SOURCES OF COMMUNITY LIFE
BY MARION HOLLEY
IT is one of the curious paradoxes of our times that, while social action has increased in militancy and social groupings move with deadlier accuracy toward their predetermined goals, the activity we idealize as truly democratic has steadily diminished in vigor. Men and nations act with more unity and intent, but with less judgment and responsibility. Individual lives are more closely intertwined, but mutual confidence vanishes. The sheer weight of mass insistence determines many issues: mass rule is oppressive, demanding, arbitrary, and seldom vitalized by freedom of vision and spontaneity of the collective will.
This paradox may easily be demonstrated by reference to contemporary national life. Scarcely does there exist among the powerful nations of Europe, in the Orient, or here in the United States, a real democracy. The seizure of power by self-elected individuals and parties has punctuated the riot of post-war years. These parties have entrenched themselves at the center of national activity, claiming for their leaders near deification, for themselves a right to omnipotence born from the belief that in them the State is personified. "L’Etat, c’est moi,” is the cry of each official partisan. Now this self-righteous seizure of every power and privilege has won for the State infallibility. But it has not caused it to represent the people.
The problem in the United States is of different complexion. In this large country no superficial unity has yet been imposed upon the citizenry, either by force or by the excitability of mob reaction. The sentiment surrounding the New Deal is already being dissipated, and it is now apparent that an appeal more powerful or an intention more ruthless will be needed to center the ambitions and energies of diverse America. Either these, or a more desperate necessity.
Meanwhile, the techniques of democracy have fallen into disuse, their functions usurped by demagoguery, the pressure of interest groups, the unseen propaganda of money, an irrational espousal of “cure-alls” by certain types of persons who hotly pursue one nostrum only until another appears, and a general listlessness on the part of the real body politic.
Despite this sterility of the contemporary pattern of government, it is an obvious and hopeful fact that the democratic ideal does exist. It is because we have reference to it, because in critical moments we are measuring the actual against it and finding an incompatibility; it is because in our own minds we are truly pledged to this vision of government by democratic process, that we view with fretfulness and perplexity the operations of our own social machine.
Our dissatisfaction, however, will be spent and lost in ineffective modes of speech unless we convert it to the uses of vigorous study of the problem and a subsequent frontal attack. We are under an immediate constraint to understand, not so much what we dislike about society, as what we desire it to be. In this approach the seed of action is concealed; only through such a positive direction of attention will the life of action be discovered. Constantly should we ask ourselves: What do we intend by "democracy?” What is a technique of democratic action? Quite apart from dictionaries, what is the American governmental ideal?
At this point it becomes very difficult to
proceed with any soberness, for straight
questions elicit swift replies, which whirl
through the mind in enthusiastic disarray.
There are a hundred considerations,
a hundred phrases which spring up from
subconscious slumber. Here is the idea
of equality; everyone must vote. But election means
selection, and immediately we have the idea
of representative government. Who, then,
is qualified to govern, or is everyone? How
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shall the general
interest be maintained?
Can any goal be said to shape the process?
“. . . That government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from the earth. . . .” Of, for, and by are the three prepositions which embody our political faith. Yet the theory behind that faith is not clearly defined by them, nor does it rest upon an assumption which, because of its confidence in the rightness of natural human opinion, is wholly defensible. The people, in themselves, are no guarantee of democratic process.
However, it is with the people that we must start, with that whole undifferentiated mass which lies at the base of society. In one respect society is nothing but the accumulation of its innumerable individual members. In another, society does not even begin to exist until these units are welded into the body we call a community.
Woodrow Wilson defined a community as "a body of me who have things in common, who are conscious that they have things in common. A community is unthinkable, unless you have a vital interrelationship of parts. There must be such a contact as will constitute union itself before you will have the true course of the wholesome blood through the body.”
This conception of a community is almost necessarily an a priori assumption to the consideration of forms of government. But while we can assume ideas, we cannot assume their practical demonstration. The problem of actualizing upon the societal level “a body of men who have things in common, who are conscious that they have things in common,” is the critical task with which we today are struggling. The boundaries of community life, of that normal interplay of function and benefit which unites men by natural ties, have so far extended their reach as to coincide almost with the world’s boundaries. Common interest has levelized us all, merged us all, undermined us all, if you will, since individual security and safety no longer exist apart from a universal sanity.
Yet despite this real extension of the body politic to its furthest limits, beyond which lies nothing human, within which is encompassed the whole innumerable breed of men, it is a fact that no legitimate group life has yet been born because no consciousness stirs the human parts to a sense of mutual destiny. This is not only true for the great unit, the international body; it is equally true of all lesser units, of nations, cities, families, true even of the individual life itself. A vast unconsciousness hangs over man, shrouding his least and best activities with a pall of inertia and uncreativeness.
Our first challenge, then, is to awake; to quicken our lives; to capture a sound comprehension of individual purpose and function (Webster defines “individual” as a “complexity in unity characteristic of organized things . . .”) and through appreciation of "things in common,” to nourish that core of consciousness upon which community life may depend, from which the process of democratic action, like “the true course of the wholesome blood,” may issue to penetrate and activate the social organism.
This is the ideal. It does not exist, except in the imaginations of a few. It has no scope nor influence upon the institutions of large human groupings. The political activities of American citizens are little permeated by a virile confidence in the democratic process. The masses of men at the root of our government no longer possess that solidarity which once enabled them to say, with magnificent assurance, “We, the people of the United States . . .”
I do not suppose there is any document more stirring than this Constitution, as it marches, in the first phrases of the preamble, to its daring statement of intention. Curiously enough, the unity which it assumed did not exist either, except germinally in the minds of a few. In 1789 the American nation had yet to be welded, out of the substance of a great ideal, through the pressure of vicissitude and tenacious leadership. As we examine the sources of our national life, we know this to be so; and it lends hopefulness to our present dilemma.
For if, once before (or many times, as
could easily be proven), an ideal having no
existence settled upon the minds of men,
intrigued them, possessed them gradually,
moved and united them, and finally created
through them a nation, a living tangible
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community of action
and hope, then surely
the miracle could again be performed.
It could and it can. Through the ideal newly released by Bahá’u’lláh, it is being performed. His goal of a New World Order, inconspicuous and feeble as it may seem to the majority, is yet the germ of a new hope and of a new society. Examined closely, it will be seen to possess a potentiality as vital, a destiny as fine as any of the ideas ever yet generated among us.
Bahá’u’lláh, who was born in Írán in 1817, lived in the East and died in Syria in 1892 without meeting any westerner except one, seems to us removed by time and place from the tradition and substance of our culture. We cannot imagine an idea of His affecting our political systems, nor does it seem likely that His philosophy, shaped on alien soil more than fifty years ago, could assist, except in a loose way, in the development of contemporary thought and habit. Yet the reverse is true. In His conceptions of the nature of society, in the techniques of government which He indicated, in the vision of world order which He painted, the essence of the modern spirit is confined and delineated. If one is avid for a sense of new horizons, let him study Bahá’u’lláh. There is to be found in the writings of this unique Person not only the modern community ideal, but the very mechanics of that kind of social action which is possible and most worthy of our times.
The core of the Bahá’í ideal is the concept of world order, which must be bred into the secret reactions of men’s minds and hearts before it can be built tangibly and formally. It is time we recognized that no community can flourish, either locally, nationally or internationally, until this basic step is achieved. The oneness of mankind is a social fact; not even a city government can neglect it, inasmuch as every city, and especially the American city, is comprised of diverse racial and national elements which, unless merged in common activity, are perforce in a perpetual struggle for control. Now the victory of one element over another—of one racial grouping, one economic class, one social set, or a political party —is a symptom of sickness in community life. Struggle is essential, but it is the equal struggle of all of these natural parts towards an achievement in government which shall represent, not victory upon one hand and loss on another, but a superior integration of the needs and actions of the parts into a single whole solution.
It is clear, therefore, that Bahá’u’lláh’s denunciation of prejudices of all descriptions was a preliminary to the ideal of world order, since the sense of human solidarity is the basis for social action upon any of its levels. By extirpating prejudice, intolerance, hatred, and all such violent reactions of narrow and confused minds, Bahá’u’lláh created the possibility of a world community. He then injected the fertile germ of the ideal itself.
Ortega y Gasset has written that "the State . . . is pure dynamism—the will to do something in common.” It begins "when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common.” New vitality is always generated by the vision of a new task; communities live again when they impose upon themselves the extension of their bounds and influence. The goal of world order is the modern dynamism, a new horizon, assuring life to the state in the very presence of its decay and chaos.
It is no mistake to say that Bahá’u’lláh injected this dynamic into His followers. With them it is not mere theory, not idle aspiration, nor a political creed which can be forfeited to personal benefit. A Bahá’í is one converted; with him world order is a religion; he stakes his talents and possessions upon his faith. It is only by such fundamental persistence and dedication of purpose that the new community can be realized, and thus Bahá’u’lláh has underwritten its success.
Horizons are never reached, however, by
mere excess of enthusiasm. Ideals, to be
great, must be rooted in cooler soil, and the
feet of idealists must hold to firm ground,
following along paths which are well
defined, logical and accessible. The goal of
world order, as described by Bahá’u’lláh, is
attainable because already the road to be
traveled is plain and there are those who are
journeying upon it. In a nationalistic and
sectarian age there are already persons who,
as acting citizens of a world community,
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are practising the
methods and perfecting
the instruments of universal society.
These are the Bahá’ís who, having accepted the message of Bahá’u’lláh ("The world is but one country and mankind its citizens . . . let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind . . .”) not as felicitous prophecy, but as a demonstrable fact, are at this moment sharing the satisfactions and responsibilities of a creative task; working as members of the Bahá’í Administrative Order, they are fast harnessing His proclamation of human unity to institutional forms. Of this Administrative Order its Guardian, Shoghi Effendi, has written: “It will, as its component parts, its organic institutions, begin to function with efficiency and vigor, assert its claim and demonstrate its capacity to be regarded not only as the nucleus but the very pattern of the New World Order destined to embrace in the fullness of time the whole of mankind.”1
Needless to say, such a system cannot be measured and evaluated in a single essay, nor is it my purpose so to do. Rather, starting from the obvious thesis that democratic action, understood in its most liberal sense, has in our day declined, we observed this decline to be but a symptom of loss in the energy of our community life. Now a community, being “a body of men . . . who are conscious that they have things in common,” loses its life either when its members do not have things in common or are unconscious of them if they do. Men today have things in common; they are united externally by economic and political interdependence, and by world-wide bonds of communication; they are united more profoundly by their common humanity. Yet these factors in themselves are no guarantee of vitality. They form the framework merely of a potential society—a society which extends around the world, only to be throttled at its source by provincialisms. As one student has phrased it, "A new world has just been created, but most of the people in it are not yet aware of the fact.”2
At the point of general awakening, then, will we find the spark to set our social body into motion. Not methods so much as a new ideal, to challenge and arouse us, will bring into play once more all of the powers and resources of the masses of men.
The sign of life is motion, wrote ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It was his Father, Bahá’u’lláh, who imparted to the body politic the modern secret of motion. Surely it is not in any way curious that the world community He touched to life should encompass, happily and uniquely, the virtues of an elevated idealism, spontaneous social action, a universal participation, and liberal, yet authoritative forms of government.
“Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead. Verily, thy Lord speaketh the truth, and is the Knower of things unseen.”3
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1The Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 52.
2Lyman Bryson.
3Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 7.
