To the Peoples of the World/Foreword
FOREWORD
[edit]The Bahá’í call for peace comes at a crucial moment in the history of humanity. Peace in the contemporary world is no longer an option but a necessity. All leaders and peoples of the world must come to realize this fact, and achieve the maturity which the Bahá’í Faith foresees for the coming of age of humanity.
To achieve peace we need a new orientation of thought and a new knowledge of the dynamics of change in the history of human society. Both have been grasped in their essence in the Bahá’í teachings. Conventional wisdom sees conflict as the warp and woof of history, punctuated by wars and relieved by temporary respites when swords are shielded and guns are silent. In conventional terms peace is merely truce; war, with ultimate conquest or subjugation, victory or defeat, is the paradigm. Contemporary governments seek security through force of arms: they aspire to peace but prepare for war.
But this concept of history, this view of the human condition, is not only false; it is a menace to life and civilization. In a world where the technologies of destruction can destroy the human population of the globe twenty times over, and where the technologies of production, services and communication are sophisticated but vulnerable, force is not an instrument of security but of genocide. In our times we can only survive, and our civilization can only flower, if we reorient the conventional wisdom and achieve the new insights which have been proclaimed by the Bahá’í Faith and which are now also supported by the latest discoveries of the empirical sciences.
Bahá’ís proclaim that the most important condition that can bring about peace is unity—the unity of families, of nations, and of the great currents of thought and inquiry that we denote science and religion. Maturity, in turn, is a prerequisite for such unity. This is evolutionary thinking, and its validity is shown by the new theories which emerge from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, dynamical systems theory, cybernetics, and the related sciences of complexity. They are supported by detailed empirical investigations in such fields as physical cosmology, paleobiological macroevolutionary theory, and new trends in historiography.
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The new scientific findings underscore the Bahá’í proclamations in regard both the overall direction of historical development—which is from primitive bands of nomadic hunters-gatherers to modern post-industrial societies and the global web of interdependence weaved by them which must, if given the chance, lead ultimately to global unity, and the overall mode of historical development, which is always beset with crises and discontinuities but is also endowed with the freedom of selecting alternative outcomes. In society as in nature, change is sudden and discontinuous, and offers multiple trajectories. Conscious human beings can explore and make use of the alternatives and choose the one that leads evolution’s preferred direction with the least possible suffering and violence.
If a group of people in possession of the ideas and the faith of the Bahá’í act in concert and with conscious knowledge of the dynamics of the historical juncture in which humanity now finds itself, they can decisively influence and change the present course of history. In the language of the new sciences of evolution, they can be the small, initially peripheral fluctuation which can be suddenly amplified in a complex dynamical system when that system becomes critically unstable, and which, amplified and spreading, can determine the course of the coming bifurcation. Acting with sound knowledge, solid faith and firm determination, men and women of good will can load the dice of social change, bias the statistics of evolutionary transformation, and achieve a humanistic end that is consistent with the great patterns and modalities of evolution that hold good on Earth as in the vast reaches of the cosmos. Maturity does not come without the turbulence of adolescence; dynamic stability on a new plane of organization cannot be achieved without critical instability and bifurcation on lesser organizational levels.
People of good will everywhere need to heed the call for world peace by the Bahá’í community and reflect on its deeper significance in light of their own perceptions, traditions, and the emerging theories of the empirical sciences. Then, through the multiplicity of approaches a common insight will crystallize, a shared way will be found. Humanity can set out on the road to a greater wisdom, a fuller maturity, if only it is given the opportunity to search its cultures and wisdoms, and reflect on its time and place in the biospheric, indeed in the cosmic, order of physical, biological and sociocultural reality.
ERVIN LASZLO October 1985