CYCLE EIGHT

1. Evolving life embraces, in mankind, a drive towards unity and the overcoming of divisive frictions. Such frictions - different religions, cultures, ideologies, etc. - derive in no small part from diverse environments, the sorts of climatically and topographically diverse environments which the Earth has been prone to for several millennia.

2. I am not alluding here to gender and class, which are pretty constant factors irrespective of environment, but to those varieties of religion and culture which remain a source of human conflict and division.

3. Only a more uniform environment can provide the basis for a universal civilization/culture complex, the sort of universality that, while acknowledging the lower values of strength and knowledge, does justice to the higher values of beauty and, especially, truth.

4. Such an environment obviously has to be artificial, and that is why the city, considered as a man-made entity, is such an important aspect of the development of civilization and culture towards a universal peak. For the city is the means whereby living environments become artificially standardized irrespective of climatic differences, and in such urban standardization lies the key to cultural universality.

5. But the city itself can be modified in keeping with new ideological insights, and thus transmuted from alpha to omega, so to speak, as curvilinear architecture, for example, increasingly ensues - where applicable - upon the more rectilinear styles so typifying the female bias (objective) of city development in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

6. Thus it is not the city as such which is bad and morally or otherwise undesirable, as from a naturalistic perspective, but rather the prevalence of certain styles of architecture which signify a beginning rather than an end, as though in heathenistic defiance of traditional or conventional Christian-type criteria.

7. If we judge or deem certain architectural styles to be irrelevant or undesirable from a more omega-oriented and progressive standpoint, that is not the same as condemning the city outright, as though a sin or crime against Nature (whatever, according to climatic and topographical conditioning, we may consider that to be). On the contrary, the almost infinite transmutability of the city allows for the progressive overcoming of Nature as a divisive influence in human affairs and for the possibility - indeed, almost certain inevitability - of universal ideological uniformity, not, be it noted, in relation to economics (still less politics and science) but, ultimately, in relation to religion, the ne plus ultra of things when genuine, and a religion, moreover, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

8. But this religion, which I equate with Social Transcendentalism, would not be so fatuous as to fly in the face of either gender or class, since two genders (male and female) and two classes (upper and lower) give us that elemental comprehensiveness which is of the essence of reality, and which permits structural stability on both upper and lower manifestations of an objective and a subjective basis, the only basis upon which justice can be done to reality and mankind be guaranteed the avoidance of utopian partisanships of the sort which, in their advocacy of this or that gender's and/or class's interests, so plagued and characterized the twentieth century.

9. Anyone who adopts Social Transcendentalism will not be interested in building 'castles in the air' or having 'pie in the sky', for the simple reason that he will know that all the Elements - from fire and water to vegetation (earth) and air - have their place, even if with an emphasis, necessarily in relation to civilization and culture, on sensibility as opposed to sensuality.

10. Thus religion, not economics, becomes the nature and guarantor of ultimate universal unity within the framework of an ideological structure which, while acknowledging gender and class distinctions, can only really be maintained on the basis of extensive and/or intensive transmutable urbanization.

11. Opposing global capitalism and consumerism is certainly an understandable stance for those who either feel threatened by it or left out in the cold, but it is only really valid from the standpoint of religion, and that new religion, in particular, which, through the Second Coming, does ultimate justice to truth - something which no previous or traditional religion - with the partial exception of Buddhism in certain of its manifestations - has ever done.

12. However, disillusionment with traditional religion does not justify, in my view, the assumption that the only solution to an economic hegemony, as signified by global capitalism, lies in politics, as though socialism - to the extent one identifies it with a political dimension - were a viable alternative to capitalism! Frankly, it is not, and no-one in their right minds would seriously espouse a socialistic alternative to capitalism in this day and age, as if a feminine approach to economics, akin to wealth being maternally dispensed to individual members of a family, were somehow intrinsically superior to its male approach, which is responsible for the initial generation of wealth through the profit system.

13. Neither is nature conservationism and global ecology necessarily a viable alternative to capitalism, bearing in mind that Nature is responsible, in no small degree, for the different ideologies and cultures which can be found to conform, in many respects, to the type of natural environment in which they exist, be it temperate or otherwise, and that more emphasis on Nature will only reverse progress towards universal unity.

14. The city is an important factor, not the sole one by any means, but nonetheless of considerable significance in ensuring the development of environmental uniformity and the overcoming, in consequence, of natural disparities, and for this reason its development should take precedence, wherever reasonably possible, over naturalistic concerns, including undue conservationist reaction to industrial and/or urban expansion.

15. Certainly it would be wrong to assume that economics and the city were synonymous, and that global capitalism was simply a product of city development. It may be that the development of the city goes through an economic phase, a capitalist phase, as formerly it arguably went through a political and even scientific one (as with the Industrial Revolution), but that development can itself be transmuted in relation to new criteria which, steeped in revolutionary religion, aim to supersede such an economic parallel.

16. For the ultimate city - the celestial city, to employ a Bunyan-like term - must be of a religious orientation, having intimate associations with 'Kingdom Come', and for such a city to arise there must first have been the economic development of the city, a development which acts as the catalyst for subsequent development of the kind in which economics, duly subordinated to religion, is effectively transcended, and religion - and therefore God - becomes the final arbiter of right and wrong, the ultimate moral standard and guide.

17. Such a new religion presupposes a new God, and such a new God - equivalent to a Second Coming Who provides for the possibility of a democratically-achieved empowerment of the People with religious sovereignty - would require and enable not only man but woman to be put in her rightful or, rather, righteous place - righteous, that is, in relation to sensibility and the reintroduction of civilization as the necessary servant, both on phenomenal and noumenal, lower- and upper-class terms, of culture.

18. At present, however, it is man who, with his economic humanism, 'calls the shots', and not altogether without the institutionalized sanction, one might almost say, of the First Coming, viz. Christ, in certain of his denominational manifestations, so to speak. But a time will come when the ultimate criterion of truth, morality, justice, culture, etc., will reside with God, as with godly humans, and then global unity and uniformity, or unity in uniformity, will take an increasingly, though not exclusively, religious turn, as germane to its consummation on the basis of the subjectively-oriented transmutation of the city, and in keeping with the will of a socially responsible transcendentalism - the will, in short, of Social Transcendentalism.