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Forward to Part I
The Prosperity Of Humankind
A Statement Prepared by the
Bahá'í International Community's
Office of Public Information
Haifa, Israel
3 March 1995
To an extent unimaginable a decade ago, the ideal of
world peace is
taking on form and substance. Obstacles that long seemed immovable
have collapsed in humanity's path; apparently irreconcilable conflicts
have begun to surrender to processes of
consultation and
resolution; a
willingness to counter military aggression through
unified
international action is emerging. The effect has been to awaken in
both the masses of humanity and many world leaders a degree of
hopefulness about the future of our planet that had been nearly
extinguished.
Throughout the world, immense intellectual and spiritual energies are
seeking expression, energies whose gathering pressure is in direct
proportion to the frustrations of recent decades. Everywhere the
signs multiply that the earth's peoples yearn for an end to conflict
and to the suffering and ruin from which no land is any longer immune.
These rising impulses for change must be seized upon and channelled
into overcoming the remaining barriers that block realisation of the
age-old dream of global peace. The effort of will required for such a
task cannot be summoned up merely by appeals for action against the
countless ills afflicting society.
It must be galvanised by a vision of human prosperity in the fullest
sense of the term -- an awakening to the possibilities of the spiritual
and material well-being now brought within grasp. Its beneficiaries
must be all of the planet's inhabitants, without distinction, without
the imposition of conditions unrelated to the fundamental goals of
such a reorganisation of human affairs.
History has thus far recorded principally the experience of tribes,
cultures, classes, and nations. With the physical unification of the
planet in this century and acknowledgement of the interdependence of
all who live on it, the history of humanity as one people is now
beginning. The long, slow civilising of human character has been a
sporadic development, uneven and admittedly inequitable in the
material advantages it has conferred. Nevertheless, endowed with the
wealth of all the genetic and cultural diversity that has evolved
through past ages, the earth's inhabitants are now challenged to draw
on their collective inheritance to take up, consciously and
systematically, the responsibility for the design of their future.
It is unrealistic to imagine that the vision of the next stage in the
advancement of civilization can be formulated without a searching
re-examination of the attitudes and assumptions that currently
underlie approaches to social and economic development. At the most
obvious level, such rethinking will have to address practical matters
of policy, resource utilisation, planning procedures, implementation
methodologies, and organisation. As it proceeds, however, fundamental
issues will quickly emerge, related to the long-term goals to be
pursued, the social structures required, the implications for
development of principles of social justice, and the nature and role
of knowledge in effecting enduring change. Indeed, such a
re-examination will be driven to seek a broad consensus of
understanding about human nature itself.
Two avenues of discussion open directly onto all of these issues,
whether conceptual or practical, and it is along these two avenues
that we wish to explore, in the pages that follow, the subject of a
strategy of global development. The first is prevailing beliefs about
the nature and purpose of the development process; the second is the
roles assigned in it to the various protagonists.
The assumptions directing most of current development planning are
essentially materialistic. That is to say, the purpose of development
is defined in terms of the successful cultivation in all societies of
those means for the achievement of material prosperity that have,
through trial and error, already come to characterise certain regions
of the world. Modifications in development discourse do indeed occur,
accommodating differences of culture and political system and
responding to the alarming dangers posed by environmental degradation.
Yet the underlying materialistic assumptions remain essentially
unchallenged.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is no longer possible to
maintain the belief that the approach to social and economic
development to which the materialistic conception of life has given
rise is capable of meeting humanity's needs. Optimistic forecasts
about the changes it would generate have vanished into the
ever-widening abyss that separates the living standards of a small and
relatively diminishing minority of the world's inhabitants from the
poverty experienced by the vast majority of the globe's population.
This unprecedented economic crisis, together with the social breakdown
it has helped to engender, reflects a profound error of conception
about human nature itself. For the levels of response elicited from
human beings by the incentives of the prevailing order are not only
inadequate, but seem almost irrelevant in the face of world events.
We are being shown that, unless the development of society finds a
purpose beyond the mere amelioration of material conditions, it will
fail of attaining even these goals. That purpose must be sought in
spiritual dimensions of life and motivation that transcend a
constantly changing economic landscape and an artificially imposed
division of human societies into "developed" and "developing".
As the purpose of development is being redefined, it will become
necessary also to look again at assumptions about the appropriate
roles to be played by the protagonists in the process. The crucial
role of government, at whatever level, requires no elaboration.
Future generations, however, will find almost incomprehensible the
circumstance that, in an age paying tribute to an egalitarian
philosophy and related democratic principles, development planning
should view the masses of humanity as essentially recipients of
benefits from aid and training. Despite acknowledgement of
participation as a principle, the scope of the decision making left to
most of the world's population is at best secondary, limited to a
range of choices formulated by agencies inaccessible to them and
determined by goals that are often irreconcilable with their
perceptions of reality.
This approach is even endorsed, implicitly if not explicitly, by
established religion. Burdened by traditions of paternalism,
prevailing religious thought seems incapable of translating an
expressed faith in the spiritual dimensions of human nature into
confidence in humanity's collective capacity to transcend material
conditions.
Such an attitude misses the significance of what is likely the most
important social phenomenon of our time. If it is true that the
governments of the world are striving through the medium of the United
Nations system to construct a new global order, it is equally true
that the peoples of the world are galvanised by this same vision.
Their response has taken the form of a sudden efflorescence of
countless movements and organisations of social change at local,
regional, and international levels. Human rights, the advance of
women, the social requirements of sustainable economic development,
the overcoming of prejudices, the moral education of children,
literacy, primary health care, and a host of other vital concerns each
commands the urgent advocacy of organisations supported by growing
numbers in every part of the globe.
This response of the world's people themselves to the crying needs of
the age echoes the call that Bahá'u'lláh raised over a
hundred years ago: "Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age
ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and
requirements." The transformation in the way that great numbers of
ordinary people are coming to see themselves -- a change that is
dramatically abrupt in the perspective of the history of civilization
-- raises fundamental questions about the role assigned to the general
body of humanity in the planning of our planet's future.
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