To the Peoples of the World:
The Great Peace towards which people of good will throughout the centuries
have inclined their hearts, of which seers and poets for countless
generations have expressed their vision, and for which from age to age the
sacred scriptures of mankind have constantly held the promise, is now at
long last within the reach of the nations. For the first time in history
it is possible for everyone to view the entire planet, with all its myriad
diversified peoples, in one perspective. World peace is not only possible
but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet--in
the words of one great thinker, "the planetization of mankind".
Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors
precipitated by humanity's stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour,
or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice
before all who inhabit the earth. At this critical juncture when the
intractable problems confronting nations have been fused into one common
concern for the whole world, failure to stem the tide of conflict and
disorder would be unconscionably irresponsible.
Among the favourable signs are the steadily growing strength of the steps
towards world order taken initially near the beginning of this century in
the creation of the League of Nations, succeeded by the more broadly based
United Nations Organization; the achievement since the Second World War of
independence by the majority of all the nations on earth, indicating the
completion of the process of nation building, and the involvement of these
fledgling nations with older ones in matters of mutual concern; the
consequent vast increase in co-operation among hitherto isolated and
antagonistic peoples and groups in international undertakings in the
scientific, educational, legal, economic and cultural fields; the rise in
recent decades of an unprecedented number of international humanitarian
organizations; the spread of women's and youth movements calling for an
end to war; and the spontaneous spawning of widening networks of ordinary
people seeking understanding through personal communication.
The scientific and technological advances occurring in this unusually
blessed century portend a great surge forward in the social evolution of
the planet, and indicate the means by which the practical problems of
humanity may be solved. They provide, indeed, the very means for the
administration of the complex life of a united world. Yet barriers
persist. Doubts, misconceptions, prejudices, suspicions and narrow
self-interest beset nations and peoples in their relations one to another.
It is out of a deep sense of spiritual and moral duty that we are impelled
at this opportune moment to invite your attention to the penetrating
insights first communicated to the rulers of mankind more than a century
ago by Baha'u'llah, Founder of the Baha'i Faith, of which we are the
Trustees.
"The winds of despair", Baha'u'llah wrote, "are, alas, blowing from every
direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is
daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be
discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably
defective." This prophetic judgement has been amply confirmed by the
common experience of humanity. Flaws in the prevailing order are
conspicuous in the inability of sovereign states organized as United
Nations to exorcize the spectre of war, the threatened collapse of the
international economic order, the spread of anarchy and terrorism, and the
intense suffering which these and other afflictions are causing to
increasing millions. Indeed, so much have aggression and conflict come to
characterize our social, economic and religious systems, that many have
succumbed to the view that such behaviour is intrinsic to human nature and
therefore ineradicable.
With the entrenchment of this view, a paralyzing contradiction has
developed in human affairs. On the one hand, people of all nations
proclaim not only their readiness but their longing for peace and harmony,
for an end to the harrowing apprehensions tormenting their daily lives. On
the other, uncritical assent is given to the proposition that human beings
are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive and thus incapable of erecting a
social system at once progressive and peaceful, dynamic and harmonious, a
system giving free play to individual creativity and initiative but based
on co-operation and reciprocity.
As the need for peace becomes more urgent, this fundamental contradiction,
which hinders its realization, demands a reassessment of the assumptions
upon which the commonly held view of mankind's historical predicament is
based. Dispassionately examined, the evidence reveals that such conduct,
far from expressing man's true self, represents a distortion of the human
spirit. Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion
constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human
nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and
conflict.
To choose such a course is not to deny humanity's past but to understand
it. The Baha'i Faith regards the current world confusion and calamitous
condition in human affairs as a natural phase in an organic process
leading ultimately and irresistibly to the unification of the human race
in a single social order whose boundaries are those of the planet. The
human race, as a distinct, organic unit, has passed through evolutionary
stages analogous to the stages of infancy and childhood in the lives of
its individual members, and is now in the culminating period of its
turbulent adolescence approaching its long-awaited coming of age.
A candid acknowledgement that prejudice, war and exploitation have been
the expression of immature stages in a vast historical process and that
the human race is today experiencing the unavoidable tumult which marks
its collective coming of age is not a reason for despair but a
prerequisite to undertaking the stupendous enterprise of building a
peaceful world. That such an enterprise is possible, that the necessary
constructive forces do exist, that unifying social structures can be
erected, is the theme we urge you to examine.
Whatever suffering and turmoil the years immediately ahead may hold,
however dark the immediate circumstances, the Baha'i community believes
that humanity can confront this supreme trial with confidence in its
ultimate outcome. Far from signalizing the end of civilization, the
convulsive changes towards which humanity is being ever more rapidly
impelled will serve to release the "potentialities inherent in the station
of man" and reveal "the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate
excellence of his reality".
I
The endowments which distinguish the human race from all other forms of
life are summed up in what is known as the human spirit; the mind is its
essential quality. These endowments have enabled humanity to build
civilizations and to prosper materially. But such accomplishments alone
have never satisfied the human spirit, whose mysterious nature inclines it
towards transcendence, a reaching towards an invisible realm, towards the
ultimate reality, that unknowable essence of essences called God. The
religions brought to mankind by a succession of spiritual luminaries have
been the primary link between humanity and that ultimate reality, and have
galvanized and refined mankind's capacity to achieve spiritual success
together with social progress.
No serious attempt to set human affairs aright, to achieve world peace,
can ignore religion. Man's perception and practice of it are largely the
stuff of history. An eminent historian described religion as a "faculty of
human nature". That the perversion of this faculty has contributed to much
of the confusion in society and the conflicts in and between individuals
can hardly be denied. But neither can any fair-minded observer discount
the preponderating influence exerted by religion on the vital expressions
of civilization. Furthermore, its indispensability to social order has
repeatedly been demonstrated by its direct effect on laws and morality.
Writing of religion as a social force, Baha'u'llah said: "Religion is the
greatest of all means for the establishment of order in the world and for
the peaceful contentment of all that dwell therein." Referring to the
eclipse or corruption of religion, he wrote: "Should the lamp of religion
be obscured, chaos and confusion will ensue, and the lights of fairness,
of justice, of tranquillity and peace cease to shine." In an enumeration
of such consequences the Baha'i writings point out that the "perversion of
human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and
dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such
circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character
is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed,
the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame
is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and
loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of
hope is gradually extinguished."
If, therefore, humanity has come to a point of paralyzing conflict it must
look to itself, to its own negligence, to the siren voices to which it has
listened, for the source of the misunderstandings and confusion
perpetrated in the name of religion. Those who have held blindly and
selfishly to their particular orthodoxies, who have imposed on their
votaries erroneous and conflicting interpretations of the pronouncements
of the Prophets of God, bear heavy responsibility for this confusion--a
confusion compounded by the artificial barriers erected between faith and
reason, science and religion. For from a fair-minded examination of the
actual utterances of the Founders of the great religions, and of the
social milieus in which they were obliged to carry out their missions,
there is nothing to support the contentions and prejudices deranging the
religious communities of mankind and therefore all human affairs.
The teaching that we should treat others as we ourselves would wish to be
treated, an ethic variously repeated in all the great religions, lends
force to this latter observation in two particular respects: it sums up
the moral attitude, the peace-inducing aspect, extending through these
religions irrespective of their place or time of origin; it also signifies
an aspect of unity which is their essential virtue, a virtue mankind in
its disjointed view of history has failed to appreciate.
Had humanity seen the Educators of its collective childhood in their true
character, as agents of one civilizing process, it would no doubt have
reaped incalculably greater benefits from the cumulative effects of their
successive missions. This, alas, it failed to do.
The resurgence of fanatical religious fervour occurring in many lands
cannot be regarded as more than a dying convulsion. The very nature of the
violent and disruptive phenomena associated with it testifies to the
spiritual bankruptcy it represents. Indeed, one of the strangest and
saddest features of the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is the
extent to which, in each case, it is undermining not only the spiritual
values which are conducive to the unity of mankind but also those unique
moral victories won by the particular religion it purports to serve.
However vital a force religion has been in the history of mankind, and
however dramatic the current resurgence of militant religious fanaticism,
religion and religious institutions have, for many decades, been viewed by
increasing numbers of people as irrelevant to the major concerns of the
modern world. In its place they have turned either to the hedonistic
pursuit of material satisfactions or to the following of man-made
ideologies designed to rescue society from the evident evils under which
it groans. All too many of these ideologies, alas, instead of embracing
the concept of the oneness of mankind and promoting the increase of
concord among different peoples, have tended to deify the state, to
subordinate the rest of mankind to one nation, race or class, to attempt
to suppress all discussion and interchange of ideas, or to callously
abandon starving millions to the operations of a market system that all
too clearly is aggravating the plight of the majority of mankind, while
enabling small sections to live in a condition of affluence scarcely
dreamed of by our forebears.
How tragic is the record of the substitute faiths that the worldly-wise of
our age have created. In the massive disillusionment of entire populations
who have been taught to worship at their altars can be read history's
irreversible verdict on their value. The fruits these doctrines have
produced, after decades of an increasingly unrestrained exercise of power
by those who owe their ascendancy in human affairs to them, are the social
and economic ills that blight every region of our world in the closing
years of the twentieth century. Underlying all these outward afflictions
is the spiritual damage reflected in the apathy that has gripped the mass
of the peoples of all nations and by the extinction of hope in the hearts
of deprived and anguished millions.
The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether
of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give
account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise. Where is
the "new world" promised by these ideologies? Where is the international
peace to whose ideals they proclaim their devotion? Where are the
breakthroughs into new realms of cultural achievement produced by the
aggrandizement of this race, of that nation or of a particular class? Why
is the vast majority of the world's peoples sinking ever deeper into
hunger and wretchedness when wealth on a scale undreamed of by the
Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even the imperialist powers of the nineteenth
century is at the disposal of the present arbiters of human affairs?
Most particularly, it is in the glorification of material pursuits, at
once the progenitor and common feature of all such ideologies, that we
find the roots which nourish the falsehood that human beings are
incorrigibly selfish and aggressive. It is here that the ground must be
cleared for the building of a new world fit for our descendants.
That materialistic ideals have, in the light of experience, failed to
satisfy the needs of mankind calls for an honest acknowledgement that a
fresh effort must now be made to find the solutions to the agonizing
problems of the planet. The intolerable conditions pervading society
bespeak a common failure of all, a circumstance which tends to incite
rather than relieve the entrenchment on every side. Clearly, a common
remedial effort is urgently required. It is primarily a matter of
attitude. Will humanity continue in its waywardness, holding to outworn
concepts and unworkable assumptions? Or will its leaders, regardless of
ideology, step forth and, with a resolute will, consult together in a
united search for appropriate solutions?
Those who care for the future of the human race may well ponder this
advice. "If long-cherished ideals and time-honoured institutions, if
certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote
the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to
the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and
relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should
these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be
exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human
institution? For legal standards, political and economic theories are
solely designed to safeguard the interests of humanity as a whole, and not
humanity to be crucified for the preservation of the integrity of any
particular law or doctrine."