One Common Faith | Page 4

to produce
regimes of totalitarian control prepared to use any means of coercion in
regulating the lives of hapless populations subjected to them. The goal
held up as justification of such abuses was the creation of a new kind of
society that would ensure not only freedom from want but fulfilment
for the human spirit. At the end, after eight decades of mounting folly
and brutality, the movement collapsed as a credible guide to the world's
future.
Other systems of social experimentation, while repudiating recourse to
inhumane methods, nevertheless derived their moral and intellectual
thrust from the same limited conception of reality. The view took root
that, since people were essentially self-interested actors in matters
pertaining to their economic well-being, the building of just and
prosperous societies could be ensured by one or another scheme of
what was described as modernization. The closing decades of the
twentieth century, however, sagged under a mounting burden of
evidence to the contrary: the breakdown of family life, soaring crime,
dysfunctional educational systems, and a catalogue of other social
pathologies that bring to mind the sombre words of Bahá'u'lláh's
warning about the impending condition of human society: "Such shall
be its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly."(2)
The fate of what the world has learned to call social and economic
development has left no doubt that not even the most idealistic motives
can correct materialism's fundamental flaws. Born in the wake of the

chaos of the Second World War, "development" became by far the
largest and most ambitious collective undertaking on which the human
race has ever embarked. Its humanitarian motivation matched its
enormous material and technological investment. Fifty years later,
while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has brought,
the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening
failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small
segment of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and
the condition of the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the
collective effort that began with such high hopes has seen the gap
widen into an abyss.
Consumer culture, today's inheritor by default of materialism's gospel
of human betterment, is unembarrassed by the ephemeral nature of the
goals that inspire it. For the small minority of people who can afford
them, the benefits it offers are immediate, and the rationale
unapologetic. Emboldened by the breakdown of traditional morality,
the advance of the new creed is essentially no more than the triumph of
animal impulse, as instinctive and blind as appetite, released at long
last from the restraints of supernatural sanctions. Its most obvious
casualty has been language. Tendencies once universally castigated as
moral failings mutate into necessities of social progress. Selfishness
becomes a prized commercial resource; falsehood reinvents itself as
public information; perversions of various kinds unabashedly claim the
status of civil rights. Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust,
indolence, pride--even violence--acquire not merely broad acceptance
but social and economic value. Ironically, as words have been drained
of meaning, so have the very material comforts and acquisitions for
which truth has been casually sacrificed.
Clearly, materialism's error has lain not in the laudable effort to
improve the conditions of life, but in the narrowness of mind and
unjustified self-confidence that have defined its mission. The
importance both of material prosperity and of the scientific and
technological advances necessary to its achievement is a theme that
runs through the writings of the Bahá'í Faith. As was inevitable from
the outset, however, arbitrary efforts to disengage such physical and

material well-being from humanity's spiritual and moral development
have ended by forfeiting the allegiance of the very populations whose
interests a materialistic culture purports to serve. "Witness how the
world is being afflicted with a fresh calamity every day", Bahá'u'lláh
warns. "Its sickness is approaching the stage of utter hopelessness,
inasmuch as the true Physician is debarred from administering the
remedy, whilst unskilled practitioners are regarded with favour, and are
accorded full freedom to act."(3)

"In addition to disillusionment with the promises of materialism, a..."
In addition to disillusionment with the promises of materialism, a force
of change undermining the misconceptions about reality that humanity
brought into the twenty-first century is global integration. At the
simplest level, it takes the form of advances in communication
technologies that open broad avenues of interaction among the planet's
diverse populations. Along with facilitating interpersonal and
intersocial exchanges, general access to information has the effect of
transmuting the cumulative learning of the ages, until recently the
preserve of privileged elites, into the patrimony of the entire human
family, without distinction of nation, race or culture. With all the gross
inequities that global integration perpetuates--indeed intensifies--no
informed observer can fail to acknowledge the stimulus to reflection
about reality that such changes have produced. With