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To an extent unimaginable a decade ago, the ideal of world peace
is taking on form and substance. Obstacles that long seemed immovable
have collapsed in humanity's path; apparently irreconcilable conflicts
have begun to surrender to processes of consultation and resolution;
a willingness to counter military aggression through unified international
action is emerging. The effect has been to awaken in both the
masses of humanity and many world leaders a degree of hopefulness
about the future of our planet that had been nearly extinguished.
- Throughout the world, immense intellectual and spiritual energies
are seeking expression, energies whose gathering pressure is in
direct proportion to the frustrations of recent decades. Everywhere
the signs multiply that the earth's peoples yearn for an end to
conflict and to the suffering and ruin from which no land is any
longer immune. These rising impulses for change must be seized
upon and channeled into overcoming the remaining barriers that
block realization of the age-old dream of global peace. The effort
of will required for such a task cannot be summoned up merely
by appeals for action against the countless ills afflicting society.
It must be galvanized by a vision of human prosperity in the fullest
sense of the term -- an awakening to the possibilities of the
spiritual and material well-being now brought within grasp. Its
beneficiaries must be all of the planet's inhabitants, without
distinction, without the imposition of conditions unrelated to
the fundamental goals of such a reorganization of human affairs.
- History has thus far recorded principally the experience of tribes,
cultures, classes, and nations. With the physical unification
of the planet in this century and acknowledgement of the interdependence
of all who live on it, the history of humanity as one people is
now beginning. The long, slow civilizing of human character has
been a sporadic development, uneven and admittedly inequitable
in the material advantages it has conferred. Nevertheless, endowed
with the wealth of all the genetic and cultural diversity that
has evolved through past ages, the earth's inhabitants are now
challenged to draw on their collective inheritance to take up,
consciously and systematically, the responsibility for the design
of their future.
- It is unrealistic to imagine that the vision of the next stage
in the advancement of civilization can be formulated without a
searching reexamination of the attitudes and assumptions that
currently underlie approaches to social and economic development.
At the most obvious level, such rethinking will have to address
practical matters of policy, resource utilization, planning procedures,
implementation methodologies, and organization. As it proceeds,
however, fundamental issues will quickly emerge, related to the
long-term goals to be pursued, the social structures required,
the implications for development of principles of social justice,
and the nature and role of knowledge in effecting enduring change.
Indeed, such a reexamination will be driven to seek a broad consensus
of understanding about human nature itself.
- Two avenues of discussion open directly onto all of these issues,
whether conceptual or practical, and it is along these two avenues
that we wish to explore, in the pages that follow, the subject
of a strategy of global development. The first is prevailing beliefs
about the nature and purpose of the development process; the second
is the roles assigned in it to the various protagonists.
- The assumptions directing most of current development planning
are essentially materialistic. That is to say, the purpose of
development is defined in terms of the successful cultivation
in all societies of those means for the achievement of material
prosperity that have, through trial and error, already come to
characterize certain regions of the world. Modifications in development
discourse do indeed occur, accommodating differences of culture
and political system and responding to the alarming dangers posed
by environmental degradation. Yet the underlying materialistic
assumptions remain essentially unchallenged.
- As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is no longer possible
to maintain the belief that the approach to social and economic
development to which the materialistic conception of life has
given rise is capable of meeting humanity's needs. Optimistic
forecasts about the changes it would generate have vanished into
the ever-widening abyss that separates the living standards of
a small and relatively diminishing minority of the world's inhabitants
from the poverty experienced by the vast majority of the globe's
population.
- This unprecedented economic crisis, together with the social breakdown
it has helped to engender, reflects a profound error of conception
about human nature itself. For the levels of response elicited
from human beings by the incentives of the prevailing order are
not only inadequate, but seem almost irrelevant in the face of
world events. We are being shown that, unless the development
of society finds a purpose beyond the mere amelioration of material
conditions, it will fail of attaining even these goals. That purpose
must be sought in spiritual dimensions of life and motivation
that transcend a constantly changing economic landscape and an
artificially imposed division of human societies into "developed"
and "developing".
- As the purpose of development is being redefined, it will become
necessary also to look again at assumptions about the appropriate
roles to be played by the protagonists in the process. The crucial
role of government, at whatever level, requires no elaboration.
Future generations, however, will find almost incomprehensible
the circumstance that, in an age paying tribute to an egalitarian
philosophy and related democratic principles, development planning
should view the masses of humanity as essentially recipients of
benefits from aid and training. Despite acknowledgement of participation
as a principle, the scope of the decision making left to most
of the world's population is at best secondary, limited to a range
of choices formulated by agencies inaccessible to them and determined
by goals that are often irreconcilable with their perceptions
of reality.
- This approach is even endorsed, implicitly if not explicitly,
by established religion. Burdened by traditions of paternalism,
prevailing religious thought seems incapable of translating an
expressed faith in the spiritual dimensions of human nature into
confidence in humanity's collective capacity to transcend material
conditions.
- Such an attitude misses the significance of what is likely the
most important social phenomenon of our time. If it is true that
the governments of the world are striving through the medium of
the United Nations system to construct a new global order, it
is equally true that the peoples of the world are galvanized by
this same vision. Their response has taken the form of a sudden
efflorescence of countless movements and organizations of social
change at local, regional, and international levels. Human rights,
the advance of women, the social requirements of sustainable economic
development, the overcoming of prejudices, the moral education
of children, literacy, primary health care, and a host of other
vital concerns each commands the urgent advocacy of organizations
supported by growing numbers in every part of the globe.
- This response of the world's people themselves to the crying needs
of the age echoes the call that Bahá'u'lláh raised
over a hundred years ago: "Be anxiously concerned with the
needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on
its exigencies and requirements." The transformation in the
way that great numbers of ordinary people are coming to see themselves
-- a change that is dramatically abrupt in the perspective of
the history of civilization -- raises fundamental questions about
the role assigned to the general body of humanity in the planning
of our planet's future.
I
- The bedrock of a strategy that can engage the world's population
in assuming responsibility for its collective destiny must be
the consciousness of the oneness of humankind. Deceptively simple
in popular discourse, the concept that humanity constitutes a
single people presents fundamental challenges to the way that
most of the institutions of contemporary society carry out their
functions. Whether in the form of the adversarial structure of
civil government, the advocacy principle informing most of civil
law, a glorification of the struggle between classes and other
social groups, or the competitive spirit dominating so much of
modern life, conflict is accepted as the mainspring of human interaction.
It represents yet another expression in social organization of
the materialistic interpretation of life that has progressively
consolidated itself over the past two centuries.
- In a letter addressed to Queen Victoria over a century ago, and
employing an analogy that points to the one model holding convincing
promise for the organization of a planetary society, Bahá'u'lláh
compared the world to the human body. There is, indeed, no other
model in phenomenal existence to which we can reasonably look.
Human society is composed not of a mass of merely differentiated
cells but of associations of individuals, each one of whom is
endowed with intelligence and will; nevertheless, the modes of
operation that characterize man's biological nature illustrate
fundamental principles of existence. Chief among these is that
of unity in diversity. Paradoxically, it is precisely the wholeness
and complexity of the order constituting the human body -- and
the perfect integration into it of the body's cells -- that permit
the full realization of the distinctive capacities inherent in
each of these component elements. No cell lives apart from the
body, whether in contributing to its functioning or in deriving
its share from the well-being of the whole. The physical well-being
thus achieved finds its purpose in making possible the expression
of human consciousness; that is to say, the purpose of biological
development transcends the mere existence of the body and its
parts.
- What is true of the life of the individual has its parallels in
human society. The human species is an organic whole, the leading
edge of the evolutionary process. That human consciousness necessarily
operates through an infinite diversity of individual minds and
motivations detracts in no way from its essential unity. Indeed,
it is precisely an inhering diversity that distinguishes unity
from homogeneity or uniformity. What the peoples of the world
are today experiencing, Bahá'u'lláh said, is their
collective coming-of-age, and it is through this emerging maturity
of the race that the principle of unity in diversity will find
full expression. From its earliest beginnings in the consolidation
of family life, the process of social organization has successively
moved from the simple structures of clan and tribe, through multitudinous
forms of urban society, to the eventual emergence of the nation-state,
each stage opening up a wealth of new opportunities for the exercise
of human capacity.
- Clearly, the advancement of the race has not occurred at the expense
of human individuality. As social organization has increased,
the scope for the expression of the capacities latent in each
human being has correspondingly expanded. Because the relationship
between the individual and society is a reciprocal one, the transformation
now required must occur simultaneously within human consciousness
and the structure of social institutions. It is in the opportunities
afforded by this twofold process of change that a strategy of
global development will find its purpose. At this crucial stage
of history, that purpose must be to establish enduring foundations
on which planetary civilization can gradually take shape.
- Laying the groundwork for global civilization calls for the creation
of laws and institutions that are universal in both character
and authority. The effort can begin only when the concept of the
oneness of humanity has been wholeheartedly embraced by those
in whose hands the responsibility for decision making rests, and
when the related principles are propagated through both educational
systems and the media of mass communication. Once this threshold
is crossed, a process will have been set in motion through which
the peoples of the world can be drawn into the task of formulating
common goals and committing themselves to their attainment. Only
so fundamental a reorientation can protect them, too, from the
age-old demons of ethnic and religious strife. Only through the
dawning consciousness that they constitute a single people will
the inhabitants of the planet be enabled to turn away from the
patterns of conflict that have dominated social organization in
the past and begin to learn the ways of collaboration and conciliation.
"The well-being of mankind," Bahá'u'lláh
writes, "its peace and security, are unattainable unless
and until its unity is firmly established."
II
- Justice is the one power that can translate the dawning consciousness
of humanity's oneness into a collective will through which the
necessary structures of global community life can be confidently
erected. An age that sees the people of the world increasingly
gaining access to information of every kind and to a diversity
of ideas will find justice asserting itself as the ruling principle
of successful social organization. With ever greater frequency,
proposals aiming at the development of the planet will have to
submit to the candid light of the standards it requires.
- At the individual level, justice is that faculty of the human
soul that enables each person to distinguish truth from falsehood.
In the sight of God, Bahá'u'lláh avers, justice
is "the best beloved of all things" since it permits
each individual to see with his own eyes rather than the eyes
of others, to know through his own knowledge rather than the knowledge
of his neighbor or his group. It calls for fair-mindedness in
one's judgments, for equity in one's treatment of others, and
is thus a constant if demanding companion in the daily occasions
of life.
- At the group level, a concern for justice is the indispensable
compass in collective decision making, because it is the only
means by which unity of thought and action can be achieved. Far
from encouraging the punitive spirit that has often masqueraded
under its name in past ages, justice is the practical expression
of awareness that, in the achievement of human progress, the interests
of the individual and those of society are inextricably linked.
To the extent that justice becomes a guiding concern of human
interaction, a consultative climate is encouraged that permits
options to be examined dispassionately and appropriate courses
of action selected. In such a climate the perennial tendencies
toward manipulation and partisanship are far less likely to deflect
the decision-making process.
- The implications for social and economic development are profound.
Concern for justice protects the task of defining progress from
the temptation to sacrifice the well-being of the generality of
humankind -- and even of the planet itself -- to the advantages
which technological breakthroughs can make available to privileged
minorities. In design and planning, it ensures that limited resources
are not diverted to the pursuit of projects extraneous to a community's
essential social or economic priorities. Above all, only development
programs that are perceived as meeting their needs and as being
just and equitable in objective can hope to engage the commitment
of the masses of humanity, upon whom implementation depends. The
relevant human qualities such as honesty, a willingness to work,
and a spirit of cooperation are successfully harnessed to the
accomplishment of enormously demanding collective goals when every
member of society -- indeed every component group within society
-- can trust that they are protected by standards and assured
of benefits that apply equally to all.
- At the heart of the discussion of a strategy of social and economic
development, therefore, lies the issue of human rights. The shaping
of such a strategy calls for the promotion of human rights to
be freed from the grip of the false dichotomies that have for
so long held it hostage. Concern that each human being should
enjoy the freedom of thought and action conducive to his or her
personal growth does not justify devotion to the cult of individualism
that so deeply corrupts many areas of contemporary life. Nor does
concern to ensure the welfare of society as a whole require a
deification of the state as the supposed source of humanity's
well-being. Far otherwise: the history of the present century
shows all too clearly that such ideologies and the partisan agendas
to which they give rise have been themselves the principal enemies
of the interests they purport to serve. Only in a consultative
framework made possible by the consciousness of the organic unity
of humankind can all aspects of the concern for human rights find
legitimate and creative expression.
- Today, the agency on whom has devolved the task of creating this
framework and of liberating the promotion of human rights from
those who would exploit it is the system of international institutions
born out of the tragedies of two ruinous world wars and the experience
of worldwide economic breakdown. Significantly, the term "human
rights"has come into general use only since the promulgation
of the United Nations Charter in l945 and the adoption of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later. In these
history-making documents, formal recognition has been given to
respect for social justice as a correlative of the establishment
of world peace. The fact that the Declaration passed without a
dissenting vote in the General Assembly conferred on it from the
outset an authority that has grown steadily in the intervening
years.
- The activity most intimately linked to the consciousness that
distinguishes human nature is the individual's exploration of
reality for himself or herself. The freedom to investigate the
purpose of existence and to develop the endowments of human nature
that make it achievable requires protection. Human beings must
be free to know. That such freedom is often abused and such abuse
grossly encouraged by features of contemporary society does not
detract in any degree from the validity of the impulse itself.
- It is this distinguishing impulse of human consciousness that
provides the moral imperative for the enunciation of many of the
rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration and the related
Covenants. Universal education, freedom of movement, access to
information, and the opportunity to participate in political life
are all aspects of its operation that require explicit guarantee
by the international community. The same is true of freedom of
thought and belief, including religious liberty, along with the
right to hold opinions and express these opinions appropriately.
- Since the body of humankind is one and indivisible, each member
of the race is born into the world as a trust of the whole. This
trusteeship constitutes the moral foundation of most of the other
rights -- principally economic and social -- which the instruments
of the United Nations are attempting similarly to define. The
security of the family and the home, the ownership of property,
and the right to privacy are all implied in such a trusteeship.
The obligations on the part of the community extend to the provision
of employment, mental and physical health care, social security,
fair wages, rest and recreation, and a host of other reasonable
expectations on the part of the individual members of society.
- The principle of collective trusteeship creates also the right
of every person to expect that those cultural conditions essential
to his or her identity enjoy the protection of national and international
law. Much like the role played by the gene pool in the biological
life of humankind and its environment, the immense wealth of cultural
diversity achieved over thousands of years is vital to the social
and economic development of a human race experiencing its collective
coming-of-age. It represents a heritage that must be permitted
to bear its fruit in a global civilization. On the one hand, cultural
expressions need to be protected from suffocation by the materialistic
influences currently holding sway. On the other, cultures must
be enabled to interact with one another in ever-changing patterns
of civilization, free of manipulation for partisan political ends.
- "The light of men", Bahá'u'lláh says, "is Justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity
among men. The ocean of divine wisdom surgeth within this exalted
word, while the books of the world cannot contain its inner significance."
III
- In order for the standard of human rights now in the process of
formulation by the community of nations to be promoted and established
as prevailing international norms, a fundamental redefinition
of human relationships is called for. Present-day conceptions
of what is natural and appropriate in relationships -- among human
beings themselves, between human beings and nature, between the
individual and society, and between the members of society and
its institutions -- reflect levels of understanding arrived at
by the human race during earlier and less mature stages in its
development. If humanity is indeed coming of age, if all the inhabitants
of the planet constitute a single people, if justice is to be
the ruling principle of social organization -- then existing conceptions
that were born out of ignorance of these emerging realities have
to be recast.
- Movement in this direction has barely begun. It will lead, as
it unfolds, to a new understanding of the nature of the family
and of the rights and responsibilities of each of its members.
It will entirely transform the role of women at every level of
society. Its effect in reordering people's relation to the work
they do and their understanding of the place of economic activity
in their lives will be sweeping. It will bring about far-reaching
changes in the governance of human affairs and in the institutions
created to carry it out. Through its influence, the work of society's
rapidly proliferating non-governmental organizations will be increasingly
rationalized. It will ensure the creation of binding legislation
that will protect both the environment and the development needs
of all peoples. Ultimately, the restructuring or transformation
of the United Nations system that this movement is already bringing
about will no doubt lead to the establishment of a world federation
of nations with its own legislative, judicial, and executive bodies.
- Central to the task of reconceptualizing the system of human relationships
is the process that Bahá'u'lláh refers to as consultation.
"In all things it is necessary to consult," is His advice.
"The maturity of the gift of understanding is made manifest
through consultation."
- The standard of truth seeking this process demands is far beyond
the patterns of negotiation and compromise that tend to characterize
the present-day discussion of human affairs. It cannot be achieved
-- indeed, its attainment is severely handicapped -- by the culture
of protest that is another widely prevailing feature of contemporary
society. Debate, propaganda, the adversarial method, the entire
apparatus of partisanship that have long been such familiar features
of collective action are all fundamentally harmful to its purpose:
that is, arriving at a consensus about the truth of a given situation
and the wisest choice of action among the options open at any
given moment.
- What Bahá'u'lláh is calling for is a consultative
process in which the individual participants strive to transcend
their respective points of view, in order to function as members
of a body with its own interests and goals. In such an atmosphere,
characterized by both candor and courtesy, ideas belong not to
the individual to whom they occur during the discussion but to
the group as a whole, to take up, discard, or revise as seems
to best serve the goal pursued. Consultation succeeds to the extent
that all participants support the decisions arrived at, regardless
of the individual opinions with which they entered the discussion.
Under such circumstances an earlier decision can be readily reconsidered
if experience exposes any shortcomings.
- Viewed in such a light, consultation is the operating expression
of justice in human affairs. So vital is it to the success of
collective endeavor that it must constitute a basic feature of
a viable strategy of social and economic development. Indeed,
the participation of the people on whose commitment and efforts
the success of such a strategy depends becomes effective only
as consultation is made the organizing principle of every project.
"No man can attain his true station," is Bahá'u'lláh's
counsel, "except through his justice. No power can exist
except through unity. No welfare and no well-being can be attained
except through consultation."
IV
- The tasks entailed in the development of a global society call
for levels of capacity far beyond anything the human race has
so far been able to muster. Reaching these levels will require
an enormous expansion in access to knowledge, on the part of individuals
and social organizations alike. Universal education will be an
indispensable contributor to this process of capacity building,
but the effort will succeed only as human affairs are so reorganized
as to enable both individuals and groups in every sector of society
to acquire knowledge and apply it to the shaping of human affairs.
- Throughout recorded history, human consciousness has depended
upon two basic knowledge systems through which its potentialities
have progressively been expressed: science and religion. Through
these two agencies, the race's experience has been organized,
its environment interpreted, its latent powers explored, and its
moral and intellectual life disciplined. They have acted as the
real progenitors of civilization. With the benefit of hindsight,
it is evident, moreover, that the effectiveness of this dual structure
has been greatest during those periods when, each in its own sphere,
religion and science were able to work in concert.
- Given the almost universal respect in which science is currently
held, its credentials need no elaboration. In the context of a
strategy of social and economic development, the issue rather
is how scientific and technological activity is to be organized.
If the work involved is viewed chiefly as the preserve of established
elites living in a small number of nations, it is obvious that
the enormous gap which such an arrangement has already created
between the world's rich and poor will only continue to widen,
with the disastrous consequences for the world's economy already
noted. Indeed, if most of humankind continue to be regarded mainly
as users of products of science and technology created elsewhere,
then programs ostensibly designed to serve their needs cannot
properly be termed "development."
- A central challenge, therefore -- and an enormous one -- is the
expansion of scientific and technological activity. Instruments
of social and economic change so powerful must cease to be the
patrimony of advantaged segments of society, and must be so organized
as to permit people everywhere to participate in such activity
on the basis of capacity. Apart from the creation of programs
that make the required education available to all who are able
to benefit from it, such reorganization will require the establishment
of viable centers of learning throughout the world, institutions
that will enhance the capability of the world's peoples to participate
in the generation and application of knowledge. Development strategy,
while acknowledging the wide differences of individual capacity,
must take as a major goal the task of making it possible for all
of the earth's inhabitants to approach on an equal basis the processes
of science and technology which are their common birthright. Familiar
arguments for maintaining the status quo grow daily less compelling
as the accelerating revolution in communication technologies now
brings information and training within reach of vast numbers of
people around the globe, wherever they may be, whatever their
cultural backgrounds.
- The challenges facing humanity in its religious life, if different
in character, are equally daunting. For the vast majority of the
world's population, the idea that human nature has a spiritual
dimension -- indeed that its fundamental identity is spiritual
-- is a truth requiring no demonstration. It is a perception of
reality that can be discovered in the earliest records of civilization
and that has been cultivated for several millennia by every one
of the great religious traditions of humanity's past. Its enduring
achievements in law, the fine arts, and the civilizing of human
intercourse are what give substance and meaning to history. In
one form or another its promptings are a daily influence in the
lives of most people on earth and, as events around the world
today dramatically show, the longings it awakens are both inextinguishable
and incalculably potent.
- It would seem obvious, therefore, that efforts of any kind to
promote human progress must seek to tap capacities so universal
and so immensely creative. Why, then, have spiritual issues facing
humanity not been central to the development discourse? Why have
most of the priorities -- indeed most of the underlying assumptions
-- of the international development agenda been determined so
far by materialistic world views to which only small minorities
of the earth's population subscribe? How much weight can be placed
on a professed devotion to the principle of universal participation
that denies the validity of the participants' defining cultural
experience?
- It may be argued that, since spiritual and moral issues have historically
been bound up with contending theological doctrines which are
not susceptible of objective proof, these issues lie outside the
framework of the international community's development concerns.
To accord them any significant role would be to open the door
to precisely those dogmatic influences that have nurtured social
conflict and blocked human progress. There is doubtless a measure
of truth in such an argument. Exponents of the world's various
theological systems bear a heavy responsibility not only for the
disrepute into which faith itself has fallen among many progressive
thinkers, but for the inhibitions and distortions produced in
humanity's continuing discourse on spiritual meaning. To conclude,
however, that the answer lies in discouraging the investigation
of spiritual reality and ignoring the deepest roots of human motivation
is a self-evident delusion. The sole effect, to the degree that
such censorship has been achieved in recent history, has been
to deliver the shaping of humanity's future into the hands of
a new orthodoxy, one which argues that truth is amoral and facts
are independent of values.
- So far as earthly existence is concerned, many of the greatest
achievements of religion have been moral in character. Through
its teachings and through the examples of human lives illumined
by these teachings, masses of people in all ages and lands have
developed the capacity to love. They have learned to discipline
the animal side of their natures, to make great sacrifices for
the common good, to practice forgiveness, generosity, and trust,
to use wealth and other resources in ways that serve the advancement
of civilization. Institutional systems have been devised to translate
these moral advances into the norms of social life on a vast scale.
However obscured by dogmatic accretions and diverted by sectarian
conflict, the spiritual impulses set in motion by such transcendent
figures as Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Muhammad
have been the chief influence in the civilizing of human character.
- Since, then, the challenge is the empowerment of humankind through
a vast increase in access to knowledge, the strategy that can
make this possible must be constructed around an ongoing and intensifying
dialogue between science and religion. It is -- or by now should
be -- a truism that, in every sphere of human activity and at
every level, the insights and skills that represent scientific
accomplishment must look to the force of spiritual commitment
and moral principle to ensure their appropriate application. People
need, for example, to learn how to separate fact from conjecture
-- indeed to distinguish between subjective views and objective
reality; the extent to which individuals and institutions so equipped
can contribute to human progress, however, will be determined
by their devotion to truth and their detachment from the promptings
of their own interests and passions. Another capacity that science
must cultivate in all people is that of thinking in terms of process,
including historical process; however, if this intellectual advancement
is to contribute ultimately to promoting development, its perspective
must be unclouded by prejudices of race, culture, sex, or sectarian
belief. Similarly, the training that can make it possible for
the earth's inhabitants to participate in the production of wealth
will advance the aims of development only to the extent that such
an impulse is illumined by the spiritual insight that service
to humankind is the purpose of both individual life and social
organization.
V
- It is in the context of raising the level of human capacity through
the expansion of knowledge at all levels that the economic issues
facing humankind need to be addressed. As the experience of recent
decades has demonstrated, material benefits and endeavors cannot
be regarded as ends in themselves. Their value consists not only
in providing for humanity's basic needs in housing, food, health
care, and the like, but in extending the reach of human abilities.
The most important role that economic efforts must play in development
lies, therefore, in equipping people and institutions with the
means through which they can achieve the real purpose of development:
that is, laying foundations for a new social order that can cultivate
the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness.
- The challenge to economic thinking is to accept unambiguously
this purpose of development -- and its own role in fostering creation
of the means to achieve it. Only in this way can economics and
the related sciences free themselves from the undertow of the
materialistic preoccupations that now distract them, and fulfill
their potential as tools vital to achieving human well-being in
the full sense of the term. Nowhere is the need for a rigorous
dialogue between the work of science and the insights of religion
more apparent.
- The problem of poverty is a case in point. Proposals aimed at
addressing it are predicated on the conviction that material resources
exist, or can be created by scientific and technological endeavor,
which will alleviate and eventually entirely eradicate this age-old
condition as a feature of human life. A major reason why such
relief is not achieved is that the necessary scientific and technological
advances respond to a set of priorities only tangentially related
to the real interests of the generality of humankind. A radical
reordering of these priorities will be required if the burden
of poverty is finally to be lifted from the world. Such an achievement
demands a determined quest for appropriate values, a quest that
will test profoundly both the spiritual and scientific resources
of humankind. Religion will be severely hampered in contributing
to this joint undertaking so long as it is held prisoner by sectarian
doctrines which cannot distinguish between contentment and mere
passivity and which teach that poverty is an inherent feature
of earthly life, escape from which lies only in the world beyond.
To participate effectively in the struggle to bring material well-being
to humanity, the religious spirit must find -- in the Source of
inspiration from which it flows -- new spiritual concepts and
principles relevant to an age that seeks to establish unity and
justice in human affairs.
- Unemployment raises similar issues. In most of contemporary thinking,
the concept of work has been largely reduced to that of gainful
employment aimed at acquiring the means for the consumption of
available goods. The system is circular: acquisition and consumption
resulting in the maintenance and expansion of the production of
goods and, in consequence, in supporting paid employment. Taken
individually, all of these activities are essential to the well-being
of society. The inadequacy of the overall conception, however,
can be read in both the apathy that social commentators discern
among large numbers of the employed in every land and the demoralization
of the growing armies of the unemployed.
- Not surprisingly, therefore, there is increasing recognition that
the world is in urgent need of a new "work ethic." Here
again, nothing less than insights generated by the creative interaction
of the scientific and religious systems of knowledge can produce
so fundamental a reorientation of habits and attitudes. Unlike
animals, which depend for their sustenance on whatever the environment
readily affords, human beings are impelled to express the immense
capacities latent within them through productive work designed
to meet their own needs and those of others. In acting thus they
become participants, at however modest a level, in the processes
of the advancement of civilization. They fulfill purposes that
unite them with others. To the extent that work is consciously
undertaken in a spirit of service to humanity, Bahá'u'lláh
says, it is a form of prayer, a means of worshipping God. Every
individual has the capacity to see himself or herself in this
light, and it is to this inalienable capacity of the self that
development strategy must appeal, whatever the nature of the plans
being pursued, whatever the rewards they promise. No narrower
a perspective will ever call up from the people of the world the
magnitude of effort and commitment that the economic tasks ahead
will require.
- A challenge of similar nature faces economic thinking as a result
of the environmental crisis. The fallacies in theories based on
the belief that there is no limit to nature's capacity to fulfill
any demand made on it by human beings have now been coldly exposed.
A culture which attaches absolute value to expansion, to acquisition,
and to the satisfaction of people's wants is being compelled to
recognize that such goals are not, by themselves, realistic guides
to policy. Inadequate, too, are approaches to economic issues
whose decision-making tools cannot deal with the fact that most
of the major challenges are global rather than particular in scope.
- The earnest hope that this moral crisis can somehow be met by
deifying nature itself is an evidence of the spiritual and intellectual
desperation that the crisis has engendered. Recognition that creation
is an organic whole and that humanity has the responsibility to
care for this whole, welcome as it is, does not represent an influence
which can by itself establish in the consciousness of people a
new system of values. Only a breakthrough in understanding that
is scientific and spiritual in the fullest sense of the terms
will empower the human race to assume the trusteeship toward which
history impels it.
- All people will have sooner or later to recover, for example,
the capacity for contentment, the welcoming of moral discipline,
and the devotion to duty that, until relatively recently, were
considered essential aspects of being human. Repeatedly throughout
history, the teachings of the Founders of the great religions
have been able to instill these qualities of character in the
mass of people who responded to them. The qualities themselves
are even more vital today, but their expression must now take
a form consistent with humanity's coming-of-age. Here again, religion's
challenge is to free itself from the obsessions of the past: contentment
is not fatalism; morality has nothing in common with the life-denying
Puritanism that has so often presumed to speak in its name; and
a genuine devotion to duty brings feelings not of self-righteousness
but of self-worth.
- The effect of the persistent denial to women of full equality
with men sharpens still further the challenge to science and religion
in the economic life of humankind. To any objective observer the
principle of the equality of the sexes is fundamental to all realistic
thinking about the future well-being of the earth and its people.
It represents a truth about human nature that has waited largely
unrecognized throughout the long ages of the race's childhood
and adolescence. "Women and men," is Bahá'u'lláh's
emphatic assertion, "have been and will always be equal in
the sight of God." The rational soul has no sex, and whatever
social inequities may have been dictated by the survival requirements
of the past, they clearly cannot be justified at a time when humanity
stands at the threshold of maturity. A commitment to the establishment
of full equality between men and women, in all departments of
life and at every level of society, will be central to the success
of efforts to conceive and implement a strategy of global development.
- Indeed, in an important sense, progress in this area will itself
be a measure of the success of any development program. Given
the vital role of economic activity in the advancement of civilization,
visible evidence of the pace at which development is progressing
will be the extent to which women gain access to all avenues of
economic endeavor. The challenge goes beyond ensuring an equitable
distribution of opportunity, important as that is. It calls for
a fundamental rethinking of economic issues in a manner that will
invite the full participation of a range of human experience and
insight hitherto largely excluded from the discourse. The classical
economic models of impersonal markets in which human beings act
as autonomous makers of self-regarding choices will not serve
the needs of a world motivated by ideals of unity and justice.
Society will find itself increasingly challenged to develop new
economic models shaped by insights that arise from a sympathetic
understanding of shared experience, from viewing human beings
in relation to others, and from a recognition of the centrality
to social well-being of the role of the family and the community.
Such an intellectual breakthrough -- strongly altruistic rather
than self-centered in focus -- must draw heavily on both the spiritual
and scientific sensibilities of the race, and millennia of experience
have prepared women to make crucial contributions to the common
effort.
VI
- To contemplate a transformation of society on this scale is to
raise both the question of the power that can be harnessed to
accomplish it and the issue inextricably linked to it, the authority
to exercise that power. As with all other implications of the
accelerating integration of the planet and its people, both of
these familiar terms stand in urgent need of redefinition.
- Throughout history -- and despite theologically or ideologically
inspired assurances to the contrary -- power has been largely
interpreted as advantage enjoyed by persons or groups. Often,
indeed, it has been expressed simply in terms of means to be used
against others. This interpretation of power has become an inherent
feature of the culture of division and conflict that has characterized
the human race during the past several millennia, regardless of
the social, religious, or political orientations that have enjoyed
ascendancy in given ages, in given parts of the world. In general,
power has been an attribute of individuals, factions, peoples,
classes, and nations. It has been an attribute especially associated
with men rather than women. Its chief effect has been to confer
on its beneficiaries the ability to acquire, to surpass, to dominate,
to resist, to win.
- The resulting historical processes have been responsible for both
ruinous setbacks in human well-being and extraordinary advances
in civilization. To appreciate the benefits is to acknowledge
also the setbacks, as well as the clear limitations of the behavioral
patterns that have produced both. Habits and attitudes related
to the use of power which emerged during the long ages of humanity's
infancy and adolescence have reached the outer limits of their
effectiveness. Today, in an era most of whose pressing problems
are global in nature, persistence in the idea that power means
advantage for various segments of the human family is profoundly
mistaken in theory and of no practical service to the social and
economic development of the planet. Those who still adhere to
it -- and who could in earlier eras have felt confident in such
adherence -- now find their plans enmeshed in inexplicable frustrations
and hindrances. In its traditional, competitive expression, power
is as irrelevant to the needs of humanity's future as would be
the technologies of railway locomotion to the task of lifting
space satellites into orbits around the earth.
- The analogy is more than a little apt. The human race is being
urged by the requirements of its own maturation to free itself
from its inherited understanding and use of power. That it can
do so is demonstrated by the fact that, although dominated by
the traditional conception, humanity has always been able to conceive
of power in other forms critical to its hopes. History provides
ample evidence that, however intermittently and ineptly, people
of every background, throughout the ages, have tapped a wide range
of creative resources within themselves. The most obvious example,
perhaps, has been the power of truth itself, an agent of change
associated with some of the greatest advances in the philosophical,
religious, artistic, and scientific experience of the race. Force
of character represents yet another means of mobilizing immense
human response, as does the influence of example, whether in the
lives of individual human beings or in human societies. Almost
wholly unappreciated is the magnitude of the force that will be
generated by the achievement of unity, an influence "so powerful,"
in Bahá'u'lláh's words, "that it can illuminate
the whole Earth."
- The institutions of society will succeed in eliciting and directing
the potentialities latent in the consciousness of the world's
peoples to the extent that the exercise of authority is governed
by principles that are in harmony with the evolving interests
of a rapidly maturing human race. Such principles include the
obligation of those in authority to win the confidence, respect,
and genuine support of those whose actions they seek to govern;
to consult openly and to the fullest extent possible with all
whose interests are affected by decisions being arrived at; to
assess in an objective manner both the real needs and the aspirations
of the communities they serve; to benefit from scientific and
moral advancement in order to make appropriate use of the community's
resources, including the energies of its members. No single principle
of effective authority is so important as giving priority to building
and maintaining unity among the members of a society and the members
of its administrative institutions. Reference has already been
made to the intimately associated issue of commitment to the search
for justice in all matters.
- Clearly, such principles can operate only within a culture that
is essentially democratic in spirit and method. To say this, however,
is not to endorse the ideology of partisanship that has everywhere
boldly assumed democracy's name and which, despite impressive
contributions to human progress in the past, today finds itself
mired in the cynicism, apathy, and corruption to which it has
given rise. In selecting those who are to take collective decisions
on its behalf, society does not need and is not well served by
the political theater of nominations, candidature, electioneering,
and solicitation. It lies within the capacity of all people, as
they become progressively educated and convinced that their real
development interests are being served by programs proposed to
them, to adopt electoral procedures that will gradually refine
the selection of their decision-making bodies.
- As the integration of humanity gains momentum, those who are thus
selected will increasingly have to see all their efforts in a
global perspective. Not only at the national, but also at the
local level, the elected governors of human affairs should, in
Bahá'u'lláh's view, consider themselves responsible
for the welfare of all of humankind.
VII
- The task of creating a global development strategy that will accelerate
humanity's coming-of-age constitutes a challenge to reshape fundamentally
all the institutions of society. The protagonists to whom the
challenge addresses itself are all of the inhabitants of the planet:
the generality of humankind, members of governing institutions
at all levels, persons serving in agencies of international coordination,
scientists and social thinkers, all those endowed with artistic
talents or with access to the media of communication, and leaders
of non-governmental organizations. The response called for must
base itself on an unconditioned recognition of the oneness of
humankind, a commitment to the establishment of justice as the
organizing principle of society, and a determination to exploit
to their utmost the possibilities that a systematic dialogue between
the scientific and religious genius of the race can bring to the
building of human capacity. The enterprise requires a radical
rethinking of most of the concepts and assumptions currently governing
social and economic life. It must be wedded, as well, to a conviction
that, however long the process and whatever setbacks may be encountered,
the governance of human affairs can be conducted along lines that
serve humanity's real needs.
- Only if humanity's collective childhood has indeed come to an
end and the age of its adulthood is dawning does such a prospect
represent more than another utopian mirage. To imagine that an
effort of the magnitude envisioned here can be summoned up by
despondent and mutually antagonistic peoples and nations runs
counter to the whole of received wisdom. Only if, as Bahá'u'lláh
asserts to be the case, the course of social evolution has arrived
at one of those decisive turning points through which all of the
phenomena of existence are impelled suddenly forward into new
stages of their development, can such a possibility be conceived.
A profound conviction that just so great a transformation in human
consciousness is underway has inspired the views set forth in
this statement. To all who recognize in it familiar promptings
from within their own hearts, Bahá'u'lláh's words
bring assurance that God has, in this matchless day, endowed humanity
with spiritual resources fully equal to the challenge:
O ye that inhabit the heavens and the earth! There hath appeared
what hath never previously appeared.
This is the Day in which God's most excellent favors have been
poured out upon men, the Day in which His most mighty grace hath
been infused into all created things.
- The turmoil now convulsing human affairs is unprecedented, and
many of its consequences enormously destructive. Dangers unimagined
in all history gather around a distracted humanity. The greatest
error that the world's leadership could make at this juncture,
however, would be to allow the crisis to cast doubt on the ultimate
outcome of the process that is occurring. A world is passing away
and a new one is struggling to be born. The habits, attitudes,
and institutions that have accumulated over the centuries are
being subjected to tests that are as necessary to human development
as they are inescapable. What is required of the peoples of the
world is a measure of faith and resolve to match the enormous
energies with which the Creator of all things has endowed this
spiritual springtime of the race. "Be united in counsel,"
is Bahá'u'lláh's appeal,
be one in thought. May each morn be better than its eve and each
morrow richer than its yesterday. Man's merit lieth in service
and virtue and not in the pageantry of wealth and riches. Take
heed that your words be purged from idle fancies and worldly desires
and your deeds be cleansed from craftiness and suspicion. Dissipate
not the wealth of your precious lives in the pursuit of evil and
corrupt affection, nor let your endeavors be spent in promoting
your personal interest. Be generous in your days of plenty, and
be patient in the hour of loss. Adversity is followed by success
and rejoicings follow woe. Guard against idleness and sloth, and
cling unto that which profiteth mankind, whether young or old,
whether high or low. Beware lest ye sow tares of dissension among
men or plant thorns of doubt in pure and radiant hearts.
