At the outset of the 21st century, BBC invited Anthony Giddens, British 'public sociologist,' to tell about the nature of our historical moment and its challenges in a series of lectures. A result was reported in the book titled "Runaway World." In Chapter Two titled "Risk," Giddens observes:

"As a consequence of global industrial development, we may have altered the world's climate, and damaged a great deal more of our earthly habitat besides. We don't know what further changes will result, or the dangers they will bring in their train. We can make sense of these issues by saying that they are all bound up with risk. I hope to persuade you that this apparently simple notion unlocks some of the most basic characteristics of the world in which we now live."

Organized in 1968 as

"an informal, non-political, multi- national group of scientists, intellectuals, educators, and business leaders deeply concerned with the situation just sketched, who among them have decided to face the issues that confront mankind in any way which offers the hope of reaching a new level of understanding and therefore of successful action"

 The Club of Rome (specifically Özbekhan, Christakis and Jantsch) produced its statement of purpose i titled “The Predicament of Mankind," where also the meaning and the nature of 'world problematique' is explained. The idea is that our characteristic 'problems' are both so closely related, and so much part of our over-all condition, that they are best not considered in isolation but together, namely as 'problematique.' This document begins as follows:

"As in every epoch of its existence, mankind today finds itself in a particular "situation". [...]

The source of our power lies in the extraordinary technological capital we have succeeded in accumulating and in propagating, and the all-pervasive analytic or positivistic methodologies which by shaping our minds as well as our sensibilities, have enabled us to do what we have done. Yet our achievement has, in some unforeseen (perhaps unforseeable) manner, failed to satisfy those other requirements that would have permitted us to evolve in ways that, for want of a better word, we shall henceforth call "balanced." It has failed to provide us with an ethos, a morality, ideals, institutions, a vision of man and of mankind and a politics which are in consonance with the way of life that has evolved as the expression of our success. Worse, it has failed to give us a global view from which we could begin to conceive the ethos, morality, ideals, institutions, and policies requisite to an inter-dependent world --this, despite the fact that the dynamics of our technologies and of our positivistic outlooks are global in their impacts, their consequences, their endless profusion and, more importantly, in the promises they proclaim and in the promises they imply.

This failure is often regarded as having created a number of separate and discrete problems capable of being overcome by the kind of analytic solutions our intellectual tradition can so readily generate. However, the experience of the past twenty or thirty years has shown with remarkable clarity that the issues which confront us in the immediate present, as well as their undecipherable consequences over time, may not too easily yield to the methods we have employed with such success in the bending of nature to our will."

In 1980, based on a decade of research by about one hundred international experts, Aurelio Peccei, the co-founder and president of The Club of Rome concluded: 

"It is absolutely necessary to find a way to change course."

REFLECTION: Process the material offered in this node, aiming at a simple, yet sufficiently accurate view, which might serve us well to empower action; the 'change of course' or as we have called it re-evolution may simply be done by allowing our society in general, and our professions in particular, to evolve as it may better serve their function—in the new and rapidly changing circumstances. What a wonderful domain for innovation!