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World Order

WINTER 1976-77

EDUCATING THE WHOLE BEING

Editorial

THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

John Huddleston

“PERSIA”; AN EARLY MENTION OF THE BÁB

Robert Cadwalader

FOOD FOR THE WORLD

John A. Pino

MANI AND MANICHAEISM: A STUDY IN RELIGIOUS FAILURE

Daniel Keith Conner

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2 • 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:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Editorial Assistant

MARTHA PATRICK

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1977, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Educating the Whole Being

Editorial

3 Interchange: letters from and to the Editor

6 The International Monetary Fund

by John Huddleston

23 Food for the World

by John A. Pino

30 “Persia”: An Early Mention of the Báb

by Robert Cadwalader

36 Mani and Manichaeism: A Sandy in Religious

Failure, by Daniel Keith Conner

47 Honoring Her “I”ness

book review by Charles M. Fair

52 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Educating the Whole Being

A RECENT STUDY has shown that some 20 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate, unable to read instructions on food packages or to understand questions on a driver’s test. Had the study concerned itself with moral competence, the statistics would undoubtedly have been even more appalling. A century of effort has failed to create an educational system capable of equipping its charges with simple skills indispensable for living in an urbanized industrial society, much less with moral sensitivities necessary for understanding a world contracted to a neighborhood. The breakdown of the family, the increase in alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, and crime, have placed upon schools additional burdens which they had never been meant to assume.

The debates of the last several decades have centered on technicalities: the design of buildings, the curriculum, the methods of instruction or of financing. Thousands of scholars have produced innumerable reports on the state of education and offered their remedies. However, no significant results have been achieved, and the disintegration of the entire educational enterprise continues.

It is noteworthy that the most fundamental questions about education are seldom, if ever, raised. Perhaps they cannot be raised in a society that refuses to distinguish between right and wrong, that lacks a common faith, a shared morality, and a sense of purpose. A society which is not a community. which doubts that morality is anything but a personal predilection, cannot educate human beings. It cannot even train them as animals since they will not be trained without being educated, and education concerns the entire human being, including his spiritual self.

“Man is the supreme Talisman,” Bahá’u’lláh has written. “Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess. . . . The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”

Education, then, must be a process designed to reveal gems of inestimable value concealed in the mind and soul of man. The gems are both spiritual and intellectual. To a questioner who asked about the training of children ‘Abdu’l-Bahá replied: “It is incumbent upon thee to nurture them from the breast of the love of God, to urge them towards spiritual matters, to turn to God and to acquire good manners, best characteristics and praiseworthy virtues and qualities in the world of humanity, and to study sciences with the utmost diligence; so that they may become spiritual, heavenly and attracted to the fragrances of sanctity from their childhood . . .”

It is, indeed, incumbent upon all who attempt to nurture and instruct to reexamine their views of man’s nature and to resolve to teach not abstractions derived from narrowly materialistic and patently unsuccessful theories which debase man and destroy civilization, but human beings.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

SHOGHI EFFENDI, in 1931, in a letter known as “The Goal of a New World Order,” stated that the pivotal principle of the Bahá’í Faith—the oneness of mankind —“is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family.” While it is not possible to say, almost fifty years later, that the goal toward which mankind is struggling has been reached, it is “stimulating,” as Shoghi Effendi noted in the same letter, “to follow the history of the growth and development of this lofty conception which must increasingly engage the attention of the responsible custodians of the destinies of peoples and nations.”

Mr. Charles M. Fair, in this issue, gives us an illuminating view of a book purporting to deal with the solution to the often difficult relationships between men and women, and, as a brilliant aside, an essay on how a limited historical perspective and an inability to express oneself clearly preclude a meaningful discussion of “the real nature of our emergency.”

Dr. John A. Pino and Dr. John Huddleston address issues affecting not only individuals but those relationships binding states and nations as members of a single human family. For the first time in our pages Dr. Pino discusses the world food supply, suggesting ways in which the increasing interdependency of the world’s nations demands more realistic national and international policies to ensure adequate food for all. To WORLD ORDER’s frequent discussions of economics Dr. Huddleston adds a survey of the International Monetary Fund, a somewhat successful exercise in international cooperation.

While we are not prepared to speculate how, eventually, adequate food for peoples throughout the world will be produced, or how the world’s monetary system will be regulated, yet the fact that men are devoting their lives to seeking new solutions is testimony to Shoghi Effendi’s assertion that “the gradual diffusion of the spirit of world solidarity is spontaneously arising out of the welter of a disorganized society.”

* * *

With spring upon us, our Fall issue scarcely off the press, and the Winter issue destined for publication after the lilacs bloom, we feel we owe our faithful readers an apology for the delays. Amidst the several International Bahá’í conferences, increased Bahá’í activities and commitments, a rigorous winter, and an unexpected share of illness, and with our small volunteer staff, we have tried to keep the magazine on schedule, but we have not done well enough to satisfy our readers or ourselves. Thus we beg your indulgence. Inevitably the Spring issue [Page 4] will probably be a bit behind schedule too, though well worth the wait with a long-planned tribute to Mark Tobey. By summer we plan to be back on schedule; and, again, we can promise some unusual nuggets. Indeed, though we seem to be moving very slowly at the moment (if at all, you may be thinking), our plans are stretching far into the future as we plan issues with the 1978 United Nations Conference on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the 1979 United Nations International Year of the Child in mind.

* * *

The authors of “Errors in Jensen’s Analysis,” which appeared in our Fall 1976 issue, have called to our attention a typographical error which, unfortunanely, changes the meaning of a sentence. On page 58 of the article, paragraph 5, line 7, the word “refute” should be “refuse.” We hasten to share the correction with you and to apologize to Dr. Hossain E. Danesh and Dr. William S. Hatcher for the oversight.

To the Editor

JENSEN

I should like to express my thanks for the article “Errors in Jensen’s Analysis,” which appeared in the Fall issue of WORLD ORDER. I was particularly impressed by the logical development of the discussion, the use of clear and concise language, and above all by the courteous and nondogmatic attitude of the authors. The contrast with the normal way of conducting intellectual debates in academic circles was very striking. I have a sense that this was an important and timely article. . . .

JOHN HUDDLESTON

Vienna, Virginia

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The International Monetary Fund

BY JOHN HUDDLESTON

FOR MANY YEARS the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was almost unknown except to officials of governments and central banks and to professional economists, probably because its activities seemed highly technical and remote from the everyday life of ordinary people. It is only in the last few years, when there have been prolonged and severe disturbances in world monetary affairs, that a wider audience has come to appreciate that the work of the IMF can have an impact on the economic well being of all of us. Bahá’ís have additional reasons for being interested in the IMF. First, like the other members of the United Nations family of agencies, the IMF is engaged in international cooperation and represents a stage in the move from international anarchy to world order, which is one of the main goals of the Bahá’í Faith. Second, like Bahá’ís, it upholds free trade as a basic long-term principle for the economy of the world. Third, it has, with the approval of member countries, created what is in effect an embryo world currency, which the Bahá’í writings identify as an essential element in the economy of a future world commonwealth.

Origins of the Internatianal Monetary Fund

IN THE MIDDLE YEARS of the Second World War the Allies, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, began planning for the postwar era. They agreed that the prewar practice of each nation’s acting on its own without much regard for others had been a disaster and that in the future it would be essential to place much greater emphasis on international cooperation. A top priority in planning was preparation for the postwar world economy. The leading personalities in this particular debate were John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), representing the United Kingdom, and Harry Dexter White (1892-1948), of the United States Treasury. The Allies had two principal economic concerns.

First, at all costs there must not be a repetition of the terrible economic depression which had occurred in the 1930s. During that period many nations, having millions of workers unemployed, their industry and agriculture in disarray, tried to improve their situation by boosting exports to other countries (to create more jobs) and by decreasing imports (which sometimes competed with their own products and, therefore, took away job opportunities). The main emphasis was not on greater efficiency and reduced cost, which would have benefited all, but rather on beggar-my-neighbor monetary and trade restrictions. Tariffs were raised and quotas were imposed on imports; exports were subsidized; national currencies were deliberately devalued in relation to those of other countries in order to make exports cheaper and imports more expensive; multiple exchange rates were established which favored essential imports but discriminated against others; and restrictions were placed on the amount of foreign currency available for imports, overseas travel, and investment. Nations pursuing such policies soon experienced retaliation in kind from their trading partners. The result was not prosperity at the expense of others as was hoped but a general compounding of the world depression which brought more misery for all.

[Page 7] Second, there must be a reconstruction of the economies of the war-torn countries of Europe and Asia. This would clearly be a tremendous task as the economies of many smaller countries and of virtually all the most important national economies, excepting that of the United States, had been heavily damaged during the war.

As the discussions developed there was a consensus that three international organizations would be needed to coordinate policies to handle economic problems. An International Trade Organization (ITO) would coordinate policies on tariffs, quotas, and other trade matters, which are handled in most countries by a department of commerce or a board of trade. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) would coordinate questions concerning exchange rates, exchange restrictions, and other monetary matters, which are normally the concern of ministries of finance and central banks. An International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now better known as the World Bank) would channel capital needed for reconstruction after the war and for helping develop the economies of poorer countries. It was agreed that membership in the World Bank would be conditional on membership in the IMF.

In July 1944 representatives of forty-five nations met at a large hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and agreed to the proposals made for the establishment of the IMF and the World Bank. A conference on the proposed ITO was left to a later date. After ratification of the agreements by the parliaments of the member nations the IMF and World Bank set up offices and opened for business in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1946. By the end of the year the IMF had forty-six members, drawn mostly from North and South America and Western Europe. At that time there were only a few members from Africa, which was still mostly colonized, or from Asia. Although representatives of the USSR had taken part in the Bretton Woods meeting, they eventually decided that their country would not join the new organization although they joined most of the other United Nations agencies. It was believed that the USSR adopted this course because it was not willing to divulge information concerning its economy, which would be required under the terms of membership.

Purpose and Structure of the IMF

THE IMF’s constitution is its Articles of Agreement and its supporting By-Laws, Rules, and Regulations. The first Article of the Agreement states that two of the IMF’s main purposes are:

To promote international monetary cooperation through a permanent institution which provides the machinery for consultation and collaboration on international monetary problems;

To facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and [Page 8] maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy.

To achieve the latter purpose member countries agree to abide by a code of behavior in international monetary affairs. The first principle is to promote exchange stability, to maintain orderly exchange rates, and to avoid competitive devaluations. Under Article IV of the Agreement members agreed to establish fixed exchange rates (called par values) in relation to the United States dollar, which in turn was fixed in relation to gold at the rate of US $35 per fine ounce. Fluctuations of up to 1 percent on either side of the par value were permitted, but if a member wished to make a larger adjustment, it would have to notify the Fund in advance. If the change proposed was more than 10 percent, the Fund would have the right to object. Generally, the IMF would agree to a devaluation if it were clear that a country had fundamental balance-of-payments difficulties but would not agree if it only had temporary difficulties, perhaps caused by commodity price fluctuations or speculation, or if it were thought that the country was seeking an unfair competitive advantage. A nation which flouted a Fund decision might be denied the use of Fund resources (see below) or even in an extreme case might be expelled from the organization (so far the latter sanction has not been used).

The second principle in the code of behavior is that member countries will establish multilateral systems of payments and will eliminate foreign exchange restrictions. Under the terms of Article VIII (General Obligations of Members) member governments agree to remove restrictions on payments so that their currencies can be used by third party countries, not to discriminate against the currencies of particular countries, and not to set up multiple exchange rates for their currencies. They also agree to provide the Fund with necessary information so that it can verify that they are abiding by the agreement.

In agreeing to these rules a member country which is importing more than it is exporting might temporarily run into a severe shortage of foreign currencies before it has time to put into effect permitted corrective policies to make its own products more competitive and to reduce its demands for imports. To overcome such short-term problems the IMF has available resources which it can lend to its members. Such resources come from members’ subscriptions (called quotas), which are paid when a country joins the IMF. The quota of a member country is determined by a complicated formula which takes account of national income, foreign reserves on a given date, size of imports, and fluctuations in exports in a given period. In 1946 total quotas amounted to some $7.6 billion of which about one third was subscribed by the United States. Normally a member country would pay the smaller of 25 percent of its quota or 10 percent of its total gold reserves in gold and the other 75 percent in its own currency. The size of a member’s quota is significant because it determines the member’s subscription fee, how much it can borrow from the IMF, and its voting power in IMF deliberations. A member wishing to draw from the IMF (that is, to purchase foreign currency with its own currency) [Page 9] is permitted 25 percent of its quota (that is, 100 percent of its real contribution in exchange reserves) without any significant restrictions or charges. Beyond this “gold tranche” a country may borrow in what are called “credit tranches”; but if it does so, it will be required to give a statement of intent with regard to correcting its balance-of-payments situation. Such statements of intent are somewhat general in tone for the first credit tranche but become more precise and stringent for higher tranches, and may involve adoption of programs of financial stabilization, including performance criteria with respect to public finance and expansion of central bank credit.

The maximum a member may draw is 200 percent of its quota or eight times its gold or real contribution to the IMF. This maximum may be waived at the discretion of the IMF, “especially in the case of members with a record of avoiding large or continuous use of the Fund’s resources” (Article V, Section 4).

Interest charges for drawings are small compared to commercial rates and are partly determined by the length of the repayment period. Normally, it is expected that drawings will be repaid (repurchased) within three to five years. By contrast, World Bank loans of capital for development projects are normally repaid over ten years or more.

Determination of voting power in the IMF by quota gives most influence to the big powers, which perhaps tends to make the organization more realistic than the United Nations General Assembly and several other international agencies where the voting is on the basis of one vote for each member country. The system is designed to ensure that the nations making the largest contributions have some control over how those contributions are used. Most decisions are to be made by majority vote, but in the case of most important matters, such as amendments to the Articles or a general increase in quotas, the assent of 60 percent of the membership with 80 percent of the votes is required. As the United States has more than 20 percent of the votes, this rule in effect gives it veto power in such matters.

The IMF’s organization has four main levels. At the top is a Board of Governors, which consists of one governor, each with an alternate, from each member country. Usually the governor of a member is the minister of finance, and his alternate is the governor of the central bank. In practice the only time the Governors come together is at the Annual Meeting, which is held jointly with the Board of the World Bank. The Annual Meetings are held on a three-year cycle involving two meetings in Washington and one in another capital. The governors have delegated responsibility for supervision of the day-to-day affairs of the IMF to a Board of Executive Directors (the second level of organization), which originally had twelve members, of whom five were representatives of the member countries with the biggest quotas, and seven were elected by groupings of the remaining membership. Most decisions in the Executive Board have been by sense of the meeting and have been preceded by informal behind-the-scenes discussions. The Executive Directors elect a Managing Director (the third level of organization) for five-year periods, who besides directing the [Page 10] staff also acts as chairman of the Executive Board. The IMF’s staff (the fourth level of organization) in the first fifteen years or so numbered about five hundred of whom about half were professional economists. The small size of the organization and the permanent location of the Executive Directors at headquarters have undoubtedly helped to minimize bureaucratic rigidities. As a result, the IMF has generally won a reputation for being responsive and relatively efficient in operational matters.

The above brief description of the IMF as established suggests that it has a threefold role. First, it is a permanent forum for international consultation. Second, it is a regulatory agency for policing a standard of behavior in international monetary affairs to which member nations have agreed. Third, it is, in effect, an international bank which can give temporary financial assistance to member countries when they run into balance-of-payments difficulties.

Before concluding this discussion of the origins of the IMF it might be of interest to note that as finally established it incorporated many features suggested by the United States but which caused some reservations amongst other delegations. Lord Keynes, for example, would have preferred the IMF to be less of a regulatory agency and more like a financial clearinghouse in which member countries would have automatic and unlimited overdraft rights. He did not believe it was necessary for the Board of Executive Directors to be in permanent session, and he would have preferred the Organization to have been located in New York, a world financial center, rather than in Washington, D.C., the seat of the United States government. He had, at one stage, also suggested the introduction of an international currency to be called the “Bancor.” Inevitably, the more cautious views of the United Status, which was to provide most of the real financial resources of the IMF in its early years, had to be given special weight.

A Decade of Transition, 1946-1955

FROM THE OUTSET it was recognized that for a period the countries of Western Europe, devastated by war, would be unable to abolish all exchange restrictions, as required under Article VIII. If they had done so, the pent-up demand for both capital and consumer goods, which could not have been provided at home, would have led to massive imports from the United States, causing either bankruptcy or very severe devaluations. Accordingly, provision was made under Article XIV for a five-year period of transition during which members were permitted to suspend the application of Article VIII. In the first years of operation only nine countries, all in the Western Hemisphere, felt that their economies were strong enough for them to abide by the terms of Article VIII. At the end of the five-year transition period the IMF would consult annually with each member country to review its economic situation and determine whether suspension of Article VIII was still justified. Even with this compromise it soon became apparent that the arrangements on par values established at Bretton Woods had not taken into account sufficiently the shift in relative trading strength which had occurred as a result of the war. Consequently, most currencies were overvalued in relation to gold and the United States dollar. In 1949 the pound sterling was devalued by 30 percent from the equivalent of U5$4 to US$2.8. Many other countries followed the lead of the United Kingdom and devalued by similar amounts.

During this period when the vast majority of members were still applying temporary exchange restrictions the role of the IMF was fairly limited. Most of the financial assistance required to help the countries of Western [Page 11] Europe recover from the war was provided on a bilateral basis by the United States under the Marshall Aid program The number of drawings from the IMF were small and were mostly confined to countries in Latin America. Nevertheless, it was during this period that the IMF, along with the World Bank, became the focus for international consultation on economic affairs through the routine at the joint Annual Meetings of the Board of Governors and, beginning in 1952, through a program of regular staff consultation missions. Over a period of time the consultation mission became one of the most important elements in the work program of the IMF. A routine was established whereby every eighteen months or so each member country would be visited by a team of four or five staff members. As a result of these activities the IMF built up intimate contacts with member governments and established a unique body of information and experience. On the basis of experience it was gradually agreed how the Articles would be applied and what requirements would he made of countries which made purchases from the IMF. In addition, provision was made for members to negotiate standby arrangements to draw when they anticipated balance-of-payments difficulties so that when such difficulties did occur they could be assured of immediate assistance. Another development during this period was the acceptance of the former enemy countries, West Germany and Japan, into the family of nations and their successful application to join the IMF and the World Bank.

Years of Expansion, 1956-1970

BY THE END of the 1950s Western Europe and Japan had recovered from the war and were once again strong centers of economic power. They no longer needed the protection of the restrictions on international payments allowed under Article XIV. Thus between 1960 and 1965 eighteen more countries, including Germany, England, France, Italy, and Japan agreed to abide by the terms of Article VIII and to make their currencies freely convertible. At the same time a large number of colonies, particularly in Africa, obtained independence and applied for membership in the international organizations including the IMF and the World Bank. In the period between 1960 and 1965 the membership at the IMF increased from 70 to 107.

These two developments had a major impact on the work of the IMF. First, there was a considerable increase in the use of IMF resources. In the first ten years there were just over 50 drawings, amounting to about $1.2 billion. In the second ten year period (1957-1966) there were about 190 drawings, amounting to $11 billion. It soon became apparent that the IMF’s existing resources were going to be inadequate to meet the new conditions. Accordingly, in 1959 quotas were raised by 50 percent to a total of $14.6 billion. This was the first general increase in quotas since the Fund began operations in 1946. In 1962 the IMF entered into a General Agreement to Borrow (GAB) with ten leading industrial countries (the Group of Ten) which gave it access to a line of credit of some $6 billion if and when needed to meet the requirements of members. This agreement has been renewed periodically since then and is still in force. In 1965 and in 1970 there were two further general increases in quotas, each of 25 percent, so that at the end of this period the IMF’s total resources amounted to some $29 billion.

A second change in the IMF’s work arose [Page 12] from the necessity to respond to the special needs and difficulties of the less developed countries which had become, as a result of the influx of new members in the early 1960s, the overwhelming majority of the membership, if not of voting power. One of the most important ways in which the IMF could be of service was to provide on request technical assistance, including the preparation and carrying out of financial policies, the improvement of fiscal systems, the drafting of central banking legislation, the organization and operational development of central banks, the reform of banking and credit systems, and the development of financial and balance-of-payments statistics. In the 1960s the IMF organized panels of technical assistance experts, many of whom were former colonial administrators, and by the end of the decade had some one hundred such experts in the field. At the same time a small training program built around a twenty-week course on international economics was rapidly expanded so that it could take on over two hundred government officials per year. Another way in which the IMF planned to help the less developed countries was to provide special new facilities for drawing on the IMF’s resources. A special compensatory financing facility permitted a country dependent on primary products, such as rubber, tin, cocoa, coffee, and so on, to make drawings up to 50 percent of quota in order to meet payments difficulties arising out of temporary shortages in exports, due to bad weather, declines in commodity prices, or other circumstances largely beyond the country’s control. A second facility was designed to assist countries to finance their contributions, up to 50 percent of quota, to international buffer stocks of primary products. The maximum a country might have outstanding from both of the new facilities was 75 percent of quota.

As international trade rapidly expanded in the 1960s, there was growing concern lest growth should be hampered by a shortage of international reserves held by members, in the same way that a domestic boom might be broken if the central bank were overcautious in controlling the money supply. It was noted that, whereas international trade was expanding at the rate of 10 percent per annum in the 1960s, international reserves were only growing at the rate of 2.4 percent.

For a long time the main international reserve asset of trading nations was gold. The virtues of gold as a reserve asset were its scarcity and the fact that it could not be manufactured. Accordingly, it was argued that it automatically imposed severe balance-of-payments discipline. The drawback of gold was that the total stock available for reserves did not maintain a constant relationship with the volume of international trade but was determined by such extraneous factors as gold discoveries (as, for example, in the 1840s and 1880s), the changing needs of industry and the jewelry market, private hoarding, and speculation. In the 1960s the stock of gold held as reserve assets by central banks was only growing at an average rate of about 0.3 percent per annum. The problem could not be solved by raising the official price of gold as this would create uncertainty and would give an unfair advantage to those countries which happened to have a high ratio of gold in their reserves. More and more, the view came to be held that there was a need for a supplementary reserve asset—and that ultimately gold should be demonetized and treated as an ordinary commodity like any other metal.

[Page 13] The other main reserve assets were convertible foreign currencies, principally the United States dollar. The postwar shortage of United States dollars finally disappeared by the end of the 1950s, and in the 1960s a persistent United States trade deficit led to a rapid accumulation of dollars by other countries. Thus in 1961 about 50 percent of all reserve assets were in convertible currencies (most of the rest was gold), but by 1971 this proportion rose to some 60 percent. In short, it was the convertible-currencies element in international reserves which met the need for more reserves as international trade expanded. This obviously could not be a permanent solution. As the accumulation of United States dollars abroad grew, there was a risk that confidence in the existing dollar exchange rate would decline. At some state the United States was bound to take steps to rectify its balance-of-payments situation. The growth in United States dollar holdings would obviously come to a halt and might well go into reverse.

After long debate it was agreed at the 1967 Annual Meeting of the Governors, held that year In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that the IMF should periodically issue to member countries a new supplementary reserve called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), as and when it was deemed that there was a shortage of other international reserves. The introduction of the SDR required the first amendment to the Bretton Woods Articles of Agreement. The SDR could only be used between and by Central Banks to settle international payments and only when a country was in balance-of-payments deficit and had difficulty paying in other currencies. Initially the value of the SDR was set at one United States dollar or 1/35 of a fine ounce of gold. The SDR would also earn a small amount of interest for holders, to be financed out of charges paid by the countries which cashed in their SDRs. Between 1970 and 1972 there were three allocations of SDRs to member countries, totaling some 9.5 billion SDRs, distributed in proportion to each member’s quota. There have not been any further issues because, contrary to expectations, the foreign currency element, notably the dollar, in international reserves continued to grow at a rapid pace.

The new programs and tasks which the IMF undertook during this period led to a rapid increase in the size of the staff. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of staff doubled, from about five hundred to about one thousand, and the number of departments increased from ten to fourteen (since then the staff has grown to about fourteen hundred and the number of departments to sixteen). Nevertheless, the IMF has still managed to maintain its reputation for efficiency and is not generally characterized by the deficiencies usually associated with large bureaucracies. Every effort has been made to recruit the staff from as wide a range of countries as possible (at the beginning of 1977 staff were drawn from ninety-three countries) and to reduce the early (and inevitable) predominance of staff from the United States and the United Kingdom. However, the IMF has not adopted formal [Page 14] national quotas and has not been subject to the political pressure in recruitment which has afflicted several other international organizations and which tends to undermine standards and undermine an esprit de corps.

The End of the Fixed Par Value System, 1971-1973

BY THE LATE 1960s it had become clear that the international monetary system was suffering from a major imbalance. As mentioned earlier, the United States had been experiencing a persistent balance-of-payments deficit which became particularly severe as the decade drew to a close. In 1970 the United States deficit reached $10 billion; in 1971 it was $30 billion. Yet the official international reserves of the United States at the beginning of 1971 amounted to just less than the equivalent of $15 billion, including some $11 billion worth of gold. The main reason for the growing United States deficit was that the United States dollar had been fixed in relation to other major currencies at the time of the 1949 devaluations, when most of the European economies were still very weak. Since then other countries, particularly Germany and Japan, had become much more competitive, and because their currencies were pegged at a low rate in relation to the dollar, they were able to sell far more to the United States than she was able to sell to them. This situation had been aggravated by the enormous expense of the war in Viet-Nam when the United States had attempted to have both “guns and butter.” The growth of a large amount of United States dollars outside the United States (called Euro-dollars) owned by multinational corporations and others represented an additional threat to the position of the dollar because most of this money was fairly liquid—that is, it consisted mostly of cash deposits or short-term loans rather than of long-term investments—and might be moved quickly to other currencies if the dollar seemed in danger.

The surplus countries urged the United States to adopt fiscal and monetary measures to rectify its balance-of-payments deficit. The United States, however, was not prepared to bear the whole burden of restoring equilibrium between the dollar and the other leading currencies and insisted there should be what were termed “symmetrical adjustments” —that is, the surplus countries should contribute to the solution by upward revaluation of their currencies. Little headway was made in this dispute and in late 1971 matters came to a head. On August 15 the United States announced a suspension of gold payments for her dollars held by other countries, and imposed a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports. Most exchange markets around the world were closed for two weeks following the announcement. When they reopened, Japan and the European industrial countries, with the exception of France, allowed their currencies to float or find their own market level in relation to the dollar—that is, the central banks stopped buying dollars to maintain the dollar exchange rate. The Bretton Woods system of fixed par values had come to an end.

It was widely feared that this development would cause chaos in international trade and that it might even lead to a return to the conditions of the 1930s. Quickly member countries of the IMF, led by the big industrial powers, began to discuss how some sort of order in the international money market could be restored. The result of these discussions was the Smithsonian Agreement, which was signed in December 1971. Signatory governments agreed to return to a policy of maintaining their currencies at either the old par value or at a new central rate but with a maximum permissible margin of 2¼ percent [Page 15] rather than the 1 percent margin previously maintained. The new system would be built around a United States proposal to devalue the dollar by 7.9 percent (to make the United States official price of gold $38 instead of $35). The United States agreed also to suppress the recently imposed 10 percent import surcharge.

It soon became evident that the changes authorized in the Smithsonian Agreement had not gone far enough. In June 1972 the pound sterling, which, like the dollar, had been under pressure, was allowed to float by the British government. In February 1973 the United States dollar was again devalued, this time by 10 percent. A week or two later Germany raised the value of the Deutsche Mark by 3 percent. Then in March 1973 the European Common Market countries agreed to allow their currencies to float in relation to the dollar. Following these developments several groupings of currencies could be distinguished. First, there were the European Common Market countries keeping their currencies tied together in an arrangement known as the SNAKE. Other countries tied their currencies to the SDR, Yet others continued their link with the dollar (about fifty) or with the pound sterling and the French franc (another twenty). The main float relationships were between the dollar and the SNAKE currencies, the pound sterling, the Japanese yen, and the Swiss franc.

During the next three years the U.S. balance-of-payments position gradually improved; and, as a result, the underlying trend was the stabilizing of the exchange value of the dollar. However, within this trend there were fluctuations of up to 20 percent in the dollar relationship with other currencies. This phenomenon was primarily due to very large speculative capital flows in anticipation of changes in exchange rates rather than to fundamental economic conditions. Despite fears mentioned earlier the floating exchange regime has not so far had any noticeable effect on the volume of world trade and employment. Fluctuations in exchange rates have, however, affected the balance of payments of individual countries, banks with large overseas accounts, and, of course, overseas travelers.

The Smithsonian Agreement was intended only as an interim measure pending the establishment of a new international monetary system to replace the Bretton Woods arrangements. To advise on a new system a special new Committee of Twenty of the Governors was formed. This body met six times in 1972 and 1973 and made three important recommendations.

First, the Committee argued that a formal par-value system was still needed in the long run to encourage international trade. However, it recognized that the fluidity of recent relations between the major economies made a more flexible system imperative for the present at least (the phrase used was “stable but adjustable”). To achieve this goal the Committee advocated wider margins of fluctuations than the 1 percent permitted in the Articles, together with simplified procedures for making small changes in par values. Having said this the Committee conceded that in times of extreme turbulence in the exchange markets, as was the condition at that time, it would be difficult to operate even a liberalized par-value system and that, therefore, a floating regime would be inevitable.

Second, the Committee proposed that SDRs be valued in terms of a weighted basket of leading currencies. As mentioned earlier the value of the SDR was originally set at one United States dollar at 1/35 of a fine ounce of gold. The devaluation of the dollar and the erratic price of gold suggested a need for a more stable valuation. Thus the second [Page 16] recommendation was quickly adopted, and since July 1974 the SDR has been valued in terms of a weighted basket of sixteen leading currencies, each weighted according to its relative importance in the world economy.

Third, the Committee recommended the establishment of a new body in the Fund hierarchy—a Council of twenty Governors, which would fit between the Board of Governors and the Executive Board and which would be responsible for making speedy policy decisions regarding the international system. Experience had shown that, on the one hand, such decisions could only be made by ministers and, on the other, that the full Board of Governors was too unwieldy to be able to act as swiftly as was likely to be necessary.

The Oil Crisis and New Directions, 1973-1976

BEFORE the Board of Governors could act on the recommendation of the Committee of Twenty concerning a new monetary system, another major international monetary crisis threatened as a result of the quadrupling of oil prices following the Yom Kippur war in late 1973. It seemed clear that the enormous increase in the price of oil not only would cause immediate and drastic payments problems particularly for many less developed countries but would seriously aggravate the condition of world recession and inflation which was developing at that time. In response to this situation the Governors agreed, as a result of the initiative of the Managing Director, to set up a new “oil facility.” The plan was that the rich countries, including the oil-exporting countries, should lend substantial amounts to the IMF’s oil facility at a moderate rate of interest (7 percent) and that the money would be used to provide assistance to member countries, especially the poor ones, while they adjusted their economies to the new situation. In 1974 and 1975 the IMF borrowed the equivalent of SDR 6.4 billion (about $6.9 billion) from seventeen countries (including seven members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) which in turn was lent out to fifty-five countries experiencing balance-of-payments difficulties as a result of the increase in the price of oil.

Pending the establishment of the new Council which had been recommended by the Committee of Twenty, the Governors set up an Interim Committee to report further on reform of the international monetary system in the light of the new conditions. This IMF Committee together with a Joint Fund-Bank Development Committee was also charged with the task of recommending further measures to assist the less developed countries. This renewed emphasis on the needs of the less-developed countries occurred against a background of bitterness, not to mention confrontation, between the rich and the poorer countries of the world. For years the developing countries, loosely organized as the Group of Seventy-Seven, had been pressing the industrial countries for greater trade concessions (mainly through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and for more capital and technical assistance. Their efforts had reached a climax at the Seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly held in the fall of 1975 when approval was given to a proposed plan called the New World Economic Order. The demands of the poor countries during this period were not greeted with much enthusiasm by the governments of the industrial countries, which had major problems of their own as a result of the world recession and which in any case were somewhat disenchanted with aid because results had been disappointing.

At its fifth meeting, held in Kingston, Jamaica, in January 1976, the Interim Committee agreed to make several important recommendations. First, the Committee proposed that Article IV be amended to legalize floating exchange rates. However, countries were recommitted to the principle that they should not manipulate exchange rates to prevent effective balance-of-payments adjustments [Page 17] or to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other members. Members should intervene in the money market to dampen down what were called “disorderly market conditions or erratic fluctuations” in exchange rates. The IMF would set practical guidelines and would be responsible for surveillance of the system. In the long run, when the underlying relationships between the various currencies had become more stable, it was envisaged that a new system of “stable but adjustable par values” would be introduced. Under such a system a currency would be permitted to fluctuate within 2¼ percent on either side of the currency parity compared with 1 percent under the Bretton Woods par-value system. The par values would be expressed not in gold or dollars as in the past, but in SDRs.

Second, the Committee proposed that quotas be raised by 32½ percent to give a new ceiling of SDR 39 billion (equal to $47 billion) and that there be some adjustment in the proportions of member countries to give relatively more weighting to the oil-exporting countries. It also proposed, as a concession to the United States, whose proportion of the total vote had fallen as a consequence of this shift, that in the future all major IMF decisions would require the concurrence of 85 percent rather than 80 percent of the total vote.

Third, the Committee recommended further steps to reduce the role of gold in international finance. It proposed the abolition of an official price of gold and the elimination of the obligation to use gold in transactions with the IMF and of the IMF’s authority to accept gold. In the future the former gold element in a member’s quota subscription would consist of convertible currencies. The IMF was authorized to dispose of one third of its 150 million fine ounces of gold—half to be returned to members in proportion to quota at the rate of thirty-five SDRs per fine ounce and the other half to be sold by auction for the benefit of the developing countries.

Fourth, the Committee made arrangements to give more assistance to the developing countries. A new Trust Fund would be established to provide balance-of-payments assistance on concessionary terms to member countries with low per capita incomes. Initially, eligible members would be those with per capita incomes not in excess of SDR 300 in 1973. The Trust Fund would be financed by profits from the sale of 25 million fine ounces of gold referred to in the previous paragraph. The profit would be the difference between the IMF’s previous book value for its gold (SDR 35 or about $42 per fine ounce) and the price which might be obtained (in 1976 the market price of gold varied between $105 and $140 per fine ounce). In addition, the Committee proposed that conditions for drawing under the Compensatory Financing Facility be made less restrictive and that drawings under this facility be permitted up to 75 percent of quota instead of up to the previous limit of 50 percent. These measures would be in addition to two others which had been recently instituted: a “Subsidy Account” to subsidize interest rates on drawings by poorer countries, to be financed out of voluntary contributions by the rich countries, and an extended IMF facility to provide medium-term assistance to countries which had to make more fundamental structural changes in changes in their economies in order to achieve a balance in their overseas-payments situation.

These recommendations of the Interim Committee were subsequently approved by the Board of Governors and at the time of writing are being submitted to national parliaments or other legislative bodies for ratification.

Review of Achievements and Some Thoughts for the Future

NEAR THE BEGINNING of the essay it was noted that the IMF originally had been given three broad roles to perform: it was to be a permanent forum for international consultation, a regulatory agency, and an international [Page 18] bank. Later it was mentioned that in the sixties it also began to undertake technical assistance. The work of the IMF can be perhaps most usefully reviewed according to these various roles.

The most obvious achievements of the IMF as an international forum have been the two amendments to the original agreements, the first establishing the Special Drawing Rights and the second recognizing the legality of the floating-rate system. Consultation on policy has been strongly underpinned with a great deal of research. The regular and objective reports of country consultation missions have been of particular value both for the country concerned and for the rest of the membership. Sometimes international consultation on policy has been slow and frustrating, especially in recent years; and for a time the industrial nations were tempted to impose their views through their own narrower organizations. Fortunately, it was recognized that this would only aggravate tensions, and most recently there has been a renewed commitment to the IMF as the only satisfactory forum for discussions of international monetary affairs. One hopes that, in the future, with the establishment of the proposed Council of Governors, policy decisions will be made in a more timely fashion. A final point worth making is that the role of the IMF as an international forum would become even more significant should the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the other socialist countries, and Switzerland become members.

As a regulatory agency in the field of international monetary affairs the IMF has been principally concerned with the elimination of exchange restrictions and with the maintenance of a fair system of exchange rates. Though exchange restrictions are still numerous, as is evident from the Executive Directors’ Annual Report on Exchange Restrictions, the Fund has been successful in holding down restrictions in many instances and often in reducing them. A major success was the acceptance of Article VIII by most of the countries of Western Europe and Japan in the early sixties. Though more controversial, a case can be made that the IMF has had considerable success also in the managing of exchange rates. For twenty years the par-value system worked reasonably well and the competitive devaluations of the 1930s were not repeated. The system had the advantage of being more flexible than the gold exchange system; at the same time it provided a basis of stability which undoubtedly helped the unprecedented expansion in world trade which has occurred in the postwar era. The system did, however, have some drawbacks. Member countries would sometimes resist a change in the par value of their currency demanded by economic circumstances, either out of fear of losing a competitive edge when upward valuation was needed, or out of excessive concern with prestige when devaluation was necessary to restore competitive prices for a country’s exports. The result, as in the doomed defense of the pound between 1964-1967, was often a long, costly, and dramatic battle against reality which only served to increase speculation rather than confidence which was the intent of the designers of the system. The system fell apart when it failed to accommodate frequent and drastic changes in par values forced by the marker partly because of varying economic conditions in member countries and partly because of the buildup of large amounts of speculative short-term capital. Just how seriously the Fund’s regulatory function has been reduced by the abandonment of the par-value system is difficult to assess. On the one hand, [Page 19] it may be that the influence of the IMF under the old system was less in practice than appeared on paper. On the other hand, the IMF has been given the task of surveillance and the establishment of ground rules for running the floating exchange-rate system. Major goals are to prevent unfair manipulation of the market for narrow national interests and to overcome erratic fluctuations which come about as a result of speculation and which prevent the exchange-rate system from performing its fundamental function, which is to bring about a pattern of trade based on comparative costs and flow of capital based on comparative profit-and-interest rates. The trend of history suggests that in the long run member countries will come to see it is to their advantage to coordinate their economic policies more than is the practice today. When that happens, “the system of stable but adjustable par values” referred to by the Interim Committee will become feasible. Such a system would undoubtedly enhance the role of the IMF as a regulatory agency.

As a banking institution the IMF was limited in the early postwar years and only became important in the late fifties. For a short time after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 it was thought that the IMF’s banking role would decline as members would no longer need financial assistance to defend a fixed value for their currency. It soon became apparent, however, that members still needed large amounts of financial assistance to maintain free-payments systems in face of such factors as inflation, massive speculation in currencies, and the quadrupling of oil prices. Thus in the last two years purchases from the IMF have been larger than ever. In 1975 total purchases amounted to SDR 4.7 billion (about $5.5 billion) and in 1976 to SDR 7 billion (about $8.1 billion). The latter figure includes SDR 2.5 billion under regular facilities, SDR 2.1 billion under the oil facility, and SDR 2.3 billion under the compensatory financing facility. The 1976 figure does not include the largest single arrangement ever made by the IMF, the SDR 3.36 billion standby requested by the United Kingdom which was approved by the Executive Board in January 1977. Many members continue to have severe balance-of-payments problems, including very large short and medium term international debts; and it is likely, therefore, that the high level of requests for IMF financial assistance will continue for some time.

The IMF has been criticized periodically for using its position as an international bank to press deflationary policies on member countries which have balance-of-payments difficulties. The counter argument is that the IMF is advising such members to live within their means and that it is giving them cheap temporary assistance to help them make the necessary adjustment. It might also be added that the IMF urges those countries having strong balance-of-payments positions to adopt policies which will facilitate the growth of imports from those countries having balance-of-payments deficits.

The most innovative and farsighted step taken by the IMF in its role as banker has been the introduction of the Special Drawing Rights. Though the amounts issued so far have been limited, the system has become firmly established especially as a stable and reliable international measurement of value, and the somewhat complicated rules governing their use have worked smoothly, thanks to a sophisticated automated accounting system at the IMF. Successful as it is, the SDR has not been without its critics. Many advocating the interests of the less-developed countries argued that SDRs should have been distributed according to need rather than quota. Conservative bankers suspected that the SDRs issued in the early seventies added to the worldwide inflation which followed. Others have argued that the SDR should be based on something more tangible than the [Page 20] judgment of the world’s finance ministers, which might easily be swayed by short-term interests. It has been suggested, for instance, that the SDR might be related to world stockpiles of certain types of basic commodities. Under such a scheme an international agency (the IMF) might buy up stocks with SDRs when commodity prices are falling and offer to sell commodities for SDRs when commodity prices are inaeasing. By this means world prices would be kept steady, and the SDR would be used as a major counter-cyclical weapon.

Whatever the merits of these arguments it seems clear that the SDR is here to stay and that in the long run it will be an increasingly important element in international finance. In this connection it is of interest to note a recent speech of the Managing Director in which he said that the IMF must play a much stronger role in the management of international liquidity and become a real world central bank. He suggested that an essential condition would be for member countries to agree to hold a certain minimum proportion of their international reserves in the form of SDRs. International management of the global amount of international reserves could then be achieved by adjusting the aggregate volume of SDRs and/or the required reserve ratio. In the widest perspective the SDR might be seen as the first step in the direction of a world currency, and future historians may come to see its creation as being the most important single act in the area of international monetary cooperation in the postwar era.

What about the International Monetary Fund’s role as a provider of technical assistance? By and large most of the former colonial territories which emerged into nationhood in the sixties have successfully established the basic financial and banking infrastructure necessary for the management of their international monetary and fiscal affairs. It would seem fair to attribute some part of this success to the IMF’s technical assistance program. It is not surprising that until the onset of the oil-price crisis in late 1973 there were many developing countries which appreciated the IMF more for its technical assistance than for any other of its services.

This is all of interest to Bahá’ís, who strongly support the work of international organizations in their efforts to bring order in a chaotic world. However, they realize there are very severe limitations on what can be achieved, given today’s conditions. What atttacts their main attention is the future. Bahá’ís believe that man will only achieve his full potential when he acknowledges his relationship with God, the unity of religion, and the oneness of mankind. The concept of the oneness of mankind, the brotherhood of man, includes an abiding desire for justice for all men and an appreciation of the enrichment of civilization that diversity of culture brings. The widespread acceptance of such principles would make it possible to build a world commonwealth united under a world federal government which, like national and local governments, would be democratically elected and responsive to the long-term as well as the short-term needs of all the peoples of the world. Bahá’ís foresee that the economy of such a world commonwealth would be coordinated and planned to develop the resources of the world for the benefit of all, to narrow differences between the rich and the poor, and to ensure the conservation of scarce resources and the protection of the environment for the benefit of future generations. Gradually the world’s economies would become one. Barriers limiting commerce and trade, such as tariffs and quotas, would be removed; weights and measures would be standardized; and a single international currency would be introduced. The unification of the economy would be further strengthened by the establishment of [Page 21] a worldwide system of education, the adoption of a universal auxiliary language, and the organization of a world system of communications. In such an economy it would seem there would be an important place for some central financial institution to manage the world currency, to coordinate financial polity and information, and to provide last resort financial support to national and regional banks—in short, an institution with roles recognizably similar to those of today’s IMF, although the surrounding circumstances would be quite different. A Bahá’í might, therefore, reasonably speculate that the IMF, given a willingness to adapt and change with circumstances, might well eventually become the basis on which is built the central bank of tomorrow’s world commonwealth.

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[Page 23]

Food for the World

BY JOHN A. PINO

This Essay was adapted from an address prepared for the Seventeenth Annual Food Hygiene Symposium, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, on November 18, 1975, and originally entitled “The Third World: Its Food, Its Needs, Its Challenges.”

THE PRODUCTION and availability of food has been a concern of man, both as an individual and as a society, ever since he came upon this earth. It is a concern which has recently taken on a new meaning for the American people. While most of us in the United States give little thought to the system of producing, storing, processing, and distributing which assures abundant supplies of almost everything on the supermarket shelf, many others in the world must search daily to obtain enough food to supply the energy to look for the next meal. It seems paradoxical to many Americans—in a land blessed with abundant natural resources, a land in which our usual problem has been a surplus of food—to be faced suddenly with the prospect of a twenty-eight day supply of food grains.

The editorial of the 9 May 1975 issue of Science described the situation:

When food is abundant, it is wasted or treated as a commodity. But when food is scarce, it is regarded as the staff of life and its distribution becomes a highly emotional issue. Food production worldwide is increasing faster than population, but distribution is uneven, reserves are limited, and bad weather conditions could lead to widespread famines. Prospects of poor crops universally are not great but variations in harvests good and bad will continue to place us on an emotional roller coaster. The United States and much of the rest of the world seems to be entering a phase in which supplies of food will be adequate. It is a good moment for stocktaking.

AT THE PRESENT time we are living in a period of instant awareness of events as they happen. Before we can fully appreciate the size and scope of a particular happening, or before we can react to it properly, we are bombarded with something new. We have little time to examine issues in the light of historical trends or experience. Our emotions are lifted to peaks of exhilaration and dropped to depths of despair in a matter of hours. Yet we appear unconcerned about or inured to the outside world. We have grown skeptical of the words of leaders. We question the validity of the “facts” as they are related to us. Only when events take on the character of a crisis do we really believe that “there must be some truth in it.”

Today, whether we like it or not, it is not possible to disassociate the destiny of the United States from that of the rest of the world. The events of history have moved us irretrievably into interdependent relationships. Perhaps no other single issue will, in the future, have so much bearing on those relationships as that of food.

[Page 24] Two factors have given the food issue an entirely new dimension. The first is the burgeoning world populations (the result of high birth rates, reduced death rates, and longer life expectancy) requiring only 35 years to double—compared to 140 years in 1900. The second is the position of the United States as the world’s principal source of surplus food. The only other major exporters of food grains are Canada and Australia. Although Latin America used to be a net exporter of food, it is now a net importer. Most of the rest of the world lives with a precarious or inadequate food supply.

The present food deficit of the developing countries is estimated at 12 million tons. While this poses no problem insofar as supply is concerned, it is estimated that the deficit will rise to 85 billion tons in a few years, a fact which does pose problems. Yet, even now, when there are aberrations, such as drought, flood, or pestilence, which cause disruption in the food supply—particularly of more than one populous region of the world—the quantity of food required to avert disaster taxes the production capacity of the world. Moreover, the number of people affected is staggering. This was brought home dramatically in 1972 and 1974 when stresses were felt throughout the world, and even the United States consumer could not escape the consequences, for the world markets were competing with him for the same food resources.

It is often said that the world food problem is not one of food production or food production capacity but one of distribution. This is partially true so far as it goes. Averting starvation or malnutrition is not simply a matter of producing more food. Food must reach the mouths of people. A principal barrier to this is the abject poverty of millions whose economic situation limits the amount and kind of food they can acquire. These are the people who come from rural areas into the cities. They seek a better life but end up on the garbage heaps of big cities, in the tar-paper barrios around capital cities, in stone-and-stick hovels on the mountainsides, without water, without lights, without schools, and without attention. There are millions more who remain in the rural areas and eke out a subsistence living, producing corn, rice, potatoes, or whatever the particular culture and geography permit.

Some people see the solution to these massive cultural and economic problems, which are largely responsible for malnutrition, as a simple one of transferring the surplus food of those nations who have it to those who do not. Of arguments put forward to justify such a simplistic solution perhaps the most compelling is the fact that the highly developed countries are pulling further and further ahead of the underdeveloped ones in the production of consumer goods, in education, and in standards of living, including housing, health, and nutrition. The highly developed countries use most of the resources, and they enjoy most of the comforts; their citizens live longer, their children survive and grow healthier, and so on. In spite of this, however, massive food transfers are not going to satisfy the growing food needs of the future. For there are certain limits to the amount of food (basic cereal grains) which nations with surpluses can produce for nations without adequate foods. Moreover, it is almost physically impossible to ship the required volumes of food, just as it is impossible for one nation or small group of nations to bear the cost of the massive food transfers.

Food grains provide most of the caloric intake of the world’s people, [Page 25] especially in the developing world where more than 60 percent of caloric and other nutrient intake is derived from cereals. However, people consume other foods, including roots and tubers, animals, fish, fruit, and vegetables. When there is an improvement in economic conditions, there is generally a shift in food habits, first by increasing the quantity of the same food, second by increasing the diversity, and finally by adding higher quality foods, such as meat, milk, eggs, poultry, and fish. However these other foods may vary from region to region of the world, yet there is enormous potential in the world for increasing the production and availability of basic food grains, certainly enough to meet the expected demand by the turn of the century.

Nevertheless, the capacity and, let us accept it, the responsibility of the “have” nations can only go so far in resolving the problems of the “have not” nations. Food supply is only one part of the disparity between the two groups. But since food supply affects so many other aspects of a nation’s well-being, it is imperative to bring about stability in that sector.

WHAT ARE THE FACTORS affecting food production, and what should be done by nations of the Third World to increase food productivity and by others to assist them?

As was stated earlier many factors affect food production. Some conditions (destruction of soil cover, increasing crop production without maintaining the soil’s fertility, overgrazing, and so on) are brought about by man and are, therefore, the easiest to do something about. Some factors are natural, some of which man can control, and some of which he cannot. Each country has its own national policies which affect food production. International influence may affect agricultural productivity in a country. Some international policies may provide incentives and encourage production. Others may, in fact, discourage productivity.

The major factors affecting food production potential are natural resources; manpower resources and technology; and policies, which necessarily have sociological, economic, and cultural implications.

Insofar as natural resources are concerned, it is estimated that there are potentially 32 billion hectares, or nearly 8 billion acres (1 hectare equals 254 acres), of cultivable agricultural land. Between 1.4 and 1.5 billion hectares (44 percent) of it is under cultivation. On most of this land, yields are less than half of what would be possible if modern technology were applied. Much of the uncultivated land is located in precisely those areas where increased food production is needed. Because it will take considerable investment to bring new lands into production, major effort must be put into obtaining higher yields from the land already under cultivation.

Most of the world’s agricultural productivity is in areas planted under natural rainfall conditions. In addition, some 200 million hectares of agricultural land is irrigated, and more land is being brought under irrigation, at the rate of 4 million hectares per year. Major river irrigation works using untapped river resources, river basin drainage, and the like will require new and substantial investments. Rain, the major source of water, both for irrigation and for natural moistening of land, is unpredictable; but many agencies are working not only to improve the accuracy of weather prediction but also to [Page 26] influence and control climate. If we learn how to maximize the use of natural rains, impounded waters, and rivers, we can easily satisfy water needs for food production to the year 2000. Perhaps by then we can control weather with new technology. However, such manipulation is not now possible.

With respect to fertilizers, insecticides, and such products we may be optimistic about our ability to provide adequate quantities of these products. Thus it is safe to say that new and more effective fertilizers will become available in the next decade and that plant protection can and will be improved by means of better chemicals which will be target specific, biodegradable, and nontoxic, and by making greater use of natural systems through improving plant resistance, biological control, and so on.

In developing countries manpower and technology are major limiting factors in agricultural production. Yet farmers simply cannot continue to farm under the high-risk system of old. Technology must be brought in from abroad and generated locally; it must be tested under local conditions, and it must be used by farmers. To accomplish these tasks is no simple matter, but it can and must be done.

Ever since man first made a deliberate effort to nurture a plant to provide himself with food, there have been attempts to select the most productive plants with the most desirable adaptive qualities. Great strides have been made in plant breeding in both the public and private sectors of the United States scientific agricultural establishment, but we must undertake the critical evaluation of the structure of our scientific community and of our support of it, with a view to its capability of meeting the future challenges of a changing world agriculture. Similarly, if other nations are to assure themselves of adequate food supplies, they must build and support the necessary scientific institutions which can provide technology applicable in their own setting.

The problems confronting veterinary science are as diverse and complicated as those confronting agriculture. The overriding issue in animal production in terms of food supply is animal health, especially in the developing countries of the tropics where livestock production is limited by poor health conditions responsible for slow growth of animals to marketable weight and by factors such as poor nutrition and management, which lead to low reproductivity, and susceptibility to diseases and parasites, which often prove lethal.

Some of the still unconquered diseases seriously restricting livestock production are trypanosomiasis and East Coast fever (in Africa), anaplasmosis, babesiasis, bovine pleuropneumonia, foot-and-mouth disease in swine and cattle, brucellosis, cattle rabies, African swine fever, African horse sickness, reproductive diseases, and a variety of internal and external parasitic infections.

The nature of modern transportation, which moves large numbers of people and all kinds of cargo great distances in short periods of time, is such that there exists an ever-present threat of the introduction of exotic diseases into places where none now exist. We have not yet learned how to cope with such a threat, except by trying to put out the fire after it has been discovered. A new strategy must be developed to bring diseases under control in the areas where they are now endemic.

Finally, among other important factors affecting food production potential are the policies and the cultural ambiance in which politico-economic policies [Page 27] occur and their influence on agriculture and veterinary science. Land tenure, seed laws, marketing practices, storage, and distribution are but a few of the important factors affecting food production. Adequate incentives and security must exist if farmers are to increase productivity. The degree to which nations are able to assure themselves the necessary technology in agriculture and veterinary science (either through the public or private sector); to provide equitable distribution of profits; to assure markets; and to provide services and security to rural families will affect their ability to feed themselves.

WHAT ABOUT OUR OWN United States agriculture and agricultural policies?

Government policy until recently has centered on maintaining farm income in the face of continuing surpluses. Because the large increases in productivity outstripped the increases in demand, significant amounts of acreage had not been farmed in order to maintain price levels. To those farmers who qualified and cooperated the government guaranteed a minimum level of prices.

The problems today—of intermittent scarcities, rebuilding depleted food reserves, and avoiding the use of export controls which would stabilize the United States market at the cost of losing friends and customers elsewhere in the world—are very different from those of ten years ago. Therefore, policies today should be different from those of ten years ago. The objective now is to encourage maximum food production and achieve relative price stability while providing the farmer an adequate return on his investment. Government action to this end should be limited, but government does have a role to play. The aim should be to foster a market economy to the maximum extent possible but with enough government intervention to obtain a balanced achievement of the various objectives which must be given high priority. These objectives are assuring food for home consumption, for emergency relief, for sale abroad, and for a world reserve.

But who in the United States is determining farm policy, which is but one component of the much broader issues of food production and use? Certainly it is not the exclusive domain of the farmer.

Insofar as world trade is concerned, agricultural policy has shifted to the State Department since food now has become a powerful tool in the kit of the diplomats. Not only is agricultural policy pulled and tugged between the Agriculture Department and the State Department, but the powerful forces of consumers, environmentalists, labor, real estate lobbies, and others are having a great and potentially disastrous effect on our agriculture.

From out of the heartland of the wheat belt comes the following plaintive note: “understandably consumers want low-priced bread and meat. But they will have it only to the extent that farmers are encouraged by return on their investment to continue to take the risk and endure the work and worry of crop and livestock production.”

While there is not complete agreement on what United States policies and practices should be, one thing is certain: United States policies are neither clear nor adequate to provide for domestic food stability or to meet external needs and opportunities. Consider the dilemma of food-grain sales abroad. Foreign sales are vital to our agriculture, yet there is a divergence of opinions as to the effect of such sales on the American people.

[Page 28] A few years ago the government was paying farmers not to grow crops. We had piles of surplus grains, cotton, tobacco, and other commodities. We gave much away, scaled down our production, and built a livestock industry which ate its way through 150 million tons of grain annually, providing the American public with enormous quantities of cheap meat. Today there are new markets for agricultural products, and this is healthy. However, there is much irresponsible talk about the effects of foreign sales on American food costs. When farmers get about four cents out of a sixty-five or seventy-five cent loaf of bread, something is very wrong. Moreover, contrived crises go hand in hand with conditioning the public to expect higher prices. Most people were ready to pay a dollar for a loaf of bread in 1974 when there existed absolutely no justification for the declarations, made by presumably responsible people, that such prices were imminent. This year [1975] United States agriculture will have produced near record levels of soybeans, corn, sorghum, and wheat.

ALL IN ALL, United States agriculture is in a strong position. What does this mean in terms of the world food supply?

First, it means that the solution to a nation’s food problem begins at home. Thus countries without adequate food supplies must be encouraged to give increasing attention to agriculture and veterinary science. In addition, such countries must implement population policies and programs. The solutions depend, not on rhetoric, but on political decisions, will, and action.

Second, it means that the United States must be prepared to lend assistance to help nations without adequate food supplies solve the problem. This may be done by the United States’ strengthening the technological base of the international and national research system, training people, contributing to credit agencies for development, and taking greater initiative in international debates.

Third, it means that the United States must contribute substantially to the development of technology which will improve the production, processing, and use of oil-seed crops, oil-seed meal, legumes, and other good sources of quality [Page 29] protein products, including aquatic resources.

Fourth, the strong position of agriculture in the United States means that she must devote increasing efforts to developing effective programs which will assure that infants, pregnant women, and nursing mothers—groups most susceptible to the effects of malnutrition—get the minimal nutrients, including carbohydrates, proteins, and essential minerals and vitamins.

Fifth, it means that the United States must be ready to respond to development programs which can significantly affect food production programs at the national level. These programs include vigorous efforts to bring under control major health hazards (such as malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis, Chagas’ disease, river blindness, venereal disease, and so on) which affect the physical well-being of people; the development of new areas which can be farmed; and efforts to harness major river and irrigation resources for water and energy.

Sixth, it means that the United States must participate in some sort of global food aid program, including the setting aside of grain reserves.

Finally, it means that the United States must gear its own agriculture to new world realities.

ARE WE in the United States prepared to let other nations bid for our food supplies? This has major implications for land-use policy, food prices, balance of payments, rural development, and political security. On the one hand, we fear the possible consequences of worsening food problems, and we panic at the thought of empty grocery shelves. On the other hand, the current situation offers an excellent opportunity for the United States to develop a comprehensive agriculture and food strategy with a stronger economic, technical, political, and social base than it has aver had. It is inconceivable that the United States should face the future only by reacting and adjusting to crises. A positive and firm position is essential for the country’s welfare as well as for that of the other nations. It will help ensure adequate food supplies for every nation in the world.

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“Persia”: An Early Mention of the Báb

BY ROBERT CADWALADER

The writer wishes to think Professor Roger Adelson of the History Department of Arizona State University at Tempe for his encouragement and kind suggestions without which this earliest known article in a Western publication dealing with the Bábís would undoubtedly yet be awaiting discovery.

IN The Báb: The Herald of the Day of Days Mr. Hasan M. Balyuzi calls attention to an article in The Literary Gazette of 15 November 1845 entitled “Mahometan Schism.” This article was subsequently reprinted in the London Times of 19 November 1845 and The Eclectic Magazine of January/April 1846. Mr. Balyuzi states that, “As far as is known, these were the earliest references to the Faith of the Báb in a Western publication.”

The original source upon which “Mahometan Schism” was based has now come to light with the discovery of an article in the London Times for 1 November 1845. As it predates by two weeks the ones referred to by Mr. Balyuzi, it becomes the earliest known mention of the Bábís in an Occidental publication.

Those familiar with early Bábí history know that source material predating the outbreak of hostilities against the Bábís in Mázindarán in 1848 is scarce. To have contemporary non-Bábí, non-Muslim information dating from 1845 is remarkable as the Báb’s mission began in the spring of 1844, although his Faith did not meet with open resistance in Persia until early 1845 following his Ḥájj or pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

The 1 November 1845 article entitled simply “Persia,” is worth quoting in full as it pertains to the Bábís:

We have been favored with the following letter, dated Bushire, August 10:

A Persian merchant, who has lately returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, had been for some time endeavouring here to prove that he was one of the successors of Mahomet, and therefore had a right to demand of all true Mussulmans to mention him as such in their profession of faith; he had already collected a good number of followers, who secretly aided him in forwarding his views. On the evening of the 23d of June last, I have been informed from a creditable source, four persons being heard at Shiraz repeating their profession of faith according to the form prescribed by the new imposter

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were apprehended, tried, and found guilty of unpardonable blasphemy. They were sentenced to lose their beards by fire being set to them. The sentence was put into execution with all the zeal and fanaticism becoming a true believer in Mahomet. Not deeming the loss of beards a sufficient punishment for the believers in the imposter, they were further sentenced on the next day to have their faces blacked and exposed throughout the city. Each of them was led by a Mirgazah (executioner), who had made a hole in his nose and passed through it a string, which he sometimes pulled with such violence that the unfortunate fellows cried out alternately for mercy from the executioners and for vengeance from Heaven. It is the custom in Persia on such occasions for the executioners to collect money from the spectators, and particularly from the shopkeepers in the bazaar. In the evening, when the pockets of the executioners were well filled with money, they led the unfortunate fellows to the city gate, and there told them

“The world was all before them where to choose

“Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.”

“After which the Mollahs at Shiraz sent men to Bushire with power to seize the imposter, and take him to Shiraz, where, on being tried, he very wisely denied the charge of apostacy laid against him, and thus escaped from punishment.

From the above one will readily recognize the reference to the Báb’s pilgrimage to the Ḥijáz, where He had proclaimed the new Message of the Sherif of Mecca. In accordance with His claim to be the Promised Qá’im (He Who shall arise) He was believed by the Bábís to be a successor of the Prophet. The editor of the article “Mahometan Schism” states that the Báb was “a successor of the Prophet,” while the original article states more correctly that the Báb “had been for some time endeavouring here to prove that he was one of the successors of Mahomet.” He claimed to be a successor of the Prophet, but only the first of two Prophets Who would arise in a very short time. In Islám: Beliefs and Institutions, Henri Lammens wrote that the Báb’s chief work, the Persian Bayán, was “animated by a more llberal and modern inspiration; but the Báb takes care not to represent it as the final word of revelation. Others, he asserts, will come after him to improve and complete it.”

One of the Báb’s innovations was a new version of the adhán or call to prayer. As the revealer of a new law, He was justified not only in altering the traditional adhán but also in completely doing away with it if need be. To His followers the alteration of the adhán, as presented in Khaṣá’il-i-Sab‘ih (The Seven Qualifications), was the revelation of the Qá’im and a pious responsibility, but to the Muslims, and particularly to Muslim clerics, it was utter blasphemy.

Both the 1 November 1845 article and those derived from it recount how on 23 June 1845 “four persons . . . were apprehended, tried, and found guilty of unpardonable blasphemy.” The first of this group was a certain Mullá Muḥammad-‘Alíy-i-Bárfurúshí, better known as Quddús (the Most Holy), who had brought Khaṣá’il-i-Sab‘ih to Shíráz. He entrusted it to Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas-i-Khurásání, who was the second of those arrested. The third Bábí was Mullá ‘Alí Akbar-i-Ardistání. Mullá Ṣádiq used to act as mu’adhdhin and to insert the new clause in the call to prayer. It was this insertion—“I bear witness that He whose name is ‘Alí-Qabl-i-Muḥammad [the Báb] is the servant of the Baqíyyatu’lláh [the Remnant of God, Bahá’u’lláh]”—which precipitated [Page 33] the furor and subsequent arrests.

The Times article refers to a fourth person arrested with the other three. In his Ṭáríkh-i-Jadíd (New History) Mírzá Ḥuseyn-i-Hamadání also mentions a fourth person by the name of Mullá Abú-Ṭálib. This conflicts with the generally accepted view that only three were attested. Mr. Balyuzi states that the identity of Mullá Abú-Ṭálib “is unknown.” According to Mírzá Abu’l-Faḍl-i-Gulpáygání, the Ṭáríkh-i-Jadíd was inadequately compiled and, “In addition to this defect, ignorant scribes and illiterate writers have, in accordance with their own fancies, so altered the Ṭáríkh-i-Jadíd that at the present day every copy of it appears like a defaced portrait or a restored temple, to such a degree that one cannot obtain a correct copy of it, unless it were the author’s own transcript; otherwise no copy can be relied upon.”

It is well known that E. G. Browne did not have this author’s transcript for his translation of the work. The Times article could also be mistaken as to the number arrested because it was at least a secondhand report and should be treated with caution. That the article may have come from an unsympathetic source is shown by such references to the Báb as an “imposter,” which shows that, while a European transmitted the information, he probably received it from a Muslim. By the very nature of his beliefs a European-Christian might not have had enough interest in the religious concerns of a Muslim country to have been the author of such an epithet.

The Times article does not mention that the Bábís underwent a scourging at the hands of Muslim clerics before they were subjected to the tortures ordered by Ṣáḥib-Ikhtíyár-i-Fárs (Governor of Fárs by Free Option of the Ruler) Ḥusayn Khán as described in the article. of this incident Nabíl-i-A‘ẓam records in The Dawn-Breakers that “By their sufferings they earned the immortal distinction of having been the first to be persecuted on Persian soil for the sake of their Faith.”

To put an end to the Bábís once and for all, the Ṣáḥib-Ikhtíyár sent a group of farráshes (attendants) to Búshihr to arrest the Báb and bring him as a prisoner back to Shíráz for investigation. Much to this expedition’s surprise, the Báb met them on the way. His manner was so pleasing and His voluntary surrender so disarming that the farráshes returned with Him to Shíráz, not as guards, but as retainers.

In Shíráz, the Báb was treated harshly by the Mullás. One Mullá even struck the Báb with such force that he knocked the green turban, the sign of descent from the Prophet, from the Báb’s head. Not realizing the fullness of the Báb’s claim the Mullás demanded, after consultation, that He take an oath before a congregation in a mosque. Ill versed in the nature of the Báb’s teachings, the clerics required of Him the denial of a station which only they had attributed to Him. Accordingly, “The Báb denied the claim of being either the representative of the promised Qá’im or the intermediary between Him and the faithful.” Following this ordeal He was released to the custody of His maternal uncle, Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ‘Alí. The point here is that the Báb never denied the station that He claimed but, rather, one to which He had never aspired. His principal [Page 34] claim was that He was the Qá’im and not the Qá’im’s intermediary.

A comparison of the 1 November Times article with the Literary Gazette version reveals certain information in the former which has been edited out of the latter. The first item of this nature is the date of the original letter itself—10 August 1845. In the last decade of the nineteenth century A. L. M. Nicolas, then stationed in Ṭihrán with the French Legation, made an extensive study of the early history of the Báb and collaborated with E. G. Browne. His work included translations of the Báb’s various writings, a multivolume history of the Shaykhís (the forerunners of the Bábís), and a multivolume history of the Báb himself. Nicolas has stated that the meeting between Ṣáḥib-Ikhtíyár and Quddús and Mullá Ṣádiq took place on 6 August 1845. The suggestion in the Times that this event transpired on 23 June 1845 is made more credible in that the letter bearing that information had been written on 10 August of that year. Given the more than hundred miles between Búshihr and Shíráz and the conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Persia it would seem that Nicolas was in error.

Another important point mentioned in the first article but not in the Literary Gazette is that the Báb “had already collected a good number of followers.” This is significant as it must be remembered that the Faith of the Báb grew in an extremely hostile environment. It was no light commitment to have become a Bábí. The few extant contemporary Muslim sources naturally tend to disparage and otherwise play down the significance of the Bábí community. Although it is mentioned in passing, the Times article gives the impression of a vigorous and growing Faith, which is in complete accord with the account given in Nabíl-i-A‘ẓam’s The Dawn-Breakers, the recognized authority on early Bábí history.

Finally, another item found only in the 1 November 1845 article is the purported words of the executioners to the three Bábís as they were about to be set free at the city gate of Shíráz: “‘The world was all before them where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.’”

Mullá Muḥammad ‘Alíy-i-Bárfurúshí was to find a martyr’s death at the hands of a mob in the city of his birth, Bárfurúsh, in the spring of 1849. Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas-i-Khurásání survived the siege of the Bábís at the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí in 1849 and lived to accept Bahá’u’lláh as “Him Whom God shall make manifest,” the One Whose advent had been promised by the Báb. Mullá Ṣádiq was given the title by Bahá’u’lláh of Ismu’lláhu’l-Aṣdaq (the Name of God the Most Truthful).

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Mani and Manichaeism: A Study in Religious Failure

BY DANIEL KEITH CONNER

This essay is adapted from a chapter in the author’s unpublished book “Not Without Honor: A Survey of Prophecy in History.”

We have also heard a number of the foolish of the earth assert that the genuine text of the heavenly Gospel doth not exist amongst the Christians, that it hath ascended unto heaven. How grievously they have erred! How oblivious of the fact that such a statement imupteth the gravest injustice and tyranny to a gracious and loving Providence! How could God, when once the Day-star of the beauty of Jesus had disappeared from the sight of His people, and ascended unto the fourth heaven, cause His holy Book, His most great testimony amongst His creatures, to disappear also? What would be left to that people to cling to from the setting of the day-star of Jesus until the rise of the sun of the Muḥammadan Dispensation?

—Bahá’u’lláh

The Kitáb-i-Íqán

Counterfeiters exist because there is such a thing as real gold.

Jalálu’d-Dín Rúmí

BAHÁ’ÍS are committed to the belief that ultimately their Faith will conquer and that the future of mankind and the evolution of its institutions are intimately joined to the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. Present-day Bahá’ís can only guess at the splendor of the new World Order which Bahá’u’lláh has promised and at the role of the Bahá’í Faith in shaping it, for they have only a few subtle and tantalizing intimations of its potential. Though the direction and ultimate shape of the future World Order and World Faith are closed to anything but speculation, all Bahá’ís implicitly believe that Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation was not in vain, that His words will have meaning and will be consulted centuries hence, and that the Bahá’í Faith, hardly beyond its infancy, is not destined to fade away or be submerged among the hundreds of cults which the modern world spawns every year.

Yet how many Bahá’ís have never wondered why some religions succeed and others die out? Though assured by Bahá’u’lláh that the Cause of God cannot fail, how many Bahá’ís have never, in a despairing or unguarded moment, wondered whether their Faith is destined to be relegated to a footnote of some history text of the distant future, regarded as a well-intentioned but bizarre manifestation of the religious revival of the late twentieth century? What are the reasons many apparently vital and well-motivated religious movements soon die out?

Bahá’ís are assured of continuity in divine guidance not only in the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh but also in the deliberations and decisions of the Universal House of Justice. They believe that its divine foundation guarantees the future of the Faith and that its direction is in the hands of divinely ordained institutions. Yet an inquiry into the dynamics of religious failure would be an instructive exercise, useful perhaps in avoiding mistakes of the past on an individual level. To that end, this article will examine the progress and decline of a religion which has a few superficial resemblances to the Bahá’í Faith, a religion born in Persia and Mesopotamia, one that claimed to be universal, recognizing the great Lawgivers of its own past, and claiming to be their fulfillment. In an effort to discover why faiths go wrong, let us look at the Life and teachings of the self-proclaimed prophet Mani.

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IMAGINE, for a moment, your proverbial space traveler. Perhaps he came from a distant sun on the far side of our galaxy, or perhaps he represented a federation of suns with planets much like our own. He was the galactic equivalent of a cultural anthropologist, his specialty primitive religions. He was charged with sampling the religious situation on planet Earth. He last visited us about the year 350 A.D.; and for a few years, positioned in his space vehicle, he watched the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. Finally, he sent a report to his equivalent of Mission Control, together with his speculations and predictions about the religious future of that part of planet Earth. That done, he and his crew moved on to the next star. Perhaps his report now gathers meteor dust in the archives of some forgotten asteroid in an out-of-the-way spiral arm of our galaxy.

Our galactic anthropologist’s timetable left him only a few years to make his assessment, but he was a trained professional. He spent his allotted time observing the cauldron of contending faiths and cults which attended the breakup of the Greco-Roman world; from experience he knew that one of them would eventually overcome all the others— at least in that part of the world. After much study, he made his choice.

Christianity? No, Manichaeism—the faith of Mani of Ctesiphon.

The world of late classical antiquity was filled with would-be prophets and aspiring messiahs who gathered a few disciples, enjoyed brief influence, and whose faith then flickered and died like a candle in the wind. But in those centuries which extended from the ministry of Christ to the conquests of Muḥammad there appeared one, and only one, man whose stature seemed to approach that of a religious Lawgiver. In the crucible of cults flourishing in those times, it almost seems that had circumstances been a little different, the prophet Mani might have founded a religion as mighty and all-encompassing as those of Jesus or Muḥammad. Indeed, it may seem the merest whim of history that Manichaeism did not become the faith of Western civilization, with Christianity and Islám consigned to the footnotes.

On the very borders of the Roman Empire, Persia and Mesopotamia were in the first few centuries after Christ the crossroads of Asia and the West. They were a melting pot of religions. Scattered by the destruction of Jerusalem and forbidden to live there, Jews had settled in Babylonia and on the southern coast of India, and they were actively proselytizing in Central Asia. Zoroastrianism, the ancestral faith of Persia, still held the allegiance of the upper classes of the Parthian Empire, while Mithraism—also born in Persia—had long since gained converts in Rome itself. Christianity vied with Mithraism for the allegiance of Roman legions stationed in frontier areas, while the Gnostic mystery cults spread from Egypt into Persia. Heretical Christianity, in the form of the teachings of Marcion and Bardasanes, infiltrated Persia frum Armenia. Nestorianism and Montanism, other heretical branches of Christianity, arrived even earlier. Buddhism, dying out in the land of its origin, was carried by missionaries into Persia, where it exerted a small influence on Christianity.

Amidst this religious chaos Ardashír I, the first of the Persian Sassanian kings, tried to make Zoroastrianism the state religion of Persia, and he set up commissions to codify Zoroastrian scriptures. Ardashír’s motives were entirely political; he was sure that a [Page 38] unified empire could never endure without a unified religion. He had no particular liking for Zoroastrianism but felt that the ancestral faith of the great kings Cyrus and Darius stood the best chance of accomplishing his purpose. In a supposed testament to his son he wrote:

Never forget . . . that as a king you are at once the protector of religion and of your country. Consider the altar and the throne as inseparable and that they must always sustain each other. A sovereign without religion is a tyrant, and a people which have no religion may be deemed the most monstrous of all societies. Religions may exist without a State, but a State cannot exist without religion; and it is by holy laws that a political association can alone be bound.

But the birth of the prophet Mani was destined to postpone Ardashír’s dream. Mani was born April 14, 216 A.D. in a village south of the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. His mother Mariam, known as “Lady Mary,” was a Parthian princess. As had happened to her earlier namesake, an angel announced to her the divine mission of her son.

The boy Mani (who was born with a defect which made him limp as long as he lived) was an exemplary child, and the inevitable miraculous legends sprang up. Because they were recorded by enemies of his religion, the legends are a bit more credible than most.

He acquired skill as a painter, a mathematicim, and an astronomer. At the age of twelve or thirteen an angel appeared to him, saying, “Forsake this congregation [a heretical Christian sect in which his father raised him]! Thou art not of its followers. The guidance of morals, the restraint of appetites, these are thy tasks. Yet because of thy youth the time is not come to stand forth openly.”

When Mani was twenty-four, the angel told him that the time was ripe to proclaim the new revelation. Abandoning the sect of his father, Mani began preaching in India and, according to some accounts, in China and Tibet also. In what might be Mani’s own words:

At the close of King Ardashír’s years I set out to preach. I sailed to the land of the Indians. I preached to them the hope of life and I chose there a good selection. . . . In the year that King Ardashír died and his son Shápur became King . . . I sailed from the land of the Indians to the land of the Persians, and from the land of Persia I came to the land of Babylon . . . I came before King Shápur. He received me with great honour and granted me that I should wander through his lands and preach the Word of Life. I spent yet . . . ? . . . years with him in his retinue.

Wearing a sky-blue cloak and carrying an ebony cane, Mani reached the capital city of Babylonia and began preaching. His enthusinsm attracted Peroz, the brother of King Shápúr I (r. 240-273 A.D.), who secured a royal audience for the young prophet. By the year 242 Mani had already converted two of the King’s brothers, and Shápúr himself listened sympathetically to Mani, who was accompanied by two disciples and his aging father (whom he had also converted). Shápúr allowed Mani to propagate his religion in the hope that it might provide the unity that the fledgling empire so desperately needed. Shápúr had learned well his father’s lesson.

In 260 Mani accompanied the King in his successful campaign against the Roman Emperor Valerian. In the meantime Mani had sent out missionaries to proselytize in the East, in Egypt, and in Syria; the new faith gained converts rapidly.

In 275 Shápúr died, and Mani requested and received protection from Shápúr’s successor [Page 39] Ormuzd. Unluckily for Mani, Ormuzd died the following year and was succeeded by Bahrám I (r. 274-277), who violently opposed the new teachings. Zoroastrian priests had convinced Bahrám that their religion must be adopted by the state beyond any possibility of challenge. All other religions must be stamped out; Mani’s faith would be the first to be eliminated.

Mani, who had been traveling in the East decided to return to Ctesiphon to confront the recalcitrant ruler. Knowing difficulties lay ahead he told his followers, “Look on me and take your fill, my children. For bodily I shall depart from you.”

Bearing a proclamation of impeachment of the King, the wrathful prophet strode into the capital. Bahrám arrested him at once and summoned him to a court hearing. Defiantly Mani reminded the King of the good will his two immediate predecessors had shown and angrily shouted, “Do with me what you will!”

Bahrám did. Mani was fettered and thrown into prison. For twenty-six days he conferred from prison with his disciples, organizing the new church and providing for a successor.

Accounts of Mani’s death are confused. Some say that he was crucified; others that he was flayed. Most likely Mani, aged sixty, broken in health by austerities and by his fetters, simply died in prison. The King set a burning torch to the body and decapitated it. To assure the agitated populace that the prophet was indeed dead, he fixed Mani’s head above the main gate of the city.

RARELY does a new religion die with its founder, and Manichaeism was no exception. It spread rapidly throughout Persia, and Bahrám’s persecutions could not stop its spread into the Roman Empire where, twenty years after Mani’s death, Roman Emperor Diocletian also ordered the persecution of Manichees. By 296 A.D. the very Roman emperor who adopted the Persian god Mithras as one of the protecting deities of the Empire imposed the death penalty upon whoever should dare to profess the creed of Mani.

Manichaeism penetrated Africa and Central Asia, and for a time threatened to overtake the Christian Church, which had a two hundred fifty year head start. Under the reign of Constantine the persecutions subsided for a time, for Constantine appears to have toyed with the idea of making Manichaeism the official religion of the Roman Empire until he rejected it in favor of Christianity. Pagan Emperor Julian extended his toleration, but after his death persecutions resumed until the harsh code of Emperor Justinian made suppression permanent. Manichaeism became the most violently persecuted religion in history.

The Sassanian kings were ruthless in their attempts to stamp out the new religion, and the Manichees were forced underground, taking on the outward observance of whatever faith was dominant in their region but inwardly professing allegiance to Mani. After the Muslim conquest of Persia in 642 A.D. the Manichees either outwardly accepted the Prophethood of Muḥammad or migrated to Central Asia, beyond the reach of the conquering Arabs. In predominantly Buddhist Central Asia, the harassed Manichees found toleration for perhaps the first and last time in their bloody history.

Taking advantage of toleration wherever they found it, they sent missionaries to China and India; in China, they gained a foothold which lasted into modern times. When the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan (r. 1269-1295) first heard of Christian missionaries, he confused them with the Manichees, who were still active in China.

In the year 775 Manichees were still so numerous that the caliph of Baghdád appointed a special inquisitor to seek out those who were hiding under the guise of Islám. In 988 the Muslim author of the Fihrist, one of the sources for the life of Mani, knew three [Page 40] hundred professed Manichees in Baghdád alone.

For a time it must have seemed that the Christian Church, split into a hundred sects and rent with heresy, would not survive the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and that the faith of the prophet Mani would conquer Western Asia. For Mani was one of the greatest religious organizers the world has ever known. Within his own lifetime his faith was known from China to Spain, while the teachings of Jesus were still confined to the Mediterranean world even a hundred years after His death.

At the height of its power in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Manichaeism was the bitterest and most dangerous rival the struggling Christian Church had to face. St. Augustine was a Manichee for almost ten years (373-382) before he was converted to Christianity. At that moment the situation was touch and go, neck and neck. In what may be a classic case of the role of the individual in history, Augustine had the wisdom to cast his lot with the winning side, and in so doing he himself might have helped to tip the balance.

By the sixth century the impetus of Manichaeism was spent. It had followers everywhere from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and it had become the state religion of the Central Asian Uighur state. Its extent was greater than Christianity was to know until modern times. But it was spread too thinly. The triumph of Christianity under Justinian and, in the following century, the explosive spread of Islám drove the Manichees into isolated pockets on the outskirts of civilization. In time they were simply absorbed.

Yet they were never completely assimilated. Although the original Manichees had virtually disappeared as a recognizable religious unity by the eighth century in every part of the world except China and Central Asia, their doctrines surfaced periodically under different names throughout the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church, by force of habit, labeled every heresy “Manichaean.” Some scholars believe the ancestry of the Bogomil heresy of Bulgaria and the Cathar or Albigensian heresy of southern France can be traced to the religion of Mani by some as yet undiscovered link. If so, then the descendants of the Manichees were not exterminated in Europe until the Albigensian Crusade of the early thirteenth century—and perhaps not even then. Some have speculated that the doctrines of Mani might have survived into the German Reformation and inspired some of the more fanatical Protestant sects. Manichean ideas are found today in the extraordinary novels and poetry of the Cretan author Nikos Kazantzakis.

SO FAR as history goes, Mani had a bad press. Most of what we know about him comes from Catholic or Muslim sources. So far as we can reconstruct it from the biased sources available, what did Mani teach? Why did he fail? And why did his religion inspire fear and loathing among so many?

Mani regarded himself as the successor of Zarathustra, Christ, and the Buddha: the last of the Apostles of God, the “Seal of the Prophets” (the Muslims borrowed the term and applied it to Muḥammad) Mani insisted that all earlier revealed religions (of which he had knowledge) were valid and that his should be regarded as their fulfillment.

His teachings were nothing if not eclectic. Even Hermes, Plato, and Pythagoras were numbered among the Apostles of God. Jesus was the greatest of past Apostles. but Mani was the greatest of all—the culmination of Apostleship. Previous Apostles had revealed only fragments of the truth, in keeping with the capacities of men of their age; Mani had [Page 41] come to reveal all. He wrote:

Wisdom and deed have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God. So in one age they have been brought by the messenger of God called Buddha to India, in another by Zoroaster to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereafter this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age, through me, Mání, the Messenger of the God of Truth to Babylonia.

The new religion, said Mani, was the world’s first universal faith; all previous religions had been directed at a specific group of people, (He may have been right. Manichaeism may not have been the world’s first universal faith, but it seems to have been the first to attempt consciously to be so.)

As befitted the founder of a universal faith, Mani strove to adapt his teachings to the needs of various peoples, asking none of them to give up its own traditions. He went even further, telling his followers to be like a chameleon, adopting the customs and practices of the dominant faith of their region. He said:

I am not inhuman like Christ who said: Whose denieth me, him I will deny. I say unto you: Whose denieth me before man and saves himself by this falsehood, him will I receive with joy, as if he had not denied me.

No doubt many Manichee lives were spared by this commandment, for in Muslim lands Manichees observed the laws of Muḥammad as diligently as any faithful Arab, and in Christian lands they proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity as loudly as any Christian. They hoped to make converts with subtlety and gentle persuasion, without openly subverting or dissenting from the established religion.

So that his religion might avoid the schism and distortion which had been the fate of all religions up to that time, Mani was wise enough to know that his teachings must be committed to writing. In his lifetime he wrote seven works of scripture. Only one of them survives in nearly complete form, and we cannot know how much of it actually came from his own hand. Yet one fact emerges clearly from the fragments we possess: Mani was a master of Oriental doctrines and their synthesis. From the Syrian form of Christianity, which stressed the ascetic way, he drew heavily. From the Gnostics of Egypt he borrowed his doctrine of the opposition of spirit and matter. From Buddhism he took his ethics. Zoroastrian cosmology, Christian eschatology, Gnostic mythology, Buddhist morals: never before or since have they been so ingeniously brewed together.

Within a century of Mani’s death St. Ephraim counted him among the great heresiarchs of the Christian Church, and until modern times Manichaeism was regarded as a Christian heresy. Yet Manichaeism was clearly a distinct religion—a new Church, an active rival to Christianity, not just a Christian offshoot. This much is evident from Mani’s teachings.

The early Christians, of course, did not see it that way, much as Jews regarded Christianity as a Jewish heresy for centuries after Christ, and as Muslims today regard the Bahá’í Faith a Muslim heresy. Perhaps it was for this reason that the Christian Church feared the Manichees so much. An internal heresy is always more dangerous to a new and struggling religion than is honest competition from a rival but distinct faith.

Manichaeism was distinct; it was the classic religion of uncompromising dualism. There are, said Mani, two gods, uncreated and equal, forever opposed to one another. From the God of Light proceeds all order and good; from the God of Darkness proceeds all chaos and evil. Evil is independent of good but equally powerful. The two gods or forces will do battle for all eternity. There [Page 42] will be no victory, for neither is superior to the other.

Satan is, of course, a well-known fixture in Christianity and other religions, but only in Manichaeism is the dualism complete. Satan is equal to God in every respect. Matter (and hence the bodies and souls of mankind) is an equal mixture of the opposing forces. Life itself is only a reflection of the eternal battle.

But, said Mani, we can consciously choose the God of Light. Through a lifetime of struggle, through austerity and asceticism, we can refine the darkness out of our spirits until we join the God of Light. Salvation comes through three steps: (a) abstinence, (b) purification, and (c) devotion and worship.

Matter and spirit, though composed equally of light and darkness, were originally created by the forces of darkness. The End will come not with the victory of Good over Evil but only with the final separation of the two forces which are intricately entangled in each of us. Dualism is permanent, but one day the separation will be accomplished. In the End, when all Light has been rescued, the angels who support heaven and earth will relax their hold, and the material universe will collapse. The Final Conflagration—to last 1468 years—will mark the promised redemption of Light. The time can be hastened by the prayers, rituals, and good works of the faithful. The recitation of prayers frees particles of Light from their prison; they can be seen in their ascent to heaven as the Milky Way.

According to Mani, Jesus, as a Manifestation of the Light, could not have been born into a human body. Like the Gnostics, Mani believed that Jesus had never been born of Mary, but rather had descended from heaven in the form of a thirty-year-old man. Jesus, moreover, did not die on the cross. At the completion of His mission, He ascended back into the realm of Light. In one apocryphal scripture called Wanderings of the Apostles —apparently of Manichaean origin—Jesus appears to St. John, who is lamenting the fate of his Master. Jesus comforts him by saying that the Crucifixion was not real; it was staged only to impress the crowd.

Mani rejected the Gospel accounts of the sufferings of Christ as fables invented only after the memory of the real events had faded. The true Gospel of Christ had ascended with Him, and the true Church had disappeared within the lifetime of St. Paul. It must be made anew. In the quotation which appears at the head of this article, Bahá’u’lláh was referring not to Manichaeism, which had long been extinct in the land of its birth, but rather to an idea which was in vogue in Ṣúfí circles. The idea, nevertheless, was a Manichaean one, and had its origin in Mani.

The begetting of children, said Mani, will only postpone the ultimate separation; hence he condemned marriage and childbearing. It is not hard to understand why King Bahrám said, “This man has come forward calling people to destroy the world.”

Mani condemned animal sacrifice, and even frowned on the taking of plant life, “He who has mowed the field will himself be born again as an ear of corn, while he who has killed a mouse will in a future life be a mouse” is a saying attributed to him. He scorned images of any kind. Manichaean services lacked ornate ritual and consisted only of prayers and hymns. The faithful were commanded to pray regularly, to fast for seven days of each month, and to partake of no meat or wine. Evil deeds, words, and thoughts were to be renounced. Forbidden also were idol worship, falsehood, covetousness, fornication, murder, theft, hypocrisy, and the study of magic. The Elect could not own property, work at agriculture, prepare their own food, or do anything which might prolong the mixture of Light and Darkness. Belief in the absolute irreconcilability of the two forces was mandatory, as was the commitment to help hasten their separation.

Believers were divided into two classes: the [Page 43] initiates and the laity, or as Mani called them, the Elect and the Hearers. Asceticism and sexual abstinence were not required from the latter, although they were urged at every opportunity to join the Elect. Mani arranged the Elect into a hierarchy of monks, priests, bishops, and apostles. Spending their lives in prayer to the Lord of Light, the monks lived communally in monasteries. The priests served as missionaries and ministers to the Hearers. There were seventy-two bishops, in imitation of the seventy-two disciples of Christ. There were, appropriately, twelve apostles. Above them all was a Manichaean pope, the representative of Mani himself.

Mani provided well for his own succession, and it is pertinent to ask for what other reasons Manichaeism was so successful for those few centuries in which it challenged the faith of Christians. Without a doubt, much of the vigor of the Religion of Light was the result of its eclecticism. When a religion acknowledges the validity of previous dispensations, it makes the transition that much easier for the convert. It does not require him to give up a large part of what he previously believed. Manichaeism was, moreover, not tied to the existence of a particular national entity, unlike Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion of the Parthian and Sassanian Empires. If a religion is to survive the collapse of the political entity which spawned it, it must sever its connection, and the sooner the better. Manichaeism survived the fall of Persia; Christianity likewise survived only because the fathers of the early Church had the wisdom not to be tied too closely with the Roman Empire.

Manichaeism was not too esoteric for the average believer to understand. The Gnostic sects and the mystery cults were open only to those with the ability to comprehend involved and abstruse doctrines. Manichaeism, like Christianity, was accessible to all.

Manichaeism spread quickly because is missionaries were far ranging, much more so than those of Christianity. Manichaean missionaries were in Central Asia, India, China, and sub-Saharan Africa long before the Christians arrived. In addition, the organizational structure of Manichaeism almost equalled that of Christianity and was superior to that of the mystery cults. Mani’s arrangement of the hierarchy of the faithful assured a stability that might have weathered even the most violent persecutions. This same stability, moreover, left the Religion of Light relatively free of heresy and internal strife.

WITH ALL THESE important assets, why did Manichaeism die out? It is true that the Religion of Light had to suffer the most relentless persecution of any major faith in the history of the world. Yet the last remnant of Mani’s faith in Europe was not wiped out until the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, when the mighty Catholic Church and the French king combined their awesome forces in a brutal suppression. This very tenacity suggests that persecution alone could not have killed the faith of Mani. Clearly, it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

In the light of Bahá’í principles one would not regard Mani as a true Messenger from God, in the same sense that Jesus, the Buddha, Muḥammad, and Bahá’u’lláh were. At most he is seen as a sincerely religious (if somewhat misguided) mortal. There are several reasons for this: his ultimate failure, his absurd cosmology; but more important, Bahá’u’lláh never counted Mani among the prophets, though He was surely aware of the religious movement begun fifteen hundred years before by His fellow countryman. The quotation beginning this article makes it clear that God sent no Messengers between the time of Jesus and the time of Muḥammad, at least not in the Middle Eastern world.

A Bahá’í, then, is apt to conclude that Mani’s faith perished for this very reason, that he was not a genuine Manifestation. There is an element of truth here, for if one [Page 44] believes in revelation at all, it follows that a faith truly based on divine revelation will not die out before its function has been fulfilled. A faith instituted by God must survive, at least until it has fulfilled its purpose.

But this line of thought involves circular reasoning. For those who believe in revelation and who will grant its possibility in faiths other than one’s own, the only objective test of the truth of any religion lies in its power of survival. We can believe in a religion, and all our intuitive faculties can attest its truth, but we cannot rationally conclude that a faith was instituted by God unless we use this test. To say that Mani failed because he was not from God is an evasion of the issue. He was not from God because he failed (and because Bahá’u’lláh did not accord him the rank of a Prophet) is all we can honestly say.

Implicit in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are at least four qualifications a prospective Lawgiver must meet if he is truly to be regarded as a Messenger from God:

1) He must have claimed to be a Messenger of God. This does not mean that he must use these precise words. Jesus said, “I am the Way . . .,” Muḥammad claimed to be a nabí and a rasúl, the semilegendary founders of Hinduism claimed to be Avatara, and the Buddha claimed to be a Teacher of the Dharma, or “Divine Law.” Semantic problems and translation difficulties need not detain us.

2) He must have founded a new and independent religion. This does not mean that his faith will have no historical roots in a religious tradition of the past. Christianity grew out of Judaism, and the Bahá’í Faith grew out of Shí‘ih Islám, yet both are distinct from their parent religions. This criterion eliminates inspired religious reformers such as Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Socrates, St. Francis, al-Ghazálí, and Joseph Smith.

3) His historical influence must have been great. This means simply that a Manifestation must be accessible to all who seek Him. He will not be “hidden,” like the Mahātmas who, according to legend, secretly guide the destiny of mankind from their hidden fastness high in the Himalayas. (This does not, however, exclude possible Lawgivers who may be lost to history, such as those of the American Indian nations or those of the generations before Abraham and Adam.)

4) He must have left behind a body of scripture which was instrumental in the founding or flourishing of a civilization. This is perhaps the most salient feature of a Messenger. He founds a civilization. He need not have written down the scripture himself (as Muḥammad did not), nor even composed it himself (as Jesus and the Buddha did not). Nevertheless, some body of scripture must have been left behind as the framework of a new civilization.

Bahá’u’lláh is, of course, too close to us in time for this test to have any value in judging His claims, but for Mani the outcome is clear. Mani passes all the tests except the last. He did indeed leave behind a body of scripture, but he founded no civilization. The world has seen Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian civilizations. There are at least six reasons why there was no Manichaean civilization:

1) Manichaeism was too antisocial. The centuries following the decay and collapse of the Western Roman Empire were harsh and brutal times. Civilization was constantly on the defensive against barbarian invaders. Anarchy, violence, untold misery—all were the common lot of that age, and civilization survived, in the opinion of Kenneth Clark, “by the skin of its teeth.” A religion which prohibited the taking of life—even animal and plant life—and whose tenets were such that large numbers of its members wandered [Page 45] about, refusing to work, living off charity, is not a likely candidate for survival in such times. The Christian Church more wisely required its monks to work as well as to pray.

2) Manichaeism’s extreme asceticism assured its ultimate collapse. A religion which forbids procreation among its most gifted believers guarantees its own extinction.

3) The organization of the Manichaean Church, in the long run, proved to be flawed. The Christian Church, by contrast, had superior organization, and it better understood the ways and needs of men. If any person longed for the life of the spirit and had extreme distaste for the flesh, he found an easier outlet in Christian monasticism than in the rigors of the Manichaean Elect. The Christian Church made greater allowance for human frailty. It sought to prepare men for the future; Manichaeism sought to eliminate that future.

4) The loss of St. Augustine, the greatest of the Church Fathers, may have been crucial for the Manichees. Never before or since did they have a greater genius within their grasp, albeit for so brief a time. (Also Constantine’s choice of Christianity as state religion of the Roman Empire hastened its victory over Manichaeism. The defection of the powerful can be even more devastating than the defection of a man of genius.)

5) The Manichaean Church, as it grew decadent, tended to complicate doctrine beyond intelligibility. The Christian Church, over time, tended to simplify matters of doctrine for the masses.

6) The Manichees, who welcomed death and cared too little about the worldly course of their faith, were too passive to survive, for violent persecution can be survived only by increased zeal and militancy on the part of the persecuted.

Perhaps now, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, out galactic anthropologist —or his succussor—is due to return. This time he will have his eye on Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and the Middle East as he watches the breakup of Western civilization and charts the course of the religions which it spawns. Perhaps he will have a holograph copy of his predecessor’s report; if so, then he will be curious to see where it went wrong, why the Religion of Light passed into oblivion, while the unpromising and fractious Christian Church grew into the world’s mightiest religion.

He will note that once again the West is importing a host of faiths and cults from the East and is also giving birth to a few of its own. He will probably guess what one of them, though struggling and obscure at the moment, will survive and eventually overcome its rivals, supplanting the worn-out creeds of the past, and synthesizing into itself the best of them as it does so.

A master of the social dynamics of religious faith, our galactic scholar will make his projection, send it to Mission Control, and then go on to the next star. It may be that his choice will be correct this time, for Mani the prophet, in his glorious failure, helped him to decide.

[Page 46]

[Page 47]

Honoring Her “I”ness

A REVIEW OF DOROTHY DINNERSTEIN’S The Mermaid and the Minotaru: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (NEW YORK: HARPER, 1976) 288 PAGES

BY CHARLES M. FAIR

LET ME COME straight to the point. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur Dorothy Dinnerstein thinks she has found the cure for what ails us. What ails us is a set of psychological dispositions traceable to the fact that “the main adult presence in infancy and early childhood' is female.” Mother, that is, brings us up, at least in the first, critical years.

The consequences of this arrangement Dinnerstein sees as quite literally world shattering. It drives adult males to look down upon and oppress females, and causes them to become ruthless pillagers of the world of nature as well (hence pollution, the energy crisis, and so on). It drives women to be contemptuous of themselves, and so, by extension, of the rest of their sex; to collaborate, often, in their own subjugation; and to develop, in the process, a repressed rage which may be turned against the self (resulting in the “truly feminine” trait of masochism), or against their children, in the form of an intermittent cruelty or capriciousness. It may likewise poison their relations with men.

Why does Mom, as the sole early keeper of the young, produce these disastrous effects? Essentially, Dinnerstein tells us, for two reasons. To a very small baby Mother is not clearly distinct from the surrounding world of objects and, therefore, ever afterwards, even in the minds of her grown children, retains a certain “it”ness. Dad, who swims into his children’s awareness when they are older and more rational, has “I”ness. He is a person; Mom remains, in part, a thing, a natural resource. In the same way that men exploit the Earth Mother, as infants or lovers or husbands, they exploit Mother Earth, as farmers or oilmen or industrialists.

The second reason for our residual dislike of Mom is that, when we were helpless infants, she was sometimes cross or indifferent when we wanted to be cuddled, or slow to feed or burp us when we were hungry or had gas pains. Lapses like these are supposed to have set up in us an enduring ambivalence towards her—affection, when we felt cozy and had got what we wanted, panic and violent rage when this fount of all our goodies temporarily dried up.

Because Dad has “I”ness, he is the respected one, the doer. (“History,” Dinnerstein remarks, “is made by ‘I’s.”) Because his wife carries the maternal stigma of “it”ness, he regards her—sometimes with her concurrence —as not quite a person, an attitude reinforced by the latent dislike of women he supposedly acquired in infancy (and supposedly never gets over, one of the basic assumptions of Freudianism being that we never really grow up). Because ambivalent toward her sex, he feels that, though indispensable, women are not to be trusted; as mother figures, tainted with unpleasant meanings and a certain quality of the inanimate, they should give us (men) what we [Page 48] need whenever we need it, but not expect too much warmth in return.

It is this mixture of need and hostility, Dinnerstein says, that has created the double standard. While quite ready to take anything any woman offers them in the way of favors, affection, or help, men have traditionally been possessive and suspicious and tyrannical with the women officially theirs. They have excluded women from the important affairs of life, ostensibly on the ground that the sex is weak and needs protection, actually because they could not bring themselves to promote women to full “person-ness.” By keeping women in general, and his own in particular, second-class citizens, a man redresses the (apparently never-forgiven) wrongs of the nursery. Being stronger, both socially and physically, than his mate, he calls the tune, and, when balked, can make his infantile rages felt. He has Mom where he wants her.

Because men, today, loot and pollute the earth with the same cocksure indifference or contempt with which they have always been ready to impregnate a passing female, we find ourselves in the horrible semiorganized mass which Lewis Mumford calls The Megamachine. Dinnerstein quotes him as saying the machine is not self-propelled—not simply runaway technology—but is driven by men, “‘above all by a love-rejecting pursuit of power.’”

Finally, in her analysis of what is wrong with the “male-female symbiosis,” or what she calls our “gender arrangements,” Dinnerstein points out that the structural differences between the sexes (“the bodily complementarity of males and females”) are the real start of the trouble. For while that complementarity may become “a central manifestation of the human delight in existence,” it also “works to maim us” by encouraging “a division of responsibility for basic human concerns, a compartmentalization of sensibility that makes each sex in its own way subhuman.”

The basic, and most pernicious, division of responsibility has to do with the rearing of children, for here, according to the argument just summarized, the psychological consequences are such as to make women either sexual toys (out of wedlock) or domestics (in it), whereas men, far from being improved by the civilizing influence of women (as people believed a century ago), are driven, by early exposure to Mom, to be cold, hostile, and exploitative, not only toward women but toward the earth.

How are women to be promoted to full human status and men to be deterred in their “love-rejecting pursuit of power”? Here is Dinnerstein’s answer: “When men start participating as deeply as women in the initiation of infants into the human estate, when both male and female parents come to carry for all of us the special meanings of early childhood, the trouble we have reconciling these meanings with person-ness will finally be faced. The consequences, of course, will be a fuller and more realistic, a kinder and at the same time more demanding definition of person-ness.” It is her conviction that “only when the emotional aura of the first parent” comes to include the second will the situation improve, because then “our conception of humanness will have to be expanded to embrace this early emotional aura; and our understanding of what the aura really is deepened to make it compatible with humanness.” Elsewhere, speaking of that “aura” she says: “When all of us come to carry it, full human status can no longer be reserved for those who do not.”

I am not at all sure that these conclusions follow. If Dad is made to share Mom’s “it”ness and to expose himself, as she does, to their small children’s rages, why won’t the children grow up about equally alienated from both sexes?

In revolutions aimed at the abolition of privileged minorities, the theory seems to be that the demotion of certain people will mean the automatic promotion of everyone else. It did not work that way in France after 1789 or in Russia after the October revolution, [Page 49] and I have my doubts that it will work in the nursery. Give both patents the “aura” now carried by Mom, and you may find that “full human status can no longer be reserved” for anyone.

I have the same difficulty with Dinnerstein’s reasoning that I have with Freudian logic generally. To take another example: is it sensible to suppose that the only, or even the main, reason that men plunder nature so recklessly is that she (note the gender) is a surrogate for mother? Likewise, if men are so coldly tyrannical toward women for the reasons Dinnerstein gives, it follows that their relations with members of their own sex must be much warmer and more considerate.

But, of course, that is nonsense. From the beginning of history to the present men have treated each other with the utmost cruelty. The serf was barely human to his lord. To Victorians, the poor were of another, pitiably inferior race—congenital defectives, given to drink and neglect of their young. In this century management tends to regard labor as a kind of mindless leviathan; and before Franklin Roosevelt gave it official status, industrialists tried to break the back of the movement by killing its organizers and terrorizing the rank and file. The enemy, in war, is always nonhuman. During both World Wars, on both sides, massacre of prisoners was common.

Women, in short, have no monopoly of “it”ness. The injustices they suffer at the hands of the other sex seem to me only a special case of the ruthlessness with which men treat each other or the physical earth. That ruthlessness or ferocity is simply part of the adaptive push one can see in other species but which, coupled with our intelligence, has made us the most dangerously ingenious of all. If this essentially ethnological view is correct, it is absurd to suppose that by making Dad share Mom’s nursery duties, we will cure the “human malaise”—that is, establish decent man-woman relations and stop our headlong plunge toward technological disaster.

Besides being implausible because too narrowly based, Dinnerstein’s argument is not internally consistent. On page 218 she describes the Megamachine, or our rape of nature-as-Freudian-mother-symbol, while on page 108, she says that “because the early mother’s boundaries are so indistinct, the nonhuman surround with which she merges takes on some of her own quasi-personal quality. In our failure to distinguish clearly between her and nature, we assign to each properties that belong to the other . . . Our over-personification of nature, then, is inseparable from our under-personification of women.”

But as it is already agreed we treat women inhumanly, this last analysis leads to the conclusion that we must be far more considerate of nature than Dinnerstein herself tells us we are, 110 pages later. This kind of contradiction never seems to bother psycho-historians, but it definitely bothers me, as a sign of what appears to be a certain enfeeblement of reason in our era, and not in the TV-viewing public only, but in those like Ms. Dinnerstein whose professional responsibility is to think and write clearly.

Like the rest of us, she also seems to be somewhat mixed up on the subject of sex (the act, not the gender). In places she can be quite gushy about it (see, for instance, her remarks on page 147 about “the mystical carnal truth that underlies the biblical use of the verb ‘to know,’” and her passage, three [Page 50] pages later, on “the symmetry between man’s peculiar procreative magic and woman’s. Her breast, her hidden womb and the dark grotto that leads to it, are dramatic, in a sense sacred” and so on.

By contrast, on page 67, she is critical of women who seem to expect too much human closeness as part of sex. “To give way to bodily lust for a man without a sense of magical personal fusion seems to them unworthy, or dangerous, or degrading; incapacity to do this seems to them a mark of human dignity, rather than the disability which in fact it is.”

But it is exactly that “disability” which, as our civilization struggled up from the brutal chaos of the pre-Gregorian age, the troubadours and poets of later time came to celebrate as the noblest of passions, the love of The One. The attempt to raise sex from the mere rutting it too often is—to make it more human because more selective, more mindful of the being, as well as the body, of The Other—was part of the Christian ideal. One might define the latter as man’s visionary belief that he could raise himself out of the hell of blind self-concern, the violence and cruelty and crude advantage taking, which were his evolutionary heritage and, in tenth century Europe, his daily condition.

Partly thanks to science, partly because of the disingenuousness of the clergy itself, this ideal and the faith it was part of have finally crumbled away, leaving us with the problem (among others) of how to treat sex. Romantics such as D. H. Lawrence took the simple course of trying to make sex or the cult of the body into a religion—one, as it turns out, with almost no content. For as men and women are driven back on sensual reward as the chief basis for their relations with one another, “the mystical carnal truth” begins to fade out in favor of a grab-it-and-run promiscuity, a love that is no respecter of persons at all. If you doubt it, consider our divorce rate, the state of our family life, and the new swinger culture as represented in publications such as Playboy or films such as Deep Throat.

Dinnerstein’s book quite perfectly reflects these developments—not only our confusion about sex, but the anxiety and impatience which have set every group one can think of marching, and loosed upon us a flood of infantile one-factor theories intended to explain the terrible problems confronting us, not the least of which is our nihilistic restlessness. The latter, in fact, is the problem, partly because it promises to make the rest of them insoluble. Man cannot, in my opinion, deliberately regress, as we are now doing—cannot give up the striving toward some more-than-adaptive ideal—and not go under, particularly in an age as equipped as this one is for mass oppression or mass suicide.

Looking at it from that point of view, I find Dinnerstein’s book so pat, so lacking in historical sense or awareness of the real nature of our emergency, as to be almost frivolous. Even its language is trendy and second-rate. Besides using words like stance, thrust, societal, resonates, central, and belaboring (for laboring), she throws them together to produce phrases such as “the stance that sets the direction of the world-making thrust.” Like many modern writers, she is careless with her metaphors, as in: “Eventually such issues are digested emotionally and intellectually on the level of shared sensibility at which central human projects ripen.”

In her preface, she tells us her book will “necessarily enrage” us and give us “existential vertigo.” She also lets herself off the hook by saying the book is not scientific, a few pages later getting a bit tough with those of us who may not accept her two basic propositions —(1) that our prevailing sexual arrangements need to be changed, and (2) [Page 51] that “some basic pathology is shaping our species’ stance,” thereby threatening us with extinction. “My argument takes them as axiomatic, and is addressed only to people who are prepared to do the same. The reader who is not thus prepared will have trouble following the argument, and I am in no way undertaking to be helpful with that kind of trouble.” (Italics original)

The times I got “existential vertigo,” it was not from her ideas but from that kind of talk. Dr. Janov, the inventor of Scream, and L. Ron Hubbard, and any number of other world problem solvers, take a similar domineering tone, and most, à la Marcuse, work in their own particular jargon. It is disturbing. To paraphrase Yeats, the center is not holding; the specialists are full of passionate intensity, while the rest of us hardly know what to believe. And almost nobody expresses himself well. One wonders why psychoanalysis, with its mania for myths, has had so little to say about the Tower of Babel.

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Authors & Artists

ROBERT CADWALADER holds a B.A. degree in history from and is now a graduate student at Arizona State University. His interests include the history of the Bahá’í Faith, Islám, the modern Middle East, And collecting Bahá’í and related literature.

DANIEL KEITH CONNER is a music instructor at Linfield College in Oregon and is known for his organ recitals throughout the Northwest. He makes a second appearance in World Order, his “Buddhism and the Bahá’í Faith” having appeared in our Winter 1971-72 issue.

CHARLES M. FAIR’s many interests, divided almost equally between literature and science, virtually defy description. He undertook, in 1956, the study of the central nervous system with a view toward establishing a model of human nature more precise than any previously stated: the result was an explanation for the cyclical view of history. In 1965, while a Resident Scientist with M.I.T.’s Neurosciences Research Program he published what he considers his major theoretical work—The Organization of Memory Functions in the Vertebrate Nervous System. He has since published The Physical Foundation of the Psyche, The Dying Self, From the Jaws of Victory, and The New Nonsense, reviewed in our Fall 1975 issue.

JOHN HUDDLESTON is an assistant chief in the Budget and Planning Division of the International Monetary Fund. He holds honors degrees in modern history, economics, and politics from Manchester University, England. His two previous appearances in World Order have included “A Letter to My Friends” (Winter 1969-70) and “The Economy of a World Commonwealth” (Summer 1975). His book The Earth Is But One Country has recently been published by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust of the United Kingdom.

JOHN A. PINO has been Director for Agricultural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation since 1970. He holds a Ph.D. in zoology from Rutgers University. Dr. Pino is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases; Vice-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Center of Tropical Agriculture; and a member of the Board of Directors of the Winrock International Livestock Research and Training Center.

ART CREDITS: P. 1. photograph by Chris Cholas; p. 5, photograph by Michael and Charlene Winger-Bearskin; p. 22, photograph by Raymond I. Moore; p. 31, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 35, photograph, courtesy of the Oriental Institute, the University of Chicago; p. 46, photograph by Michael and Charlene Winger-Bearskin; back cover, photograph by George Miller.

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