In December 1993, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences and Humanities of the National University of Mexico organized a seminar entitled "The World Today: Situation and Alternatives." Its task was to examine the central concerns and problems facing humanity in the final stage of the 20th century, beginning with the certainty that as the "world order" that arose out of World War II disintegrates and we enter a new phase, which is barely taking shape, the irrational paradoxes and tendencies of the modern era require analysis and discovery of a "new Reason."

With the goal of inviting diagnosis, and as far as possible, explanations and prognoses as a basis for proposing alternatives to the current global, regional, and national junctures in a period of crisis and transition like the present, the participants contributing to this volume were encouraged to provide the most powerful explanations available to the social sciences. Our goal was not only to describe the "world situation," but also to identify and evaluate options and obstacles to the establishment of a humanist agenda for the 21st century.

The obstacles are greater than we imagined and must be recognized if they are to be overcome. The undeniable fact is that the three great blueprints for a less unjust world have failed for one reason or another: the social democracy of the more advanced capitalist countries, because it joined with the new colonialism of the late 19th century; the "real socialism" of the East, because it could not overcome totalitarian dictatorship and fell into corruption; the nationalism of the poor countries, because it drifted into corrupt authoritarian populism and the chauvinism of the caciques (political bosses) that preceded and accompanied the chauvinism of the peddlers of associated dependency.

Those great blueprints achieved greater social justice than did liberalism and the established social structures that late 20th century neoliberalism has destroyed or seeks to destroy. Yet, for a variety of reasons, social democracy, populism, and "real socialism" increased social justice only in limited periods and spaces, whereas new and crueler injustices now threaten "the South" and other points on the compass.

The world economic system is subordinated to a kind of exclusionary globalization. Without promoting equity or economic expansion, such globalization is taking place in the context of dispersal of advanced technologies in atomic explosives, ballistic armaments, and chemical-bacteriological warfare inherited from the Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. All of this makes the modern world's predicament objectively overwhelming, urgently requiring new proposals and options; it also enhances the importance of serious research in the social sciences.

For example, let us consider studies on the distribution of wealth and income in this context. They show us that inequality has not only tended to increase in modern times, but has also accelerated since the Industrial Revolution. Inequality at the end of the 20th century is calculated as greater than it was in 1930 and is greater in the 1990s than it was 20 years ago. To the foregoing must be added a new empirical reality: threats to the environment, the depletion of nonrenewable natural resources like oil, the destruction of renewable natural resources like the tropical rain forests, the dangers of using new sources of energy with their concomitant atmospheric pollution from nuclear waste, and many other forms of what has come to be denounced using numbers, dates, and places as the danger of ecocide -- all of which receives insufficient attention.

Since the chapters here examine numerous regions and nations of today's world and a vast array of problems, and the collection is characterized by a historical and interdisciplinary approach, this volume is a useful tool for basic analysis. It offers the reader a wealth of studies providing a comparative overview of a variety of contrasting forms, results, and impacts of such processes as globalization and the simultaneous reformulation of the economic-financial, trade, and political-strategic system of social interactions in diverse regions, nations, and societies.

These essays provide a clear view of how the historical and anthropological components of social classes and their mediations are subjected to unprecedented pressures; these are manifested in diverse forms of political instability that could lead to traumatic expressions of political violence like those that occurred in the 1930s, leading up to the Second World War.

The end of the Cold War today seems to have unleashed forces that were either latent in, or suppressed by, that great ideological confrontation: tribalism, religious fundamentalism, racial conflict, and xenophobia. All of these reveal deep-seated fragmentation of the structure of mass society amid decomposition of the global productive apparatus and the threat of financial chaos. Under these circumstances, humanity is reaching the end of the century and the unsteady threshold of a new millennium facing problems it will be unable to overcome without knowledge of the scope of historical resistances and their importance to the functioning of, both determined by and creating, the current and future system.

In 1936, Dutch historian J.H. Huizinga synthesized the serious dilemmas and challenges facing humanity at the time. Many of them persist today on a scale never before recorded in human memory. At risk is the very framework of biochemical reference, the vital envelope supporting humanity's ability to make history. The currency and validity of the studies in this volume may help us understand the true magnitude and obstinate persistence of historical resistances, and of the challenges and problems we face at the turn of the millennium.

"We are living in a demented world. And we know it," wrote Huizinga (1936) shortly before the horror of the World War II. He continued,

After the war and the dropping of the atom bombs, Norbert Wiener, the American mathematician who introduced cybernetics, came to Mexico's National Cardiology Institute to discuss his book, The Human Use of Human Beings (1954), with Arturo Rosenbluth and Manuel Sandoval Vallarta. His book had warned against the dangers threatening the survival of humanity. He pointed out that such dangers might be imminent and that it would be impossible for humanity to live another 500 years the way it had been living in the past, abusing what he called the Fifth Freedom, the freedom to exploit material and human resources, leaving to speculation, corruption, and consumerist privilege, the banker's business of drugs and arms; all of this implied an uncertain future for human survival. Wiener was another pioneer in removing the subject of survival from rhetorical or emotional discourse, so as to insert it into the very heart of scientific and humanistic knowledge of our time. His concerns have been confirmed in our day, as have his warnings: the intensification of risk to the fragile ecosystem is not a linear process; the slightest change, a drop, may bring about the end of the world as we know it. Wiener maintained, on the basis of his mathematical and cybernetic models, that a solution is possible if the alternatives of a truly democratic, free, and just blueprint are set in motion.