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

millenia 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 practise

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, Baha'u'llah says, it is a form of prayer, a means of

worshiping 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 Baha'u'llah'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 millenia of experience have

prepared women to make crucial contributions to the common effort.