Rick Turner: History is not a process leading up to perfection in the flowering of our present "civilization."

Theory itself is not difficult.

What is often difficult is to shift oneself into a theoretical attitude, that is, to see that things in one’s experience cannot be taken for granted… The present nearly always seems to be at least fairly permanent.

In order to theorize about society perhaps the first step (psychologically) we have to make is to grasp the present as history. History is not something that has just come to an end and certainly not something that came to an end fifty years ago. Societies, including our own society, have been changing in many ways, great and small, throughout time, and there is no reason to believe that they have stopped now. History is not a process leading up to perfection in the flowering of our present ‘civilization.’

- Rick Turner