“A NEW CYCLE OF HUMAN POWER”
BY MARION HOLLEY
THE period in which we happen to live, this bountiful and chaotic present, has visited our world with an undue share of surprises. So unprecedented have been the developments of the last fifty years, that men are ill-fitted to cope with them, turning even potential benefits into channels of destruction. While possessed of powers which in other times would have seemed super-human, and blessed with an abundance of materials, both physical and mental, men have nevertheless proven themselves poor managers. Individuals have lost the gift for simple happiness, and the social body struggles in a turmoil of ever more serious crises. The situation, now surely in a critical phase, requires the application of honest intelligence. It is a curious fact that our need has evoked so little of it.
Nowhere is this more aptly illustrated than in the current approach to an issue which, without question, forms one of our gravest problems. The issue rears its head in a hundred shapes. It may be seen in the quarrel of science with religion, in the emphasis upon material and immediate values, in disrespect for an older generation’s virtues, in the common usage of such unmistakable phrases as “get by,” and “chisel.” In short, whether the evidence be small or great, local or universal, it indicates an attitude which has pervaded our society—an attitude minimizing the possibilities of the spiritual, or, if you prefer, disregarding those non-material values which contribute so profoundly to character.
Now perhaps the most barren approach to this problem is that of downright rationalization. There appeared recently, in a national magazine, an article by a most able writer, analyzing what he called “the crisis in character.” His essay was thoroughly convincing, his examples typical and the deductions faultlessly drawn. But the reasoning was capped by an inexcusable paragraph. “Is the problem insoluble,” he wrote, “and is the future necessarily as dark as the present situation would indicate? I refuse to believe so. . . . If there is to be a regeneration of the national character it can come only by the regeneration of each of us as individuals. . . a change which one cannot predict but of which one need not despair.”1
I am reminded of another author who, in sketching the probable course of future events, asserted that a new “social conscience” would be required. He then continued, “Let us for the moment assume it.” Whereupon, having provided in this simple manner the foundation essential to the success of his platform, he completed the essay, and the world was restored once more to normalcy.2 Unfortunately, history proceeds unaltered by such cheerful fantasies.
There is another type of thinking which, though honest, is rendered useless by its faulty focus. It is the interpretation which takes no account of perspective and ignores the bias inevitably stamped upon us by our times. For perceptions are as relative in social situations as in physical, and absolute dicta are prone to lose their validity. Today the U. S. S. R. may adopt as its slogan, “Religion is the curse of the people.” But there are those who, reading events from another angle, might insist that the people are the curse of religion. Scores of young modernists are busy rearing an epitaph to revealed religion. Will they receive kinder support from time’s unfolding panorama than was accorded to Lucretius, that Roman poet who joyfully buried religion, some fifty years before the birth of Christ? Curiously enough, he too placed confidence in the rational mind. It was the Greek scientist who “first opposing dared raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand.”3 One can excuse the Roman’s miscalculation
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1James Truslow Adams, “The Crisis in Character,” Harper's Magazine, August, 1933.
2Edward C. Aswell, “Social Revolution," The Forum, July, 1933.
3Lucretius, “Beyond Religion,” Anthology of World Poetry, ed. by Mark Van Doren, Albert & Charles Boni, New York, 1928.
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more easily than a modern’s, since the former,
without benefit of anthropology, could not
know that religion constitutes, apparently,
one of the universal elements of culture.
Still a third type of thinking obscures our comprehension of the social problem. It involves the attachment of undue importance to symptoms, with a relative indifference to possible causes; and gives rise to a method of cure based on the eradication of these symptoms. Followers of the method, though lavish in the expenditure of their energies, achieve results that are shamefully inadequate. The outstanding example of our day is provided by workers for peace—literally millions of them, if one includes the members of organizations maintaining an interest in the struggle—who attempt a solution through disarmament. Valiantly they strive to stamp out war by restraining nations whose activities are dictated by the system under which they live. And the system is a war system, competitive, selfish, necessarily cruel. In spite of obvious failure—for the imminence of armed conflict is greater in 1933 than at any time since the World War—little attention is devoted to the thesis that "no general disarmament is possible in the absence of a well-organized World Community.” Yet in that assertion, Salvador de Madariaga possibly has isolated the cause, and therefore the basic cure, of war.1
Thinkers of this kind give currency to the notions that automobiles, motion pictures, or the younger generation are the sources of our character crisis. They are gifted with powers of description; they make impressive pronouncements. But they neglect to point out that the younger generation is what it is, not because of natural perversity, but because of its social environment. They fail to cure either the young or the environment.
Now the Western world, and more particularly the United States, has created an image of itself, whether by the use of such intellectual processes as have been described, or by others more trustworthy. It is interesting to examine that image, for it reflects what the modern world believes itself to be. In the American phase, the picture was elaborately
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1Salvador de Madariaga, Disarmament, Coward-McCann. McClelland, 1929.
assembled at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, in the summer of 1933. The idea of progress, in the words of its leading exponent, “is a theory that the lot of mankind on this earth can be continually improved by the attainment of exact knowledge and the subjugation of the material world to the requirements of human welfare.“2 The Exposition was dedicated to the portrayal of achievements in this category, notably to the accomplishments of science. And they have been, in the last century, stupendous. They have changed the face of the earth, and vastly altered man’s activities. They have invested him with a mighty power. They have raised him almost to mastery of the forces of nature. Man stands, in the twentieth century, on a pinnacle of knowledge and control. With a conquest so dazzling and so recent, little wonder that he indulges in self-congratulation, and reads the significance of all things in terms of his latest success.
But even as this world-conception unfolds itself, thrilling the eye with its perfect mechanism, and the mind with a vision of perpetual progress, a mist of doubt steals in and enshrouds the whole. For the picture is not complete. Our century of progress is also a century of retrogression. And this “brave new world” is no world at all, but only a half-world constructed from the things we most admire.
What of the Great War, with million men engaged in military activity, and its economic losses estimated at three hundred billions of dollars? How shall we explain or solve the universal economic maladjustment which even now is clutching society, carrying in its wake unestimated physical and moral havoc? What of the obstacles encountered by the democratic ideal, the political treacheries to which it has been turned, the dangerous growth of physical violence as the supporter of the state, rather than a trained public opinion? How can there be any basis for a thesis such as Oswald Spengler’s, in "The Decline of the West”; yet, if there is none, why should his book be so obviously feared?
Such observations as these did not belong
———————— 2Charles Beard, ed., A Century of Progress, Harper & Bros., New York, 1932, p. 6.
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in a Century of Progress Exposition. They did
not appear. But they, and a hundred like
them, indicate a world strangely compounded
of conquest and defeat. It is evident that
man has learned to control a vast number
of things, but not yet his own actions, nor
his relations with his neighbors. It is still
more certain that his magnificent achievements
in the physical sciences may be overbalanced,
even destroyed, unless this social
control be mastered. The possibility has been
graphically stated in a recent book: “A
distinguished economist and student of
international affairs recently expressed to
me his private opinion that modern civilization was
due, not for a sudden collapse out of which
something better would arise, but for a long
decline similar to that by which the Roman
Empire slid into the Dark Ages. A hundred
years from now, he predicted, historians
would be talking about that great age of
mechanical civilization which reached its apex
about 1914. . . . I think substantially the
same nightmare haunts the dreams of many
intelligent men today.”1 This
is the problem
which stands athwart our destiny, the crisis
we are obliged to face and dare not evade.
Now there is one deduction which may safely be drawn: the problem is essentially one of lack—lack of ability or intelligence or virtue. For every material advantage lies ready to use. A cue was provided perhaps by Mr. Beard’s book, “A Century of Progress.” Chapters were devoted to Industry, Transportation, Agriculture, Banking, Government, Medicine, Education, etc., but there was a striking omission. Religion was granted exactly no place at all. One reviewer wrote, with a certain complacency: “However great the advance in individual phases or groups, organized religion as a whole stands today just about where it stood a hundred years ago, and has read itself out of inclusion in a volume dedicated to the proggress of a century.” It is possible that this omission, trivial and even amusing as it may appear, actually underscores with grim emphasis the poverty of soul which has carried us to our present impasse.
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1George Soule, A Planned Society, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1932, p. 275.
2Maynard Shipley, Book Review in The Survey Graphic, September, 1933, p. 477.
As a matter of fact, there is surprising agreement upon this. Ortega y Gasset concludes his acute study of European conditions in this manner: "This is the question: Europe has been left without a moral code. It is not that the mass-man has thrown over an antiquated one in exchange for a new one, but that at the center of his scheme of life there is precisely the aspiration to live without conforming to any moral code.”3 August Claessens, secretary of the New York Socialist Party, writes: “It is pure fancy that a transitional state can prosper and new society function unless a changed social psychology is achieved” . . . unless there is "a diffusion of idealism among the masses.“4 Walter Lippmann asserts that “the ideal of an ordered society . . . involves not a mere change in the outward forms of things but in the essential habits and practices of mankind.”5
Examples such as these could be multiplied indefinitely, but I am aware would not serve to strengthen the point. They do suggest, however, another difficulty. For even if we were to discover that society’s fundamental need is a new virtue and integrity, a strengthening of character and will, the development of a moral code applicable to these increased resources—and if we were to isolate this need as the core and motivation of the solution—what could be done about it?
Yes, what could be done about it? Virtue, unfortunately, is not a commodity to be ordered, but a sentiment which has animated the heart of humanity, some times more and in other times less. Indeed, there is almost a rhythm about it, a rhythm which can be mapped through the course of the centuries. It is comforting to say, with President Roosevelt, that "the overwhelming majority of the people . . . recognize that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but it does progress through integrity, unselfishness,
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3Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1932. Chapter 15.
4August Claessens, “Four Means to Labor Control," The Socialism of Our Times, A Symposium, ed. by Laidler and Thomas, Vanguard Press, New York, 1929, pp. 75-76.
5Walter Lippmann, Charter Day Address, University of California, March 24, 1933.
responsibility and justice.1 But the assertion does not make the statement true. Were it true, we should not be talking about it. We should not be searching, and so far in vain, for means to check the decadence into which society drifts. One at least of our fertile theories—whether socialism, the intensification of nationalism, a federated world, a return to first-century Christianity, eugenics, or another—would strike on success.
Gustave Le Bon has written the appropriate words, "If we try then to discover why so many nations perished after a long decline . . . We find that these profound falls had generally the same cause—enfeeblement of the Will. . . . It was always by this enfeeblement of character, and not by that of intelligence that the great peoples disappeared from history.2 Is this to be our epitaph?
The world is a confusing place at best, and considerations such as these do not make it less so. There exists, however, one interpretation which, standing upon the frank admission of woeful fact, looks forward to a better order—a social order not utopian, but possible of achievement through definite actions. Oswald Spengler has written—and this is perhaps his most profound intuition—that "culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness.”3 The hope of a restoration of our powers then, let it be clearly understood, lies primarily in the awakening of true spiritual dynamics.
Now the Bahá’í Faith carries the tremendous
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1President Roosevelt's Message to Congress, January, 1934.
2Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie Politique, 1910.
3Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918, Vol. II, p. 308.
affirmation that, although we live in the midst of a cultural decline, there has been born among us “a new cycle of human power.” And the impetus originating and supporting this cycle is none other than the Manifestation of God, Bahá’u’lláh, acting upon the world and vitalizing it through the will and the bounty of God. It is as well to state the case frankly, for in such straits as we now find ourselves, no man can afford to ignore a possibility, however fantastic it may seem on first hearing.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said: “Today no power save the great power of the Word of God. which comprehends the realities of things, can gather together under the shade of the same tree, the minds and hearts of the world of humanity. It is the motive-power of all things; it is the mover of souls and the controller and governor of the human world.”4 In this way, with a stroke at the center of man’s failure, with a cure for the rottenness at the core of his civilization, has the new cycle been inaugurated.
It is a daring Faith and a living Faith. Through the enthusiasm it arouses in its followers, the potentiality and future of a new world order is assured.
For “the time of former things is past and a new time has been created, and all things are made new by the desire of God. But only a new eye can perceive, and a new mind can comprehend this station.”5
The words carry a challenge which demands investigation. It would be foolhardy to ignore it. For by what right does any man walk abroad, and call himself a citizen of the world, if he be not cognizant of its condition and enamored of its promise?
———————— 4Star of the West, Vol. VI, p. 65.
5Bahá’u’lláh, Bahá’í Scriptures, p. 117.
