As Shoghi Effendi had prophetically warned, forces undermining inherited
systems and convictions of every kind were continuing to advance in tandem
with the integrating processes at work in the world. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the euphoria induced by the restoration of peace in both
Europe and the Orient proved to be of the briefest duration. Hardly had
hostilities ended than the ideological divisions between Marxism and
liberal democracy burst out into attempts to secure dominance between the
respective blocs of nations they inspired. The phenomenon of "Cold War",
in which the struggle for advantage stopped just short of military
conflict, emerged as the prevailing political paradigm of the next several
decades.
The threat posed by a new crisis in the international order was heightened
by breakthroughs in nuclear technology and the success of both blocs of
nations in equipping themselves with an ever-growing array of weapons of
mass destruction. The horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had
awakened humanity to the appalling possibility that a series of relatively
minor mishaps, as uncalculated as the process set in motion by the 1914
incident in Sarajevo, might this time lead to the annihilation of a
considerable portion of the world's population and leave large areas of
the globe uninhabitable. For Baha'is, the prospect could only bring
vividly to mind the sombre warning uttered by Baha'u'llah decades earlier:
"Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden
from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of
changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would
prove lethal."(108)
By far the greatest tragedy resulting from this latest contest for world
domination was the blight that it cast over the hopes with which formerly
subject peoples had welcomed the opportunity they believed they had been
given to build a new life of their own devising. The obstinate
determination of some of the surviving colonial powers to suppress such
hopes, though doomed to failure in the eyes of any objective observer, had
left the urge for liberation in many countries with no recourse but to
assume the character of revolutionary struggle. By 1960, such movements,
which had already been a feature of the political landscape during the
earlier decades of the century, were coming to represent the principal
form of indigenous political activity in most subject nations.
Since the driving force of colonialism itself was economic exploitation,
it was perhaps inevitable that most movements of liberation assumed a
broadly socialistic ideological cast. Within only a few short years, these
circumstances had created a fertile ground for exploitation by the world's
superpowers. For the Soviet Union, the situation seemed to offer an
opportunity to induce a shift in the existing alignment of nations by
gaining a preponderating influence in what was by now beginning to be
called the "Third World". The response of the West--wherever development
aid failed to retain the loyalties of recipient populations--was to resort
to the encouragement and arming of a wide variety of authoritarian
regimes.
As outside forces manipulated new governments, attention was increasingly
diverted from an objective consideration of developmental needs to
ideological and political struggles that bore little or no relation to
social or economic reality. The results were uniformly devastating.
Economic bankruptcy, gross violations of human rights, the breakdown of
civil administration and the rise of opportunistic elites who saw in the
suffering of their countries only openings for self-enrichment--such was
the heartbreaking fate that engulfed one after another of the new nations
who, only short years before, had begun life with such great promise.
Inspiring these political, social and economic crises was the inexorable
rise and consolidation of a disease of the human soul infinitely more
destructive than any of its specific manifestations. Its triumph marked a
new and ominous stage in the process of social and spiritual degeneration
that Shoghi Effendi had identified. Fathered by nineteenth century
European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of
American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit
credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the
second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion
claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of
humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality--including human
reality and the process by which it evolves--is essentially material in
nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of
material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the
collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the
system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its
assigned task.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, impulses to devise and promote any
formal materialistic belief system disappeared. Nor would any useful
purpose have been served by such efforts, as materialism was soon facing
no significant challenge in most parts of the world. Religion, where not
simply driven back into fanaticism and unthinking rejection of progress,
became progressively reduced to a kind of personal preference, a
predilection, a pursuit designed to satisfy spiritual and emotional needs
of the individual. The sense of historical mission that had defined the
major Faiths learned to content itself with providing religious
endorsement for campaigns of social change carried on by secular
movements. The academic world, once the scene of great exploits of the
mind and spirit, settled into the role of a kind of scholastic industry
preoccupied with tending its machinery of dissertations, symposia,
publication credits and grants.
Whether as world-view or simple appetite, materialism's effect is to leach
out of human motivation--and even interest--the spiritual impulses that
distinguish the rational soul. "For self-love," 'Abdu'l-Baha has said, "is
kneaded into the very clay of man, and it is not possible that, without
any hope of a substantial reward, he should neglect his own present
material good."(109) In the absence of conviction about the spiritual
nature of reality and the fulfilment it alone offers, it is not surprising
to find at the very heart of the current crisis of civilization a cult of
individualism that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates
acquisition and personal advancement to the status of major cultural
values. The resulting atomization of society has marked a new stage in the
process of disintegration about which the writings of Shoghi Effendi speak
so urgently.
To accept willingly the rupture of one after another strand of the moral
fabric that guides and disciplines individual life in any social system,
is a self-defeating approach to reality. If leaders of thought were to be
candid in their assessment of the evidence readily available, it is here
that one would find the root cause of such apparently unrelated problems
as the pollution of the environment, economic dislocation, ethnic
violence, spreading public apathy, the massive increase in crime, and
epidemics that ravage whole populations. However important the application
of legal, sociological or technological expertise to such issues
undoubtedly is, it would be unrealistic to imagine that efforts of this
kind will produce any significant recovery without a fundamental change of
moral consciousness and behaviour.
* * * * *
What the Baha'i world accomplished during those same years acquires an
added brilliancy against the background of this darkened horizon. It is
impossible to exaggerate the significance of the achievement that brought
the Universal House of Justice into existence. For some six thousand years
humanity has experimented with an almost unlimited variety of methods for
collective decision-making. From the vantage point of the twentieth
century, the political history of the world presents a constantly shifting
scene in which there was no possibility that was not seized upon by human
ingenuity. Systems based on principles as different as theocracy,
monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, republic, democracy and near anarchy
have proliferated freely, along with innovations without end that have
sought to combine various desirable features of these possibilities.
Although most of the options have lent themselves to abuses of one kind or
another, the great majority have no doubt contributed in varying degrees
to fulfilling hopes of those whose interests they purportedly served.
During this long evolutionary process, as ever larger and more diverse
populations came under the control of one or another system of government,
the temptation of universal empire repeatedly seized the imaginations of
the Caesars and Napoleons directing such expansion. The resulting series
of calamitous failures that have lent history so much of its ability to
both fascinate and appal, would seem to provide persuasive evidence that
the realization of the ambition lies beyond the reach of any human agency,
no matter how great the resources available to it or how firm its
confidence in the genius of its particular culture.
Yet, the unification of humankind under a system of governance that can
release the full potentialities latent in human nature, and allow their
expression in programmes for the benefit of all, is clearly the next stage
in the evolution of civilization. The physical unification of the planet
in our time and the awakening aspirations of the mass of its inhabitants
have at last produced the conditions that permit achievement of the ideal,
although in a manner far different from that imagined by imperial dreamers
of the past. To this effort the governments of the world have contributed
the founding of the United Nations Organization, with all its great
blessings, all its regrettable shortcomings.
Somewhere ahead lie the further great changes that will eventually impel
acceptance of the principle of world government itself. The United Nations
does not possess such a mandate, nor is there anything in the current
discourse of political leaders that seriously envisions so radical a
restructuring of the administration of the affairs of the planet. That it
will come about in due course Baha'u'llah has made unmistakably clear.
That yet greater suffering and disillusionment will be required to impel
humanity to this great leap forward appears, alas, equally clear. Its
establishment will require national governments and other centres of power
to surrender to international determination, unconditionally and
irreversibly, the full measure of overriding authority implicit in the
word "government".
This is the context in which Baha'is must strive to appreciate the unique
victory that the Cause won in 1963, and which has consolidated itself over
the years since then. A full understanding of its meaning is beyond the
reach of the present and perhaps of the next several generations of
believers. To the extent that a Baha'i does grasp it, he or she will hold
nothing back in a determination to serve its unfolding purpose.
The process leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice--made
possible by the successful completion of the three initial stages of the
Master's Divine Plan under the leadership of Shoghi Effendi--very likely
constituted history's first global democratic election. Each of the
successive elections since then has been carried out by an ever broader
and more diverse body of the community's chosen delegates, a development
that has now reached the point that it incontestably represents the will
of a cross-section of the entire human race. There is nothing in
existence--nothing indeed envisioned by any group of people --that in any
way resembles this achievement.
When one considers, further, the spiritual atmosphere that pervades Baha'i
elections and the principled conduct called for in even their simplest
operations, one is humbled by a much greater awareness. In the raising up
of the supreme governing institution of our Faith, one is witnessing a
striving to the utmost of human capacity to win the good pleasure of God,
a united and ardent determination that nothing whatever, in either
cultural conditioning or the promptings of personal desire, should be
allowed to stain the purity of this ultimate collective act. Nothing
beyond this lies within human power. By its action, humanity has done
literally everything of which it is capable, and God, in accepting this
consecrated effort on the part of those who have embraced His Cause,
endows the institution thus brought into existence with those powers
promised to it in the Kitab-i-Aqdas and the Will and Testament of
'Abdu'l-Baha. Little wonder that 'Abdu'l-Baha foresaw in the process
leading up to the culminating historical moment reached in 1963, the
centenary of Baha'u'llah's declaration of His mission, the fulfilment of
the vision of the prophet Daniel, "Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh
unto the thousand, three hundred and five and thirty days." In the
Master's words:
For according to this calculation a century will have elapsed from the
dawn of the Sun of Truth, then will the teachings of God be firmly
established upon the earth, and the Divine Light shall flood the world
from the East even unto the West. Then, on this day, will the faithful
rejoice!(110)
With the establishment of the Universal House of Justice, the second of
the two successor institutions named by 'Abdu'l-Baha as the guarantors of
the integrity of the Cause had emerged. The vast body of the Guardian's
writings and the pattern of administrative life he had created and which
were imprinted indelibly in Baha'i consciousness, had endowed the Baha'i
world with the means to ensure universal agreement about the intent of the
Revelation of God. In the Universal House of Justice it now also possessed
the ultimate authority conceived by Baha'u'llah for the exercise of the
decision-making functions of the Administrative Order. As the Will and
Testament explains, the two institutions share jointly in the Divine
promise of unfailing guidance:
The sacred and youthful branch, the guardian of the Cause of God as well
as the Universal House of Justice, to be universally elected and
established, are both under the care and protection of the Abha Beauty,
under the shelter and unerring guidance of His Holiness, the Exalted One
(may my life be offered up for them both). Whatsoever they decide is of
God.(111)
The relationship between these two centres of authority, Shoghi Effendi
further explained, is a complementary one, in which some functions are
shared in common and others specialized for one or other of the two
institutions. Nevertheless, he was at pains to emphasize:
It must be ... clearly understood by every believer that the institution
of Guardianship does not under any circumstances abrogate, or even in the
slightest degree detract from, the powers granted to the Universal House
of Justice by Baha'u'llah in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, and repeatedly and
solemnly confirmed by 'Abdu'l-Baha in His Will. It does not constitute in
any manner a contradiction to the Will and Writings of Baha'u'llah, nor
does it nullify any of His revealed instructions.(112)
Realization of the uniqueness of what Baha'u'llah has brought into being
opens the imagination to the contribution that the Cause can make to the
unification of humankind and the building of a global society. The
immediate responsibility of establishing world government rests on the
shoulders of the nation-states. What the Baha'i community is called on to
do, at this stage in humanity's social and political evolution, is to
contribute by every means in its power to the creation of conditions that
will encourage and facilitate this enormously demanding undertaking. In
the same way that Baha'u'llah assured the monarchs of His day that "It is
not Our wish to lay hands on your kingdoms",(113) so the Baha'i community
has no political agenda, abstains from all involvement in partisan
activity, and accepts unreservedly the authority of civil government in
public affairs. Whatever concern Baha'is may have about current conditions
or about the needs of their own members is expressed through
constitutional channels.
The power that the Cause possesses to influence the course of history thus
lies not only in the spiritual potency of its message but in the example
it provides. "So powerful is the light of unity," Baha'u'llah asserts,
"that it can illuminate the whole earth."(114) The oneness of humankind
embodied in the Faith represents, as Shoghi Effendi emphasized, "no mere
outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious
hope". The organic unity of the body of believers--and the Administrative
Order that makes it possible--are evidences of what Shoghi Effendi termed
"the society-building power which their Faith possesses."(115) As the
Cause expands and the capacities latent in its Administrative Order become
ever more apparent, it will increasingly attract the attention of leaders
of thought, inspiring progressive minds with confidence that their ideals
are ultimately attainable. In Shoghi Effendi's words:
Leaders of religion, exponents of political theories, governors of human
institutions, who at present are witnessing with perplexity and dismay the
bankruptcy of their ideas, and the disintegration of their handiwork,
would do well to turn their gaze to the Revelation of Baha'u'llah, and to
meditate upon the World Order which, lying enshrined in His teachings, is
slowly and imperceptibly rising amid the welter and chaos of present-day
civilization.(116)
Such an examination will focus attention on the power that has made it
possible for Baha'i unity to be achieved, consolidated and maintained.
"The light of men," Baha'u'llah says, "is Justice." Its purpose, He adds,
"is the appearance of unity among men. The ocean of divine wisdom surgeth
within this exalted word".(117) The designation "Houses of Justice" given
to the institutions that will govern the World Order He conceived, at
local, national and international levels, reflects the centrality of this
principle in the teachings of the Revelation and the life of the Cause. As
the Baha'i community becomes an increasingly familiar participant in the
life of society, its experience will offer ever more encouraging evidence
of this crucial law in healing the countless ills which, in the final
analysis, are the consequences of the disunity afflicting the human
family. "Know thou, of a truth," Baha'u'llah explains, "these great
oppressions that have befallen the world are preparing it for the advent
of the Most Great Justice."(118) Clearly, that culminating stage in the
evolution of human society will take place in a world very different from
the one we know today.