Major Trends 20 years on
This just came in from Howard Snyder. Over the next few days I’ll be publishing Howard Snyder’s update to the Ten Major Trends.
Steve
Thanks for sending me the comments by yourself and several others regarding the “Ten Major Trends” that Dan Runyon and I highlighted in our 1986 book, Foresight. I found a number of the comments very insightful and generally agree with them.
Here are a few of my own reflections and “second thoughts” regarding these ten trends. Another issue is what new trends do we see emerging now?
In 1995 I published “Earthcurrents: The Struggle for the World’s Soul” (Howard A. Snyder), which probably some of your readers have seen. I originally conceived of this as an update to Foresight but it developed into something else—a survey of global trends and an inventory of worldviews. Here I was dealing less with the church than with global society.
The eight trends analyzed there are:
1. The coming of online global society (Internet, etc.)
2. Economic globalization
3. The feminist revolution
4. Environment at risk—global warming, species depletion, water, etc.
5. The genetics and quantum physics revolutions (DNA, superstrings)
6. Virtual reality and artificial intelligence
7. Cultural and economic decline of the U.S.
8. Global culture vs. global clash of civilizations
These also deserve some updating comment, but that will have to wait for another time except for some scattered references.
Howard
