The twentieth century, the most turbulent in the history of the human
race, has reached its end. Dismayed by the deepening moral and social
chaos that marked its course, the generality of the world's peoples are
eager to leave behind them the memories of the suffering that these
decades brought with them. No matter how frail the foundations of
confidence in the future may seem, no matter how great the dangers looming
on the horizon, humanity appears desperate to believe that, through some
fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, it will nevertheless be possible
to bend the conditions of human life into conformity with prevailing human
desires.
In the light of the teachings of Baha'u'llah such hopes are not merely
illusory, but miss entirely the nature and meaning of the great turning
point through which our world has passed in these crucial hundred years.
Only as humanity comes to understand the implications of what occurred
during this period of history will it be able to meet the challenges that
lie ahead. The value of the contribution we as Baha'is can make to the
process demands that we ourselves grasp the significance of the historic
transformation wrought by the twentieth century.
What makes this insight possible for us is the light shed by the rising
Sun of Baha'u'llah's Revelation and the influence it has come to exercise
in human affairs. It is this opportunity that the following pages address.
I
Let us acknowledge at the outset the magnitude of the ruin that the human
race has brought upon itself during the period of history under review.
The loss of life alone has been beyond counting. The disintegration of
basic institutions of social order, the violation--indeed, the
abandonment--of standards of decency, the betrayal of the life of the mind
through surrender to ideologies as squalid as they have been empty, the
invention and deployment of monstrous weapons of mass annihilation, the
bankrupting of entire nations and the reduction of masses of human beings
to hopeless poverty, the reckless destruction of the environment of the
planet--such are only the more obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to
even the darkest of ages past. Merely to mention them is to call to mind
the Divine warnings expressed in Baha'u'llah's words of a century ago: "O
heedless ones! Though the wonders of My mercy have encompassed all created
things, both visible and invisible, and though the revelations of My grace
and bounty have permeated every atom of the universe, yet the rod with
which I can chastise the wicked is grievous, and the fierceness of Mine
anger against them terrible."(1)
Lest any observer of the Cause be tempted to misunderstand such warnings
as only metaphorical, Shoghi Effendi, drawing some of the historical
implications, wrote in 1941:
A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course,
catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its
ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its
driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its
cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every passing
day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is
smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive
its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome.
Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind
of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its
foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting
the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its
kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its
light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.(2)
* * * * *
From the point of view of wealth and influence, "the world" of 1900 was
Europe and, by grudging concession, the United States. Throughout the
planet, Western imperialism was pursuing among the populations of other
lands what it regarded as its "civilizing mission". In the words of one
historian, the century's opening decade appeared to be essentially a
continuation of the "long nineteenth century",(3) an era whose boundless
self-satisfaction was perhaps best epitomized by the celebration in 1897
of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, a parade that rolled for hours
through the streets of London, with an imperial panoply and display of
military power far surpassing anything attempted in past civilizations.
As the century began, there were few, whatever their degree of social or
moral sensitivity, who perceived the catastrophes lying ahead, and few, if
any, who could have conceived their magnitude. The military leadership of
most European nations assumed that war of some kind would break out, but
viewed the prospect with equanimity because of the twin fixed convictions
that it would be short and would be won by their side. To an extent that
seemed little short of miraculous, the international peace movement was
enlisting the support of statesmen, industrialists, scholars, the media,
and influential personalities as unlikely as the tsar of Russia. If the
inordinate increase in armaments seemed ominous, the network of
painstakingly crafted and often overlapping alliances seemed to give
assurance that a general conflagration would be avoided and regional
disputes settled, as they had been through most of the previous century.
This illusion was reinforced by the fact that Europe's crowned heads--most
of them members of one extended family, and many of them exercising
seemingly decisive political power--addressed one another familiarly by
nicknames, carried on an intimate correspondence, married one another's
sisters and daughters, and vacationed together throughout long stretches
of each year at one another's castles, regattas and shooting lodges. Even
the painful disparities in the distribution of wealth were being
energetically--if not very systematically--addressed in Western societies
through legislation designed to restrain the worst of the corporate
freebooting of preceding decades and to meet the most urgent demands of
growing urban populations.
The vast majority of the human family, living in lands outside the Western
world, shared in few of the blessings and little of the optimism of their
European and American brethren. China, despite its ancient civilization
and its sense of itself as the "Middle Kingdom", had become the hapless
victim of plundering by Western nations and by its modernizing neighbour
Japan. The multitudes in India--whose economy and political life had fallen
so totally under the domination of a single imperial power as to exclude
the usual jockeying for advantage--escaped some of the worst of the abuses
afflicting other lands, but watched impotently as their desperately needed
resources were drained away. The coming agony of Latin America was all too
clearly prefigured in the suffering of Mexico, large sections of which had
been annexed by its great northern neighbour, and whose natural resources
were already attracting the attention of avaricious foreign corporations.
Particularly embarrassing from a Western point of view--because of its
proximity to such brilliant European capitals as Berlin and Vienna--was the
medieval oppression in which the hundred million nominally liberated serfs
in Russia led lives of sullen, hopeless misery. Most tragic of all was the
plight of the inhabitants of the African continent, divided against one
another by artificial boundaries created through cynical bargains among
European powers. It has been estimated that during the first decade of the
twentieth century over a million people in the Congo perished--starved,
beaten, worked literally to death for the profit of their distant masters,
a preview of the fate that was to engulf well over one hundred million of
their fellow human beings across Europe and Asia before the century
reached its end.(4)
These masses of humankind, despoiled and scorned--but representing most of
the earth's inhabitants--were seen not as protagonists but essentially as
objects of the new century's much vaunted civilizing process. Despite
benefits conferred on a minority among them, the colonial peoples existed
chiefly to be acted upon--to be used, trained, exploited, Christianized,
civilized, mobilized--as the shifting agendas of Western powers dictated.
These agendas may have been harsh or mild in execution, enlightened or
selfish, evangelical or exploitative, but were shaped by materialistic
forces that determined both their means and most of their ends. To a large
extent, religious and political pieties of various kinds masked both ends
and means from the publics in Western lands, who were thus able to derive
moral satisfaction from the blessings their nations were assumed to be
conferring on less worthy peoples, while themselves enjoying the material
fruits of this benevolence.
To point out the failings of a great civilization is not to deny its
accomplishments. As the twentieth century opened, the peoples of the West
could take justifiable pride in the technological, scientific and
philosophical developments for which their societies had been responsible.
Decades of experimentation had placed in their hands material means that
were still beyond the appreciation of the rest of humanity. Throughout
both Europe and America vast industries had risen, dedicated to
metallurgy, to the manufacturing of chemical products of every kind, to
textiles, to construction and to the production of instruments that
enhanced every aspect of life. A continuous process of discovery, design
and improvement was making accessible power of unimaginable
magnitude--with, alas, ecological consequences equally unimagined at the
time--especially through the use of cheap fuel and electricity. The "era of
the railroad" was far advanced and steamships coursed the seaways of the
world. With the proliferation of telegraph and telephone communication,
Western society anticipated the moment when it would be freed of the
limiting effects that geographical distances had imposed on humankind
since the dawn of history.
Changes taking place at the deeper level of scientific thought were even
more far-reaching in their implications. The nineteenth century had still
been held in the grip of the Newtonian view of the world as a vast
clockwork system, but by the end of the century the intellectual strides
necessary to challenge that view had already been taken. New ideas were
emerging that would lead to the formulation of quantum mechanics; and
before long the revolutionizing effect of the theory of relativity would
call into question beliefs about the phenomenal world that had been
accepted as common sense for centuries. Such breakthroughs were
encouraged--and their influence greatly amplified--by the fact that science
had already changed from an activity of isolated thinkers to the
systematically pursued concern of a large and influential international
community enjoying the amenities of universities, laboratories and
symposia for the exchange of experimental discoveries.
Nor was the strength of Western societies limited to scientific and
technological advances. As the twentieth century opened, Western
civilization was reaping the fruits of a philosophical culture that was
rapidly liberating the energies of its populations, and whose influence
would soon produce a revolutionary impact throughout the entire world. It
was a culture which nurtured constitutional government, prized the rule of
law and respect for the rights of all of society's members, and held up to
the eyes of all it reached a vision of a coming age of social justice. If
the boasts of liberty and equality that inflated patriotic rhetoric in
Western lands were a far cry from conditions actually prevailing,
Westerners could justly celebrate the advances toward those ideals that
had been accomplished in the nineteenth century.
From a spiritual perspective the age was gripped by a strange, paradoxical
duality. In almost every direction the intellectual horizon was darkened
by clouds of superstition produced by unthinking imitation of earlier
ages. For most of the world's peoples, the consequences ranged from
profound ignorance about both human potentialities and the physical
universe, to naive attachment to theologies that bore little or no
relation to experience. Where winds of change did dispel the mists, among
the educated classes in Western lands, inherited orthodoxies were all too
often replaced by the blight of an aggressive secularism that called into
doubt both the spiritual nature of humankind and the authority of moral
values themselves. Everywhere, the secularization of society's upper
levels seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism
among the general population. At the deepest level--because religion's
influence reaches far into the human psyche and claims for itself a unique
kind of authority--religious prejudices in all lands had kept alive in
successive generations smouldering fires of bitter animosity that would
fuel the horrors of the coming decades.(5)