The human future may depend upon social learning-the transposition of knowledge into culture and behavior. How this may be accomplished is being addressed by anthropologists, psychologists, and sociobiologists, and educators, although the route to an adequate answer is inherently metadisciplinary. Assessing and evaluating the driving forces of change in our society would rationally seem a high priority for the shapers of public policy. The Congress of the United States has repeatedly declined to consider legislation for an institutional capability to assess trends in population, resources, and environment. The National Environmental Policy Act, Title II, places this responsibility on the Council for Environmental Quality, but neither congresses nor presidents have supported its implementation.
Conservative opinion rejects it as a step toward centralized social planning.
In our expanding and complexifying world system, conflicting forces drive toward inadequately examined and frequently incompatible probabilities. Chaos theory has been invoked as a suggestive heuristic toward discovery of which among convoluting forces are more likely to dominate the future. Emotional and intuitive aspects of human values and behaviors are resistant to empirical inquiry-but society could benefit if their origins and consequences were better understood and evaluated.