Bahá’í World/Volume 28/The Dangerous Passage to a World Republic
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Leonardo 30.17; theologian, writer, and
prqféssor at Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, discusses the crisis of destructionfizcz‘ng humanity, and the means by which it can be survived.
THE DANGEROUS
PASSAGE TOA WORLD REPUBLIC
When a tree has fulfilled its intrinsic potentialities, we say it has attained its climax. It then dies and falls. When people have spent their individual energy supply, they grow old and die. When, over the next ten billion years, the sun exhausts its stock of hydrogen and, later, of helium, it will become a shining star and die, slowly turning into a white dwarf and, ultimately, a black hole—but having earlier dragged into itself the entire solar system and our own planet earth. The entire universe and each one of its beings, particularly the organic ones, fall under the law of entropy. They have limited potentialities: one day they will all disappear.
Doesn’t the same thing happen with social systems? Isn’t our system of social intercourse losing or wasting its potentialities and on the way to dissolution? It is undoubtedly facing a major crisis. The question is, is it a crisis of circumstance that, once overcome, will usher in a new age of prosperity, or is it a structural crisis paving the way for a terminal outcome in an intensive care unit?
I adopt the hypothesis that we are in the heart of a structural and terminal crisis. It is structural because it affects every aspect,
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as bacteria take over an entire organism, producing septicemia and, eventually, death. And it is terminal because it represents the depletion of a paradigm—Of all energies, all dreams and all strategies that might be able to cope with the system’s own internal contradictions. The system marches irrevocably towards death. Nothing can stop this.
Is it the end of the world, then? Yes and no. Yes, because it represents the end of this kind of world. No, because the world will go on. The end will bring forth the opportunity for a new world to emerge, that is to say, a new civilizing standard capable of providing us with a new meaning to life and all the peoples of the earth with a new horizon of hope for humankind.
This dual perspective of death and life is present in the original Sanskrit meaning of the word crisis. Crisis derives from kir 0r krl—to cleanse and purify. There is an undeniable affinity between crisis and crucible. The severe process of purification implies death and rebirth: the death of worthless gangue, of aggregates, of contingency; and the rebirth of the gist, of essence, of necessity. Whatever is put into the crucible of a crisis, and remains, acquires the potential or Virtuality Of founding a new future. It is a catharsis we are undergoing at the present moment.
TWO Mortal Crises in the Current System
Two crises have arisen from our current system of social intercourse, two crises that are unsolvable by the system’s intrinsic resources: the social crisis and the ecological crisis.
The social crisis plots the rich against the poor as never before in the history of humankind. The production process, by using automated technologies, can produce goods and services with extreme swiftness and on an ever—increasing scale. However, these goods are appropriated exclusively by a small elite of nations or by the upper classes in poor, dependent countries. This logic gives rise to an immeasurable injustice and a widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots.
There is a very real risk of a bifurcation in humankind: on the one hand, those benefiting from advances in biotechnology who will live on to age 130, surrounded by every kind of amusement and delight; 0n the other, the great masses condemned to
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suffer every type of want and deprivation, dying as they have always died, before their time.
It is all the more serious not only because of the perverse abyss between the ones and the others, but also the absolute lack of humanitarian sensitivity. Our sense of solidarity and responsibility for our neighbors and fellow creatures has become extremely meager. It is in keeping with the logic of the system to exalt the individual, to reward his or her performance and to impose a regime of private appropriation of goods that are produced by the labor of all. This logic inevitably creates inequalities: accumulation on one side, destitution 0n the other.
Today we are moving from dependence to relinquishment. We relinquish those who are dependent, condemned to being seen and treated as economic and social nonentities. How long will they accept the verdict of death hanging upon them? We should not discard serious clashes between the North and the South, between those who are inside and those who are outside the reigning system, leading to unheard-of Violence and devastation.
The second crisis is ecological. The current consumptionbased system is predatory. By extolling maximum consumption of all natural and cultural goods, it submits all limited natural and cultural resources to a systematic process of depredation. The final result cannot but be the degradation of the quality of life for humans and all other creatures of the biotic community. We have assembled a poisoning machine that destroys and kills the air, the land, the water, the living organisms, the ecosystems and the planet itself. How much Violence can earth’s system of dynamic equilibrium withstand? What is the limit of its sustainability—which, once disrupted, may bring disastrous consequences for the biosphere? In addition to being homicides and ethnocides, human beings may well turn out to be ecocides and biocides as well.
The system is like a wolf, whose nature is to devour sheep. It is of no avail to admonish mercy or to file down its teeth. Voracity is the wolf’s intrinsic quality and nothing will stop it from being voracious. Such is our current system of social intercourse, implemented over the last four centuries for all of humankind, that has today achieved worldwide integration. This system lacks
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any internal value that might lead it to change its course, or even limit its iniquitous and undesirable effects.
Over the next years, these two crises will give the global system an ultimatum. We are groping our way towards a worst—case scenario. It’s like an airplane about to take off. After it reaches a certain critical point, it can no longer be stopped. If it does not rise in flight, it will crash at the end of the runway. We are currently all smiles, content in our scientific knowledge, traveling smugly along the broad highway of history, barely aware that up ahead the end of the line and the abyss await us.
We hear the bells toll. They toll over the world system, today so arrogantly Victorious and alienated from the gravity of the disease that has taken hold of it and will lead to its death. Death may come from the two crises mentioned above. It is highly probable that it will stem from the collapse of the world economic and financial system that currently sustains our societies. The truth will surface. But when it does, it will be too late. We will then see productive capital (roughly 35 trillion dollars) breaking away from speculative capital (about 80 to 100 trillion dollars—no one knows for sure). The latter is solely paper, and pure image. In a major crisis, it will evaporate like a soap bubble, with no sustainability whatsoever, tumultuously dragging towards irrevocable disaster millions of people who will perish like flies—while others will seek refuge, surviving in preserved oases and envying those who died before them.
Or perhaps the purifying crisis will arise from ecological havoc. It is not impossible nor improbable that some important link in the eaith’s systemic equilibrium will burst: the regime of climates, seasons, and drinking water might break down; some horrendous contamination of radioactive waste might spread; the decline in human fertility might not stop (as seen in Central Europe); the outbreak of some deadly bacteria might decimate millions and millions of living creatures, humankind included, putting an end to the great adventure of the species homo sapiens et demens—or most of its specimens. The terrific fall of some low-flying meteor is not entirely avoidable, as has happened many times throughout the history of earth—67 million years ago just
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such a piece of flying debris destroyed the greater part of the biosphere and all the dinosaurs. The technical expertise to track an approaching meteorite is still rudimentary.
Conclusion: the desolation of tribulation? Once again, yes and n0. Yes, because globalization (particularly in its economic expression: competitive and noncooperative) has revealed the interdependencies that exist among all of us and the system’s inability to solve humankind’s collective problems and avoid the imminent cataclysm. No, because such a cataclysm might pave the way for a new rearrangement of the Earth and of what is left of our tribes. A new kind of civilization will arise, more benevolent towards life, more integrative of differences, more spiritual and more ecological.
In every conceivable form, we approach the new millenium ashamed of ourselves, of our lust to subdue, attack, and destroy everything that is not like us—as so many wars have given witness, most recently those in Iráq and Kosovo. Ashamed Of the way we treat our children, millions of whom toil as slaves. Ashamed of how we treat our elderly, abandoned in interminable queues in hospitals and welfare agencies. And ashamed of how we systematically prey upon and trample life on this planet, as if it were not our only common home.
We are now approaching the dangerous threshold of a purifying Good Friday. But as we have said, it will not be the end of the world. Only the end of this kind of world, worn out in its regenerative capability and lacking in reproductive energy. Another world will ensue. What will it be like? What may grow amidst its ruins?
The whitest lilies grow on the darkest swamps. Amidst the ruins of ancient Mayan cities grow the most luxuriant trees. Something similar will happen with the emerging civilization.
We are swiftly marching towards one single worldwide society—the first of a unified humankind. We’re all arriving there from a lengthy exile, where we have remained insulated in regional cultures in the frontiers of nation-states. We are slowly returning to our common home, earth, and discovering ourselves as part of the human family. But this phenomenon, that Pierre Teilhard de
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Chardin saw as the emergence of the noosphere (one mind and one heart united in diversity), must still enter human consciousness. To achieve this, we must supersede the current civilizing paradigm—a paradigm that atomizes, divides and contraposesand accept the new one derived from quantum physics, from the new biology, from cosmology, from ecology—in a word, from the sciences of the earth—capable of relating, including, and composing everything with everything else. But this new paradigm can become hegemonic only when the old one and the institutions that support it are dismantled. Then, for the first time, we will witness the collective management of the earth and the social administration of the demands of the peoples that inhabit the earth.
After World War I, the League of Nations emerged, the first attempt to collectively think through the political problems of humankind. It failed. World War 11 gave rise to the United Nations. It lingers on, tottering, until today, wholly incapable of coping with the new challenges for which it was not created.
We are convinced that after the great and cathartic passing that is to come, there will most certainly be an articulation of peoples and civilizations, rather than of governments. The World Republic will bring about a caring feeling for the earth and its sons and daughters, and will learn to manage our limited resources so that they minimally fulfill the needs of all creatures alive today and of all those still to come.
Spirituality and Ethics, the Bases of the New World Society
The suffering caused by the collapse of the old world system will convince everyone that it’s not possible to establish a new world covenant founded exclusively on human beings. The earth, the ecosystems, and all creatures must be included in a greater sociocosmic covenant of survival and fraternal intercourse. Such a pact is untenable in a culture that has a single paradigm—and a purely rational and material one to boot. The rainbow, symbol of the cosmic alliance between God and the survivors of the Flood, will act as common reference and inspiration. Diversities will coexist and converge into seeking the common good for all. A new sensitivity is thus required, whose roots are to be found in the logic of the heart and in mutual caring.
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This new sensitivity will give rise to a profound spirituality. Human beings will discover that the spiritual dimension is an objective dimension of the cosmos and of each one of us—the dimension of interiority and of each entity’s inherent history, the consciousness that feels itself part of a greater whole, aware of the secret thread that interweaves everything, creating an unfathomable, dynamic, diverse, and converging unit. This living and irradiating guiding thread will be deciphered as God, revealed in our hearts as enthusiasm to live, struggle, create, and mould life and nature in accordance with a purpose of wisdom, love, and beauty.
This perspective founds a new ethic, erected on two fundamental values. Without these new values—namely, right measure and essential caring—it will be impossible to preserve both life upon our splendorous blue-white planet and the planet itself.
The right measure has assured that the living cosmos is still here with us today and we with it. Cultures survive inasmuch as they abide by this principle, known as the Golden Rule. By abandoning it, they become unstructured and die. Our culture is absolutely devoid of measures in every field. Thus the proximity of its dissolution.
And what is the right measure? It is a balance between the more and the less. It is the optimum relative. It is the wisdom to deal with limited resources, both natural and cultural, in such a manner that they last as long as possible or can be regenerated and reproduced. The sustainability of each being and ecosystem depends on the right measure. It is the right measure that allows us to defy the inexorable law of entropy, the unrestrained wear and tear of all things. Without the right measure, everything ends before it should and dies before its time. With the right measure, everything is prolonged and lives longer.
The first paragraph of the new world constitution will begin with a solemn proclamation of the holy principle of the right measure. Wasn’t it the same with the Greeks and their méden dgan (nothing in excess)? With the Romans and their ne quid nimis (nothing in excess)? With the Chinese and their wu—wi and yinyang (the perfect harmony)? Without the right measure, the planet’s
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limited resources will not suffice for all humans and other living creatures. The new constitution will not decree, “Thou shalt not consume”; rather, it will state, “Thou shalt consume with solidarity.” It will not say, “Thou shalt not show violence nor the shadowy dimension of human beings,” but rather, “Thou shalt show it in the right measure, in a constructive manner, the pathological as pathological, so that it may be countervailed and cured by health and wholeness.”
Without the right measure, the planet will not withstand the increasing rates of consumption. Without the right measure, the peoples of the earth will not coexist in peace nor will they converge in diversity. Without the right measure, no creative synthesis will be found between the symbolic and the diabolic in human history and in the heart of each one of us. Without the right measure, we will not find the balance between flying upward towards the divine Father/Mother and plunging downward towards the social procurement of our daily bread. Only by joining “Our Father” and “Our Bread” will we be able to truly say “Amen.”
The second fundamental ethical value of a common future for earth and humankind is essential caring. To care means to enter into a loving relationship with reality and each created being. It is to invest in the heart, in affection, in subjectivity. Things are more than mere things-to-use. They are values we can appreciate, symbols we can decipher. To care means becoming involved with people and things, paying them due attention, placing ourselves Close to them, feeling them within our heart, joining them in communion, valuing them, and understanding them in their interiority. Everything for which we care we also love. And we love everything for which we care. When we establish a bond of love between ourselves and people and things, we become concerned for them and learn to feel responsibility for them.
As the ancients well taught and as has been repeated by one of the greatest modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger, “the essence of being human is caring.” If human beings are not cared for from the day they are born until the day they die, they will become unstructured, wasting away and finally dying.
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More than thinking, loving, and creating, humans must know how to care, a prerequisite for every other human expression.
Caring determines the minimum ethos for humankind. Caring is the appropriate ethical attitude towards nature and our common abode, earth.
Caring will redeem love, life, social intercourse, and the earth. The new millennium will only be ushered in when the ethic of essential caring triumphs. Around the values of right measure and essential caring, there Will be woven the social and ecological covenants providing firm bases for the new emerging world society. This new society is suffering labor pains right now, striving to be born in all parts of the world. A little longer, just a little longer, and it will come forth full of life and hope. With the Portuguese poet Camoes, we may also say:
After blustery tempest,
Gloomy night and sibilant wind, Morning brings forth serene clarity, Hope of safe port and salvation.
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