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Forward to Part V
The Prosperity Of Humankind
A Statement Prepared by the
Bahá'í International Community's
Office of Public Information
Part 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 organisations 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 reorganised 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 organised, 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 organised. 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 programmes 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 organised as to
permit people everywhere to participate in such activity on the basis
of capacity. Apart from the creation of programmes that make the
required education available to all who are able to benefit from it,
such reorganisation will require the establishment of viable centres
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 civilising 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 civilising 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 organisation.
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