfortable and secure elements of the population, is asking the less well placed class groups to “take it easy,” take “one step at a time,” and remember that “Rome was not built in a day.”

Conservatives, urging law and order under the status quo, have reason on their side.  The movement of a technologically oriented community from monopoly capitalism into socialism-communism is without historical precedent and therefore largely experimental.  Plans are tentative; there are shortages of materials and particularly of skills based on experience.  Costly mistakes are made leading to delay until they can be corrected.  The counter-revolution, abundantly financed by the forces of reaction, operates constantly, in critical situations almost always through the military, to preserve the “law and order” which are the prime forces behind its wealth and its power.  In an untrod, untested area ignorance is a blank wall until it is pierced by ingenuity and innovation.  There are many ways to miss a defined objective and only a few ways to reach it.

Cautious, experienced people, living comfortably, are inclined to let well enough alone.  Restless, hopeful idealists are eager to reject, modify, improvise and replace.