Every civilisation is a wager that its wisdom will keep pace with its power. Ours is the first to place that wager at planetary stakes.
A hunting band with poor ethics could damage a valley. An industrial civilisation with poor ethics can alter the chemistry of an atmosphere. The moral demand placed on a society scales with its reach, and our reach has grown faster in two centuries than in the whole preceding history of the species.
This is not an argument against capability. It is an argument about sequencing. Capability answers can we. Only conscience answers should we, and conscience is not automatically produced by capability — sometimes capability actively erodes it, by making consequences distant, abstract and statistical.
Distance is the key mechanism. A person who kills an animal with their hands knows exactly what they have done. A person who orders a product knows almost nothing about the river it polluted, the forest it displaced or the hands that made it. The moral information has been stripped out of the transaction. Not hidden — simply not carried.
Progress, in this light, is not a direction. It is a magnitude. A magnitude needs a direction supplied from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is precisely what a society’s philosophical and ethical life is for. Which is why a civilisation can grow more powerful and less coherent at the same time — and why it will experience that incoherence as anxiety long before it can name the cause.
The Gita’s central problem is closer to this than it first appears. Arjuna’s crisis is not a lack of ability; he is the most capable archer on the field. His crisis is that capability without a settled understanding of duty produces paralysis or atrocity, and he cannot tell which he is about to commit. Krishna’s answer is not to increase his power. It is to reorder his relationship to action.
That is the manoeuvre this book is trying to perform at civilisational scale.