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World Order

Summer

1967

Partners in the Great Enterprise

by THEODORE J. KREPS

Racial Attitudes in the United States and Brazil

by RUSSELL HAMILTON

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World Order

VOLUME 1 NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER is intended to stimulate, inspire and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy.

Editorial Board:

DR. FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

DR. HOWARD GAREY

MONROE E. MICHELS

GLENFORD MITCHELL

Business Manager:

MRS. MURIEL MICHELS

Art Director:

HENRY MARGULIES

Yearly subscriptions: $3.50 per year in U.S., its territories and possessions; foreign subscriptions $4.00 per year. Address any correspondence or checks for subscriptions to World Order, c/o Mrs. Muriel Michels, 1 Cove Ridge Lane, Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870. Single copies available $1.00 each.

Copyright © 1967, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

Manuscripts and suggestions for articles and subjects to be treated editorially will be welcomed by the editors. All will be acknowledged.

CONTENTS

An Editorial .......................... 3

Partners in the Great Enterprise

by THEODORE J. KREPS ............ 4

The Bahá’í Faith and the Professions

by PAMELA RINGWOOD ............ 9

Racial Attitudes in the United States

and Brazil. Some Comparisons

by RUSSELL HAMILTON ............ 17

Orientations

by RUSSELL STAFFORD ............. 29

The Voice from Inner Space

by WINSTON EVANS

and MARZIEH GAIL ................. 30

Problems of Selecting a World Language

by EVELYN HARDIN ................ 42

A Letter

by WILLIAM STAFFORD ............. 48

The Persian View of the Afterlife

by RICHARD N. FRYE .............. 49

A Review

by STANWOOD COBB ............... 53

The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, nor of the Editorial Board.

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AN EDITORIAL

Sometimes it happens, as if by accident, that a number of apparently random objects thrown together in a certain space acquire a relationship to each other as of organs to an organism. As editors, we receive a certain number of articles from our contributors and from those which we accept we compose an issue. This is as close to random as you can get—yet, each issue has a character, almost as if it had been intended to carry out a theme. This fourth number of WORLD ORDER, for example; if you see it as a whole, it does appear to take as theme the relationship of the material and the spiritual. Professor Kreps’ moving statement of the moral concerns of an economist and businessman exemplifies in an astonishing way the relevance of the spiritual domain to a world we had regarded as wholly material; Pamela Ringwood’s discussion of the moral responsibilities of members of the professions to their clients and to society shows as clearly the overlapping of these two incommensurable realms; the hard-hitting theological discussion of Marzieh Gail and Winston Evans reveals the anguish experienced by the leaders of a religion which had been articulated in a pre-scientific age and whose truths they seem unable to re-state in terms meaningful to modern man.

A solution to material problems consonant with spiritual truths which have been accessible through the ages is rendered difficult by our tendency to regard the details of practical solutions as of essential rather than as of merely ancillary importance. We fight crime with computers; we attempt to solve political problems through fool-proof systems; we wrangle over psychoanalytic doctrines in our attempts to reduce the misery of individuals—and certainly we are right so to do. But just as a constitution, no matter how logically put together, cannot, in the absence of a certain amount of good will, assure the flawless functioning of a state, so the most ingeniously invented code of comportment cannot solve the problems of human relationships without some appeal to the larger, the spiritual context of our human experience.

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PARTNERS IN THE GREAT ENTERPRISE

BY THEODORE J. KREPS

Theodore J. Kreps, Emeritus Professor of Business Economics at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, has graciously permitted us to reprint the Founders’ Day Address which he delivered at Stanford on March 6, 1966.

The unfolding saga of the astronauts is the most thrilling and recent of a series of scientific and industrial revolutions that have multiplied man’s power for good or evil and made imperative demands on man’s character and responsibility.

Increasingly revealed by assiduous creative research for truth, beauty and holiness, a boundless creativity as unseen as gravitation, as powerful as love, is emerging into the finite in new forms. It transfuses alike the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the outermost reaches of space and the innermost recesses of the atom, the broadest sweeps of national and international action and the subtlest intricacies of human personality. This creativity is a continuing process, a becoming that itself is actuality. No sooner does one arrive or solve old problems but one starts on a fresh journey into a frontier area of new problems.

Participating in this creativity is man’s adventure. To be a partner in this Great Cosmic Enterprise constitutes his worth, his dignity, and his grandeur as an individual, no matter what his specialty or field of activity or interest. Daily business activities are as much a part of the Great Enterprise as are Sunday worship services. The here and now is as eternal as what has been or will be.

As the astronauts, whether Russian or American. who have circled the earth have repeatedly emphasized, these exploits of knowledge and action have not been only their achievement alone but also that of thousands of helpers each faithfully doing his small part of the job. Riding or manipulating space ships is a task quite appropriately hailed as the achievement not merely of the nuclear scientists, the metallurgists, the fuel experts, and the computers, but also of the many businessmen, government officials, and workers, whether ten-talent, five-talent or one-talent persons. Just as vast reefs and islands are built from trillions of coral shells, those who do the work of the world, fight its battles, build its history, and produce its civilization are the base of every dynamic force that lifts the levels of society. A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

Most important in the rank and file are the hundreds of millions of one-talent people. Society is always grateful for the five- and ten-talent persons who in the profound wisdom of Jesus’ parable are driven by their genius to develop prodigiously what is in them. But it is the one-talent layman who often throws his talent away. “What can I do?” he asks. “I am unknown. I am just a door-watcher.” [Page 5] Yet every new idea, every change in mass beliefs or scientific insight, every reform began with a minority of one. The profound movements of history have started with nonconforming men and women.

Who in the nineteenth century, for example, reformed the prisons and brought about more humane treatment for the insane? Was it an impressive bishop or professor or prominent politician, social leader or business executive? An impassioned group of doctors? A committee of prominent citizens who put an advertisement in the newspapers? No; it was a relatively unknown girl from Hampden, Maine: Dorothea Dix. She had one capacity that many of us today are too prosperous to have, and too conformist to permit: the quality of compassion coupled with righteous indignation. Most of us mutter and mumble but we keep silent and pass by on the other side lest someone think we have “leftist leanings.”

THE VITAL ROLE OF THE ONE-TALENT MILLIONS

As Dr. Channing pointed out more than a century ago, the impulses that quicken and reform society come not from the conspicuous few but from the millions of businessmen and workers who are the militant actualizers of democratic values. They translate the basic Christian ideals of love and brotherhood into ever better programs for cleaner cities, healthier homes, safer highways, and an educational system that will draw out every spark of talent in every person. The freedom of the Christian man they translate into freedom from open or disguised political and economic oppression. Human brotherhood becomes flesh in enlarged peaceful trade with our world neighbors. Love that seeketh not its own is embodied in using all roads to agreement not only for settling industrial and class warfare, but also for tireless patience in negotiating millions of agreements daily in the marketplace and elsewhere, agreements from which all parties benefit, based on faith and responsible performance.

There is an indissoluble symbiotic relationship between the politics of time and the politics of eternity. This relationship is not chronological. The establishment of the “Kingdom of Heaven” is not beyond history. It is precisely the essence of man’s purpose here to try to build it now, within history. Eternity must enter into time and transform it.

As Emerson said, “What is man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what he has incompletely made, a renouncer of fallacies [particularly the many economic fallacies so profitable to special interests], a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life.”

In a democracy, survival is a race between continuous, vigilant, constructive reform and catastrophe. To paraphrase a dictum of the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the society which does not constantly bring to bear on its problems all available trained intelligence is doomed. Not all our advertising and public relations, not all our wit, not all our victories on land or at sea, not all our profits, not all our stock market gains, not all our automobiles or rising levels of living—can move back the finger of fate. There is no appeal from the judgment pronounced daily on those who cease or refuse to learn. The nation that neglects its human responsibilities today will assuredly have its nose ground into the dust of tomorrow.

EVERY WORKBENCH AN ALTAR

All of the major church groups, whether Protestant or Catholic, are devising bridges to “span the tragic and pervasive gulf between religious commitment and [Page 6] secular pursuits.” They realize that skyscrapers, tenements, giant factories, and the asphalt jungle exert more potent influences on character development than the cathedral. The business executives who daily determine employees’ income, job advancement, and usefulness do more to forge character than churches may do on Sunday. Managements in industry and commerce by their payments of wages, salaries, dividends, interest, and taxes and by their investment in physical and human resources crucially influence who shall be able to afford higher education for their children and (as trustees of the schools and colleges) who shall teach them and what they shall be taught. Newspapers, business magazines, books, radio, television, and advertising ceaselessly, sometimes blatantly, seek out the mass market. Thus, it is through lay people in their various occupations, whether merchant, worker, civil servant, or homemaker, that knowledge and power (both beneficial and evil) are released for building a new world. Their places of witness and of de facto worship are where they work, whether in the marketplace, factory, government office, farm, school, household, or church. No social change takes place of itself. It must be achieved by individuals. None can escape taking a position on vital issues, the least considered and most irresponsible frequently being that of having “no opinion,” of noninvolvement, of “I don’t care,” or neutrality. As Emerson said, “What you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.” Everybody’s life exposes his system of values, most egregiously so those who pretend to have none.

The general need here—and the basic challenge—is obvious. With all our open-minded welcoming of revolutionary changes in technology—atomic and solar power, fission, fusion, rocket and missile bombs, miraculous new metals and rare earths able to stand re-entry temperatures, electronic data processing, cybernetics, suburbanization, air conditioning in the tropics, RNA, DNA, and so on— have we the vision and wisdom to devise and welcome with equal judicious alertness the changes in our political and economic institutions needed to harness the chariot of technology to the goals and aspirations of democracy? In the race between the education we need to work out wise decisions in the markets and at the polls, and with the catastrophe involved in surrendering the tasks which each of us ought to be doing ourselves to politicians, warlords, business leaders, or experts, how can we assure alert, understanding public participation and control in the long-run public interest? Here is a challenge that is not easily met.

This is neither the time nor the place to explore the numerous conflicting answers to this basic problem of our free enterprise system: How preserve freedom of entry, equality of opportunity, and economic justice?

Those who recommend a let-business-alone or let-labor-alone policy remind me of the elephants that are said to have shouted, “Every man for himself,” as they stamped among the chickens. To such cynical counsel millions of small businessmen, farmers, and workers properly raise vigorous objection and constantly devise and support measures giving them equal protection, a fair deal, a reasonable chance.

On the other hand, no one wants such a degree of political power united with economic power that a monolithic totalitarianism emerges of the kind that brought catastrophe in the form of the corporate state in fascist Italy, the new order in Nazi Germany, or the Zaibatsu in Japan, and which now still menaces the free world from behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains. Both extremes— government taking over business or big business taking over government—spell disaster.

As President Eisenhower warned in his famous Farewell Address, we are in [Page 7] an age challenged and dominated by a military-industrial complex: specialists in violence working hand-in-glove with specialists in producing the instruments of violence. Yet our goal is the pursuit of peace for which we need experts and specialists in cooperation, in securing voluntary coordination at all levels of national and international relations. We need to keep strong the vitality, efficiency, moral stamina, and techniques of responsible freedom, of competition, and of individual initiative. Above all, this generation is called upon to meet the challenge of greatness.

THE GREAT ENTERPRISE

The eminent psychologist, Dr. Harry A. Overstreet, has in a book by that name called man’s adventure upon earth The Great Enterprise. Free enterprise, he states, is not enough. The times require great enterprise, and you and I, all of us, are participants therein.

Meaning will come to our joint endeavors, he points out, only in the measure that we lift our eyes up from ourselves and our own property to the aspirations of others not in our family, nor in our business, nor in our nation, nor even in our race. Wherever man is, he yearns for freedom to develop the embryo of talents which is his share of boundless creativity. That is precisely the freight of meaning carried in the famous declaration “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

No freedoms are possible, even for those who act responsibly, except under laws protecting them from self-centered aggressors who act irresponsibly. The first requirement of peace and order is an equal administration of justice under which a home is a man’s castle and his business is a zone or area for creative voluntarism such that constructive activities and abilities can thrive in full flower. To protect these freedoms against force and fraud, within and without, billions of dollars of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed.

Basically, therefore, money, monetary profits, and materialistic gain rank no better than third behind freedom and justice. To achieve larger increases in wealth, employment, gross national product, or national income, while excellent, is not man’s major goal or challenge. That, as Dr. Overstreet put it, consists in his trying as best he can to be a fully active partner in The Great Enterprise. To quote the concluding paragraph of Dr. Overstreet’s book:

The central challenge to whatever maturity of mind we can muster is how we can work our way out of a variously unbalanced world into a world in dynamic balance. And for our time and generation this means how can we work our way out of the closed worlds we have universally created, out of the closed world of sovereign states into the open world of the commonwealth of man. Out of the closed world of economic monopoly, restrictions and exploitation, into the open world of economic freedom. Out of the closed world of racial and class snobbery and oppression into the open world of men’s dignity and friendliness where all of us help each other to be free. The great enterprise of this our day is to make the climb up from the morasses of separatism, of fervent dislikes, [Page 8] of conflicts between races, classes, religions, and nations up to a new plateau of practical living and joint spiritual endeavor which fully recognizes that we are our brother’s keeper.

But we are not only our brother’s keeper, we are also his maker. American warmongers create Russian warmongers, and vice versa. The labor leader is frequently a replica of his boss. Those who sow hate reap it. And, as Emerson pointed out, to have a friend, you must first be one. Our workshop is the arena where, every day, character is being forged. On the assembly line is the altar at which we are working out the universal order of truth, beauty, holiness, and love taking shape here and now. In an enterprise so vast, so miraculously fashioned that even the world’s greatest scientists have scarcely made a beginning in unraveling it, all of us, each one of us, has a small share, a task for each moment. Even a year is merely one tick of the clock in the eternal space-time continuum of endless mystery and miracle, which encompasses us round about as the ocean a bit of plankton. Uncomprehending, attempting to fathom the cosmos without and the vast universes within even the smallest atom or cell, we are like travelers taking notes in the vastness of an undiscovered continent, irresistibly pressing on toward ultimate goals of which we are but dimly aware.

Blind to our origins hundreds of thousands of years ago, beset by terrors of our own creation, we readily wallow in the lazy opportunism and easy cynicism that we are nothing, and that all our efforts go for naught, only to be struck at times against our will by the blinding revelation, as was Saul of Tarsus, that every human being, whether Jew or Greek, bondsman or free, no matter what his color, creed, or status, has a transcendent dignity realizable only in those activities at which he is busy.

In this way all other creatures, every nation, race, occupation, and class are partners, whether in business, in labor organizations, in schools and universities, in government, or in homes. As partners in this greatest of all great enterprises, each in his sphere has the daily opportunity humbly to contribute his insight, good-will, managerial talent, and devotion.

In all such activities, including what is more narrowly called business, there are not only challenges to every kind of human talent but temptations are many and strong as well. Freedom of enterprise in each case has to be earned each day by responsible behavior. World business organizations require world citizens, men strong enough to know and acknowledge their weakness, brave enough to face themselves as they are, compassionate when others fail, duly considerate of all whose welfare their decisions affect, whether stockholders, workers, suppliers, customers, competitors here and abroad, governmental policies, or American ideals. They know that no one is worthy of trying to manage others if he cannot master himself. They undertake ever larger private responsibilities, breaking new paths, humble and gentle in success, honoring the past by transcending it. They accept adversity as a necessary test of strong men, and are wary lest the Capuan ease of perpetual prosperity undermine initiative and moral strength. Above all, it is the busy men, large and small, by whom, in the measure the free enterprise system develops the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary men, economic growth and national strength are achieved. Whatever the constructive talent may be, large or small, no one is unimportant.

So let nothing keep us from making our contribution. No matter how massive the indifference or resistance, let us stand up for that which is good and true. No darkness, however vast, have ever put out the smallest light.

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THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH AND THE PROFESSIONS

By Pamela Ringwood

Pamela Ringwood of Canberra, Australia, is a lawyer and social worker. She is interested in socio-legal aspects of society and in particular in the field of family law and inter-professional cooperation.

To be a Bahá’í in this time is to live in a stimulating and intensely interesting environment. The perspective of the Faith lends meaning to the apparent chaos of the world and deep insights into its development and patterns. This article will deal with only one of the many areas to be investigated, and, within this area, I have particularized still further, taking my examples from the medical, legal, and social science professions, simply because these are the ones with which I am most familiar. The distinction between a profession and another occupation is often said to consist in the element of service which transcends mere personal commitments to work, and it is with respect to this element in particular that the insights of the Faith have great significance.

BACKGROUND—THE CHANGES IN SOCIETY AND THE PROFESSIONS

The great changes in society during the last century or so have been accompanied by sweeping though often unacknowledged changes in the professions. It is not often realized that the rate of change is even more remarkable than the new inventions and facilities which characterize our age. At no other time in the history of mankind have people lived in a society which has changed so fast—and it is continuing to change at a rate which is itself increasing. A concomitant of this swift movement of change is that the social climate in which the professions work is changing constantly, thus affecting the aims and work of professions operating within it. It is not surprising, then, that a number of the professions have recently been taking a look at themselves. This may be seen in the themes of conferences, of articles and books. If the professions are to play a really effective part in our society, this re-evaluation is enforced by the rate of change. In particular, this is true of those professions which are concerned with people and which are thus greatly affected by whatever affects social conditions. For many, uncertainty as to their professional role in society or growing unease with the limitations of this role even in the social microcosm of their employment has forced them into reconsideration of their goals, status and functioning.

In this reconsideration and evaluation, several things must be borne in mind—

FIRSTLY, along with this tremendous change in society, there has been a growth of knowledge about social factors and their control. For the first time, we have become aware on a large scale that social events have causes which can be effectively controlled and manipulated both to cure and prevent problems. This level of awareness, commonplace as it is to our time, is new in history.

For centuries, people thought that social phenomena and their results, plague, crime, malnutrition, high infant mortality, social disorganization, were by and large the design of a higher providence or the workings of Fate. What we are learning is that we can produce more effective and harmonious social relationships and environments, by the control of social, economic, biological and psychological factors. We have learnt in part how to temper the cycles of boom and depression in our industrial society, and in many areas, the knowledge which can give us control is steadily increasing.

In the field of medicine, the explosion of knowledge has opened up areas of [Page 10] expertise and broadened the horizons of the profession. Diagnosis has become incredibly refined and exact since the days of the poxes. The advances in the psychological and social sciences have been so extensive that new professions have come into being, founded on their insights. These new professions and the wider scope of established professions have created some tense situations—the areas of functioning may overlap, the ways of dealing with the same situation or the objective involved in it may be incompatible. Some solution must be found unless the effectiveness of professional action is to be limited by the need to fight offensives and counter-offensives in areas of interaction.

SECONDLY, this vastly increased knowledge has brought with it an awareness of what can be done to help people and a sense of responsibility to give such help. When we were largely unaware of the causes of poverty, disease, or misery, we could be reasonably happy about others’ enduring them as part of the mysterious dispensations of Providence. Our society is, however, becoming increasingly sure that many of these conditions can be not only alleviated but prevented by appropriate social or technological action.

In this context we can see the significance of the work of such pioneers as Sir John Simon. For over twenty years in the late nineteenth century, as the British Government’s chief medical adviser, Sir John worked on public health. He brought the standards of the country to a height which freed many thousands of people from the intolerable misery in which the overcrowding of the Industrial Revolution had placed them. His first report as Medical Officer to the City of London (1849) shows the appalling problems with which he contended constructively and courageously:

“The swarms of men and women, who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell differently from cattle; swarms to whom personal cleanliness is utterly unknown; swarms, by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations are quite unconceived. . . . The task of interfering in behalf of these classes begins at length to be recognized as an obligation of society.” These problems were in part aggravated and in part created by the Industrial Revolution and their pressure forced the finding of solutions on a wide scale.

In much the same period, we begin to have comparable advances in other fields. Law used as the instrument to provide security of income, and of medical treatment, and legal aid and opportunities for education and rehabilitation were developed. The protagonists in each of these fields, bound up in the overwhelming difficulties they faced, were inclined to think that the provisions for which they fought would automatically remedy the ills and secure the happiness of the whole society. The propaganda of the compulsory education people sounds like the prophecies of the Promised Day and that of the suffragettes is not far removed from this. Despite the very great advances these groups have made by their reforms, it is becoming increasingly apparent to us that much more extensive views must be taken of any proposed reforms, which must be integrated with existing patterns and with other proposals for change. We are also becoming aware of the importance of combined professional approaches to problems and solutions, as we see that in their functioning they are both interlocked and interdependent. Of all generations to date, we realize most fully that no man is an island and that no social problem can be encapsulated from the rest of society. Although our control over society is by no means as complete as the nineteenth century in the first flush of discovery thought it would be (the man is the captain of his fate, the master of his soul philosophy), it is still, taken in the light of the past achievements of mankind, very remarkable. Only the most callously indifferent [Page 11] or ignorant could now leave others to suffer needlessly. Osbert Sitwell commented on the comforting illusions of the well-to-do Victorian of that day. He saw a child hurt when playing in a park and he mentioned it to his nurse. She told him not to worry because the lower orders did not feel pain as he did. The development of the social sciences has forced most of us to the conclusion nowadays that the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin, rather than to the earlier view that the majority of people—the lower orders—had about the same response level as fish. The implications of this have been pointed up within the legal field by the brilliant jurist, Dean Erwin Griswold: “The development in the law of the twentieth century which strikes me as of outstanding significance is the increasing recognition which has been given to ethical and social elements in the continuing process of adjusting human relations.” He goes on to say that whereas the growing awareness of the importance of contemporary social and economic conditions and of what goes on in people’s minds in relation to the aims of law and justice, was the main juristic achievement of the first half of the twentieth century, he hoped that the main achievement of the second half would be to use this knowledge more effectively.

The American sociologist, Talcott Parsons, was very interested in this question of the professions because they are a group in society which exercises a powerful but not often fully acknowledged influence. He drew attention to the fact that in a money-based society, the existence of a large group of persons who are ‘service’ oriented is quite remarkable. He sees the professions as a potential spearhead of social change and reform. This is undoubtedly true. The impact of a united body of professional opinion is more than considerable. However, professions are not, simply by virtue of being professions, progressively minded. The potential of movement can be exercised backwards as well as forwards. Social controls capable of harnessing energy for constructive purposes can also be used to destroy initiative and experiment.

In order for this potential to be exercised creatively and not merely conservatively, there must be an awareness both of purpose and of what it is realistic to try to achieve. There is no automatic safeguard against the professions’ becoming mainly instruments of negative control, interested mainly in safeguarding status or established principles. The only reasonably effective and non-limiting safeguard is in the level of enlightened awareness of long-term objectives and of education in the broad sense in the professions themselves. This must be allied with an attitude which is concerned with objective good rather than self-justification and satisfaction. Professional people have a duty to use their knowledge and experience not simply within the restricted range of their own practices but in the service of mankind in general. Particularly in matters affected by their special skills and experience, it is to the benefit of the community that they lead change rather than be led by it.

Two important areas of professional functioning are revealed by these considerations:

—the first is the area of practical interaction between professions in day to day affairs;

—the second is that of social or legislative action in which the experience of day to day cases is used to create more satisfactory conditions.

PROFESSIONAL INTERACTION

As Talcott Parsons says, professions today are much more developed both in their background knowledge and in their social status than previously. Further [Page 12] interaction between professions has increased as their own spheres have enlarged and overlapped in human affairs. The awareness also that each profession is operating within—affecting and being affected by—the social environment, has given something of the same perspective and similar aims to diverse professions. In the complex web of modern society, professions cannot as easily as formerly pursue their way in cool isolation from each other.

As our increasing knowledge has made us realize, social problems tend to be many-sided and their solutions, of considerable variety and depth. Again, as professional people have become aware of this, they have wanted to improve their skills and attitudes so that they can function in this three-dimensional professionalism. Most of us sense this challenge, some more acutely than others, some only through its negative effects. Even in our money society, it is also fair to say that for most of us the practice of our professional skills and the use of our knowledge have a value and interest over and above the simple receipt of fees for work. There is a real reward in work well done, which most professional people experience and value. We are fortunate in our day and in this industrial society that our work is both interesting and challenging.

The question of interaction with other professions, seen so often as a point of frustration and annoyance, can, with the realization of all that they have fundamentally in common, become a source of interest and stimulation, lending another dimension to the practice of one’s profession in a ‘social’ time. These areas of interaction may include the giving of medical or psychiatric evidence in court, the dealing with Workers’ Compensation cases, or the social and legal interests involved in matrimonial cases. There are other areas of potential interaction which are not explored because of our unawareness of them. Those of us in one profession may not at times realize that a given situation is within the professional grasp of another. We fail to classify it as having legal or medical or social significance because we are unaware of the identifying marks of that situation in those circumstances. In the tangle of our professional functioning, the client’s problem may go basically unresolved because we do not know that help is available for it.

Within this area of practical co-operation, there are basic Bahá’í principles which are of considerable importance.

FIRSTLY, there is the emphasis on courtesy. The busy practitioner or counselor may not at all intend to be discourteous but his abrupt and preoccupied manner may make communication difficult if not impossible. The Bahá’í Faith enjoins on us not merely a refraining from outright abuse but an overcoming of that indifference to the needs and feelings of others which is oftentimes as deadly to cooperation. Founded as it is on a positive respect for other human beings, it helps to create a climate in which cooperation is spontaneous and not forced as a duty.

In the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “Love the creatures for the sake of God and not for themselves. You will never become angry or impatient if you love them for the sake of God. Humanity is not perfect. There are imperfections in every human being and you will always become unhappy if you look toward the people themselves. But if you look toward God you will love them and be kind to them, for the world of God is the world of perfecting and complete mercy. Therefore do not look at the shortcomings of anybody; see with the eyes of forgiveness.”

SECONDLY, there is the feeling of service which takes away the limiting considerations of safeguarding status or image. For a Bahá’í, work done in the spirit of service is equivalent to an act of worship. This gives him an attitude towards his work which makes it less on a selfishly personal level and more part of the huge work that is going on in many spheres for the service of mankind. He respects [Page 13] those who are engaged in this work, irrespective of whether they also are Bahá’ís.

THIRDLY, there is the importance of using one’s reason and one’s spirit to illuminate situations. This attitude is particularly useful in overcoming professional prejudices and undue rigidity as to thoughts and patterns of behavior.

Let us look at two areas of tension with the eye of understanding: These both occur in the giving of medical evidence in court and are quite common. Frequently to doctors, the questions asked in court seem to be preposterous because they ask for a kind of judgment which it is very difficult to give exactly. In a number of areas of medicine, scientific exactness has become impossible and in others doctors are often loth to make a judgment. This attitude is often perplexing to lawyers who deal with the crude, ad hoc decisions that human nature entails and who are aware that decision on legal rights cannot wait until science makes an exact assessment available through later advances.

Then too, there is often a difference between the lawyer’s facility in following a verbal argument and that of the non-lawyer. Throughout his course and in practice, the lawyer becomes used to this and follows a sustained and wordy argument with relative ease. Even people in therapeutic and interviewing professions do not devleop this skill as much, and where a person’s professional interest is more technological and scientific than literary, he may look an inept fool in the witness box. Honor Tracey in her witty book on a legal trial, The Straight and Narrow Path, points out that, whereas a legal summing up may be a brilliant and technical summation of the evidence as it appears in the legal context, it may nevertheless to those who experienced the situation seem like the ravings of a lunatic.

The willingness to find common interests and, most of all, a common language to overcome these superficial differences of approach, depends to a great extent on the interest and the desire for self-education of the practitioner. The Bahá’í has his interests set wide by his all-encompassing Faith and will endeavor steadily to raise his level of comprehension and tolerance of those with whom he comes into contact. He will replace unreasoning or even reasoning antagonism by an endeavor to resolve the particular difficulties which provoked it.

FOURTHLY, and involving all of these principles, is that of consultation. While there has been a dramatic surge forward in discussion and team work techniques, they still fall far short of the Bahá’í skill of consultation. While taking full advantage of improvements in the processes and techniques of consultation, its consultative principle is founded on a deep spiritual awareness of the dignity and integrity of other human beings and a deep practical knowledge of how to apply this awareness in communication.

This awareness takes account of the common bond that unites all humanity, whatever its funny little individual ways, and it founds both respect and understanding of others. We can add to this a solid respect for truth itself. The aim for any Bahá’í in a discussion is not to see who wins but what is true. He sees no discredit in changing his views if the opposite is firmly proved to him nor does he triumph over others who change their views when they hear his arguments. As a sheerly practical exercise, in his Bahá’í community life, he has learned through many day-to-day, small encounters and large crises how to overcome his prejudices against the personalities of others and listens to their statements for the truth which is in those statements. He has learnt not to be influenced by affection or status or dislike in his earnest search for truth.

Within this context of acceptance of others and the neutrality of the search for truth, the techniques of group discussion can function much more effectively [Page 14] and at a much deeper level than they are often wont to, in situations where individuals lack this basic tie. The contrast of Bahá’í consultation with what are loosely called ‘teams’ of interdisciplinary workers, makes the latter sometimes look like travesties of consultation techniques. The interest and the stimulation of effective interaction on this level as well as its practical advantages point to the need for fully implementing this principle in the professional sphere. Many idealistic people who are equally convinced of the value of these principles simply do not have the privilege and opportunity that Bahá’ís have of learning to exercise them at a deep level within an accepting community. It is the great triumph of the Bahá’í Faith to bring spiritual principles into the reality of every-day life so that all may learn to tread the spiritual pathway with practical feet.

Through consultation at this 1evel, one can learn from others’ experience, see through their eyes—and this is a prized ability in a world of complex and intricate situations. It not only improves the sphere of one’s own functioning but can extend the horizons of one’s possible effectiveness.

THE AREA OF SOCIAL ACTION

This is a question of considerable importance to every conscientious professional person. To what extent should he speak out and to what extent should he tacitly let social evils lie? To what extent should professional people use their influence and knowledge in the framing of laws and the taking of action to alleviate problems?

These are difficult questions which it is much harder to answer than to put. One of the reasons for the difficulty is the diversification of socio-economic status now common among professions owing to the greater educational opportunities. This means that the professional person who takes a determined stand will find that there are always quite a proportion of his professional colleagues who will not support him and may actively fight against him. He may also be wary of the reaction among his clients and patients. Dr. Spock, in referring to the lack of individual professional activity in American civil rights campaigns, has said:

“The professional man guards his reputation for soundness and his inner serenity by espousing only those opinions and positions he can defend in depth. It’s no wonder he winces at the thought of involvement in an outside controversy for which he will surely be called an ignorant meddler or a neurotic troublemaker —by the public, by his neighbors, by plenty of his colleagues.”

He goes on to say we cannot avoid our dual responsibility as citizens and professional people by building a wall of specialization around us, that we must participate in public controversy and risk the criticism of our colleagues: “If more of us were willing to be bold, boldness would become respectable.”

Modern society poses many problems in response to which an enlightened decision must be made. If professional people refuse to assist in those decisions of which they have knowledge or experience, then in many cases the decisions will be taken by those whose ignorance of the situation prevents them from having feelings of unworthiness.

It is one of the greatest fallacies in the social arena to assume that if one refrains from making a decision, then no decision is made.

In fact a decision is always made. Ours is the choice whether it is hammered out by the conflicting pressures of expediency and unconscious pressures or made rationally, consciously and humanely, stated explicitly so that it may later be amended or developed.

However, it is not enough that a decision be taken, it should be taken according [Page 15] to the right principles. The insistence of the Bahá’í Faith upon the importance of the individual investigation of truth and the harmony of science and religion, the important place given to knowledge and to the arts and sciences, broaden one’s outlook. In a world which daily becomes more complex, the Bahá’í is also assisted by the guidance of the Teachings. To those early Bahá’ís in the nineteenth century, the emerging world community and its responsibilities were only a dream; but to the Bahá’ís of the present-day world it is fast becoming a reality. On every hand they see the evidence of the prophecies, and the reasons for the principles and laws become more apparent. Unshackled from the manacles of passing whims and excitements, they are free to focus their minds and activities on those subjects which will be of enduring benefit to mankind.

Added to this is the tolerance of other people and classes which is a practical exercise in the Bahá’í world and which cuts across the petty discriminations of human society. This tolerance is founded not only on a dedication to the principle of the oneness of mankind but also on a practical experience through consultation and the life in the Bahá’í community, of how to express this love for each other and appreciation of each other’s capacities in working and consulting with each other. It is a criticism which has been leveled at most professions and at social work in particular that the members expect the public to adhere to middle class standards of morality and manners and have not always appreciated the positive values in other ways of life. The ability to tolerate and even benefit from differences of custom in others while still seeking the fundamental spiritual unity that binds together all men, is one that is actively and practically encouraged in the Bahá’í community.

CONCLUSION

In a society which is heavily concerned with money and status, we need to keep firmly before us the legend of the little boy with the torch. Many years ago, the people of a little village had to make the difficult journey from the dark valley to the mountain heights. They formed themselves into a procession and at their head, they put a little boy. He was entrusted to carry the torch which lit the way for them.

The villagers slowly climbed up the mountain, following in his steps. As they went on, the boy started to look behind him and he saw the streams of people following his lead. He kept on looking behind and thinking how very important he must be for them to follow him.

As he was thinking this and looking back, he stumbled and nearly dropped the torch. A hand reached out from one of those nearby and caught it before it could fall to the ground. Some one else then carried the torch and the villagers followed him, sweeping by the little boy at the side of the road.

Much too late he realized that what they had been following was the torch that lit their way, not him.

The effective part which Talcott Parsons sees for professions can only be played if they realize their part in the service of mankind and see their functions within the perspective of God’s plan for man.

[Page 16]

RACIAL ATTITUDES IN

[Page 17]

THE UNITED STATES AND BRAZIL

SOME COMPARISONS

by Russell Hamilton

Professor Russell Hamilton, who teaches Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, received his doctorate at Yale. He has spent a year in Brazil, conducting research on Brazilian literature and civilization.

At a time when the question of the Negro’s Civil rights has emerged as our most pressing domestic issue, well-meaning Americans reaffirm their commitment to the ideal of the equality of all men while at the same time they defensively point out to the rest of the world that other countries have racial problems similar to ours. When rioting erupted between whites and Negroes in London during the early sixties, the American press could hardly contain its glee; at last the smug, self-righteous English, with a small colored minority in their midst, could see what we were up against with our twenty-two million Negroes. Many fair-minded, if not [Page 18] liberal Americans seem to be convinced that racial conflict is an inevitable, universal phenomenon. They speak of Indonesia’s anti-Chinese riots of May, 1963 as racial conflict, and they see the 1965 situation in former British Guiana as bitter racial rivalry between Negroes and East Indians. Even Brazil does not escape the charge of “you too have your race problem.” In 1965 the National Broadcasting Company televised a news special that explored this problem and arrived at the conclusion that little was being done to relieve the plight of the Brazilian Negro who lives in slums and performs the most menial tasks. The commentator quoted President Castello Branco’s announcement that his administration was pledged to erase the marks of poverty from the nation. “But,” said the commentator, “he made no reference to the Negroes.”

This news special undoubtedly came as a surprise to some, since Brazil stands with Hawaii as a society generally believed to have no racial problem. Brazilians themselves have so emphasized their lack of racial prejudice that it has become a major source of national pride, and on occasion, a source of consternation to some Americans. Anthropologists and sociologists from the United States have descended on Brazil in the last few decades, and one sometimes gets the impression that they are mainly bent on disproving the claim of racial democracy. They have indeed found the existence of racial discrimination, but often, in spite of their social scientist objectivity, they misinterpret what they observe on the basis of the very peculiar form of racism in their own country. Other American visitors to Brazil have also contradicted the popular claim of racial utopia there. An American Negro athlete traveling in Brazil under the auspices of the State Department, countered some anti-American remarks with the angry retort that from what he had seen Brazil hadn’t solved its race problem yet. The athlete’s disillusionment with Brazil’s claim of racial equality would seem to be well-founded, for Columbia University anthropologist Marvin Harris writes that “The myth that Brazilians have no racial prejudices has been exposed by numerous studies carried out in both northeastern and southern portions of the country.” Professor Charles Wagley, also of Columbia University, comments on Brazil’s reputation: “More than any country in the Western world, Brazil is recognized, cited, and applauded as proof that racial democracy can work. But the facts of Brazilian race and class relations are not as simple as that. They require some explanation, sometimes even to Brazilians themselves.”

Some personal observations in Brazil will serve to illustrate what anthropologists are talking about and offer a basis of comparison with American racial attitudes. One incident occurred in Rio de Janeiro when another American and I took a trolley ride to a small station at the half-way point of the famous Corcovado mountain. We arrived at the station in time to witness the final minutes of a heated argument between a streetcar conductor and a watchman. My attention immediately focused on the altercation because the watchman was Negro and the conductor white, and more important, the two men were hurling racial insults at each other: the watchman was a “lazy, stupid Negro,” and the conductor a “sneaky, not to be trusted white man.” A similar incident occurred on a crowded bus in Salvador, Bahia, when a white youth challenged a young Negro to leave the bus and settle their dispute. The Negro, after refusing, muttered that he was being picked on because of his color. The third and most bizarre case of discrimination came when a female domestic was reluctant to work for Negroes because she feared people would laugh at her. Added to these more or less personal experiences are the often curious stories circulated about the Amercian colonies of Rio and Salvador. A United States foreign service officer claimed that [Page 19] a Brazilian had told him that only since the late nineteen fifties have Negroes been allowed on Rio’s Copacabana beach. And in Salvador, when a dark-skinned Brazilian engineer sought to enroll his two children in the English language school, Americans on the board of trustees expressed the belief that Brazilian parents and teachers might object. On the other hand, some Americans go to Brazil in search of a never-never land of complete social and racial tranquility, and are depressed when they encounter racial consciousness. A young woman artist dejectedly told of how her Negro maid had proudly showed off a fair-skinned child while she hid a darker one behind her skirts.

These isolated incidents are representative enough to indicate at least a degree of racial juxtaposition in Brazil. As further proof of racial prejudice, several students of Brazilian society have documented derogatory stereotypes generally applied to Negroes, some, according to Wagley, “as shocking as those heard in the Deep South of the United States. . . .” One might think that American and Brazilian attitudes toward the Negro differ little. But if we analyze the above incidents we see that they contain truly amazing aspects, amazing, that is, to anyone familiar with American society. If the watchman-conductor argument and the bus episode had occurred in an American city under like conditions, race riots would have ensued. In both cases there were many spectators, both Negro and white, but none seemed sufficiently aroused to intercede. Some onlookers were mildly disgusted, others indifferent, and quite a few merely amused. This supports Professor Wagley’s contention that “derogatory attitudes and stereotypes remain in the Brazilian tradition and can be called on in any competitive situation (if there is no other way to get at your competitor you can always call him a préto [black]), but they generally lack conviction as determinants of behavior.” We must make this fundamental distinction between attitudes in the United States and Brazil: there is a definite and noticeable lack of racial tension in the South American republic as contrasted with an explosive atmosphere in this country.

The maid who had misgivings about working for Negroes was herself a “woman of color” who would be considered a Negro in the United States. Judging by my experiences with domestics, some of them obviously Caucasian, I would say that this was a rare incident, and upon inquiring into the background of the lady in question I learned that she had great aspirations of social ascent. Her squeamishness was more social than racial in nature. Brazilians, when informed of the episode, were horrified at the suggestion that this was a racial incident. Even a black Brazilian, known for his concern with the position of the Negro in his country, laughed it off as an odd, atypical occurrence. As for the beach restrictions, a perusal of photographs dating back to at least twenty years before the late fifties revealed dark-skinned Brazilians cavorting in the sand and waves of Copacabana. Without disputing the foreign service officer’s veracity, the fact that he was a white Alabamian, particularly sensitive to his state’s reputation in racial matters, might have influenced either his informant or his interpretation of what was said. The school enrollment episode can be dismissed as a clear case of American racial prejudice. What is interesting with regard to this incident is the reaction of several Brazilian teachers at the school. Besides being offended when asked what they thought about admitting the children, they could only reply that the Negro in question was a doutor. Again, social position takes precedence over color. Another basic difference between racial attitudes in the United States and Brazil is the close relationship between race and social class in the latter country. It is naive, however, to expect a society completely devoid of color [Page 20] consciousness in a country where slavery existed until as late as 1888. That Negroes perform menial chores should not have come as a surprise to the commentator of the news special: it is unlikely that masses of people only a few generations removed from servitude would be found primarily in higher economic classes, particularly in an underdeveloped country with a pyramidal social structure.

In spite of some similarities, there is a wide gap separating racial attitudes in the United States and Brazil. One might compare the Brazilian man of color with the southern or eastern European immigrant in this country. He may be denied admission to some private clubs and he is the object of ethnic stereotypes, but he is tolerated and capable of escaping his origins through social mobility. The analogy is not completely valid, of course, because the Negro has the added handicap of easy identification and therefore difficult assimilation. In Brazil, as in America, the Negro’s color identifies him with his former status of servitude. But in Brazil color is less of a stigma, and the Negro also occupies a position of nostalgia and national pride. Many Brazilians, regardless of color, employ the word nêgo (a corruption of negro) as a term of endearment; and less abstract proof of a more peaceful racial climate in Brazil lies in its history of no race riots, no lynchings, and no Ku Klux Klan-type organizations. Brazil has no clearly defined Negro community, while our caste system necessitates our thinking in terms of a separate Negro class structure—and many Americans still tend to lump all Negroes into one social class. Although the news special commentator conceded that there were no Black Muslims or White Citizens’ Councils, he seemed to imply that these were natural phenomena that would come with Brazil’s economic development and industrialization. In line with this thinking, a young Brazilian sociologist, in an address to visiting American school teachers, painted an ominous picture of the future of the Negro in Brazil. She suggested that along with Brazil’s emergence as an industrialized nation would come greater racial conflict. This misinterpretation of the Marxist theory of inevitable class struggle in a capitalistic society surely does not apply to the race question in Brazil. The young lady was basing her statements on social rather than racial conflict and also on the example of the United States, and in part on the more frequent incidents of racial discrimination in industrialized São Paulo. What she failed to take into consideration were the very unique traditional and historical factors which shaped our present dilemma and which are unlikely to repeat themselves anywhere in Brazil.

The best way to an understanding of the differences between racial attitudes is through a look at these traditional and historical factors in both countries. Gilberto Freyre, the renowned Brazilian sociologist and exponent of the theory of a Portuguese “new world in the Tropics,” has been a leading supporter of the cult of Brazilian racial democracy. He has come under increasing attack for his unorthodox methods and his attempts to mitigate the cruelty of slavery in Portuguese territories. In his now classic The Masters and the Slaves (Casa Grande e Senzala), which portrays the patriarchal slave society of Brazil’s sugar-growing northeast, he expounds the theory that the Portuguese by virtue of centuries of contact with darker peoples, many quite “civilized,” were able to accept the Negro as a human being. In other words, the Negro was treated no better or worse than a white man who had the misfortune to be enslaved. Although Freyre’s allegation of a benign form of servitude can be disputed since by its very nature slavery is a cruel institution, his attitudes have been vindicated in part by Stanley M. Elkins in his book Slavery. Mr. Elkins, in his highly documented work, shows why American slavery was the most sadistic and dehumanizing the [Page 21] world has ever known. The American slave was chattel under the absolute domination of his master; he was private property, and his owner, under the law, held the power of life and death over him. Social establishments, and particularly the Church, rather than influencing legal and shaping moral standards acquiesced in the powerful, private property-oriented institution of slavery. At the mercy of his owner the slave was virtually denied participation in American society: “The integrity of the family was ignored, and slave marriage was deprived of any legal or moral standing.” When the plantation owner allowed his slaves to embrace Christianity it was usually to assure their docility (Negro spirituals were seen as childlike and harmless interpretations of the Gospel). Because of this traditional attitude toward Negro religiosity, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership caught many people off guard when it became a defiant force in the civil rights movement.

In Latin America, and particularly in Brazil, the institution of slayery presents some striking contrasts with that of the United States. Elkins reports that “every slave bound for Brazil was to receive baptism and religious instruction before being put on board, and upon reaching port every ship was boarded by a friar who examined the conscience, faith, and religion of the new arrivals.” Elkins makes this general statement on Latin American slavery: “In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, we are immediately impressed by the comparative lack of precision and logic governing the institution of slavery there; we find an exasperating dimness of line between the slave and free portions of society, a multiplicity of points of contact between the two, a confusing promiscuity of color, such as would never have been thinkable in our own country” (italics mine). After appraising several differences between the two systems, such as the Brazilian slave’s opportunity to earn money and buy his freedom as contrasted with the durante vita policy in this country, Elkins analyzes the psychological effects of American slavery. He develops the idea of the lazy, carefree plantation slave who gave rise to the “Sambo” stereotype, and by means of a clever analogy with Nazi concentration camps, he shows the eifects of a closed society on the personality. The childlike slave became dependent on his master, just as inmates in concentration camps often reverted to childhood and looked up to and imitated their SS guards. Because the Latin American slave was afforded many contacts with society in general, and never lost his dignity as a human being, the “Sambo” stereotype is completely absent from the Brazilian tradition.

These distinctions between the systems of slavery are significant, though often ignored, in any consideration of race relations as they exist today in Brazil and the United States. Because of our system of slavery the American Negro has inherited a legacy of moral and spiritual degradation. In spite of studies such as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and the more recent Moynihan Report to the federal government on the disintegration of the Negro family, many responsible Americans still fail to see the psychological damage done to the black man by our unusual form of racism. And because many Americans ignore the historical factors which contributed to this racism, they feel convinced that by hard work and motivation the Negro should improve his lot as surely as the members of any other deprived group. Even the liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits of New York expressed his condemnation of Negro rioting by citing the example of other ethnic groups that had risen from the depravation of the slums by non-violent means. The descendents of European immigrants proudly tell of how their parents worked and sacrificed to assure their children a share in the American dream. But to equate Negro migrants from the rural south with patriarchal [Page 22] families from the “old country” is to disregard the stigma of color, plus the centuries of denial suffered by slaves, and the subsequent generations of bitter despair borne by their descendents. Even middle-class Negroes who have tried to accept the “American way of life” as something more than a frustrating taunt, know that no amount of acculturation will gain them the assimilation enjoyed by the sons of European immigrants. No other minority group has suffered the extent of psychological oppression experienced by the Negro. An analogy of the plight of the Negro with that of other “colored” minority groups, at home or abroad, is invalid, for even impoverished American Indians will admit that they enjoy greater social acceptance and freedom of movement than the black man. Indians, like Orientals, do not comprise a controversial minority. Roy Rogers and Will Rogers are two prominent Americans of some Indian ancestry; but who would think of Roy as an Indian cowboy or of Will as an Indian comedian? Many Americans, even in states with sizable Indian populations, will acknowledge the presence of Indian ancestors in their background, knowing that this does not make them non-whites nor does it present any social stigma. Individuals with Negro ancestry, on the other hand, must either “pass for white,” or admit to their background and accept their place in the black community. Moreover, when the Indian is identified as such, he suffers from a considerably lesser degree of the sensitivity surrounding the Negro. This fact was displayed recently on a television quiz show when an Indian girl entertainer supplied a correct answer and was jokingly called “one heap-smart Indian.” It is highly unlikely that the master of ceremonies would banter with a Negro guest in a southern dialect. Without minimizing the injustices done to the American Indian, we must emphasize the often overlooked, intangible emotional factors plaguing the Negro and setting him apart as a member of an utterly unique American minority group.

One of the most tragic aspects of our racism has been the manner in which it has distorted many Negroes in their attitudes toward themselves and toward American society. It has given a substantial number of Negroes an attitude of self-defeat, or reckless aggressiveness, as manifested in the arrogant “diddy-bop” strut of some urban youths; it has made other Negroes so hyper-sensitive that they frequently interpret innocent actions or remarks as being racially motivated. Self-hate (if you tell a child he is inferior long enough, he begins to believe it), and virulent, ingrained myths have wrought havoc with the Negro psyche. When the Negro attempts to counteract the myths and assimilate, he is rebuffed; when he escapes from the ghetto and takes on middle-class respectability, he still must contend with the uncertainty of such things as motel or restaurant accommodations. When one of his numbers attains success, whites proudly speak of him as a credit to his race, and thus an anomaly. If an individual Negro gains an uncommon measure of acceptance, other Negroes are apt to label him a traitor who’s trying to be white.

The American Negro must function in a paradoxical, and in some respects, surrealistic atmosphere. Notwithstanding his “high visibility” he is also the “invisible man,” as novelist Ralph Ellison describes him. Selective perception, the process by which one sees not what is actually before his eyes, but what he has been taught to see, makes for some curious situations as regards the Negro’s anonymity. There are cases of mistaken identity, some more lacking in verisimilitude than those found in seventeenth century Spanish drama, whereby two Negroes of dissimilar physical characteristics are mistaken for each other by whites. There are numerous cases in which a very light-skinned Negro has been [Page 23] taken for a very dark-skinned one, or vice versa. On the surface this seems rather insignificant, but it points up a very important characteristic of white attitudes toward Negroes. The Negro is a stranger to many in this society. He is seldom accepted as just another individual (prevailing racial tensions make this next to impossible); he is seen as an interchangeable projection of a faceless mass. The common belief that all Negroes look alike is accompanied by the more serious tendency to hold Negroes responsible for one another’s acts. For many whites the Negro is his brother’s keeper, and when a crime is committed the hearts of “respectable” members of the black community skip a beat for fear that the wrongdoer may be one of theirs. An obnoxious white drunk in a public place is just another drunk, but a Negro drunk is a drunken Negro. On the other hand, when a Negro rescued a small white boy from an abandoned well on Long Island, a grateful public official paid the man high tribute by assuring him that his act had done more for the cause of civil rights than a dozen laws. This sort of attitude indicates why many Negroes feel as if they are involved in a precarious game of debits and gains. On the debit side is the Harris Poll’s recent revelation that in the opinion of a majority of whites the Negro image has been damaged by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell’s present difficulties.

Whites too have suffered at least moral damage from our surrealistic racial attitudes. While many underprivileged Negroes have been demeaned by the system, many lower-class whites have been brutalized. Middle-class whites, struggling to keep their sense of fair play in proportion, have become hopeless hypocrites, and many white liberals have suffered anguished feelings of moral guilt in the face of our insoluble problem. Yet, artificial lines of communication still persist. Out of ignorance whites continue to ask Negro acquaintances embarrassing and naive questions. A highly educated wife of a college professor may invite her new Negro neighbor to tea, and then, seemingly unaware that nearly seventy per cent of American Negroes have white ancestry, ask why some Negroes are lighter than others. Or in the wake of a racial incident, a disturbed liberal will ask a Negro friend to talk to his people. In spite of overwhelming contradictory proof, many whites still believe that any individual Negro can speak for the Negro masses. Several Negro comedians have been able to see the humor in the paradoxes of our system. By caricaturing stereotypes and exploiting certain common situations in race relations, they have exposed much of the absurdity of the myths surrounding the Negro. No one has accomplished more in this line than Godfrey Cambridge, whose routine on the token Negro at a social function burlesques an all too frequent occurrence. In return for his martinis the only Negro at a party must answer a series of ingenuous questions that by now have become conventional. At times he may find himself chastising a group of liberals who accept this rebuking as a welcome catharsis.

In the last decade much progress has been made toward erasing legal patterns of segregation, and many fair-minded Americans have recognized the Negro’s civil rights as a moral issue. Still the struggle for true integration, whereby the Negro can move about freely in this society, will meet with ever-increasing resistance on the part of large segments of the population. Beyond the economic, educational, and political disfranchisement of the Negro lie the myths so deeply entrenched in fear—and violence is the fruit of fear. In the summer of 1966 Negro demands in the Chicago area moved perilously close to an emotional subject, and thereby uncovered fierce recalcitrance. Open housing has emerged as such an emotion-charged issue that even liberal office-seekers realize that to emphasize it in their campaigns can mean political suicide. When interviewed [Page 24] after the Chicago outbreaks, white residents voiced the usual objections to Negro neighbors: they were dirty, disorderly, many were criminally inclined, and they would bring down property values. Underlying these objections was sexual fear; for at the height of the march into all-white neighborhoods, demonstrators were greeted with overt manifestations of physical aversion in the form of placards depicting a leering, ape-like caricature, and bearing the caption “Kiss me, I’m Equal.” With the threat of physical proximity and social integration, the old bugaboo of interracial sex came to the surface.

The taboo of race mixture underlies all the myths of physical aversion. In the Deep South the cult of white womanhood has long been the segregationist’s emotional call-to-arms; and if nothing unites southerner and northener the fear of miscegenation does. When all arguments against integration fail, the question “would you want your daughter to marry one?” can win the day. In an article entitled “Interracial Marriage and the Law,” lawyer William D. Zabel has this to say of the emotional impact of miscegenation: “The fact of interracial marriage can cause a young Radcliffe-educated ‘liberal’ to refuse to attend the wedding of her only brother, or a civilized, intelligent judge to disown and never again speak to his daughter. How many persons are repelled or at least disconcerted at the mere sight of a Negro-white couple? Perhaps their number tells us how far we are from achieving an integrated society.” Mr. Zabel also cites former President Harry Truman’s condemnation of interracial marriage on the grounds that it “ran counter to the teachings of the Bible.” Stalwart liberals who eloquently defend the equality of their black brothers will hesitate and stammer on this subject, or claim that their concern is for the marginal off-spring of such unions— as if there were such a thing as a Negro half-caste in this society.

It is understandable that American Negroes give low priority to the elimination of anti-miscegenation laws (the Reverend Abernathy, an aid to Martin Luther King, said in a speech that the Negro doesn’t want to be the white man’s brother-in-law, he just wants to be his brother), but that many should condemn it is further proof of the devastating psychological effects of racism. So great is this taboo based on sexual fears, that the American film industry must pussyfoot about amorous situations involving Negroes, whether interracial or not, to avoid offending a sensitive public. In the award-winning A Patch of Blue a scene in which Negro actor Sydney Poitier plants an innocent kiss on the cheek of the white heroine had to be deleted from the film for southern consumption. And the producers of a television spy series have been applauded for casting a Negro in a starring role. They have been particularly courageous for presenting the actor in love scenes, with Negro women, of course. Apparently they cannot expose the public to too much of this sort of thing, though, for Negro boy gets Negro girl only occasionally. On the other shows he sublimates with a hearty meal while his white side-kick takes care of the necessary romantic sequences. Author Zabel reviews the origin of some of the anti-miscegenation laws on the books in nineteen states, and emphasizes the significance of such statutes: “Although an argument can be made that the Supreme Court would make a serious error if it struck down these laws, it misstates the question to ask whether a decision should be deferred because the issue is incendiary to some whites and insignificant to most Negroes. In their apparent lack of concern about the existence of these laws, Negro spokesmen may underestimate both their symbolic meaning and their psychological force in states which have such laws.” (p. 79).

Bearing in mind the ambivalences and emotional aspects of race relations in this country, we can easily understand why no number of anti-segregation laws [Page 25] will completely relieve explosive racial tensions. On the other hand, a look at Brazilian attitudes toward race and miscegenation shows why they are at least on the way to achieving their much talked about racial democracy. Brazil’s definition of race makes a system of discrimination such as ours virtually impossible to apply. Our definition is social, based on origin, while theirs is based more or less on physical appearance. Adam Powell, for example, would certainly be considered white in Brazil. Although the official census recognizes only three main racial divisions, branco (white), prêto (black), and pardo (brown), Brazilians employ a series of terms to describe fine gradations in skin color, facial features, and hair texture. There exist several studies of this usage, the most recent being Marvin Harris’s “Racial identity in Brazil,” in which he documents forty such terms. To the above-mentioned group of visiting American high school teachers, this multiplicity of terms was racism, and it is generally true that they can identify esthetically desirable physical types. Brazil, after all, does share the Western world’s standards of beauty, which means that light skin, straight hair, and aquiline noses are desirable characteristics. The relatively few Negroid types found working as store clerks and bank tellers can be attributed in part to a tendency among employers to hire individuals who present a “good appearance” to the public. Aspiring dark-skinned males tend to choose lighter spouses, and there is a common saying that a Negro woman who bears fair-skinned children is helping to melhorar a raça (improve the race). In certain situations, to call a man prêto to his face might be less than diplomatic, and if a black man possesses means or position, he may be referred to euphemistically as a mulatto or moreno. The popular saying that “money whitens” has more than a grain of truth.

This use of terms, however, reflects the lack of racial tensions in Brazil. A traditional carnival song tells of a Negro woman whose hair was so “nappy” that no comb could possibly pass through it. And just as the American Indian singer was not offended by the master of ceremonies’ dialect, Brazilian Negroes are not offended by this song, nor by any number of allusions to racial characteristics. If prêto represents the least desirable physical type, the mulatto, and particularly the mulatto woman, has long been considered a favorable if not ideal type. It has been said that the Portuguese’s attraction for dark-skinned women stems from the Iberians’ early contact with Arabs and Africans; and the cult of the “enchanted Moorish girl” shares almost equal prestige with that of the diaphanous blonds of European courtly tradition. In Brazil this idealization of the brown woman has given rise to a romantic “cult of the morena,” whereby the mulata is celebrated in song or verse as in this stanza of a poem by contemporary poet Vinicius de Morais:

I love Brazilian mulatas,

and especially those of Rio.

I want to sing their praises

in the liveliest poetry of the most delirious samba,

completely without shackles. I want to say, for example,

that mulatas are like that word which I dislike

when it comes from the mouths of economists: conjuncture.

“Mulatas—I would say to them—you are a conjuncture.”

Because, just notice,

Everything about the mulata is this: a delightful thing,

sure equilibrium, perfect articulation in love.

Romanticism and sexual attraction surround the mulatto woman, and from the standpoint of racial tranquility, this cult has resulted in the acceptance of the [Page 26] mulatto as a marriage partner in Brazil’s lower socio-economic groups and to a degree among members of the upper classes. Marriages between coal-black Negroes and very light-skinned individuals may not be common, but the presence of Negro blood does not make a person an undesirable mate. And when a dark-skinned Negro marries a Caucasian, Brazilians show no repulsion or discomposure. The marriage last year of Negro soccer star Pelé to a white woman was given extensive photographic coverage by all the major Brazilian magazines, and the event was only newsworthy because it concerned a national sports hero. When American Negro entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. married a Swedish movie star no American magazine dared show them together, and, in fact, perfect strangers reacted with paranoiac fury, even to the point of threatening the couple with death. Some people were so repelled by this marriage that several years after the event, a popular woman’s magazine was accused of bad taste when it carried a photograph of Davis and his daughter in a report on famous fathers and their little girls.

How does miscegenation make for a better racial climate in Brazil? Obviously, if Negro ancestry does not make a person a pariah, it follows that Brazilian society cannot adhere to a visceral contempt for the black relatives of the mixed-blood, much less enforce a system of segregation based on origin. Many white Brazilians openly admit the possibility of Negroes in their ancestral background. Compare this to the United States where there are cases on record of husbands seeking litigation on the mere suspicion of Negro blood in a spouse. In the United States the recognition of a mulatto group ceased during Reconstruction when such a distinction would have made it difficult to make Jim Crow successful. For while sexual exploitation of the subjugated woman is a fact of New World slavery, attitudes toward these clandestine unions can vary greatly. In Brazil this miscegenation often resulted in romanticism, but in the United States it gave rise to feelings of guilt and self-degradation. Our Protestant ethic gave impetus to a sense of perversity toward sexual relations between Negroes and whites.

The Negro in Brazil may occupy the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder, but he suffers from a much lesser degree of the psychological damage that has afflicted his North American counterpart. Brazil is also the Negro, and his contributions are recognized. Although the Brazilian black man bears the weight of economic oppression, he has been spared the added frustration of feeling spiritually dispossessed in his native land. The Brazilian Negro was not stripped of all contacts with his African culture, while one of the American Negro’s most agonizing problems has been his lack of identity. Only barely discernible vestiges of African culture have survived the Negro’s complete detachment from his origins. American Negroes comprise perhaps the only completely American group in this country of immigrants. Even jazz is more uniquely American than African, and the belief that Negroes possess an innate sense of rhythm has become an odious myth to many. For generations Negroes have hated their blackness and shared the Western world’s ignorance of an contempt for Africa.

With the emergence of self-determinism in the newly formed countries south of the Sahara has come a resurgence of dormant black “nationalism” in the United States. Militant young civil rights spokesmen are attempting to bring dignity and acceptance to the color black. Many militants scorn the word “Negro” as a white man’s term of degradation and prefer either black or Afro-American. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee has used the cry of “Black Power” to rally American Negroes to a new feeling of unity and racial pride. Small groups have organized in several cities to [Page 27] revive and practice what they consider to be aspects of their American heritage. There is no serious back-to-Africa movement, but some Negroes are attempting to bring African culture to the American black man. In Los Angeles and New York one sees American Negroes wearing Nigerian or Ghanaian vestments and some women are seeking to stress their Negroid beauty by no longer “straightening” their hair. Along with the Black Muslims have arisen several sects, such as the African Religious Federation whose members venerate Yoruba gods. Black heritage schools teach Negro history and African languages to slum children who otherwise would know nothing of their past except that their ancestors were slaves. And “Uncle Tom” is a ready epithet for any Negro who disagrees with this new feeling of militancy and racial identity.

Unfortunately, and in spite of the sense of belonging it may give to some, this Africanization is largely self-conscious, artificial, and fraught with misinterpretations. It has resulted in a spate of self-styled leaders who have little knowledge of the culture which they profess to teach, and it has made for frustrations and self-deceptions. Some American Negro girls continue to visit the beauty parlor to straighten their hair, which they cover with “natural look” wigs for Afro-American functions. Those Negro intellectuals who seek to cleanse their souls of the contaminations of Western civilization are making an awkward attempt to adopt a culture that does not exist for them. Essayist and novelist James Baldwin once wisely told a group of Negro high school students that they had to make it here, as a part of this society.

Brazilian Negroes come by their African heritage through four hundred years of cultural continuity. The followers of Afro-Brazilian religious sects profess a code and credo rather than a mere desire to seek racial roots; and the cults are now an integral part of Brazil’s heritage. Many foreigners have made references to Brazilian Negroes and mulattoes who have attained success in such fields as medicine, engineering, and litreature. Brazilians look upon these individuals as Brazilians first, and rather accept without fanfare that the Negro had a part in the building of the nation. The rebellious Zumbi who established a community of run-away slaves in the seventeenth century, occupies the position of a champion of the downtrodden and not just that of a Negro hero. The Negro has never felt himself so removed from Brazilian society or from his cultural origins as to make concerted efforts to seek his identity; he has never become so embittered against Western civilization as to want to cleanse himself of its contaminations.

Brazil is hardly the racial utopia some persons hold it to be, and regardless of their tendency to play down incidents of racial discrimination in their country, many bourgeois Brazilians suffer from the vestiges of an inferiority complex dating back to the nineteenth century and its pseudo-scientific theories on race. A concern for “civilization” and Brazil’s reputation as a Western nation seems to preoccupy some members of the upper class. Since a common definition of civilization is technological and economic advancement, many Brazilians hold the United States in great esteem; and this esteem often extends to a respect for certain American social attitudes. If Brazilians believe that they have achieved racial democracy many of them also believe that the United States is the very epitome of racism. The Brazilian Press carries the more sensationalist items regarding racial stress in the United States, and it appears that many Brazilians take it for granted that any white American just naturally dislikes Negroes. An illustration of respect for American racial policies occurred when a mulatto girl represented Brazil in the 1965 Miss World contest held in California. Letters to a Brazilian magazine expressed the fear that the girl’s presence in the United [Page 28] States might cause difficulties.

Some Brazilians working or studying in the United States reveal interesting reactions to our race problem. These people are invariably of the upper-middle class, and they have a predisposition to admire the United States and to fall under the influence of its social patterns. An example of this occurred a few years ago when a Brazilian physician, a permanent resident in this country, refused to hire a Negro domestic, also a Brazilian, because he feared that his neighbors in an all-white suburb would object to the girl’s presence. This incident prompted another Brazilian to comment that in this country Brazilians sometimes outdo Americans in racial prejudice.

There may well be many Brazilians who are fiercely jealous of their country’s reputation as a Western nation; there may well be Brazilians who are ashamed of certain African aspects of their culture, such as the macumba religious rites; and there are undoubtedly racists in Brazil who feel that the black man is innately inferior. The significant consideration is that these individuals cannot give full play to these fears and prejudices, because the social and racial climate will not permit it. The claim of complete racial equality may be an imperfect cult, but because Brazilians believe in it, they are less likely to tolerate any overt, official segregation, and will, as they have in the past, vehemently censure even subtle forms of discrimination.

The American Negro visiting in Brazil does not encounter the daily rebuffs he has come to expect in the United States. Race is not an important issue in Brazil, while it is assuming greater importance in the United States. In Brazil Negroes do not constitute a controversial minority group, although they (prêtos and pardos) comprise more than thirty-five per cent of the total population. Brazilians celebrate no Brotherhood day, but they have a greater claim to the ideal of the brotherhood of man than their North American neighbors. Finally, the important difference between discrimination in Brazil and the United States is a matter of degree, for there is racism and there is racism, and no matter how many similarities we find between Brazilian and American stereotypes, the missing ingredient of deeply rooted, emotionally charged myths makes their brand much less nefarious and less difficult to counter than ours.

[Page 29]

ORIENTATIONS

by William Stafford

Thought, an instinct, wavers for policy,

wild for a guide somewhere beyond the sky.

Why should fixed things rule a world that pours?

Kestrels may groove through storms to guide the stars.

[Page 30]

THE VOICE FROM INNER SPACE

By Winston Evans and Marzieh Gail

A graduate of the University of the South, Mr. Evans has studied in depth contemporary theologians, with many of whom he is personally acquainted. He has lectured on the Bahá’í Faith and related subjects at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Marzieh Gail, a writer and translator, is the author of THE SHELTERING BRANCH. Her article, “The Bright Day of the Soul”, appeared in our Spring 1967 issue.

A cartoon by Steinberg in the New Yorker shows a potentate seated on his throne with a plumed and helmeted guard at attention behind him. Before him, bowing low, are two people come to render homage. Throne, potentate, courtiers and guard are set, against a backdrop of trouser leg, on the toe of an enormous shoe.

We submit that whatever the artist’s intent, this is basically better theology than many Christian leaders are expressing these days. In a personal inquiry carried on all over the United States, which we reinforced by reading several [Page 31] walls-full of current and highly articulate books, we found that present theologians and churchmen have for years been questioning concept after concept formerly thought fundamental to Christianity.

Some inner circles even refer to the people of our times—Organization Man in the Lonely Crowd that makes up the Affluent Society—as “Post-Christian Man.”

Paul Ramsey, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, begins his preface to a recent study with this sentence: “Ours is the first attempt in recorded history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead.” The book thus prefaced is Gabriel Vahanian’s brilliant God is Dead. There is no high Christian credential that Dr. Vahanian lacks; he has the diploma and Licence en Théologie from the Sorbonne, was a World Council of Churches Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary where he earned a master’s degree and doctorate, he taught at Princeton University three years, and later was Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse. Dr. Vahanian writes that in our age “man cannot even become a Christian. The fundamentals of our culture. . . make us impervious to the conception of Christianity.” (139) “Christianity has today reached a point of no return.” (229) His title is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s fable of the death of God in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

According to the internationally-known American theologian Nels F. S. Ferré, formerly holder of this country’s oldest Chair of Theology at Andover-Newton, even people who still profess a belief in God worship Him under various kinds of “umbrellas,” attempting thus to mitigate and ward off His influence on their lives. (The Sun and the Umbrella).

At Loyola University, Dean William C. DeVane of Yale gave an address in which he pictured the general situation in this way: “. . . we must acknowledge that the loss of faith in our world, in our destiny, in our religion, is the cloudy and dark climate most of (thinking) America finds itself living in today.”

Redbook reported in August, 1961, on a survey its pollsters had made among theological students in leading American seminaries. Of one hundred students, destined for the ministry, who were questioned on the Second Coming and Latter Day theme—a theme to which the Bible devotes such preponderant emphasis— only 1% believed in it. Only 2% of the students believed in life after death.

“There will be no Return of Christ in a physical body,” announced the former President of a well-known theological seminary. “The Spirit is coming every day to those who can receive it.” Queried after his sermon, which was delivered at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, as to whether the coming of Jesus had been foretold in the Old Testament, he answered: “I don’t like that word ‘foretold’.”

The foregoing is not, of course, the whole story in Christian America, as various other groups might well protest: Billy Graham and the Fundamentalists do stress the Second Coming. “He can come at any time now,” Billy reiterates as Fundamentalists have since William Miller’s time, over a hundred years ago. Billy usually devotes one night in every crusade to the Second Coming, to which, he states, the Bible contains over three hundred references. The Advent, he says, is not a matter of if but when.

The Roman Catholic position is neither to disregard nor to stress the “Second Coming.” Interviews with a number of priests showed that Catholics believe in the Bible prophecies as to the “Return” but do not think it imminent. Since no [Page 32] pope has pronounced on the question of eschatology—the doctrine of last things, of Death and final Judgment—there is no official Catholic view, and Catholic theologians can and do speculate on this theme. While laymen have received little if any instruction on the “Second Coming,” we learned at Notre Dame University that eschatology is becoming a live issue in some Catholic circles.

II

That many of the Christian clergy really do not believe in what they still preach is brought home to those who have read a little book called Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, England, also the author inter alia of an Observer article entitled Our Image of God Must Go.

In his bestseller, Honest to God, here reviewed because it is an obvious example of much current Christian thought, the Bishop states (so far as anyone can determine) that virtually all the taken-for-granted concepts which bishops are paid to teach and Christians come to church to listen to, must go.

“. . . The first thing we must be ready to let go is our image of God himself,” Bishop Robinson tells us (124, lower case his). The Bishop defines the God who must go as a “Supreme Person, a self-existent subject of infinite goodness and power, who enters into a relationship with us comparable with that of one human personality with another.” (48)

“Suppose. . . the skies are empty?” asks the Bishop, reminiscent of the Russian orbiters who assured us they are. (45) Again, he refers in Orwellian terms to the God who must go as “a sort of celestial Big Brother.” (57) Approvingly, he quotes Paul Tillich’s words: “You must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.” (47) He sanctions Tillich’s name for God: “ground of all being,” “ground of our being,” substituting, you might say, geology for theology, and allocating to God a domicile even lower than man’s and formerly reserved for somebody else. He adds that “when Tillich speaks of God in ‘depth,’ he is not speaking of another Being at all—but “of our ultimate concern, of what we take seriously without reservation.” (46) According to Bishop Robinson, “statements about God are statements about the ‘ultimacy’ of personal relationships.” (50)

“Suppose the atheists are right. . . ,” the Bishop asks. “Suppose that all such atheism does is to destroy an idol, and that we can and must get on without a God ‘out there’ at all?. . . Perhaps after all the Freudians are right, that such a God—the God of traditional popular theology—is a projection, and perhaps we are being called to live without that projection in any form.” (17)

The Bishop further allots respectful space to two statements of Julian Huxley, one, that God as a separate entity is superfluous and the world can be explained without positing Him, and two, that “. . . God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.” (38)

Bishop Robinson finally decides: “We shall eventually be no more able to convince men of the existence of a God ‘out there’ whom they must call in to order their lives than persuade them to take seriously the gods of Olympus.” (43)

So much for God. Then what about Jesus Christ? Jesus is “the one in whom Love has completely taken over. . .” (76) “But suppose the whole notion of ‘a God’ who ‘visits’ the earth in the person of ‘his Son’ is as mythical as the prince in the fairy story?” the Bishop asks. (67) He tut-tuts the Incarnation—the idea that, as he expresses it, Jesus “was God for a limited period taking part in a charade,” that “underneath he was God dressed up—like Father Christmas.” (66) “Indeed, [Page 33] the very word ‘incarnation’. . . . conjures up the idea of a divine substance being plunged in flesh and coated with it like chocolate. . .” (67)

As for the Atonement, he says, “. . . the whole schema of a supernatural Being coming down from heaven to ‘save’ mankind from sin, in the way that a man might put his finger into a glass of water to rescue a struggling insect, is frankly incredible to man ‘come of age,’ who no longer believes in a deus ex machina.” (78) We can only take this to mean that he regards the God of the Four Gospels as one artificially introduced by stage machinery and no longer acceptable.

As for the Virgin Birth, it is “a symbol,” (77) and Christmas is a “myth.” (67) Easter is out, too. “Must Christianity be ‘mythological’?” the Bishop inquires. With Rudolf Bultmann, he wants to “demythologize” Christianity, and debates “how far Christianity is committed to a mythological, or supranaturalist, picture of the universe at all,” (33) adding that supernaturalism “is as primitive philosophically as the Genesis stories are primitive scientifically.” (33) The Bishop says he is “convinced . . . we should follow Huxley . . . in discarding the supranaturalist framework,” (127) and he endorses R. Gregor Smith’s: “The old doctrine of transcendence is . . . an assertion of an outmoded view of the world.” (44) “If,” concludes the Bishop, “Christianity is to survive, let alone to recapture ‘secular’ man, there is no time to lose in detaching it from this scheme of thought—and thinking hard about what we should put in its place.” (43)

Small wonder that Bishop Robinson finds it hard to pray. He says that in his theological college with plenty of time, teachers, “the classics of the spiritual life, and all the aids and manuals,” he still could not pray and felt guilty about it until he discovered many kindred, if silent, spirits.

It follows, logically enough, that Bishop Robinson brooks no moral standards. What he says of misdeeds, without enumerating all of them, is that fornication, theft, murder and so on are not necessarily wrong, “For nothing can of itself always be labelled as ‘wrong,’” and “persons are more important even than ‘standards.”’ (118-120) The Judaeo-Christian law must go. “The sanctions of Sinai have lost their terrors,” he writes, “and people no longer accept the authority of Jesus even as a great moral teacher.” (109) Christ’s laws were not laws anyway: “The moral precepts of Jesus are not intended to be understood legalistically, as prescribing what all Christians must do . . . and pronouncing certain courses of action universally right and others universally wrong. . .” (110) They are “illustrations of what love may at any moment require of anyone.” (110) “One cannot . . . start from the position ‘sex relations before marriage’ or ‘divorce’ are wrong or sinful in themselves.” (118) “Jesus. . . is content with the knowledge that . . . if our eye is single, then love will find the way, its own particular way in every individual situation.” (112) There are no more standards, no universal norms, only “a radical ‘ethic of the situation,’ with nothing prescribed—except love.” (116)

(We do not remember, incidentally, that Jesus showed forth only love. We seem to recall various epithets which He used with regard to some of His contemporaries; He called them fools, thieves, serpents, vipers, wicked, sinful, hard of heart, evil, faithless, of the devil, hypocrites, whited sepulchres, hidden graves, blind guides, blind leaders of the blind, full of iniquity, ravening dogs, adulterous.)

But why bring in the Bible? The Bishop does not hold with “‘a recall to religion,’ a reassertion of the sanctions of the supernatural.” He advocates taking our place “alongside those who are deep in the search for meaning . . . even if God is not ‘there.’” (121)

[Page 34] In other words, one should forego the imitation of Christ for the imitation of Pilate. Christ says: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” And Pilate answers: “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38)

Christianity—this is the Bishop’s point—needs “radical recasting.” (7) Its doctrine of God must be detached “from any necessary dependence on a ‘supranaturalistic’ world-view.” We should be “thinking hard about what we should put in its [supranaturalism’s] place—what “we” should, i.e., what man should.

Strangely, Bishop Robinson does not feel that Bishops should go. Although he states with Bonhoeffer that the Church must become lay, he is against “abolishing its sacramental ministers.” (137) Otherwise, all that the Bishop seems to leave of Christ’s faith as the world understands it, is a kind of vague social service do-goodism (90). This, plus reading the Bible another way, and fashioning a God in man’s image, will somehow make Christianity relevant to modern life, and “secular man” will come back to the “fold”—only this term “fold,” of course, must go.

Whether Bishop Robinson is being honest with himself or not is between him and his Ground of Being. You might think that in this book he has written himself right out of his profession, and would be separated from the Church quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. On the contrary, he has been treated sympathetically in a pamphlet by the Archbishop of Canterbury entitled Image Old and New, and for the rest widely praised both by laymen and churchmen who feel the same way he does. He has merely become the public spokesman for what Christian theologians have been writing and telling each other for a long time. Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his “religionless Christiantity,” Karl Barth who apparently does not believe in life after death, Reinhold Niebuhr who does not believe in a transcendental God, Bultmann and his abandonment of a supernatural order, Tillich and his God in “depth” who is not “another Being at all”—these are among the Christian intellectuals of our day who have shaped the clergy’s thought. Meanwhile like the husband in a French farce, the parishioners will be the last to know.

III

According to their own testimony, the people out in front today can no longer be called leaders, because they do not know where they are going. “By perplexity,” writes Dean Samuel H. Miller of the Harvard Divinity School in his recent Dilemma of Modern Belief, “I mean standing in a world where all the signposts are down; where the language has changed and nobody knows where the sun is going to rise tomorrow; in a world where the clocks are all telling a different time, and everybody is late, and going nowhere in a hurry; where everybody dreads the future, has no time for the past, and wears a mask in order to see as little as possible of the present.” And again, “The key we are seeking is likely to be found in a place unilluminated by academic lights.” And elsewhere, “We must be willing to follow a new star when the night is darkest. . . .”

The late Richard Niebuhr of the Yale Divinity School said: “Modern man is lost and disillusioned—not only about himself, but also about the things in which he once put his trust, such as nationalism and technology, which the Russians and under-developed nations are trusting today. In the West, the most sensitive . . . are living in a great religious void; their half-gods are gone and the gods have not arrived. This is true of men both in and out of seminaries and churches. . . .”

In the Christian Century (May 22, 1963) Bishop Gerald Kennedy of California [Page 35] laments, “. . . as churchmen we present to the world the curious spectacle of being at an all-time high numerically and at an all-time low spiritually."

A Chinese observer comments: “Everywhere I look, the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost.”

The words dark, lost, dead are among the most used by these thinkers, and have been since—say for convenience—the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. In the 19th century Matthew Arnold wrote:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

His Dover Beach theme of retreat from the world to a woman is still repeated obsessively in song and story, and indeed exemplifies the average modern man’s way of life.

Not everyone is hopeless, however. Two comments on our times by secular writers are cited here as valuable because, rather than endlessly depicting the dark present, they look toward tomorrow. Arnold Toynbee, a light year away from the Bishop of Woolwich, writes that the great need of modern man is a rebirth of belief in the supernatural, and indicates how this may be brought about when he tells us that whenever an old civilization begins to show signs of moral decay and disintegration, we should be on the alert for a new world religion.

And Charles Beard, asked if he could sum up the lessons of history in one chapter, replied: “I can do better than that—I can sum up the lessons of history in four sentences: (1) Him whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. (2) The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine. (3) The bee fertilizes the flower which it robs. (4) When it gets dark enough the stars come out.”

If most of today’s intellectuals are unable to interpret the signs of the times it is, we submit, because they have left out the key to history: the periodic intervention of the Founder of a world religion. They have looked everywhere else in the world for an answer but here.

Who was it that led the Israelites from slavery into a civilization so splendid that it fertilized the philosophy of Greece? (Cf. Maimonides, by David Yellin and Israel Abrahams.) As the Graeco-Roman world went down, who was it that founded the new world of the West? And how did it happen that “The Arabs underwent one of the most sudden and astonishing changes that history records of any people whatever. In 620 they were a few obscure nomadic tribes tending meagre flocks and herds in the semi-desert regions of the Arabian peninsula. One hundred years later they were the masters of an Empire as great in extent as that of Rome at its Zenith;” that it is their ensuing civilization which is now credited with triggering Europe’s rebirth?

Moses, Jesus, Muhammad are the answers; They and the other High Prophets who fashioned civilizations—Buddha, Zoroaster, and the rest—from before Abraham’s day until ours.

IV

What does the Bahá’í say to present-day Christian leaders, and specifically to [Page 36] the questions raised in such a book as Honest to God?

The Bahá’í Faith “proclaims unequivocally the existence and oneness of a personal God, unknowable, inaccessible, the source of all Revelation, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and almighty.” First, God is.

Second, God is unknowable: “He is, and hath ever been, veiled in the ancient eternity of His essence. . .” (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, 47) He is “exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress.” (Gleanings, 46)

Third, by an act of His will, He created man to know, love, and worship Him, and this man can do only through the recurring Christ, the Manifestation of God on earth—that is, the Inaugurator of a new cycle of civilization. He who was “before Abraham was” will continue, on God’s behalf, to intervene in history from age to age: “The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days being thus closed in the face of all beings, the Source of infinite grace . . . hath caused those luminous Gems of Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit . . . that They may impart unto the world the mysteries of the unchangeable Being, and tell of the subtleties of His imperishable Essence.” (Gleanings, 47) “. . .all the praises, the descriptions and exaltations [of God, the Unlimited Reality] refer to the Holy Manifestations” “. . . these illuminated Souls, these beauteous Countenances [the recurring Manifestations] have, each and every one of Them, been endowed with all the attributes of God. . .” (Gleanings, 49) “These Primal Mirrors which reflect the light of unfading glory, are but expressions of Him Who is the Invisible of the Invisibles.” (48) God “can in no wise incarnate His essence and reveal it unto men . . . He Who is everlastingly hidden from the eyes of men can never be known except through His manfestation, and His Manifestation can adduce no greater proof of the truth of His Mission than the proof of His own Person.” (49)

Fourth, not man but the Manifestation of God establishes the values, standards, universal norms for the duration of His Dispensation; right and wrong are whatever He says they are, till His jurisdiction ends. He may carry on the law of the previous Manifestation, or he may break it as He pleases. Like the Unknown God Whom He represents and betokens, “He shall not be asked of His doings, and His might is equal unto all things.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations, 87) Men obey Him because they sense that He has been given the authority to command, that His kingdom is not of this world, and that His laws are not tyrannies but disclosures as to the nature of His day in history and how men can best adapt to it, and thus become whole and flourish. From Him alone they learn how to love; to cherish God’s creatures for God’s sake, “and recognize in every human face a sign of His reflected glory.” For Him they live and even die, because He is “the supreme embodiment of all that is lovable.”

Bishop Robinson asks in his book what “we” should put in place of the supranaturalism in Christianity. The only possible outcome of such human strivings to refashion religion, we submit, would be that Christians would then be “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” (Mark 7:7) Religions cannot be artificially induced, nor successfully tampered with by ordinary people. He who produces a religion, like a great poet or a great composer (although far above these, and in another sphere) cannot be fostered or appointed or legislated: He has to happen. He has to live in the world and suffer, and as Jesus says, like a grain of wheat He has to “fall into the ground and die,” sacrificing His life to bring forth the new age. In death He overcomes. He is the Lord of History, the [Page 37] chosen mouthpiece of the Unknowable God. He is His own proof; He is the Being Who makes people exclaim: “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the seas obey Him?” (Mark 4:41)

And what of the “Return,” the Judgment Day, the “Time of the End,” the doctrine of last things? On whatever day the Manifestation comes, says the Bahá’í Faith, that day is the Return of Christ—not of the man Jesus, not of the given lamp, but of the Light that before Abraham was.

Although in essence one, the Manifestations cannot tell all They know to every generation, nor reveal all Their truth to unseeing eyes: “Ye cannot bear it now,” Christ said. Ours is a special day, a special point in time, the day of “all truth,” Christ said, the day when, as the Qur’án foretold, “Thou shalt see every nation kneeling.” (45:27) This is the death time not of the world but of the old era, the promised birth time of the oneness of men and of the federated planet, and Bahá’u’lláh’s “supreme mission is none other but the achievement of this organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations . . .” He has come “not to destroy or belittle previous Revelations, but to connect, unify, and fulfill them.” This is that “religion of the future,” envisaged in the 19th century by the learned Max Müller as the only answer to the problem of religious unity: the religion of the future, he wrote, would be the fulfillment of all the religions of the past. This Revelation, new as springtime in itself, is still “a restatement of the Divine Purpose,” “a restatement of the Truth underlying all the Revelations of the past. . . .”

To Bahá’ís, “religious truth is not absolute but relative . . . Divine Revelation is orderly, continuous and progressive and not spasmodic or final . . . the Prophets of the unknowable God, including Bahá’u’lláh Himself, have all . . . been commissioned to unfold to mankind an ever-increasing measure of His truth, of His inscrutable will and Divine guidance, and will continue to ‘the end that hath no end’ to vouchsafe still fuller and mightier revelations of His limitless power and glory.” (Shoghi Effendi)

Sensing all this in 1843, moved perhaps by the adventist furor of the time (it was one year before William Miller’s promised date of 1844—when the Bahá’í era actually began in Persia, with the Declaration of the Báb) James Russell Lowell wrote:

V

God sends His teachers unto every age,

To every clime, and every race of men,

With revelations fitted to their growth

And shape of mind, nor gives the realm of Truth

Into the selfish rule of one sole race.

The response to the Bahá’í Faith of those into whose hands mankind blindly commits its conscience demonstrates the urgent need of Bahá’u’lláh’s first principle: the independent investigation of truth.

A professor of the Moody Bible Institute, asked what he thought of the Bahá’í Faith, instantly replied: “There’s no question about it. It is the work of the devil.”

Unfortunately the fundamentalist, now as always, takes his Scripture literally, whereas it is often to be understood as a symbol. The world hated Jesus (John 15:18), said He was mad and a devil (John 10:20) and interpreted all His words in a literal sense, although Jesus often spoke in symbols; for example, when He [Page 38] said heaven, He did not always mean the sky: “I am the living bread,” He told them, “which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever.” “And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? . . . How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:42, 51-52) To the fundamentalist, now as then, the Manifestation has not fulfilled the terms of His advent. To do so literally, He would have to appear riding on a cloud that would somehow be visible around the earth and simultaneously remain as stealthy and concealed as a thief in the night.

When Bahá’ís teach that Christ has already returned, not only churchmen but people who have not been inside a church for twenty years quote Matthew 24:24: “There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets. . . .” never pausing to think that if the dime store is full of fake diamonds and pearls, there are real ones at Tiffany’s.

Some are fairer, of course. Following a Bahá’í talk, a professor of Christian theology in the Southwest told us: “Now I know how the rabbis felt.” In Michigan, a young Catholic priest listened to these lines from Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet to Pope Pius IX:

“O Pope! Rend the veils asunder. He Who is the Lord of Lords is come. . . . He, verily, hath again come down from Heaven even as He came down from it the first time. Beware that thou dispute not with Him even as the Pharisees disputed with Him (Jesus) . . . Beware lest any name debar thee from God, the Creator of earth and heaven . . . Call thou to remembrance Him Who was the Spirit (Jesus), Who, when He came, the most learned of His age pronounced judgment against Him . . . whilst he who was only a fisherman believed in Him. Take heed, then, ye men of understanding heart!” The priest commented: “You know, it would be ironic and tragic if this story were true.”

But many will not even listen. An ivy league lady theologian once granted us an interview. After our opening statement, essentially the same one which had attracted friendly attention from various male notables among her colleagues, she brought our visit to a rapid end with: “I am not interested in anything you have to say. I thought you had come here to talk about me.”

A leading Presbyterian minister in a southern city, asked if he would read the Promise of All Ages, a book by the erudite George Townshend, Canon of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and Archdeacon of Clonfert, who left all he had to become a Bahá’í and informed his fellow-churchmen of the reasons in his The Old Churches and the New World-Faith—replied he had no time for a study on Bible prophecies and the Return of Christ, adding that “three-fourths of the better-educated clergy do not believe in Bible prophecies.” This minister doubtless thought, as many white southerners used to about the race issue, that if he simply ignored the Bahá’í Faith and kept quiet, it would go away. When members of his church embraced the new World Faith, he “never had time” to discuss it with them.

A Rector of a fashionable Episcopalian church, also not a believer in the Bible prophecies, did, however, read The Promise of All Ages. Asked for his comment, he answered: “When I decided on this career of the ministry, I built a wall around myself. I knew I could never look over that wall.”

At a leading Eastern university, a professor of the history of religion when questioned about the Bahá’í Faith replied that he had been interested in studying “only the major religions.” And yet, every major religion was minor once; his attitude confirms what Arnold Toynbee remarks in a Study of History, that in a [Page 39] Hellenizing world of the second century, the Christian Faith loomed no larger in the sight of the dominant educated minority than the Bahá’í does to the corresponding Westernizing class today.

Although its Herald, the Báb, and thousands of early followers were killed, and its Founder was exiled to the great Fortress at ‘Akká, and every effort was exerted by two tyrants, the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of Turkey, with armies of jailers and spies at their command, to prevent its spread—the Bahá’í Faith, comprising people of all races, religions, classes, nationalities, is now established in over 250 countries and dependencies, its literature has been translated into more than 200 languages, its temples have been reared in Ashkhabad and Wilmette, in Kampala, Sidney and Frankfurt, and in the last ten years alone it has gained hundreds of thousands of new followers. Small wonder that we Bahá’ís consider our World Religion unkillable, and destined to guide humanity. With these credentials, surely Christian scholars and laymen could spare the time to look into this Faith, which has come to modern man in a modern age, and has that relevance to our everyday life which Christianity, many of its leaders tell us, has irrevocably lost.

The name Bahá’u’lláh, given Him by His Herald, the Báb, means the splendor, the light, the glory of God. To Bahá’ís He is the spiritual Educator, the healing Physician, the way, truth and life for our times. Whether or not we turn to this Lord of the New Age can be of no human concern to Him, for this nobleman of Persia, after forty years of living martyrdom, died a prisoner and exile near ‘Akká, Israel, in 1892. But it can be of life and death concern to each one of us.

Many intellectuals, primarily European, have paid tribute to the Bahá’í Faith. The Comte de Gobineau was one of the first to bring news of the Báb to Europe, in his Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale. Inspired by this, the British Orientalist E. G. Browne of Cambridge University went to the Holy Land, saw Bahá’u’lláh, and vividly recorded his experience. A Russian drama on the Báb aroused the interest of Tolstoy, who wrote: “I have known about the Bábís for a long time and have always been interested in their teachings. It seems to me that these teachings . . . have a great future for . . . discarding all these distorting incrustations that cause division, [they] aspire to unite into one common religion all mankind. . . . I therefore sympathize with Babism with all my heart inasmuch as it teaches people brotherhood and equality and sacrifice of material life for service to God.”

Many discovered the Bábí poetess Táhirih, who, for this Faith, died a martyr’s death, described by Lord Curzon of Kedleston as “one of the most of the most affecting episodes in modern history.” Dr. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, hailed this Faith as “the greatest light that has come into the world since the time of Jesus Christ,” adding, “Never let it out of your sight.” Auguste Forel, the great Swiss scientist, was converted through a Tablet on creation addressed to him by Bahá’u’lláh’s son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and dying, had the Bahá’í Religion proclaimed from his graveside. Dr. T. K. Cheyne, internationally known Oxford theologian, the chief editor of Encyclopaedia Biblica, author inter alia of Critica Biblica and The Prophecies of Isaiah, wrote in his Reconciliation of Races and Religions: “There was living quite lately a human being of such consummate excellence that many think it both permissible and inevitable to identify him mystically with the invisible Godhead.” Commenting on the scholar’s difficulty in obtaining information on the lives of the Founders of world religions, Dr. Cheyne declares: “There is only one such life. It is that of Bahá’u’lláh.”

[Page 40] As for our contemporaries, Dr. P. A. Sorokin of Harvard stated of the Bahá’í Faith: “We have our eyes on it.” Asked for his opinion, the Dean of one of our greatest Divinity Schools said: “The Bahá’í ethical teachings are the very highest.” Quickly, however, he added: “But of course the Christian Revelation is unique.” Bahá’ís are told by the followers of every religion that their particular religion is unique. They are right; everything is unique: “The sign of singleness is visible and apparent in all things . . . the oneness and unity of God is apparent in the reality of all things. . . (Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, 326)

In the British Weekly of August 26, 1954, Robert Semple, a member of the Management Committee of the Presbyterian Church, wrote: “. . .nor can one wonder at the rapid growth in Christian Countries of the new Bahá’í World Faith, which is also gaining many adherents among the people of Asia and Africa; for that Faith has as its motive power a burning belief in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of men, of all creeds and races, and, here is the point, like the early Christian Church, it practices what it preaches. Perhaps, after all, this new Bahá’í Faith is the answer to the apparently irreparable disunity of the Christian Church.”

Arnold Toynbee, who refers to the Bahá’í Faith as one of the “higher religions,” writes in Christianity Among the Religions of the World: “. . .when I find myself in Chicago and when travelling northwards out of the city, I pass the Bahá’í Temple there, I feel in some sense this beautiful building may be a portent of the future. I suppose the Chicagoan Bahá’ís are mostly converts from Christianity. It is true that one can become a convert of Bahaism with a minimum disturbance of one’s ancestral roots. Of all the Judaic religions Bahaism is the most tolerant.”

Dr. Marcus Bach of the State University of Iowa School of Religion has, in books, magazine articles and lectures, brought the Bahá’í Faith to the attention of millions of people in the United States and abroad. Dr. Bach believes that the Bahá’í world Religion has been held back in this country “by the unwillingness of Americans to take seriously the claim that another Messiah has appeared or that Christ has returned.” He states in the same article: “I have met Bahá’ís in many parts of the world. They are all cut to the same pattern: heartfelt dedication to the Cause and person of Bahá’u’lláh, zeal in the advancement of their ideals. They ask no salaries, want no honor, and are literally more interested in giving than in receiving.”

“What gets your interest gets you.” Our era is dazzled by the sky rather than by Heaven. Certainly, space is a gift of the new era, and scientists are chosen people; but our streets are slick with blood, because people cannot get on with one another, and science may quite well carry this problem with it to the moon. For science cannot change the human heart, nor motivate the masses toward a different way of life. It is as a Persian poet already knew, ten centuries ago:

Canst thou on water walk, against the law?

So can a straw.

Canst rise up in the air so high?

So can a fly.

If thou wouldst play a real man’s part,

Subdue thy heart.

Science, impelled by the new surge of life, the quickening power that accompanies every Manifestation’s advent, has unified the globe physically and made it —who knows?—the most dangerous place to live in the universe. The human race [Page 41] must now unite or vanish. Old ways no longer work. “. . . the fundamental cause of this world unrest” Shoghi Effendi has written, “is attributable . . . to the failure of those into whose hands the immediate destinies of people and nations have been committed, to adjust their system of economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly evolving age . . . to reshape the machinery of their respective governments according to those standards that are implicit in Bahá’u’lláh’s supreme declaration of the Oneness of Mankind. . . the unification of the world. . .” It is Bahá’u’lláh’s mission to make the world safe for humanity.

The Christians have not chosen to look for a recurrence in another form of that eternal Entity which Jesus called “I.” Therefore Christian leaders have misread the signs of the times, and according to their own testimony are no longer able to guide their people: for a guide is one who knows where he is going. The same thing applies to other Faiths as well; among them all, only Bahá’ís have a sense of direction, and are oriented toward the future instead of the past.

[Page 42]

PROBLEMS OF SELECTING A WORLD LANGUAGE

By Evelyn Hardin

Evelyn Hardin, Associate Editor of the International Language Review, is a writer and lecturer on education, world government and world language.

Learned historians and high school students alike realize that our world is “shrinking.” The process cannot be reversed; should we not adapt ourselves to this social change as speedily as possible? Events (World Wars) and inventions airplane, radio, television, etc.) have brought the distant points of the world closer. Cultural and economic ties bind the world’s peoples together but languages hold them apart. The planet is becoming one world—why not adopt a world language?

Consider the dilemma of a young man in his educational choice: what language should he study to be prepared for the future? It is impossible now to be prepared to speak the language wherever one travels, for there are approximately 3,000 ethnic languages in the world. Experts differ somewhat on the count since they have not agreed among themselves as to which are to be considered languages and which dialects. In addition, there are around 700 constructed languages, designed with the hope of solving the world language problem, and new [Page 43] language projects appear frequently.

Translations are not as satisfactory in delivering a message as could be desired. Below is a quotation from a letter by William H. Schulze, who attended the United Nations 20-year celebration of its formation in San Francisco in June 1965 and a few days later in the same city, an international meeting of the World Federalists:

Interpretation of UN speakers went more smoothly perhaps because the speakers were aware of the demands of simultaneous translation. At the Federalists’ meetings, I believe texts were provided, but there were difficulties. For example, one of the speakers, whose message was worth hearing, was clearly five pages ahead of the interpreters until someone, aware of the difficulties in the translating booths, finally brought him back this side of the sound barrier. Meanwhile I listened in on the French interpreter who kept repeating ‘This is not translatable’ while the Japanese was going at top speed and gasping for air. Then a speaker began in French but playing to the vastly larger American audience by making humorous asides in English. The result here was that we exploded with laughter while 150 Japanese sat there as though hard of hearing. Through one of the Esperantists in the Japanese delegation, I became aware of hurt feelings and misunderstandings on the part of the Japanese, simply because of the language barrier. This was most unfortunate as theirs was the largest foreign delegation and no doubt required considerable financial sacrifice. Contrast this with the Congress which will bring people from all over the world to Japan for two weeks this summer, using only one language—Esperanto.

Howard E. Sollenberger, Dean of the School of Languages, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, wrote of a Foreign Service Officer arriving at his post, discovering that translators were translating only those press items favorable to the United States because to them, it was embarrassing to be critical of their employer. The result was misleading information. He quoted the dialogue of an American interviewer in Vietnam and the verbatim translation which seemed as unrelated as the childhood game of “Cross Questions and Crooked Answers.” The possibilities of mistakes in translation in matters of a delicate and diplomatic nature are frightening.

Contrast the linguistic situation of two nations, India and the United States, two extremes, with the other nations coming somewhere between. In India the Constitution of 1950 recognized fourteen languages of the country, while the 1951 census listed 782 different idioms without attempting to distinguish between languages and dialects. A ten-rupee Indian banknote has the value of the money listed in nine printed languages. The English language, disliked because it was forced upon India during the British raj, was necessarily the chief means of communications between the various language groups in India. When independence came in 1950, provision was made to replace English in fifteen years by Hindi. Leading educators of the country protested, insisting that this was insufficient time to coin technical terms and translate text-books into Hindi, and could only result in decline in the quality of education. As the time approached for the change to Hindi as official language, there were bloody riots in the southern part of India where Hindi was a foreign language. At least 68 persons were killed, and the riots only abated when assurance was received from the government that English would continue to co-exist as one of the official languages. The educated classes of India are aware that the variety of languages holds back progress and national unity.

[Page 44] In the United States one language is spoken from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Of course there are Spanish speakers, and in parts of Louisiana there are still a few natives who speak a French patois, yet, schools are conducted in English; mass communication: newspapers, radio and television are in English. Had the separate states of the United States spoken separate languages as in the closely packed countries of Europe, the history and development of the United States would have been quite different. Without linguistic unity, the United States could not have achieved its present success in the fields of business, science, education or culture.

The linguistic unity of the United States can be considered a pilot project demonstrating what could be achieved on a world scale without the language barrier. Average Americans as well as directors of large foundations who have not offered support for the movement toward a world language are quite unaware of this. Only after involvement in two World Wars, in which Americans were sent to distant parts of the globe, did the United States government become alert to the importance of languages and pass legislation supplying funds for the teaching of languages. Still the government and most of the people do not seem to recognize the fact that teaching languages will never solve the problem and provide a means for world understanding. Only the selection and use of one language, to be taught in each country of the world in addition to the national tongue, will, in a single generation, enable each inhabitant of the world to communicate with any other inhabitant, anywhere.

Two mistaken ideas we wish to lay to rest; first, that a world language will take the place of national languages. The advocates of a world language want only an approved language which will be simultaneously taught in each country, along with the national tongue. Each speech carries with it cultural values which should be preserved.

Secondly, the adoption of an international auxiliary language will not automatically bring peace. Persons can disagree and quarrel in any language. A world language will provide the means of reaching understanding if there is a will to use it.

Shall the international auxiliary language be a natural or a constructed language? If selected on the basis of the largest number of speakers, it would be Mandarin Chinese. If selected on the basis of speakers in most parts of the world it would be English. How do you think the French would like English to become the lingua franca of the world? Would the Russians and Chinese agree to English?

If one of the great national languages became accepted as the world tongue, the nations speaking that language, it is claimed, would have an unfair political and economic advantage over all other nations. To tie up the adoption of a world language with political considerations, it is argued, could arouse antagonism and bring indefinite delay.

Margaret Mead, anthropologist and curator of the New York Museum of Natural History reasons that the international language should be a national language because constructed languages lack the redundancy necessary for understanding, but she stipulates that it should be the language of a politically obscure people.

If you speak English, secretly you may desire it to be the international tongue because of the effort it would require of you to learn an additional language. But this is also the way other nationals feel. Mario Pei, author of One Language for the World has written that he could predict the constructed language an individual would favor—that one which most nearly resembled his native tongue. [Page 45] We are more than prejudiced in favor of our native language; we are conditioned to that end.

One group of constructed languages is based on the feeling of language familiarity. A deliberate study was made to select words which are common to the greatest number of languages. As Latin was the parent language of several languages of Europe, French, Spanish, Italian, etc., and Germanic languages were exposed to Latin and borrowed words, there is a large vocabulary list which contains similar words in the various European languages. Interlingue-Occidental (Edgar de Wahl—1922) and Interlingua (developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association, founded by Alice V. Morris and Dave H. Morris and after their deaths promoted by Dr. Alexander Gode) as well as less-known projects such as Interling (Thomas Wood of England) and Europa-Latine (W. J. Visser of Amsterdam), all make use of the international vocabulary.

The abstracts of the Third World Congress of Psychiatry held in Montreal, Canada in June 1961, give the speeches on the left-hand page in the native language of the speaker; on the right-hand page, a digest of the same in Interlingua. German speakers find the Interlingua version easier to understand than if the text had been in English or French; the English, French and Spanish speakers also find the Interlingua text easier than if it had been written in another language besides their own tongue. It has also been determined that studying a constructed language with an international vocabulary makes it easier afterwards to learn one of the European languages.

It is often mentioned that eastern languages should be represented in any proposed international auxiliary language. Many of the constructed languages contain words from various eastern languages but there is no common denominator for them comparable to Latin with European languages. It is just as difficult for one from the east to learn another eastern vocabulary as it is to learn a western language.

Among the constructed languages, Esperanto is the one with the most speakers, most wide-spread usage and largest body of literature, both original and translated. Esperantists have endeavored for many years to have it adopted by a world body. The League of Nations passed a resolution stating that it “follows with interest . . . the teaching of Esperanto in schools of some members . . . hopes to see that teaching made more general in the whole world . . .”

Again, after much preliminary work, a resolution was presented at the UNESCO conference in Montevideo in 1953 which was at first defeated, but brought up again after charges that Esperanto had been unfairly treated. This time the result was 30 in favor, 5 opposed and 17 abstentions. The resolution was similar to the one by the League, abbreviated here: “The General Assembly. . . takes note of results attained by Esperanto . . . authorizes the Director General to follow current development in the use of Esperanto in education, science and culture, and, to this end, to co-operate with the Universal Esperanto Organization . . . takes note that several Member States have announced their readiness to introduce or expand the teaching of Esperanto . . . and requests these Member States to keep the Director-General informed of the results attained in this field.”

At the start of International Cooperation Year (ICY) proclaimed by UNESCO, the UES (Universal Esperanto Association), which is recognized by UNESCO as an international non-governmental organization (NGO) with consultative status, made the decision to initiate another world petition in the hope that this time full recognition of Esperanto as official world language would be achieved. The petition was extended past ICY and was presented to the U. N. [Page 46] Secretariat on Oct. 6, 1966. It was signed by 920,954 individuals, among them many government officials, and by 3843 organizations, whose membership totals 71 millions. (From Newsletter published by the Esperanto League for North America, Oct. 1966.)

Let us imagine a petition-signing interview, and assume you are an average American receiving a copy of the Esperanto petition. “Are you in favor of a world language?” “Yes.” So you are asked to sign here. “But why should it be Esperanto?” you may ask. “There are sixteen million who speak it,” you may be told. Whereupon you may conclude that 16 million can’t be far wrong. However, you do not have time to study Esperanto yourself just now, but suggest that you want to give a personal boost to the Cause, so you would like to send a little greeting in Esperanto to many friends, and if the interviewer would kindly translate for you, you will have your secretary type it up, then take it to your printer. At this point the interviewer will reluctantly admit that it would not be suitable for your stenographer to type it because she has not the necessary diacritical marks on her typewriter. In fact, they would have to be put in by hand after being typed: yes, and then an ordinary printer does not have type fonts which can be used for Esperanto, only certain printers recommended by Esperantists.

A fact not publicized by Esperantists is that the form of their language was officially fixed in 1905 until official adoption by the world and that only minor changes and additions to the vocabulary have been made since then. However, about one-half of the approximately 700 constructed languages were designed as improvements upon Esperanto!

Of all the constructed languages, Esperanto is the only one which has had an opportunity to be officially presented or considered as a candidate for a world language. With its NGO standing with UNESCO, the UEA is even in a position to protest as “unfair”, if UNESCO gave attention to any other constructed language. With Esperantists holding the forefront of public attention on the topic of world language, and at the same time refusing to make its own format and construction more acceptable, should not Esperantists ask themselves whether they are furthering or blocking the cause of a world language? (Esperanto has proven, and nothing can minimize this, that a constructed language can be used to carry on businesses, promote Causes and make love and get married in.)

Some other constructed languages have many followers. Ido, Occidental, Interlingua and Neo have Associations and support from many countries. Still other constructed languages have fewer speakers, even no more than two, or exist only partially in one man’s brain as his own private communication with himself.

What holds back the adoption of a world language? From a close look at the situation for five years, I would consider hindrances to the movement to be unawareness and apathy on the part of the general public and the partisanship of too many of those who are actively working, each for his own proposal. Dr. Pei wrote: “Each of them [inventors of constructed languages] has sinned in presenting his own particular solution as the only possible solution, failing which everything connected with the international language must perforce fail.” How can a world language be achieved in disunity? When there is a spirit of unity, coupled with a scientific rather than an emotional approach, surely this could bring about the desired results.

Dr. Pei proposed that a committee representative of the various peoples of the world shall make the selection of a world language, with the respective governments agreeing beforehand to teach the selected language in their schools. He proposes a short period for a commission to correct any irregularities and [Page 47] make phonetic the writing of the selected language and train teachers. At a certain time the world auxiliary language would be taught in the kindergartens and continue with this age group, always starting new kindergarten classes after the appointed time. In practice, all progressive-minded people would insist upon learning the world language without delay. Now science has provided the most effective teaching medium for all: television.

Those commissioned to select the world language must consider themselves as trustees for unborn generations and must free themselves from the clamor of those who advocate this or that solution, and from their own inclinations in this direction. Scientific objectivity can best be achieved by actual testing and then results should be abided by. Only by testing can claims for this or that proposal be substantiated.

What needs to be done in promoting an international language besides being objective and working unitedly for the goal of a world language? Widespread publicity is needed to bring the problem before the masses of humanity, both to create a demand so governments will act, and also to prepare the people for the coming of a world speech. We would not want the masses of humanity to wake up at the last minute and then riot. Yes, the topic could start such bloodshed; witness India and Belgium. Widespread publicity may bring financial support so that scientific testing of various proposed solutions to the language problem could be carried out in an orderly manner. Scientific proof would be the best way of reconciling competitive proposals for a world language.

We have not much more time and none to waste. According to David Sarnoff television will soon be using satellites to send programs directly into homes, and all over the world. He wrote, “If we delay even five years in coming to grips with the problems of international regulation, the disorders resulting from lack of it may pass beyond control.” Television, the most educational medium, has been used in Italy to reduce illiteracy substantially. Television opens the way to decrease illiteracy all over the world. Simultaneous television in homes in all parts of the planet is pregnant with possibilities both good and evil; to reap the benefits, a world language should be available—within the next five years!

NOTES:

[Page 48]

A LETTER

by William Stafford

William E. Stafford, Ph.D. University of Iowa, is professor of English at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. He has published poetry in the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review. His latest book, THE RESCUED YEAR, was published by Harper and Row in 1966. He has won many awards, including the National Book Award and the Shelley Memorial Award.

Dear Governor:

Rather than advise you this time or complain

I will report on one of our little towns

where I stopped last week at evening.

This town has no needs. Not one person stirred

by the three lights on Main Street. It lay

so mild and lost that I wanted you to know

how some part of your trust appears, too far

or too dim to demand or be afraid.

Now I let it all go back into its mist from

the silent river. Maybe no one will

report it to you any more.

You could think of that place annually

on this date, for reassurance—a place where we

have done no wrong. For these days to find out

what to forgive one must listen and watch:

even our friends draft us like vampires, and it is

the non-localized hurts that do the damage.

We have to forgive carefully those demands

for little helps, those unhappy acquaintances.

We must manage the ultimate necessary withdrawal

somehow, sometimes let the atoms swirl by.

So, this time, please keep on being the way

you are, and think of that town. A locust tree

put its fronds, by the way, quietly into the

street light; repeated breaths of river wind

came up-canyon. Let that—the nothing, the no one,

the calm night—often recur to you.

Sincerely,

A Friend.

[Page 49]

THE PERSIAN VIEW OF THE AFTERLIFE

By Richard N. Frye

Richard N. Frye, Aga Khan Professor of Iranian at Harvard University, has studied at the universities of Illinois, London and Tehran, as well as at Princeton and Harvard. He is the author of several books, the latest of which, THE HERITAGE OF PERSIA, has appeared in several languages.

One might divide beliefs on the afterlife into two groups, a positive and a negative one. The latter would deny the survival of the individual in any form after his death, claiming that man in his totality came from nothing and will return to nothing. A religion, however, must be concerned with the fate of the individual person after his death, even though it claims that his destiny may be to lose his identity in a cosmic soul or the like. Even in the faiths of India, whose rebirth or continued individual existence is considered a curse rather than a boon, there is an eschatology based on Nirvana, which to many outsiders seems the direct opposite of parallel beliefs in “revealed religions.” In the widest connotation of the word, a religion is a body of beliefs, practices, or rites which gives hope to man that there is some meaning to the universe and that the individual has a hope of participating in the mystery of it.

Just as one may speak of the various religions of India which have a similar outlook on the destiny of man, so we may consider the beliefs of the people of Iran in a totality. It is interesting to consider the changes in the beliefs of the Iranians throughout history, as well as the constant features of these beliefs in spite of invasion, conquest and calamity. To me the continuity of culture and thought in Iran is more striking than the changes. Iran in a sense is a bridge between the almost timeless continuum of the civilizations of India and China and the “goal-directed” cultures of the West, built upon the prophetic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet Iran had its prophet of hoary antiquity, Zoroaster, who, at least from the ancient Greeks, received an honored place in the history of mankind. Let us examine the views of the ancient Persians on the afterlife, and how these beliefs may have changed and continued even to the present day.

We can tentatively reconstruct the religious outlook of the earliest Iranians from parts of the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrians, and from the [Page 50] related Vedas of neighboring India. Likewise students of comparative Indoeuropean philology and comparative religion can aid our attempts to understand the faith of the invaders who spread over the Iranian plateau in the first half of the first millennium B.C. It is not the place here to discuss the various theories of Indoeuropean religion which have led to disputes among partisans of different views. Certainly the contention of George Dumézil of the College de France and his school, that Indoeuropean society reflected the tripartite division of the gods, is of importance to our question. But this is not the place to discuss even the consequences of a postulated division of society, into priests, warriors and common folk, for the belief in an afterlife among the ancient Indoeuropeans. A study of the ancient texts gives a general impression, and I stress that it gives me a general impression, that early Indoeuropean society, and later Iranian society was more concerned with survival here on earth than with the afterlife. In other words, I would assume that the early Iranians were perhaps more fearful of the chances of surviving in this life, than in the afterlife. We sometimes tend to forget that most of the energies and thoughts of ancient man were directed towards mere survival, and his religion consequently was based on that aim.

In my opinion, the hymns of the Vedas, and the ‘Younger Avesta’ were primarily obligations laid upon the worshipper to placate the gods, and more than that, to insure the continued and proper functioning of this world. It would seem that the very words of the hymns, together with sacrifices, had to be uttered in certain ways and with certain rites, just to make the world go around. This would bring happiness in this world, and presumably in the next. The nature of the next world, or the individual’s passage to it after death, remain unclear, although one may presume an abode of the shades, such as one would infer from the most ancient Greek religion.

Zoroaster appears like a bolt of lightning in this world. We do not know when or where he lived, but presumably he flourished in eastern Iran before 550 B.C. (not a precise statement). In studying the Gathas of the Avesta, which are presumably his words, one feels something of the power and influence of his message, even though the meaning of many passages in the Gathas is very difficult to fathom. Zoroaster has been characterized as primarily a social reformer, or as a mystic, or a politician, but it is perhaps best just to call him a prophet. His success as a prophet may have coincided with the need of people around him to overcome their fears, probably at that time no longer fears of mere survival in this world, but fear of enemies, in this world as well as in the next. One may interpret Gathas as a profound social document, with no references to immortality or salvation, but if one translates the word amərətāt as “immortality” or something akin, rather than “vitality”, as it has been done, then we may postulate a message about the afterlife in Zoroaster’s teaching. To deny the words urvān and daēnā, the meanings of “soul” and “religious conscience”, or similar interpretations in many passages of the Gathas, is, in my opinion, folly. The interpretation of any religious text is difficult, but ancient hymns without commentaries, such as the Gathas, are even more obscure. Compare the Psalms in Hebrew, perhaps the most difficult of ancient Hebrew texts. I personally believe that the future life was very much the concern of Zoroaster and one should seek to interpret the Gathas with this in mind. Further, I think that an eschatology and a soteriology applicable to the individual exist in the Gathas. Since the Gathas are verses in metre without explanations or commentaries we can hardly elaborate on the meaning of the afterlife and salvation for Zoroaster. We must turn to later texts for further information.

[Page 51] Zoroastrianism as we know it was really formed and codified under the Sasanian dynasty which ruled Iran from ca. 224-651 A.D. We cannot discuss the fascinating details of the establishment of a state church, the ordering of a fire ritual and hierarchy of fire altars, and the struggle to establish orthodoxy. Rather, we must concentrate on the view of the afterlife of the people. Fortunately one of the architects of Zoroastrian orthodoxy, the priest Kartir, has left an apologia pro vita sua on stone in several inscriptions which he caused to be carved. He is quite clear in his declaration, “heaven exists and hell exists; whoever is a welldoer, he goes ahead to heaven, and whoever is an evildoer is cast into hell. And whoever is a welldoer, and further has run after good deeds, he has attained fame and fortune, in this solid body, and his solid soul has obtained righteousness, as I Kartir obtain.” In his longest inscription of Sar Mashhad in Fars province in southern Iran, which unfortunately is in a poor state of preservation, Kartir adds to what he said above, “he who is righteous, his own dēn goes to heaven, and he who is sinful, then his own dēn (goes) to hell.” Here is a clear presentation of the state of afterlife, and the simple admonition that by good deeds one goes to heaven, and for evil works one goes to hell.

There are many questions one may ask about the declarations of Kartir, probably written about 290 A.D., and for the answers we must turn to later Pahlavi books which tell much about the fate of man. Let us turn to the beliefs of orthodox Zoroastrianism as contained in several treatises relevant to our subject.

The concept of dēn (Avestan daēnā) seems to be peculiar to the Aryans or Indo-Iranians, if we understand it correctly. Much has been written about this word, which may be interpreted as “religious conscience.” It is not, however, simply anyone’s religious conscience in the modern sense, but rather the identification of the individual with the path or way to salvation; dēn is the good religion of the Zoroastrians. If man is a religious animal, then dēn is that religiousness which distinguishes him from animals. In a sense, I suppose, it could be compared with the Logos or the Truth which makes man free in Christianity, but it includes the rites, prayers and duties of the Zoroastrian faith. I should like to think that we have in this concept, already in the ancient religion of Iran, the combination of the “state and stage” by which the later Muslim mystic attained salvation. This we shall mention again below.

So the gate to salvation for the ancient Persian was entered by adherence to the precepts of his religion, a religion of good thoughts, good words and good deeds, especially the last. Man on earth accumulated good marks, and if they out-weighted his bad deeds, then he went to heaven. Good deeds are primarily the performance of proper purification rites, recitation of prayers, and the like, while evil deeds are primarily the failure to perform them. Thus the follower of Zoroaster generally knew where he stood.

The daēnā or dēn is not to be confused with the soul of man (urvān in Avestan), which is the essence which survived death. According to teachings in the Pahlavi books, the soul after death remains for three nights near the head of the body. During the three days after death the relatives of the deceased perform rites and utter prayers which will strengthen and aid the soul of the deceased for its coming test. At the end of the third night the dēn, in the form of a maiden, approaches the soul, beautiful if the man was good in his lifetime, ugly if he had been evil. The dēn is then the religious record of the soul on earth, and it leads to paradise across the Chinvat bridge. The bridge to paradise becomes as wide as possible for the passage of the righteous soul, and as thin as a hair for the sinner, so that he falls from it into hell. Such, in brief, is the fate of the soul after death, [Page 52] although there are many more details and also variations of the above.

In Zoroastrian thought man has more than a soul. Every soul has a guardian angel, or a kind of spiritual form, superficially akin to Plato’s universal forms (fravashi in Avestan). These fravashi exist outside of time; before birth and after death they are in paradise, but during the lifetime of individuals they are here on earth with him. Fravashi exist not only for men but for everything in creation, and their function is to insure the proper functioning of the universe. Only the soul and the fravashi of a man survive death. Incidentally, it should be noted that there is a purgatory, where the soul, whose good and evil deeds are evenly balanced, remains until the final judgement.

The individual’s fate is part of the cosmic drama of the conflict between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, good and evil. The final resurrection proclaims the annihilation of Ahriman and the purification of the sinners, so that in the end all will be reunited in the eternal abode of light. Again there are many details and variations on this theme, but the final triumph of goodness and eternal life is secured for all souls.

Thus it is clear that Zoroastrianism is an optimistic faith, one in which good thoughts, good words and good deeds dominate the life of the individual on earth, and in which final salvation eventually comes to all. There are countless questions one may raise, such as the role of Zoroaster and the future savior (Saoshyant, a descendant of Zoroaster who resurrects the bodies), the nature of the final resurrection, and many others. Even if we could answer some of these questions, there is no space in a short article to discuss them. Let us concern ourselves, in conclusion, with the nature of the road to salvation for the Zoroastrian, and then for the Muslim Persian of later times.

For the Zoroastrian, it seems clear that only the person who has been initiated into the Zoroastrian faith through various rites and ceremonies can even set out on the road to salvation. By his own deeds he works toward that salvation. Non-Zoroastrians presumably are excluded from the Zoroastrian heaven. So in Zoroastrianism we have the two features of initiation and deeds corresponding to faith and works in Christianity, or to the “states and stages” of the Muslim mystic. Perhaps this dual path is common to all religions, but it does seem to have been a prominent feature of later thought in Persia relative to the religious life. Grace and discipline, the latter in preparation for a new level of the path of the Sufi upwards toward union with God, occur again and again in the writings of the Sufis of Islamic Persia. Furthermore, many of the details of the journey of the soul after death were probably carried over by the Persians into their new religion of Islam from the older faith. One should stress this continuity of spiritual outlook in the ancient and the mediaeval land of Iran.

Perhaps again we are thinking of certain universal features of man’s belief in the afterlife. For those who adhere to one religion or to another, good works, including prayers, sacrifices, and faith, plus some sort of illumination, revelation, or beatification brings the individual soul to paradise, heaven, or Nirvana. To the agnostics, the various religious paths are nonetheless open, for what other paths can men follow if they are to have any hope in anything? The atheist, too, need not be forgotten, for religion offers him the consolation of aesthetics, with the message that man can be more true to his own nature by following the sublime path of religion than by following his personal whims. As a friend, W. Cantwell Smith, said, man is not man until he has discovered that the proper response to death is poetry not prose.

[Page 53]

A REVIEW

By Stanwood Cobb

ERICH W. BETHMANN: STEPS TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING ISLAM.

American Friends of the Middle East, 1966 Washington, DC.

Dr. Stanwood Cobb, an educator and lecturer, became interested in Islam while teaching at Robert College in Istanbul half a century ago. He is the author of several books, among them SECURITY FOR A FAILING WORLD.

In 1908 the writer, together with a fellow teacher at Robert College, Istambul, took advantage of the midyear vacation to visit Egypt and Sudan. At Khartum we attended an address given by an American missionary at the American Mission College. Introduced to my friend Hussain, the missionary rejoiced at meeting a Turk who he thought was a convert to Christianity. Upon finding that he was not, the missionary turned upon him and said: “You are a Muslim? Don’t you know Islam was the invention of the Devil?”

This type of invitation to Christianity no longer holds in missionary fields. But Islam still remains the most competitive to Christianity of all the world religions. This competition is age-long. The Christian world has made very little effort to study the achievements of Islam, or to understand its essential nature.

But today, due partly to political and commercial involvement in the Middle East, interest is rapidly awakening in Islam and in the Arab. Very welcome, then, is this contribution to the literature on Islam by Erich W. Bethmann, editor of publications of the American Friends of the Middle East, in the form of a brief condensed book—“Steps Toward Understanding Islam”.

This book will help to bridge the age-long gulf between Christianity and Islam. Mutual understanding breeds respect. “Unless men can learn to understand and to be loyal to each other across religious frontiers,” says Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Director of Harvard’s Center for World Religions, “unless we can build a world in which people profoundly of different faiths can live together and work together, then the prospects for our planet’s future are not bright.” The book under review is eminently calculated to help us learn to understand the Muslim and his religion.

Islam begins, of course, with Muhammad. Few in the Western world now doubt the sincerity of the prophet, or the admirableness of his character. How he escaped to Medina, a fugitive from assassination; won the voluntary submision of the city to his rule, defeated the forces sent against him from Mecca; entered Mecca triumphantly, and established the rule of Islam throughout Arabia, all this in eight years, is described with an analysis of the way, seemingly miraculous and so considered by Islam, in which this victorious transition came about.

The Muslims admire their Prophet, but they do not worship him. The focus of their adoration is not Muhammad—the human channel for the divine Word—but the Word itself, as constituted in the Qur’án. And Muslims like to boast that this Word was taken down directly as it flowed from its prophetic channel, with no adulteration, no human concepts intervening.

A second point in which Islam differs very much from Christianity is its approach to the problem of sin. Islam looks upon sin as a serious mistake by man himself. There is no place in its theology for mediation, for a Savior through whom forgiveness must be sought.

A third point of difference, and one in which Islam comes into direct conflict with Christianity, is its teaching of “progressive revelation.” God has revealed himself many times—to Abraham, to Moses, to Jesus and others, always in accordance with the need of the times. Muhammad— as progressively subsequent to Christ and as the “seal of the prophet,” should have been accepted by the whole world. But in spite of this non-acceptance, the Muslims extend the hand of brotherhood to Jews [Page 54] and Christians as “people of the book”— the Jews having their sacred Torah and the Christians their Bible.

Comments are made on the required daily prayer, which the author terms “a discipline in democracy. There is complete equality before God when men pray in the mosque. Rich and poor, the wise and the ignorant stand shoulder to shoulder just as they enter, there are no privileged seats, and all are equally humble before God. In the mosque the Muslims become a classless society.”

The pilgrimage to Mecca was a further means of establishing the sense of brotherhood, above race and above class, in the world of Islam. Also, it made the Arabs the greatest travelers on earth during the Middle Ages.

“From the far flung Muslim World each year several thousands, of ten tens of thousands, converged upon Mecca at a given period, emphasizing thereby the unity of Islam among the diversity of races and peoples. In an age when travel was difficult and communication between peoples scarce, it widened the horizon of Muslims and made them the most international minded, or world-minded of all peoples.”

Nowhere does Islam differ from Christianity more markedly than in the relationship between church and state. While Christianity has been gradully evolving a complete separation between these two important institutions, Islam has continued, in the main, to follow the pattern of the “Islamic State” as laid down by Muhammad.

“Muhammad introduced to the Arabs a new concept, the concept of a supra-tribal society, the ummah, the concept that all the believers form a new community, a new society which follows its own particular laws and regulations. . . . Islam is a way of life as the Muslims themselves like to call it. The divine and the secular are not separated, therefore the confrontation between church and state as we understand it does not exist.”

This Islamic society, bound together religiously into the Islamic State, had several liberal provisions far in advance of the time, one of which was the right of women to hold property in their own name. Another important provision was the Zakat or obligatory alms-giving, which developed under Islamic government into a sort of social security.

The author might well have developed at this point a discussion as to how this semi-theocratic Muslim form of government, with its Koranic-imposed requirement of consideration for the rights and needs of all its citizens, laid the foundations for one of the most prosperous and contented periods of human culture the world has ever known—that which reigned in Andalusia under the Moorish rule.

Bethmann ends his book with an interesting discussion of the problems that face Islam today. These are many and varied. But in spite of the difficulties that confront contemporary Islam, this world religion is more alive today than it was 20 years ago. “An awakening is taking place, the awareness of the magnitude of the problems confronting them. What the final outcome will be it is difficult to foretell. . . . But the original genius of the people will remain. And it is not too hazardous to predict that Christianity and Islam will still be with mankind when our present-day ‘isms’ will be merely chapters in the history books of coming generations.”