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World Order

WINTER 1973-74

RECOLLECTIDNS OF SHOGHI EFFENDI

Ugo Giachery

THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION

Douglas Martin

PERCEPTUAL COMPETENCE AND THE

ANISA PROCESS-CURRICULUM

Patrick W. Conway

NOTES ON WOMEN’S LIBERATION

James C. Haden

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 8 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 FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

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: USA and Canada, 1 year, $4.50; 2 years, $8.00; single copies, $1.25. All other countries, 1 year, $5.00; 2 years, $9.00; single copes $1.35.

Copyright © 1974, 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

1 A Crisis of Misplaced Values

Editorial

3 Interchange: Letters to and from the Editor

14 The Spiritual Revolution

by Douglas Martin

23 Perceptual Competence and the ANISA

Process-Curriculum, by Patrick W. Conway

28 Poems

by William Stafford

36 Recollections of Shoghi Effendi

by Ugo Giachery

46 Notes on Women’s Liberation

by James C. Haden

53 Design for Living

book review by Sheila Banání

54 Hope for Living

book review by Arthur L. Dahl

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

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A Crisis of Misplaced Values

IT HAS LONG BEEN HELD by the enlightened that unlimited growth and ever-increasing consumption were ideals that every society must strive to attain. The economic boom that followed World War II has lasted for a generation, turning a majority of the inhabitants of industrialized nations into compulsive consumers. Indeed, unlike ancient Greeks who defined man as a rational animal, modern thinkers of a certain bent began to think of him as a consuming robot whose destiny was to buy and turn into refuse billions of tons of food, clothing, cars, household goods, and gadgets of every sort. Nothing could be permitted to last: styles, fashions, tastes, preferences, and appetites had to change incessantly, spurring consumption and littering the world.

The energy crisis sounded the alarm, sending shivers down the spines of industrial societies. Attempts to exorcise the specter with words are bound to fail, for the crisis is real. It is a crisis not only of maldistribution but, more essentially, of misplaced values. A civilization based on the premise that “happiness is the taste of . . .” a cigarette, the possession of a car, a summer home, a fiberglass fishing rod, a ticket to a ball game, or perhaps a bottle of liquor, a civilization in which everything, including love and honor, are for sale, is bound to atrophy the heart, damage the mind, and inflate the ego. “The unquenchable thirst for, and the feverish pursuit after, earthly vanities, riches, and pleasures,” and “the lapse into luxurious indulgence,” the all-pervasive materialism of contemporary life are the ultimate causes of the current crisis.

The civilization so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences [writes Bahá’u’lláh] will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men . . . If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it bad been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. . .

The present crisis may be alleviated for a time. It will not be permanently solved short of a complete reconstruction of the bases of civilization, a reconstruction which, alas, will not take place without mankind’s experiencing even more distress, more misery, and more conflict.

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Interchange LETTERS TO AND FROM THE EDITOR

AS OFTEN HAPPENS—sometimes by chance, sometimes by design—there is a thread running through several pieces appearing in this issue of WORLD ORDER. That thread is a concern with the sort of environment in which we live.

The concern is not a new one for the Editors, for we have published editorials on man’s pollution of his environment (Summer 1972) and on his pollution of the quality of his inner and collective life (Winter 1971-72). We have also published articles on the importance of the ocean as man’s last resource (Winter 1968-69) and on the interdependence of flowers and insects (Spring 1969) and a review discussing the limits of growth unchecked by the proper moral values and goals (Summer 1972).

And yet there is ever more to write about the matter, for man is slow to internalize Bahá’u’lláh’s injunction “that man should know his own self, and know those things which lead to loftiness or to baseness, to shame or to honor, to affluence or to poverty.” Indeed, more often than not, we prove ourselves children of this tumultuous age which Shoghi Effendi has characterized as having “the impetuosity and irrational instincts of youth, its follies, its prodigality, its pride, its self-assurance, its rebelliousness, and contempt for religion.”

Thus, as our cities become uglier, our trips shorter, our lights dimmer, even the meat on our tables less frequent, it is with gratitude and relief that we continue to find those who refuse to focus on the darkness surrounding us but who look to the possibilities of creating a more meaningful future.

With pleasure, therefore, we call your attention to Dr. Patrick W. Conway’s article on perceptual competence. to Mrs. Sheila Banání’s review of René Dubos’ So Human An Animal, and to Arthur L. Dahl’s review of George B. Leonard’s The Tranformation. All deal, in different ways, with the relationship between man and his environment, the detrimental effects on man of an impoverished environment, and man’s choice—indeed his responsibility —for creating healthy, imaginative environments, whether it be in our human relationships, our technology, or our political, economic, and social structures.

* * *

During the last year and a half a number of articles have appeared in WORLD ORDER discussing various facets of the ANISA (American National Institute for Social Advancement) comprehensive educational model being developed at the Center for the Study of Human Potential, School of Education, University of Massachusetts. There has been an overwhelmingly favorable response to the articles, and many requests for additional information have been addressed both to the Editors and to the ANISA project staff. There have also been letters from those who take issue with the concepts on which the ANISA model is based. Below is a lively exchange between members of the ANISA staff and some of our readers.

* * *

The ANISA programme fascinates me and I have high hopes for its widespread or even universal acceptance as its coherence and general common sense become apparent. [Page 4] But I am sorely dismayed that its proponents are seemingly unable to explain it sensibly to anyone outside their professional field. The articles you have published so far have sought progressively to give readers an understanding of what ANISA’s roots are and how it plans to channel human growth, and could potentially have been most stimulating. But I express the opinion that any future articles should be worked over by a high school English teacher before publication to ensure their readability. It manifestly must be possible to explain the ANISA system without resort to so much in-group slang.

To speak of a human being as “the organism” in no way enhances ANISA’S prestige and is not in keeping with its conception of man as “the pinnacle of creation,” Bahá’u’lláh’s “Supreme Talisman.” Instead of repeating the litany of “psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective and volitional” on nearly every page, thus attempting to enforce attachment to and identification with the terms themselves, one might suggest the usefulness of a relaxed and meaningful explanation of the thoughts they are intended to symbolize.

The Bahá’í Faith recognizes the position of experts in the order of things, not as ends in themselves but as fertilizing and fructifying agents in the larger society. If ANISA is to enjoy any measure of success it must be through its appeal to a representative selection of non-experts. Clinging defensively to the obscurantist professional terminology lowers ANISA to the level of just another educational theory rather than the real contribution it is toward carrying forward an ever-advancing civilization.

RICHARD HEISER

Windsor, Ontario, Canada

We appreciate very much Mr. Heiser’s point of view and are sympathetic to the concern he expresses. We do plan a number of publications on ANISA for parents of children who are attending ANISA schools or classrooms. These publications will reflect his suggestion for a “relaxed and meaningful explanation” of the Model and will avoid the extensive use of technical terminology.

We have made verbal and audiovisual presentations on the ANISA Model to over 30,000 people and have encountered no difficulty in making ourselves understood, even when dealing with its theoretical foundation. The articles in WORLD ORDER had to be short and were therefore necessarily abstract. Furthermore, because the ANISA project is an attempt to develop a science of education, our first efforts have been to formulate a coherent body of theory derived from a particular philosophical base. Because the subject of this science, the human being and how he develops, is the most complex of all phenomena, an extensive terminology is required to achieve specificity of explanation. The success of any science depends upon the adequacy of its theoretical formulations, which are devoted to statements and propositions about how the phenomena are related, and definitions of all terms used. Just as physics, medicine, engineering, or chemistry have special terminology, so must education have its terminology if it is to become a science. To call the specialized vocabularies of any science “in-group slang” or “obscurantist professional terminology” reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of science and how it develops. Far from “lowering ANISA to the level of just another educational theory,” its special terminology is an indispensable means of its bringing clarity to the complex process of education.

We are pleased that Mr. Heiser feels able to say that ANISA is a “real contribution” toward carrying forward an ever-advancing civilization. We hope that it [Page 5] will be, but such a judgment is premature. If ANISA is to enjoy any measure of success it will not be primarily through “its appeal to a representative selection of non-experts.” Its general success will depend upon whether or not it works; the significance of any success it may have will depend on whether it works better than alternative systems. It will take a number of years of careful evaluation to make such a determination. ANISA projects were initiated this year in four different sites; and we are happy to report that, on the basis of data collected during the first half of the school year, the efficacy of the Model has exceeded our expectations.

DANIEL C. JORDAN

Director, Anisa Project,

Center for the Study of Human Potential,

University of Massachusetts,

Amherst, Massachusetts

I have a number of comments to make concerning the ANISA Model as portrayed in the recent article [Daniel C. Jordan and Raymond P. Shepard, “The Philosophy of the ANISA Model,” 7, No. 1 (Fall 1972), 23-31]. . . .

I believe I understand the ANISA philosophy as outlined in this article, but this does not tell what ANISA is, in fact, or what it will do. This is my concern.

Philosophy, purpose aside, is a set of cognitive hypothetical constructs that are often built upon and derived from previous similar constructs and may or may not have a direct meaning in terms of something that IS or DOES, a reality or truth. In fact, philosophy often deals in abstractions and is usually at least one step removed from a reality. Stated otherwise, philosophy all too often “begins in words and ends in words.” To date, everything I have read about the ANISA Model has been characterized by little specificity, concreteness, or substance other than the construction of hypotheses.

From my reading of the Bahá’í writings it is my understanding that there are two essential methods of determining truth or reality in this world. One, of course, is the messages of the Manifestations of God that provide us with the standards not only of truth and reality, but of our relationship to that truth, our purpose. From this first source we also know that the second method is scientific investigation. Bahá’u’lláh is emphatic to the point of declaring that “if religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition.” To the best of my knowledge the Bahá’í writings do not place philosophy on the plane of either science or religion. This is for good reason. I believe this is basically because philosophy is the product of mans’ imagination; it may or may not bear on reality and is useful only to the degree that it conforms to the reality expressed by science or religion.

This is the central issue of my concern about the ANISA Model. It appears to be constructed not on science or religion, but on philosophy (an analysis of your references will support this). The dangers of building an educational system on philosophy (that it may end in words as it was begun, as other educational philosophies have) is evident in the article. The article presents one philosophic opinion or interpretation of something that may have some basis, several times removed from science or religion, and builds upon that several other hypothetical constructs. . . .

Education needs religion to tell us the what, the substance or content. What knowledge, emotions, etc. to impart to the learner. Religion answers these questions; we do not need a philosophy for this.

Neither science or religion imply a uni-dimensionalism, something your article [Page 6] implied was the case until ANISA came along. Both science and religion deal with the concept of “organism which can illumine those features of our existence which are characteristically human, such as consciousness, will, purpose, creativity, and the capacities to know and to love.” Science and religion deal with all of these capacities or qualities.

Learning and learning competence, as you have defined them, the core of the ANISA Model, are the subject of very considerable and well-founded scientific investigation (they are also the subject of a lot of superstition; discrimination is necessary). What is disturbing is that you present a spirit of starting-from-scratch, “nobody has done it so we must discover fire.”

My concern is exemplified in the following: “The failure of the last hundred years’ efforts at giving a scientific description and reaching a scientific understanding of man have convinced us of the limitations of the scientific materialist philosophy. We have therefore adopted a philosophy. . . .” First, let us not confuse and use interchangeably the process of scientific investigation and the “scientific materialist philosophy.” The editorial in this very issue of WORLD ORDER is addressed to this very generalization and confusion of materialism with science, and the abandonment of science you are demonstrating. The scientific process is the most sure means of determining truth beyond Revelation that we have, and despite your assessment of failure, you offer no viable alternative other than a philosophy. A philosophy, any philosophy, replacing the scientific method, would be one small step backward for ANISA, but one large step backward for mankind.

The scientific materialistic philosophy is something else entirely. Accepting that this is inadequate in no way undermines the absolute necessity of science per se. The discrimination, if made, is unclear in the article. . . .

In the same paragraph you dismiss and equate the reductionism of the Gestalt psychology and the behaviorism of Skinner. This is a good example of the failure to discriminate what is and what is not science. The application of a model from one field of science in which it has been tested and proven to another field, without rigorous testing of that application, as the Gestalt theory attempted to do is clearly not science at all, but superstition, the absence of science. Skinner and the behaviorists have gone about things in quite a different manner. For one thing, it is obvious that animal responses are much closer to human responses than electromagnetic fields. For another, behaviorists do not merely accept that what is true for an animal response is true for a human response. The very notion of behaviorism is that human, as well as animal behavior, is subject to scientific investigation. Not that constructs can merely be applied from one to another. Behaviorists are conducting investigation into and discovering the nature of those very differences. Work is being done in a scientific manner that concerns emotional responses particular to humans, animal/human differential responding to identical scheduling problems, cognitive behavior particular to humans, and the biological parameters or predispositions to learn among species that are beginning to give clues to why human behavior may of a necessity be unique. All of these are beginning to identify, describe, and perhaps tell us how to influence those specific qualities of man that are unique. You may not “like” behaviorism because it has developed from a science of a “lower order,” but so has everything else. No science, if it be science, can be dismissed because of its evolvement. Nor can it be dismissed to support a philosophy.

[Page 7] Human behavior, including those qualities of knowing and loving, are fair game for scientific investigation. If there is a case against this, it is not presented in the article.

While criticizing science as a means of discovering the nature and qualities of man and for formulating educational methods, you present no viable alternative. The scientific method demands quantification. The scientist must define units (“billiard-ball-like”). Without such quantification there is no science at all. Science cannot be based on the type of generalizations that you present in your article. How will you construct your psychology? A philosophy of organism is neither new, nor a scientific psychology, or a science. How will this philosophy go about “illumin(ing) those features of our existence which are characteristically human”? By philosophizing or by empiricism? I think by the latter.

You suggest that you may be presenting an answer in your next paragraph in which you say that “The task of forming a more complete picture of the potentialities of man thus involves an attempt to further our understanding by recognizing that newer scientific ideas can grow out of and be made harmonious with their predecessors by including them in a larger explanatory context.” You then suggest the development of modern celestial mechanics as an example. This is not an example. You have developed a philosophy and suggest that newer scientific ideas can grow out of it. The development of modern astronomy is an example of the reverse process. Galileo did not discover new relationships between the sun and earth because of the previous development of a new cosmology. On the contrary, the scientific discovery came first; then the philosophic adaptations were made. The development was the result of Galileo’s ignoring all existing philosophies and applying the type of empirical analysis that can only be hindered by a commitment to a philosophy.

You do not appear to base your new philosophy on a new scientific finding; you base it on your a) misreading of the current science of behavior and b) impatience that it has yet to achieve a task that will never be complete. Aside from your enthusiasm, which I respect, you offer no concrete evidence that your philosophy offers any superior alternatives. An example of pre-scientific thought.

I am also particularly concerned with the obvious influence of Humanistic psychology in your Model. This is evident in your summation in which you say “This understanding of man and his potentialities removes the obvious ‘factual’ and ‘material’ from the center of our view of the cosmos and replaces them with the sensitive reaction of the experiencing and self-actualizing subject himself as the ultimate determinate of the ‘grain’ or ‘texture’ of reality.” I am all for sensitivity and humanism as expressed in the writings and teachings of our Faith, but this is something else. Since when is man free to determine the grain and texture of reality. Reality is a constant that is not determined by man. This and the notion of a “self-actualizing” man are contrary to the notion of man, as I understand it, presented by the Faith. If you mean self-actualizing in that there is a “given measure” that develops, OK. The seed self-actualizes in that it grows to fulfill its potential. But it grows according to the influences and nourishment of its environment, not according to its self. Man does not self-actualize in the terms understood by most humanistic psychologists; rather it self-actualizes as the seed, according to the influences of its environment.

Both the notions of man determining the grain or texture of his reality and the notion of self-actualizing focus on the [Page 8] nature or degree of man’s freedom. Man’s conceited opinion (superstition actually) of his freedom is dealt with by Bahá’u’lláh. It is dealt with similarly by the scientist Skinner. Both state that man’s freedom is an illusion as he perceives it, and real freedom is submission unto His laws, the laws that do constitute reality. Skinner just doesn’t know that they are His laws, rather than Skinner’s or man’s, though many of them are parallel.

The parallels between the science of behavior and the teachings of the Faith go very much further. Just briefly, Bahá’u’lláh makes one of His most significant statements on learning when He states that the “trainer of the world is justice for it consists of two pillars, reward and retribution. These two pillars are two fountains for the life of the people of the world.” Bahá’u’lláh continually points to the consequences of man’s behavior in positive and negative terms with an obvious attempt to influence man’s behavior or spirit. As Bahá’ís conscious of these teachings, we experience these consequences. The notions of operant conditioning are in complete harmony with these positions; self-actualization is not.

If we are truly going to develop an educational process to serve as the model for a Bahá’í world, we must look very closely at our use of metaphors such as the “release of human potential” and “self-actualization.” I appreciate their usage as figures of speech. They do make reading more exciting and stimulate emotions. But, their use in the formation of a construct upon which research must be built is certainly questionable. They are pre-scientific in this context. . . .

LARRY MILLER

President, Human Behavior Institute

Raleigh, North Carolina

We are very happy to be given the opportunity to respond to Mr. Lawrence M. Miller’s letter of February 27, 1973. To answer all the questions he has raised would easily fill a dissertation and rather than attempt the impossible we will try to address what we see as the central issue underlying his various concerns—namely the relation between science and philosophy.

Much of Mr. Miller’s criticism proceeds from a mistaken assumption about the nature of science. Scientific inquiry is a special case of the general activity of human understanding and therefore cannot be viewed apart from the basic processes of perception and thought on which such understanding depends. Moreover, since science and knowledge are continually evolving, it is logically impossible to achieve a definitive notion of the scientific process without a study of its evolution. For this task we have two major sources of evidence. One is the history of science while the other is the systematic study of logical and intellectual growth in human beings. The rationale for the latter is rooted in the soundly supported biological thesis that ontogeny reflects phylogeny (See Jean Piaget, Biology and Knowledge [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971]). A careful analysis of either of these sources of evidence reveals that systematic understanding involves the active selection, transformation, and abstraction of the organism’s interaction with the environment. In other words, the character of scientific understanding is not a mere reflection of the external world as the naive realists advocate; nor does it derive from the biologically determined structure of the brain. Rather, such knowledge emerges from the distinctive modes of interaction with the world.

Such an assertion amounts to a direct repudiation of the positivist view taken by Mr. Miller. The positivist maintains that science consists of a convenient descriptive summary of objective facts refined by [Page 9] quantitative methods and thus has no need of philosophy or metaphysics. Its aim is to describe objectively the world as it is, without a trace of subjective partiality. For the positivist, the ideal of the scientific method is exemplified by the scientist who approaches phenomena without preconceptions or biases and simply records what he observes. Observation is followed by theory building which attempts to account for the observations in terms of some formal quantitative statement. As further observations are made the theory is presumably tested and refined.

This model is unsupported by historical evidence and is certainly not congruent with the results of extensive studies made by Piaget and other cognitive psychologists on the nature of thought processes (See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970]; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge [New York: Harper, 1964]; and Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modem World [New York: Free Press, 1967]). For one thing, such an account omits the generative role of speculative insight which reaches for explanation beyond the fact as given. Kuhn points out how Galileo was able to see a swinging pendulum, a body that merely repeated the same motion over and over, where others for thousands of years had only seen a falling stone, struggling to achieve its natural place in the cosmos. The difference between these views was nothing less than revolutionary for the development of modern physics. What precipitated this change of vision? Certainly the phenomenon of a stone swinging back and forth was not new to the scientific community, and there was nothing inadequate in the Aristotelian explanation—in terms of objectivity; it was as descriptively accurate as that of Galileo. Here the scientific leap had nothing to do with more accurate or neutral observation but as Kuhn indicates, “the exploration by genius of perceptual possibilities” made available by a shift in cosmological thinking that had been germinating since the late Middle Ages. Thus Galileo’s theoretical breakthrough, by no means a bare beginning purged of philosophical bias, was in fact the culminating step in a line of speculative reformulations concerning the nature of physical reality (For detailed documentation refer to M. Claget, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1959]).

The point of this abbreviated illustration is that scientific inquiry is always conducted within the context of more general axiomatic suppositions about the nature of reality. Such suppositions govern the choice of methods, determine what constitute crucial dimensions of measurement and what are to be considered the facts of the matter. Even if presuppositions and first principles go unacknowledged, they are still influential in guiding the course of scientific inquiry. For example, before Galileo no one had given much attention to the time per swing of a pendulum nor had anyone apparently inspected what must have been to Galileo’s successors the obvious relation between the radial length of the string and the period. Whereas for the Aristotelian observer the length of time taken for the stone to stop swinging was an important fact, for Galileo it was an extraneous variable hardly worth noting. Thus there are no colorless observations, no impartial facts. Every proposition, hypothesis, and result refers to a universal background of first principles exhibiting some general systematic character. Apart from this background the elementary data which are integrated to form a proposition and even the proposition itself are devoid of intelligible meaning. In Whitehead’s words:

Nothing has been defined because every [Page 10] entity requires a systematic universe to supply its requisite status. Thus, every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for that fact. There are no self-sustained facts.

The job of speculative philosophy is to articulate, and criticize such metaphysical premises so that limitations, incoherences, and omissions can be identified and a perspective gained. Only when the scheme is made explicit can it be directly subjected to the scrutiny of rational thought. Otherwise the blind spots become entrenched habits of thought, and speculative reason stagnates. Any repudiation of philosophy by scientists amounts to a form of antiempirical obscurantism, because it fallaciously denies that there is a development in scientific first principles. In reviewing the history of science, Whitehead comments:

the prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. . . [such an] attitude becomes a dogmatic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought.

And again: “Only truths of a congenial type can be investigated by any one method or stated in the terms dictated by the method . . . Evidence which lies outside the method simply does not count.” (Recall the differences between Galileo’s and Aristotle’s “factual” accounts of a swinging stone.)

B. F. Skinner’s system of behavioral analysis, which Mr. Miller seems to favor as the kind of behavioral science upon which a comprehensive model of education ought to be based, is a contemporary illustration of the impoverishment which psychology or any other science risks when it refuses to be concerned with the adequacy of its metaphysical foundations and rejects important evidence lying outside the method. The cost for Skinner is ultimate incoherence and logical contradiction. For example, in his recent book Beyond Freedom and Dignity he states his basic thesis in the following way (quoted in Psychology Today, September 1971):

An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment responsible for both the evolution of the species and repertoire acquired by each member. Environmental contingencies now take over the function we once attributed to autonomous man.

Skinner’s system thus shifts the source of control to the environment. But nowhere does he clearly specify those conditions which constitute the environment. If the environment is qualified in terms of those elements (stimuli) which evoke “responses” and rewards them (reinforcement), then clearly one must include within the environment the inner experience of one’s thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. Without question these have important roots in our encounters with the outside world; but action or behavior, as Piaget and Bruner have shown, involves the integration of traces of past experience (memory) with intentions; memory and intentions are matters basically internal to the organism. Insofar as the process of integration is enacted by the organism, then we must admit the causal role of internal processes in determining behavior and conclude that the individual does indeed exercise a measure of self-determination or control in shaping his actions. In other words both stimulus and reinforcement ultimately take their definition from the internal states of the “responding” organism—states which Skinner holds as unimportant for a science of behavior. Yet, he defines a stimulus as anything the [Page 11] organism responds to. Thus if something happens in the external environment and the organism does not respond to it, then that “something happening” is not, by definition, a stimulus. Clearly the internal state of the organism determines whether or not any given event is a stimulus. This is why a given event may or may not be a stimulus to a particular human being. If we should speak Chinese to someone who doesn’t know Chinese, he cannot respond as someone who knows Chinese. Knowing Chinese refers to an internal state of the brain where the linguistic experience of the organism has somehow left its trace. The same is true for reinforcement; something is defined as a reinforcement only if it increases the probability of a particular behavior reoccurring in the presence of the event called the stimulus. Again, the nature of the organism has a say about what will or will not be reinforcing. Chocolate may be reinforcing to some children, for instance; others may not like it or be allergic to it, in which case it will not serve as a reinforcement.

Skinner has stated repeatedly that a science of behavior need not be concerned with the internal states of the organism— what goes on between the “environmental contingencies” and the “response”—experimental data unaccounted for. Such a dismissal of evidence to uphold a theory is not only anti-empirical, it is the most formidable barrier to scientific progress. Studies on the development of perceptual acuity for example demonstrate that perceptual learning is not significantly influenced by reinforcement contingencies, nor can it be extinguished by the removal of such contingencies (See Eleanor Gibson, Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development [New York: Appleton, 1969]). Once a strategy has been learned, it is not abandoned when reinforcement is discontinued. Similar results have come from attempts to induce logical operations in children through conditioning. Again, the results are negative. Follow-up studies of any reported successes have invariably shown that the children learned only to mimic the particular verbal cues which the experimenter was soliciting and had not grasped the underlying abstract principle which would enable them to generalize the response to other occasions. On the other hand the responses of children who had already achieved logical abstract modes of reasoning could not be extinguished or swayed back to pre-logical levels through conditioning techniques. One could go on citing further examples, but space does not permit such documentation. The point is that the logical and empirical deficiencies of Skinner’s system leave it inadequate to serve as the basis of an educational model.

It would, however, be a serious mistake to ignore the vast contribution which Skinner has made to the study of behavior. His legacy of experimental data is methodologically sound. But his interpretive scheme is based on a metaphysics that was long ago abandoned by modern physical and biological sciences because of its limitations. Thus the real issue to be considered in attempting to assess the meaning and importance of Skinner’s work for the psychology of education is not whether it is true or false but rather consists in noting its scope of useful application and its failure beyond that scope. This is another task requiring the application of metaphysical analysis and synthesis. Given the fragmented state of current psychological thought, such an effort would seem very productive.

By now it should be clear that science and philosophy should not be regarded as adversaries in the struggle for systematic understanding but as mutual critics. Philosophy, on the one hand, offers the means for rigorously examining the coherence of assumptions, axioms, and methods of the [Page 12] specialized sciences, and a tool for disciplined speculation about the general implications of scientific discoveries achieved in particular specialized disciplines. The specific sciences, on the other hand, provide the testing-ground to which theory and metaphysics must be unflinchingly subjected in order to provide new information for the refinement and/or revision of current understanding. The aim, after all, is to achieve a deeper comprehension of reality, a comprehension that puts within our hands the means of civilized progress. To reject any source of evidence is a betrayal of that ultimate rationalism which is the very cause of science itself.

Mr. Miller’s criticism of the notion of self-actualization reveals once again the dangers of failing to be concerned with the wider metaphysical generalities underlying specific scientific doctrines. Such assertions as “reality is a constant. . .” is an unequivocal recapitulation to Newtonian cosmology. In the light of the evidence of modern physics the traditional view of the universe as composed of stable immutable matter has given way to one in which process and change are the elementary characteristics of reality. But the findings of physics aside, one is still faced with the inescapable fact of change and evolution in the living world—birth, growth, death, mutation, the rise and fall of civilizations. If there is anything constant about reality, it is its irrepressible change. To be sure, enduring patterns are manifested in the flux, and such patterns provide the continuity and an order necessary for stable identities. But this is not equivalent to saying that reality is a constant.

The second part of the same statement holds that man does not determine reality. This is a somewhat baffling assertion. To accept it one would have to omit all machines, buildings, telecommunications, technology, art, literature, music, in fact, the entire phenomenon of civilization from the category of things that are real. Rather than merely adapting to his environment man has shown an increasing propensity to adapt the environment to himself. Indispensable to the feat of human progress is man’s foresight or forethought, his capacity to envision possibilities and ideals yet unfulfilled and translate them into reality. Man is a purposive being and his sense of purpose enables him to shape his future and ultimately the present. One of the most distinguished biologists of our century, Julian Huxley, puts the matter in bold relief:

Whether he wants to or not, whether he is doing or not he is in point of fact determining the future of evolution on this earth. This is his inescapable destiny and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it the better for all concerned.

If the ANISA Model is truly interested in addressing scientifically the breadth of issues concerned with the release of human potentialities, issues which lie on the frontiers of current knowledge, we cannot afford to exclude any source of empirical evidence which will yield an increase in understanding and bring us closer to our goal. This does not mean we should accept uncritically any finding that comes along. As Mr. Miller correctly points out, this can lead to serious errors. Rather, we must examine such input in the light of its adequacy, coherence, and consistency with the widest generalities of human experience as they are manifested in philosophy, art, language, religion, and science.

PATRICK W. CONWAY, Ed.D.

ANISA Staff Member,

Center for the Study of Human Potential,

University of Massachusetts,

Amherst, Massachusetts

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[Page 14]

The Spiritual Revolution

BY DOUGLAS MARTIN

GLOBAL REVOLUTION is the dominant fact of life in our age. Throughout the world men are rebelling against the dead weight of the past. Typically, the challenge to traditional institutions and assumptions now insists on the need for changes which reach to the very roots of the social order. Typically, too, it manifests an increasing readiness to resort to force to achieve such changes.

The origin of this vast upheaval has been the subject of unending academic and public discussion. In seeking to comprehend a phenomenon which clearly goes far beyond demands for specific political, social, and economic reforms, social scientists have felt compelled to formulate a new vocabulary. They depict the crisis as a “cultural” revolution, a challenge to the “quality” of modern life, a search for “relevancy” and “authenticity.” However suggestive such terminology may be, it remains tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of human experience in the second half of the twentieth century. It is apparent that we in fact are witnessing a massive revulsion on the part of mankind against ways of life that, in their nature and their goal, are seen as anti-life. In so sweeping and profound a reaction violence is incidental. The essential revolution advances quietly, often for a time unnoticed, in the hearts of millions of people who spiritually “drop out” of a world they have found meaningless. The routine tasks may or may not be done; laws may be obeyed or flouted; but the roots of faith—without which no society can long endure—have been severed.

This is the first thing that can with confidence be said about the revolution of our times: it is in essence spiritual.

The first voice to make this statement, a century ago, was that of Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. In announcing Himself to be the Messenger of God awaited by all the world’s religions, Bahá’u’lláh declared the unification of mankind in one people and one universal social order to be the Will of God in this age. He asserted that the revelation of this divine purpose had set in motion forces within both man and society that will in time transform human existence:

I testify that no sooner had the First Word proceeded, through the potency of Thy will and purpose, out of His mouth . . . than the whole creation was revolutionized, and all that are in the heavens and and all that are on earth were stirred to the depths. Through that Word the realities of all created things were shaken, were divided, separated, scattered, combined and reunited, disclosing, in both the contingent world and the heavenly kingdom, entities of a new creation. . . .

Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His Mission was rejected by the rulers of society to whom He addressed it in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Humanity was therefore left to struggle with those forces of which He had spoken, but left to do so in a context not of search for global unification, but rather of attachment to national, racial, cultural, class, or political loyalties. The fruit is the world we live in. There is not on earth today a social system which can be said to serve man’s needs. There is none in which human identity does not seem endangered. There is none which appears to possess real moral authority. This is as true of socialistic societies as it is of capitalistic ones, as true of cultures based on Christian values as it is of [Page 15] those founded on Islám or Buddhism.

In briefly tracing the course of mankind’s struggle over the past century, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of Bahá’u’lláh’s Message, underlined a further characteristic of the resulting crisis:

Every system, short of the unification of the human race, has been tried, repeatedly tried, and been found wanting. Wars again and again have been fought, and conferences without number have met and deliberated. Treaties, pacts and covenants have been painstakingly negotiated, concluded and revised. Systems of government have been patiently tested, have been continually recast and superseded. Economic plans of reconstruction have been carefully devised, and meticulously executed. And yet crisis has succeeded crisis, and the rapidity with which a perilously unstable world is declining has been correspondingly accelerated. A yawning gulf threatens to involve in one common disaster both the satisfied and dissatisfied nations, democracies and dictatorships, capitalists and wage-earners, Europeans and Asiatics, Jew and Gentile, white and colored.

The second feature of the revolution is that it is universal.

The elements of society most keenly sensitive to the crisis are the underprivileged, the youth, and the minorities. Unlike those who are deeply involved in the existing order, they do not have the emotional commitment to the status quo which past habits or considerable personal investment bring. In their eyes present-day civilization stands or falls on its own record. In a technological age that record is coldly exposed for all to read. The evidence is now overwhelming that Western civilization like its older counterparts in other areas of the world has failed the test of such an examination. That is to say, its values have been largely rejected by the people on whom those values must depend for their survival. One may or may not feel that the examination has been adequate or fair. What demands attention is the almost deafening verdict expressed in the spreading apathy and withdrawal of our times. We are being told that present-day civilization, morally speaking, is not one in which human beings can live and grow.

This fact throws into sharp relief a third feature of the modern crisis which is implicit in what has already been said: the revolution is entirely out of man’s control.

Nor is there any prospect that it can in some way be brought under human control. The history of the hundred years since Bahá’u’lláh declared His Mission provides whatever evidence is needed to support Shoghi Effendi’s judgment that:

Humanity . . . has, alas, strayed too far and suffered too great a decline to be redeemed through the unaided efforts of the best among its recognized rulers and statesmen —however disinterested their motives, however concerted their action, however unsparing in their zeal and devotion to its cause. No scheme which the calculations of the highest statesmanship may yet devise; no doctrine which the most distinguished exponents of economic theory may hope to advance; no principle which the most ardent of moralists may strive to inculcate, can provide, in the last resort, adequate foundations upon which the future of a distracted world can be built.

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FOR BAHÁ’ÍS, recognition that the process of social breakdown is irreversible is both a great burden and a real benefit. An incalculably large part of the suffering of our times is the result of men’s struggle somehow to avoid the realization pressed on them by their own experience. Only with the greatest reluctance do we let go our illusions. The greatest of modern illusions is that man can save himself. No one can be said to have dispassionately examined the record of the past several decades who still retains this belief. The process is irreversible because it is a part of nature itself:

All created things [‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said] are expressions of the affinity and cohesion of elementary substances, and non-existence is the absence of their attraction and agreement. Various elements unite harmoniously in composition but when these elements become discordant, repelling each other, decomposition and non-existence result.

Shoghi Effendi relates this basic principle of existence to the institutional and social life of mankind:

If long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution?

The most important thing about the revolution is its direction. Humanity has been described as “evolution become conscious of itself.” For nearly six thousand years our world was the private preserve of a small leisured class. Now, almost overnight, in the wake of the universal Revelation of God promised in all the sacred scriptures of the past, people everywhere are awakening to the possibilities of human life. Something that can truly be called humanity is being born.

One thing only is lacking. “The whole of mankind,” Shoghi Effendi states, “is groaning, is dying to be led to unity. . . .” The achievement of such a unity involves the building of a society fit for human beings to live in. That is where the revolution is going. However long and bloody the process, mankind is struggling blindly toward the creation of a world community.

Bahá’ís believe that the “nucleus” and “pattern” of that community already exist, as the result of a hundred years of work by the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh. Slowly, over the past century, as the Bahá’í teachings have been carried to all parts of the world, people of every racial and national origin have embraced them. As they have done so, they have sought to give these teachings effect not only in their personal lives, but also in their social relationships.

Bahá’u’lláh’s conception of organic community has been summed up in these words:

In the human body, every cell, every organ, every nerve has its part to play. When all do so the body is healthy, vigorous, radiant, ready for every call made upon it. No cell, however humble, lives apart from the body, whether in serving it or receiving from it. This is . . . supremely true of the body of the Bahá’í world community, for this body is already an organism, united in its aspirations, unified in its methods, seeking assistance and confirmation from the same Source, and illumined with the conscious knowledge of its unity. . . . The Bahá’í world community, growing like a healthy new body, develops new cells, new organs, new [Page 17] functions and powers as it presses on to its maturity, when every soul, living for the Cause of God, will receive from that Cause, health, assurance, and the overflowing bounties of Bahá’u’lláh which are diffused through His divinely ordained order.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Community has now passed the first critical century of its evolution. In contrast to the deepening disorder of the world around it, its original unity remains unbroken, as both its expansion and diversification rapidly accelerate. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s vision of world unity emerging from worldwide revolution begins to take on form and substance:

In the contingent world there are many collective centers which are conducive to association and unity between the children of men. For example, patriotism is a collective center; nationalism is a collective center; identity of interests is a collective center; political alliance is a collective center; the union of ideals is a collective center, and the prosperity of the world of humanity is dependent upon the organization and promotion of the collective centers. Nevertheless, all the above institutions are in reality, the matter and not the substance, accidental and not eternal—temporary and not everlasting. With the appearance of great revolutions and upheavals, all these collective centers are swept away. But the Collective Center of the Kingdom, embodying the Institutions and Divine Teachings, is the eternal Collective Center. It establishes relationship between the East and the West, organizes the oneness of the world of humanity, and destroys the foundation of differences.

FROM THE FOREGOING it will be apparent why those who have recognized Bahá’u’lláh regard the well-beaten path of political action not merely as pointless, but as wasteful of urgently needed resources. That is not to denigrate the motivation of others. It relates solely to the inescapable priorities imposed by recognition of God’s Messenger to our age and of the Mission entrusted to Him. Again, in words written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi:

What we Bahá’ís must face is the fact that society is disintegrating so rapidly that moral issues which were clear a half century ago are now hopelessly confused and . . . mixed up with battling political interests. That is why the Bahá’ís must turn all their forces into the channel of building up the Bahá’í Cause and its administration. They can neither change nor help the world in any other way at present. If they become involved in the issues the governments of the world are struggling over, they will be lost. But if they build up the Bahá’í pattern they can offer it as a remedy when all else has failed.

That pattern itself includes service to the material as well as the spiritual needs of mankind. From whatever background an individual may enter the Bahá’í Cause, recognition of Bahá’u’lláh must inevitably and intensely sharpen his social conscience. So it is that around the world Bahá’ís are found working in a wide range of non-partisan humanitarian programs. So it is, too, that Bahá’í youth are encouraged to pursue educational goals that will fit them to contribute practically to the relief of human suffering and want. Collectively the Bahá’í community itself devotes great energy to serving the aims of the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies. What the Bahá’í teachings deny is that political action of a national or other partisan nature holds answers for problems which are in their very essence universal. In the spreading public disillusionment with politically oriented agencies, Bahá’ís see a reflection of this fact of twentieth-century life.

[Page 18] The challenge which Bahá’u’lláh places before the individual who recognizes Him, is to work for the realization of a new pattern of human life. As men of all backgrounds have responded in ever increasing numbers, the implications of the challenge to the individual have steadily become clearer. Shoghi Effendi, it is reported, has explained:

. . . the object of life to a Bahá’í is to promote the oneness of mankind. The whole object of our lives is bound up with the lives of all human beings; not a personal salvation we are seeking, but a universal one. . . . Our aim is to produce a world civilization which will in turn react on the character of the individual. It is, in a way, the inverse of Christianity which started with the individual unit and through it reached out to the conglomerate life of men.

The pursuit of such an objective requires a transformation in the individual’s order of moral priorities that is as revolutionary as any other aspect of the modern condition.

The human virtue to which Bahá’u’lláh assigns the highest place is justice. He says: “O Son of Spirit! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me. . . . By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of Thy neighbor.” This central moral attribute Bahá’u’lláh sets in the context of community growth: “The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men.”

Intimately related to justice in building healthy social relationships is love. Going beyond “the golden rule” of past revelations, Bahá’u’lláh teaches that the creation of a human community that incarnates the principle of unity in diversity requires that men learn literally to prefer others to themselves. We do this when we focus on the good qualities of our fellowmen, and, as individuals, resolutely overlook those qualities we do not admire. The effect is to nourish the desirable attributes which are noticed and praised, just as the effect of censure and coldness is to blight individual sense of self-worth and inhibit spiritual growth.

Detachment becomes another moral attribute of prime importance in such a context. Freed from the ascetic connotations of the past, detachment serves a vital function in such areas as the process of consultation on which Bahá’í institutional life entirely depends. Attachment to the self includes attachment to ideas which are “mine,” to the ego which can be bruised, to the desire for one’s own wishes to be accepted. The central principle of consultation, however, is the struggle of the group to find a collective mind, through which the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh can communicate with them. As in all other areas of moral effort, the group reacts upon the individual by requiring a conscious effort at detachment, until this becomes a habit.

Moreover, it is only by living in a community that an individual can discover and gradually eradicate the universal disease of prejudice. The more one works with people of varying backgrounds, the more he finds his prejudices are groundless. This includes not mere racial differences, but the much-discussed “generation gap” between the ideals of youth and those of the adult, the vast differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” the division between the well-educated and the illiterate, the discrimination against women, and the host of other forms which this age-old enemy of social order assumes.

Honesty is a moral quality which assumes new significance in the deliberate attempt to [Page 19] build an organically united society. Man today lives in a hypocritical society wherein each person tends to develop a mask to hide his own feelings. We also tend to say those things which we think will please our listeners (and something else when we are away from them). This has become so much a pattern that we sometimes even learn to hide our true feelings from ourselves, because we seek acceptance and feel that we must conform to the generally accepted point of view. The whole basis of Bahá’í consultation is quite opposite to this. “. . . at the very root of the Cause lies the principle of the undoubted right of the individual to self-expression. . . .” “Truthfulness is the foundation of all the virtues of the world of humanity. Without truthfulness, progress and success in all the worlds of God are impossible for a soul.”

Similarly, the Bahá’í teachings strongly censure certain moral weaknesses which, in the past, have been viewed somewhat complaisantly by almost all religious systems. Backbiting, for example, Bahá’u’lláh tells us, “quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.” The only other human failing condemned in these particular terms is the use of narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs.

Justice, love, detachment, honesty, freedom from prejudice, and backbiting—these are a few of the spiritual qualities which Bahá’u’lláh has redefined and emphasized as the focus for the individual’s inner battle. In laying particular stress on these and other human attributes which directly serve the development of community life, therefore, Bahá’u’lláh has created a new system of moral priorities. The ethical standards which man has inherited from past religions and cultures do not necessarily contribute equally, or in some cases at all, to the emergence of a universal civilization which represents the long-awaited establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. That Kingdom has its own integrity and its own processes of organic growth, and those who would serve it can do so only in harmony with this divinely ordained pattern.

“O friends! Be not careless of the virtues with which ye have been endowed, neither be neglectful of your high destiny.” “Beware lest the powers of the earth alarm you, or the might of the nations weaken you, or the tumult of the people of discord deter you, or the exponents of earthly glory sadden you.” “This Day a door is open wider than both heaven and earth. The eye of the mercy of Him Who is the Desire of the worlds is turned towards all men. An act, however infinitesimal, is, when viewed in the mirror of the knowledge of God, mightier than a mountain.” “One righteous act is endowed with a potency that can so elevate the dust as to cause it to pass beyond the heaven of heavens. It can tear every bond asunder, and hath the power to restore the force that hath spent itself and vanished.”

THE FORM of the global society toward which mankind is being impelled must match these ideals; must indeed arise from the same divine impulse. The age-old issue of authority in the organization of human affairs must find a solution which not only unites the diverse peoples of the world, but protects and nurtures their individual capacity.

The uniqueness of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh lies in its response to this challenge. Fundamental to its teachings is the assertion that the “age of human maturity” has dawned, and that mankind is capable of responding to divine order in its social life. The central thrust of Bahá’u’lláh’s mission, [Page 20] therefore, was the establishment of His “Covenant.” Through this Covenant, for the first time in history, a Manifestation of God has Himself founded the institutions for the organization of the community life of those who recognize Him. Acting on His assurance, democratically elected Bahá’í Spiritual Assemblies have been formed at both local and national levels. In all their essentials these institutions are faithful reflections of the Will of God as revealed in the comprehensive written statements of His Messenger. Today they form one organically united administrative system embracing the whole earth.

In 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His Mission, the crowning unit of His embryonic World Order was successfully raised. In April of that year some elected representatives of Bahá’u’lláh’s followers in every part of the globe gathered at the Bahá’í World Centre on the slopes of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. There they carried out the first democratic worldwide election in history. The international administrative body born that day had been conceived a century earlier by Bahá’u’lláh. It assumed the name given it by Him: “The Universal House of Justice.”

With the emergence of this central organ of Bahá’u’lláh’s Cause, the social model He conceived a century ago stands essentially complete. Separated entirely from the arena of political dispute it seeks to demonstrate conclusively the truth its members have discovered: that mankind can learn to live as one human family. As yet it represents no more than the “first shaping” of the community that will gradually be built by the growing numbers of people of every background who are entering it. To his House of Justice Bahá’u’lláh has assigned a wide range of discretion in adapting the institutions and ordinances of this community to the exigencies of an “ever-advancing civilization.” The essential pattern however has been set, and its viability clearly demonstrated.

Far ahead lies the ultimate objective of Bahá’u’lláh’s coming, the establishment of the global society toward which the universal revolution of our times is resistlessly impelling all mankind. The present generation of Bahá’u’lláh’s followers will not see the attainment of this goal. What they know is that it is attainable; that their individual and collective efforts bring it daily nearer; and that in this lies the real meaning of life.

The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, whose supreme mission is none other but the achievement of this organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations, should, if we be faithful to its implications, be regarded as signalizing through its advent the coming of age of the entire human race. It should be viewed not merely as yet another spiritual revival in the ever-changing fortunes of mankind, not only as a further stage in a chain of progressive Revelations, nor even as the culmination of one of a series of recurrent prophetic cycles, but rather as marking the last and highest stage in the stupendous evolution of man’s collective life on this planet. The emergence of a world community, the consciousness of world citizenship, the founding of a world civilization and culture. . . .

*

THROUGH REVOLUTION TO COMMUNITY

Excerpts from the Bahá’í Sacred Writings and Texts

THE BÁB: “God hath set all things free from one another that they may be sustained by Him alone, and nothing in the heavens or in the earth, but God, sustains them.”

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH: “[Jesus] said: ‘Come ye after Me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.’ In this day, however, We say: ‘Come ye after Me, and We may make you to become quickeners of mankind.’” “Verily, God [Page 21] lovetb those who are working in His path in groups, for they are a solid foundation.”

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ: “Consider ye that He says ‘in groups,’ united and bound together . . . with sincere intentions, good designs, useful advices, divine moralities, beautiful actions, spiritual qualities. . . . When the holy souls, through the angelic power, will arise to show forth these celestial characteristics, establishing a band of harmony, each of these souls shall be regarded as one thousand persons. . . .

“O ye friends of God! Strive to attain to this high and sublime station and show forth such a brightness in these days that its radiance may appear from the eternal horizons. This is the real foundation of the Cause of God; this is the essence of the divine doctrine. . . .”

SHOGHI EFFENDI: “Who else can be the blissful if not the community of the Most Great Name, whose world-embracing, continually consolidating activities constitute the one integrating process in a world whose institutions, secular as well as religious, are for the most part, dissolving? . . .

“Conscious of their high calling, confident in the society-building power which their Faith possesses, they press forward, undeterred and undismayed, in their efforts to fashion and perfect the necessary instruments, wherein the embryonic World Order of Bahá’u’lláh can mature and develop. It is this building process, slow and unobtrusive, to which the life of the world-wide Bahá’í Community is wholly consecrated, that constitutes the one hope of a stricken society.”

THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE: “We should constantly be on our guard lest the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society should lead us to think that such superficial adjustments . . . as an extension to all members of the human race of the benefits of a high standard of living, of education, medical care, technological knowledge . . . will of themselves fulfill the glorious mission of Bahá’u’lláh. Far otherwise. . . . Far deeper and more fundamental was [the Báb’s, Bahá’u’lláh’s, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s and Shoghi Effendi’s] vision, penetrating to the very purpose of human life. . . . ‘The principle of the oneness of mankind,’ [the Guardian] writes, ‘implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.’ . . .

“Dearly loved friends, this is the theme we must pursue in our efforts to deepen in the Cause. What is Bahá’u’lláh’s purpose for the human race? For what ends did He submit to the appalling cruelties and indignities heaped upon Him? What does He mean by ‘a new race of men’? What are the profound changes which He will bring about?”

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[Page 23]

Perceptual Competence and the ANISA Process-Curriculum

BY PATRICK W. CONWAY

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY has just begun to feel the impact of a recent synthesis in biological thought—the concept of epigenesis. This principle, first advanced by the great embryologist C. H. Waddington, asserts that the structural and functional properties of an organism are specifiable neither by the inherited genetic structures nor by the simple selective pressures of the surrounding environment but by a complex system of interactions between these two sources of influence. The reality of the organism’s development is not to be found within the genetic code nor in the order of the external world but in the creative process unifying these component sources.

A major contribution of the epigenetic principle has been the resolution of the nature-nurture controversy involving the age-old dichotomy between innate and acquired characteristics. It now becomes less meaningful to ask which attributes are “inherited” and which are acquired. Rather, the pertinent issue becomes the nature of the interrelation between the developing organism and its environment.

Among the first psychologists to discern the profound implications of epigenesis in understanding the nature of psychological development was Jean Piaget. In his recent book Biology and Knowledge Piaget traces the origins of perception and intelligence as complex extensions of patterns exhibited in more primitive physiological processes. He views the similarity as more than simply a coincidental parallel, asserting that knowledge and morphogenesis (the origin of biological structures) are different manifestations of the same process.

If one takes this position, and the arguments in favor of it are compelling, then perception can be seen as the nutriment of mental development since is the agency by which the organism feels and reacts to the causal influences of its environment (including the body). Thus, in terms of psychological epigenesis, perception is the primary means through which the organism can be sensitive to an environment with which it must interact if it is to realize its inherent potentialities.

Having indicated the role of perception in development in rather general terms, we now turn to the controversial question of how perception is accomplished and its general function in the development of knowledge. These questions will involve, first, a brief review of two contrasting traditions which figure significantly in the evolution of modern perceptual theories; second, an attempt to resolve these conflicting notions by introducing some general principles about the nature of perception consistent with the ANISA theory of development; and, third, a presentation of empirical evidence relevant to these principles. Finally, we will identify several basic trends in the development of perception, noting some implications for education.

Although psychology and education lack a generally accepted theory of perception, attempts at developing such a theory date back many centuries. The two contrasting approaches dominating modern thought derive from the empiricist tradition, the chief advocates of which were Locke, Hume, and Berkeley, and the idealist tradition, championed [Page 24] by Immanuel Kant.

For the empiricists perception originates almost entirely in the external world with little if any influence contributed by the percipient. Accordingly, the individual passively registers impressions and images of the world around him. The mind is viewed as the passive clay on which sensations write, something which merely absorbs and stores sensory data. Higher forms of knowledge are thought to be the result of inferences made from raw sense-data (for example, color, contour, luminescence, pitch, intensity). Two key assumptions behind this position are that sensations are the basic elements of all perception and that these sensations and their function in the perceptual system consist of facsimile images or patterns that mirror the arrangement of elements and physical forces in the external world. Learning allegedly causes individual differences only in terms of the detail and completeness of the mental image. This approach has sometimes been termed objectivism since it presumes that perception simply involves, directly and objectively, representing the world inside the head by virtue of accrued sensations. One serious deficiency of the objectivist position is its failure to account for the active character of most perception, which selects and organizes information from the environment on the basis of past experience, present needs, and intentions. Furthermore, current knowledge of sense physiology and the studies on sensory deprivation strongly indicate that sensations are not the basic elements of perception but rather the end product of many physiological transformations.

The idealists advocate the opposite extreme and view the experiencing subject as the active determinant of his perception. The outside world here plays a subservient role to the overriding influence of subjective consciousness, and the structures of reality are all seen as being imposed by the mind of the observer. While such a view much more comfortably accommodates those very points on which the objectivist theories are at least adequate, we are left without an accounting for the effects of experience in determining the mental structures which characterize perception. Whereas Kant posited that such structures were a priori categories of understanding, Piaget has demonstrated that the patterns of integrating sensory information are derived from the organism’s interaction with the environment.

Alfred North Whitehead suggests a resolution of these contradictory perspectives by asserting that perception in the broadest terms is the process of taking into the constitution of one thing what was in the constitution of another. Thus, the foundations of perception belong in the experience of causality, the subject experiencing the effect of an environment. For example, when one gazes at a green leaf there is an alteration of his energy state which results from the absorption of energy (light reflected from the leaf) by the retina. This lowest level of perception is based on the transition and contrast of going from one energy level to another. The green leaf is thus a constituent of the perceiving subject in however trivial a way. It is important to note that what is taken in is not a representative of the outside object but what the outside object has contributed to the observer, in this case, ambient light energy. But there is a further stage of process present in the higher forms of life, particularly in man, which involves actively selecting (differentiating) and integrating these primary causal feelings into an articulate form which is given an independent objective status in the environment —in this case a green thing out there which is clearly separate from me, the viewer. However, this objectification is the end product of a complex subjective process; it is not a given.

How then is the transition made from vague ambient feelings of effect to the abstract [Page 25] clarity of higher modes of perception? Michael Polanyi, a physicist turned psychologist-epistemologist, suggests that the highly developed perceptual systems of man

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The ANISA Model

The ANISA Model represents a comprehensive educational system functionally defined by specifications which insure its replicability, evaluation, and refinement. The specifications embody educational objectives pertaining to the development of human potential through the attainment of learning competence and explanations of how to achieve them. These objectives are derived from a well-articulated philosophical base that clarifies the nature of man and are supported by a coherent body of theory generated from the philosophy. This body of theory includes:

A Theory of Development which defines the nature of human potential; establishes two broad categories of potentialities—biological and psychological; identifies proper nutrition as the essential element in the development of biological potentialities and learning competence as the key factor in the release of psychological potentialities; establishes five categories of psychological potentialities—psychomotor, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and volitional; defines development as the translation of potentiality into actuality; defines the basic nature of creativity in terms of that translation and equates it with learning; establishes interaction with the environment as the means by which development is sustained; fixes three basic categories of environment (physical, human, and the unknown) and establishes the Self as the microcosmic reflection of the three environments and the most constant aspect of the environment it experiences; and categorizes interactions in terms of their power to facilitate development and safeguard survival.

A Theory of Curriculum which establishes two categories of goals or objectives of the formal educational system—content goals and process goals; specifies the substance of the former as the information culture has accumulated organized in terms of the classification of environments, including the symbol systems used to convey that information, and the substance of the latter as formation of internal structures on which learning competence depends (i.e., content goals may specify what to think about while process goals concentrate on how to think); accounts for the emergence of personal identity (character formation) in terms of value formation and defines values as the relatively enduring structurings of potentialities (process) as they are actualized and integrated with information (content) assimilated about the various environments; and defines three value sub-systems (material, social, and religious) on which three higher order competencies rest (technological, moral, and spiritual) and which combine to form the total values system that constitutes the personality—the Self.

A Theory of Pedagogy which defines teaching as arranging environments and guiding the child’s interaction with them for the purpose of achieving the goals specified by the curriculum theory; outlines the diagnostic, prescriptive, speculative, experimental, and improvisational aspects of arranging environments and guiding interaction; and specifies the nature of evaluation.

A Theory of Administration which provides the rationale for staff differentiation and integration; defines the nature of management in terms of purpose consistent with the philosophy; provides the means for institutional self-renewal; and accounts for the necessity and nature of community and home involvement and support.

Finally, because the ANISA Model rests on the universal processes of growth and development, it has cross-cultural applicability and addresses directly the problem of how to achieve equal educational opportunity.

The word anisa is Arabic and means “tree of life.” It was selected to represent an effort to design a new educational system concerned with nurturance, shelter, continuing fruition, and beauty. ANISA (the American National Institute for Social Advancement) is a private organization which was incorporated in 1969 as one means of furthering the objective of developing a new educational system. The development of the ANISA Model has taken place with the assistance of a quarter of a million dollar grant from the New England Program in Teacher Education, Durham, New Hampshire, and has been carried out by the ANISA project staff of twenty members, at the Center for the Study of Human Potential, School of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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[Page 26] (vision and audition in particular) are ways of integrating the immense input of the various sense receptors into a focused experience of conscious perception. The more primary levels of input function as subsidiary clues which point to a transformed level which is qualitatively different from their reality as separate entities. Polanyi applies the term “tacit knowing” or tacit integration to describe this hierarchical structure of the perceptual process. The hierarchy consists of ascending stages of awareness with each new level manifesting increasingly complex levels of data integration and culminating in the apex of focal consciousness. But if simple sensations are not the rudiments of this process, what are the basic materials of perception? How is the causal input of the environment received by the specialized sensory systems of the body? In order to try to answer this question we have abstracted a hypothesis from an extensive range of literature spanning many disciplines from epistemology to physiology. The proposition is that the mind’s grasp and enjoyment of the world of which perception is an integral facet rest on two basic psychological and neurological principles. The first is the principle of response to novelty or change while the second is the principle of response to invariance or permanence in the form of pattern. Both of these ingredients are indispensable in sustaining the perceptual process.

These principles imply a radical departure from historically dominant views of perception. The essential nature of perception now becomes a problem of process rather than substance, of transition as opposed to stasis.

To clarify the issue let us draw on some specific illustrations in articles reporting the results of research in perception. These studies might best be characterized as efforts to determine the boundary conditions of human perception—that is, investigation into factors or influences under which perception breaks down or is radically altered. Knowledge of these limits can provide us with a further understanding of fundamental conditions upon which perceptual operations themselves are based.

One such area of inquiry has been that of the spontaneous and irrepressible fluctuations of attention which seem to occur in an unchanging situation. There is substantial evidence that it is impossible for a person to focus his perception for an indefinite period of time upon a single aspect of a stabilized unchanging situation. This holds for all senses including vision, although it is generally easier to preserve the focus of visual perception than auditory or tactile perception because of the person’s capacity to control the orientation of the sense organs themselves.

Donald E. Broadbent has attempted to account for the results of clock-test vigilance tasks, of whose exact moment of occurrence the subject has no foreknowledge, in terms of this factor. He argues that the decline in vigilance is due to “the inability to maintain any concentration of awareness on a relatively unimpressive and unchanging situation.” Sooner or later blockages in perception occur, and attention wanders to other features of the environment or to the observer’s own thoughts. Hence, an event occurring during this period goes unnoticed, though this is less [Page 27] likely to happen if the event is expected. This inability to maintain attention on monotonous tasks is a well-known phenomenon to radar observers, pilots, and industrial inspectors.

Broadbent found in 1963 that a short interval between periods of testing or a novel stimulus (say a telephone message) temporarily restored the full efficiency of a subject’s performance. He also discovered that when every signal was followed by an auditory message informing the subject of his performance, deterioration was retarded; and in some cases performance improved. An important effect of such feedback aside from its informational value is that it serves to introduce some variation (novelty) into an otherwise monotonous situation and in so doing creates a climate in which perceptual processing can occur. Broadbent further observed that the signal itself introduced novelty into the situation and that the occurrence of each signal restores performance partially to the level at the beginning of the watch.

An interesting mode of perceptual fluctuation can be observed in the spontaneous reversals of depth relations that often occur when one focuses upon ambiguous two-dimensional representations which suggest three-dimensional forms which themselves are static—for example, the Necker cube. If one stares at a selected point on the cube pictured below, in a short while, his perception of it will change. Far points become near and vice versa.

Such reversals of perceptual configuration are largely spontaneous and are only partially under voluntary control—that is the viewer cannot completely inhibit these involuntary tendencies. Voluntary direction of attention towards one configuration may increase its dominance, but it seldom produces complete suppression of the other. As we shall demonstrate later, the reason for this probably lies in the physical organization of the perceptual system.

An even more dramatic instance of the breakdown of perception under invariant stimulation is the phenomenon of perceptual fading. This is elicited when a stationary image is projected on the retina for a prolonged period of time. Under such conditions the observer finds that the image begins to fade or disappear completely and then spontaneously reappears over regular intervals. It is noteworthy that the speed and amount of fading as well as rates and frequency of regeneration vary according to the nature of the figure. The amount of fading correlates negatively with the degree of meaning and complexity associated with the particular figure, again suggesting that novelty and variation are requisite ingredients of perception; but there are even further confirmations in the results of investigations into the neurological processes underlying vision.

Recent findings indicate that the function of vision is dependent upon continual change or fluctuation of stimulation upon the retina. For example, it has been found that constant motion of the eyeballs is necessary for visual perception. Such motions are too tiny and too rapid to be seen by the unaided eye. Their amplitudes are less than one minute of arc, and their frequencies are in the range from 50 to 150 cycles per second. Nevertheless, if this movement is compensated for by optical or electronic feedback devices so that the image is exactly stabilized on the retina, vision ceases within a fraction of a second.

We might extrapolate from these findings and postulate (1) that-our perceptual system is not equipped to deal with steady inputs

(continued on page 30)

[Page 28]

Here Is . . .

Dawning toward each other, two

draw near, their failures true, their

limits right, some day. And all

who share our weakness may

admire the two—their kind our kind.

Our kind, my kind, I am afraid

to praise: even our virtues live

only in those whose flaws match mine.

Somewhere to praise are other beings

too great for us to understand.

Friend, here is my level hand.

Looking Out in the Morning

There is a promise: you live a certain

way, something says, “Yes.”

All other ways—events may flood

your life, and gains may come, but

that something says, “No.”

I look out in the morning. The sky

makes a pact with me:

that glimpse, no one can know its

worth. Now it exists, did not before,

can never be lost.

That gift is given, just as

your life is given, not earned,

not to be deserved or not deserved:

it is. There is this promise inside

whatever in fact occurs.

[Page 29]

First and Last Things

Sometimes you glimpse far ditches—laced

by a grasping tide stronger than

the ocean: what made the world binds it.

Below the comparative calm of

a forest fire or a storm, there whirls this

terrible pool: Today, Our Time,

And the urge many people suffer,

the leaning, always ready to go:

it’s like the water seething at banks underground.

But once this land was a river, and water

that is now stone flowed down from burning

mountains, part of the great stars—

And then you and I were nothing, no place,

no place in all the world.

In Skeleton Cave

Hand open along the wall, we two

breathlessly descend. Under our fingers in the dark

those cave paintings flower. Later, back in the open,

every person has the new look:

hundreds of stories tattooed on. Positive

people, they carry a deep design; they

live inside what is printed across

the front of their faces. Under our feet

we feel caves correct themselves

when people speak. We blink

to each other: beneath, unknown to those others,

run miles of jabbering walls.

Poems

BY WILLIAM STAFFORD

[Page 30]

(continued from page 27)

and that the subjective experience of vision cannot be reduced to states of matter or energy, to substance devoid of process, but rather that it is based fundamentally on the experience of transition within a situation; (2) that the organism is actively involved in generating this condition of flux and transition and is, therefore, engaged in the construction of reality; and (3) that complementing the requisite element of change and novelty is the simultaneous need for sameness or pattern within the process, because without order and structure experience is unintelligible. Pattern perception, the experience of identity or sameness amid change is the result of an array of stimuli upon the retina which is congruent with an immediately previous array upon a different set of cells. The brain can perceive something only if it can detect the sameness of an array before and after displacement.

Thus, neither a totally steady state nor an unpatterned random flux can be assimilated by the experiencing organism. The particular sense impressions are fleeting, always changing. The movement of the sense systems keeps changing the input at the receptive level only to isolate over time the several invariances of such input. The traditional models of sense perception derivative of the two approaches outlined earlier postulate a sense receptor mosaic or template for each sense. This mosaic in turn projects the pattern of stimulated receptors to the brain. Within the present approach such an anatomical projection is irrelevant to sense perception since the pattern is constantly changing. The empirical evidence thus corroborates our thesis that perception arises out of novelty emerging within order and order emerging from novelty. This theme offers fresh insight into William James’ belief in the immanence of the past in the present; the immediate present, he felt, was the felt transition from the immediate past. Thus, for James the clap of thunder is the feeling of the silence perishing from a moment ago. “The parts of experience hold together from next to next by the relations that are themselves part of experience.”

The Dynamics of Perception

TO RECAPITULATE a basic premise stated at the beginning of this paper, the relation between organism and environment must be described not in static terms but in terms of its ongoing interactions. Any attempt to understand the evolution of the subject apart from its intimate communion with the environment is inadequate. The important issue to be considered is not so much the subject and environment as the flow-processes that connect them—their mode of interrelation.

It is now clear that the classical model of perception which assigns the sense organs to the mere role of transducers changing physical energy to some physiological analog which subsequently gets selected for further processing by the central nervous system is a misleading over-simplification of the perceptual process. As James Gibson points out, the brain does not simply construct or compute objective information from the direct inflow of sense data. Instead, our perceptual systems including the sense organs actively seek and selectively extract information from the environment.

Urie Neisser, a noted figure in the field of cognitive psychology who shares this basic perspective, has described perception as a process of “analysis of synthesis” which he likens to the operation of a paleontologist who reconstructs a dinosaur by carefully extracting a few fragments of bone from a mass of rubble. In a similar manner we perceive the world around us by differentiating critical features from the welter of [Page 31] impinging stimulation and integrating or synthesizing these differentiated features into a pattern which we immediately experience as the “object” of our perception. Thus, the object as it is perceived depends partly on the contributions which the percipient brings to the occasion, partly on how he differentiates the various features of his environment, and partly on how he synthesizes them into a pattern. Some aspects of these operations (such as the ability to integrate a complex aggregate of constantly variable energy states into the experience of color) as was indicated earlier seem to have strong innate basis. As far as we know, every human being except those who suffer from color blindness has an inborn capacity to discern color. However, other aspects of the percipient’s contribution are to a large extent, if not entirely, acquired through learning; and it is this fact which leads us to consider how experience modifies and extends the basic perceptual operations immanent within us by virtue of our genetic inheritance.

The adaptive alteration of behavior as a result of learning is best seen as an extension of the epigenetic system outlined earlier. Learning is a dimension of development which imparts to man an extraordinary plasticity, allowing him to be sensitive and creative in the way he expresses his innate potentialities. In the case of perceptual learning the operations of differentiating and integrating sensory information are once again neither a direct reflection of the order in the external world nor simply derivative from one’s “in-born” tendencies. Rather they emerge from the interaction of the organism’s immanent nature and the environment. Such interactions include skeletal muscle movements as well as more refined operations such as eye-movements, lens adjustment, or shifting the focus of attention. Over a period of time the accrued result of these interactions is integrated into what James calls the “pre-perceptual image,” which is a pattern of references brought to bear upon the incoming sensory information—references of past association including tacit emotional content as well as explicit memory, references to interests, aims, and aspirations. This preparation is the subject’s contribution to the perceptual act, determining in part the manner in which the incoming sensory information is analyzed (differentiated) and synthesized (integrated). As James expressed it, pre-perception is half the looked for thing.

The learned basis of pre-perceptual images (often referred to in contemporary literature as “schemas” or “sets”) becomes clear through the following illustration. A child’s pre-perceptual set of an automobile tends to be relatively undifferentiated. If asked to draw what he sees, he is likely to omit the door handles, chrome trimming, window vents, and other details, but not because he lacks the ability to see or draw such detail. Rather, his pre-perceptual structures may not be sufficiently complex to assimilate all the features present. A car designer, however, is apt to detect readily and utilize such detail since he brings to the situation a highly differentiated and integrated pre-perceptual set.

Before an educator can design educational experiences that would foster the development of perception, he must have some idea about the various dimensions along which the child’s perceptual sets develop as a result of learning. Eleanor J. Gibson and Heinz Werner suggest such general trends based upon extensive reviews of relevant research findings. Although the particular dimensions are different, they are in general terms very similar. For example, both identify a developmental trend (primarily differentiative) toward greater selectivity of information, a selectivity which becomes more directed from within (more purposive) instead [Page 32] of from without. James once expressed the latter condition as one in which the child seems to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his attention.

The increased selectivity of perceptual sets in turn enables one to make finer discriminations of the features which distinguish one object from another; to isolate more rapidly those features which remain constant and do not vary among particular instances (features such as sizes, shapes, or patterns in varying contexts); and to ignore sense information irrelevant to one’s perceptual intentions.

A second major trend (primarily integrative) involves an increase in the ability to organize disparate elements into a higher-order pattern which makes one out of many. One example would be the integration of discrete notes into a melody. Another would be to see a semi-circular series of dots as the letter “c”. Such higher-order perceptual integration in some respects will also involve different levels of cognitive functioning.

This brief description of several developmental trends in perception is not meant to be exhaustive but rather to suggest the kinds of information of which a curriculum designer and master teacher must be aware in order to plan and carry out developmentally appropriate learning experiences for the purpose of increasing perceptual competence.

The ANISA Model is made functionally replicable by its specifications—detailed definitions of all processes underlying learning competence from all categories of potentialities and explanations of experiences children need to have to develop such competence.

The following list identifies a number of important processes underlying efficient visual perception. The ANISA visual-perceptual curriculum centers on these processes. Because of limitations of space, a detailed listing of processes for the other modes of perception—that is, auditory, kinesthetic, vestibular, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory— cannot be presented here.

I. Movement Perception

A. Directionality

1. Fixation (convergence)—holding an object centrally in the visual field.

2. Horizontal pursuit—following movement from right to left or from left to right.

3. Vertical pursuit—following an object moving up or down.

4. Circular pursuit—following objects moving in a circular motion clockwise or counterclockwise.

5. Depth pursuit—following an object that is moving towards the eyes or away from the eyes.

6. Combinations of the above.

B. Duration (time perception)

1. Velocity—being able to see the relative speeds of moving objects (slower / faster), and to see changes in speeds.

2. Synchrony (simultaneity)—being able to ascertain that objects are moving at the same time.

3. Rhythm—being able to see a pattern in movement.

4. Sequence—being able to see a repetition of patterned units.

5. Pace—being able to see variations in the size of temporal units as represented by movement patterns even though the relationship between rhythm and sequence remains constant.

C. Cause/Effect (Being able to see that one event, B, occurs only after a prior event, A. This is a perceptual form of inference.)

II. Space—Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional

[Page 33]

A. Figure-Ground (form perception)

1. Contour—being able to see the characteristics of the outer form of an object.

2. Edge—being able to locate the demarcation that forms the outer limits of an object.

3. Proximity—being able to distinguish the nearness or farness of objects in relationship to one another.

a. Above/below (height or verticality)

b. Left/right (width or laterality)

c. Front/back or before/behind (judgment of depth)

d. Size/area (judgment of distances)

4. Separation—being able to discern disconnectedness among objects.

5. Closure—a filling in of gaps to create a figure (another form of perceptual inference analogous to interpolation in cognition).

6. Continuity—being able to organize objects into a sequence (a form of perceptual inference analogous to cognitive extrapolation).

7. Constancy—being able to interpret the apparent changes in shape that occur when perspective changes as a function of perspective and not a change in the actual shape of an object. The visual image of both shape and size changes with a shift in perspective; the objects themselves remain constant.

B. Projective Space (three-dimensional only)

ProjeCtive space is determined by a number of cues, some of which can be interpreted by one eye alone and some of which require both eyes.

1. Monocular cues.

a. Proximal size (closer objects appear larger)

b. Brightness (closer objects are brighter)

c. Shading (shadows create perspective and depth)

d. Texture gradient (closer gradients are coarser in texture)

e. Linear perspective (parallel lines converge as they recede from the viewer)

f. Interposition (closer objects obscure objects behind them)

g. Movement parallax (closer objects appear to move faster)

2. Binocular cues.

a. Convergence (the closer the object, the more the eyes must turn inward toward each other)

b. Retinal disparity (the closer the object the greater the disparity between the images falling on the two retinas)

III. Color

A. Hue—being able to discriminate among different wave lengths for example, being able to tell the difference between red, blue, yellow.

B. Saturation—being able to discriminate among complexities of light waves, determining the relative amounts of grey present within a given hue.

C. Brightness—being able to discriminate among different amounts of light reflecting from a given object (being able to tell the difference between shades of one hue such as red, which might be broken down into pink, red, and maroon).

D. Contrast—combinations of all of the above.

IV. Translation of Two-Dimensional Representations into Their Three-Dimensional Referents

Since a great deal of education in classrooms is mediated through two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional reality, children need particular [Page 34] experiences in order to make this kind of translation.

V. Translation of Three-Dimensional Reality into Two Dimensional Representations.

This occurs primarily through drawing pictures and involves knowledge of the various monocular cues, such as texture gradients, and other depth cues created by shadows, diminishing size with increased distance from the viewer, etc.

Let us now take a closer look at one of these processes, figure-ground perception, highlighting some of the implications for curriculum development and teaching. The ANISA theory of pedagogy defines teaching in terms of arranging environments and guiding the child’s interaction with the environment in order to foster in the best possible way the development of powers essential to learning competence.

Figure-ground perception involves the ability to differentiate certain features from a previously undifferentiated perceptual field and to integrate these features into a figure or pattern that is distinctly separate from and predominant over the remaining information in the perceptual field. Those aspects unassociated with the figure become the background or simply ground.

The process of figure-ground discrimination refers to the basic schema or set which segregates from the welter of stimulation those visual or auditory units upon which more refined processes will elaborate. For example, Neisser points out that a literate person can differentiate on request a single letter on a page of print (for instance, the “q” appearing earlier in this sentence). Having found it, he can note whether it is well-formed and how it differs from “p” or “b.” Figure-ground processes keep the “q” a separate and integral figure while all this happens. This is an acquired or learned capacity very difficult for young children and illiterate adults.

Figure-ground discrimination is a critical variable in the development of learning competence because the ability to read, to perceive depth, and to create a psychomotor/perceptual match—that is, to coordinate hand-eye activity, for example in writing— are all skills that have some basis in figure-ground perception. Moreover, figure-ground configurations also affect memory. (That which is held as figure is better remembered.)

The generalizability of the process from one context to another also provides a solid justification for incorporating figure-ground learning experiences in the curriculum. Once a “figure” has been differentiated from a number of grounds, it is more likely to be abstracted from previously unencountered contexts. For example, the human perceptual system is capable of recognizing the same speech patterns in virtually unlimited variations of the particular physical characteristics (as for example, background noise, intonation, time span, etc.).

Any number of simple visual and auditory discrimination tasks can be employed as learning experiences. The child may be presented with a picture containing many different shapes and objects and asked to pick out particular shapes such as circles or triangles. In a more difficult exercise the contour of a familiar shape, such as a bird, may be embedded in a confusing background of extraneous lines and the child asked to find the shape. If his efforts are unsuccessful, the teacher may show the youngster the shape in isolation, uncluttered by the confusing background; or the teacher may simplify the background.

For auditory figure-ground tasks, music provides an ideal medium. One possibility is to have the student identify a theme or motif appearing in various harmonic or contrapuntal contexts. As in visual discrimination tasks the complexity of the problem should be adjusted to match the child’s developmental level.

The above examples are only simple illustrations of how one process of the ANISA [Page 35] curriculum may be strengthened by specific activities. The point to be noted here is that an ANISA teacher who understands the theories of development, curriculum, and pedagogy can select any of the processes (such as figure/ground) from any category of potentiality (psychomotor, affective, perceptual, cognitive, or volitional) and generate an infinite variety of experiences geared to any developmental level designed to increase learning competence as it pertains to that process.

Finally, we raise two general implications of the epigenetic approach for educators, both parents and teachers. Since the child’s perceptual learning sets are developed as a result of his interactions with an environment, it is important in the early years of childhood that (1) the environment be rich in contrasts but not overstimulating—periods of stimulation should be alternated with periods of quiet; (2) the environment should perpetually introduce a moderate degree of novelty to the child but should avoid presenting disordered and excessive change; the novelty should emerge from within some familiar ground of order; and (3) the child should be given ample opportunity to act upon and manipulate objects in his environment. Several studies strongly indicate that the above mentioned trends in perceptual development are significantly enhanced by a child’s active explorations of his environment through movement and manipulation.

Summary

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to cover adequately within the confines of a brief article a topic as vast and complex as perceptual development. Many issues had to be excluded sacrificing breadth to depth. For instance, we have omitted any discussion of the particular anatomy and psycho-physiology of the sensory systems—vision, audition, olfaction (smell), gustation (taste), taction (touch), kinesthesis (muscle orientation), and vestibular sense (balance), since these topics are well covered and easily accessible to interested readers in a number of current publications. Instead, an attempt was made to explore a more fundamental level of the issue, the role of perception in the wider context of human development and the reality of perception as a highly refined and enormously extended expression of the epigenetic system which links the developing organism with his environment. Without perception the individual would be cut off from all contact with the external world and would be denied a range of experiences crucial to his development. For man the process begins with his receiving the world as a cause immanent within his being. These simple causal feelings are transformed, differentiated, integrated, and reintegrated and culminate in the focus of conscious experience. Whereas the perception of one’s environment as causally felt is vague and ambient, the transformed product is clear and articulate. Thus, through the integration of perceptual processes man becomes sensitive to the subtleties of experience. As Whitehead said:

[The] clarity of human vision both enhances the uniqueness of each individual occasion, and at the same time discloses its essential relationships to occasions other than itself. It emphasizes both finite individuality and also its relationship to other individualities.

Further, it discloses some analysis of the matter-of-fact in immediate realization. And yet, by this disclosure it brings into prominence the potentialities for alternative realizations, in the past, in the future, in the present. It tells what may be and what might have been. It lays bare diversities and analogies. Mankind enjoys a vision of the function of form within fact, and of the issue of value from this interplay.

[Page 36]

Recollections of Shoghi Effendi

BY UGO GIACHERY

SHOGHI EFFENDI RABBANI, Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, played a unique role and occupied a unique station in the history of the Faith. For thirty-six years he served as the authorized interpreter of Sacred Writings, the custodian of the Shrines of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, the leader of the Bahá’í world community, the builder and the guide of its nascent institutions, and the architect of global teaching plans that have carried the Faith to over three hundred and fifty countries and territories of the world.

Since Shoghi Effendi’s passing in November 1957 the Bahá’í community has expanded at such a rapid rate that today the vast majority of its members consists of those who have enrolled in the last ten years. The Bahá’ís who personally knew Shoghi Effendi represent a dwindling minority. It is, therefore, especially important that they record their memories, thus transmitting to their fellow Bahá’ís and to future generations detailed knowledge of his person and his imperishable work.

Dr. Ugo Giachery, an Italian by birth and culture, knew Shoghi Effendi and served him for a number of years. Having embraced the Faith in New York, he dedicated himself to the Cause as speaker, writer, and teacher, playing a most important role in the establishment of the Bahá’í community in Italy after the second World War. In December 1951 Shoghi Effendi appointed him a Hand of the Cause, or member of an institution charged with the propagation and protection of the Faith under the direct guidance of the Guardian. In that capacity Dr. Giachery acted as Shoghi Effendi’s representative to international conferences at Stockholm (1953) and Chicago (1958) and participated in others (New Dehli, 1953; Frankfurt, 1958). He traveled widely in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, visiting Bahá’í communities, attending national conventions, and helping establish Bahá’í institutions in areas newly opened to the Faith. He also assisted the Guardian in the construction of the superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb and the erection of the International Archives Building in Haifa.

Having been closely associated with Shoghi Effendi for several years, having experienced directly the power and energy that flowed from his person, and wishing to perpetuate the memory of that precious experience, Dr. Giachery has recently written a book of reminiscences. WORLD ORDER is delighted to have the opportunity to present to its readers, ahead of the book’s publication in the United States, excerpts from two chapters of Dr. Giachery’s Shoghi Effendi: Recollections.

F. K.

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The portions from two chapters of Dr. Ugo Giachery’s Shoghi Effendi: Recollections are reproduced by permission of the author and by arrangement with the publisher, George Ronald, London, England. Copyright 1973.

[Page 37]

[Page 38]

THE ONLY FIRM from which Mr. Maxwell had received a reply was that of Messrs. Guido M. Fabbricotti, of Carrara, the marble capital of the world. How this firm came to send a reply is related in the following episode and is yet another illustration of the element of wonder that pervaded every stage of activity connected with the conception, planning and execution of this lofty project.

Mr. Fabbricotti himself, who had carried on the tradition of the firm established a century before, had passed away a few years earlier, and its affairs were being conducted by his two sons-in-law, Colonel Bufalini and Dr. Orlando. A technical adviser and consultant was Professor Andrea Rocca who had graduated at the beginning of the century from the Academy of Beaux Arts (Accademia delle Belle Arti), of Carrara, and was a brilliant architect. His knowledge of granite, marble and other building materials, not only in Italy but also in many other parts of the world, could hardly be matched anywhere. He was born of a long line of marble craftsmen who, as he used to say, went back to the days of ancient Rome. During the lean postwar years, when there was practically no marble business, he called almost every morning on the various firms in Carrara, in the hope of finding something to do. One morning, in the early spring of 1948, he entered the Fabbricotti office as one of the two partners was crumpling in his hand what appeared to be a letter. As he threw it into the wastebasket, Professor Rocca asked:

“What is that you are throwing away?”

“Oh, it is only a preposterous request for information that sounds like a fable,” the partner answered; “something about a grandiose mausoleum to be erected in the Holy Land! But who can build such a costly structure at this time? Let us forget about it.”

Architect Rocca bent forward and lifted the crumpled letter out of the wastebasket.

“Let us read this again, together,” he said.

As soon as he became aware of its contents, he felt it provided the opportunity of a lifetime. After some resistance he induced the officers of the firm to answer it, and to offer their services in whatever capacity needed. From that moment on, Architect Rocca became the enthusiastic and indefatigable supporter of the project. Some weeks later, Mr. Maxwell met him in Rome and felt immediately that the project could be accomplished with speed and with the least element of error by a skilled staff under Professor Rocca’s supervision. Architect Rocca’s devotion to the whole work became his second nature; his competence and knowledge were astounding. He and I made a team of traveling surveyors to the quarries to select the perfect marble and to the ateliers where it was cut and carved with the highest degree of skill. After erection of the Shrine of the Báb was completed we teamed up again for the production of the marble needed to build the International Archives on Mt. Carmel. My association with him lasted well over ten years and taught me to appreciate and admire his great talent and versatility in doing things with marble. Through our association he learned much about the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, and his respect for the Cause and his love for Shoghi Effendi, in [Page 39] time, knew no bounds. When he passed away on 4 November 1967, Italy lost one of its best architects of the old school.

[Page 40]

AS PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED, the far-sightedness of Shoghi Effendi had prompted him to establish and develop an archive of the Faith in which relics and writings would be gathered and preserved for posterity—for believers in general, historians and others—in order to assure authentic sources of information. Immediately after completion of the three additional rooms of the Shrine of the Báb in 1929, he started to assemble every available item that he could secure, concerning the writings and the records of the lives of Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and displayed them as best he could at that time, in the newly-added rooms. As time passed, however, it became evident that the space was insufficient and only temporary, considering the fact that the Shrine was exclusively destined as a sepulcher, a place so sacred that he envisaged the time when visitors would be allowed only to circumambulate the edifice. Another small building, situated very close to the tomb of the Greatest Holy Leaf, in the Monument gardens near to UNO Avenue, was also utilized by the Guardian as part of the archives, and many objects and mementos were guarded and displayed there. He usually made reference to that building as the “Minor Archives.”

During my first two visits to the Holy Land, Shoghi Effendi spoke often of the importance of archives not only at the World Centre of the Faith but also for every national and local administrative body. Being well acquainted with the difficulties arising from the uncertainty of historical origins, facts and developments of some of the religions of the world, he encouraged individuals and institutions to develop, along well thought out plans, what would in time become the authoritative and genuine sources of the history of the Cause throughout the world, with an incredible variety of information reflecting the habits, culture, social and intellectual evolution of peoples, and the inception and development of the Faith, including its pioneers and early believers, in all continents of the globe. On such occasions, Shoghi Effendi spoke of the need for erecting a special building, somewhere on Mt. Carmel, in which to gather and preserve all the items already assembled, and all others yet to come.

Before proceeding to the momentous decision of building the new International Archives, I should like to mention an episode which further demonstrates the eager interest of Shoghi Effendi in collecting information and facts pertaining to the Sacred Writings and the history of the Cause. One evening, as I entered the dining room, the Guardian was already seated at his place at the table, his face shining with an inner jubilation which he could neither control nor conceal. At his side, upon the table, stood a small bundle, an object wrapped in a colored silk handkerchief, typical of the East and of Írán in particular. As soon as we were all seated and attentive, even before dinner was served, he said that a pilgrim had that day arrived from Ṭihrán, bringing with him one of the most precious documents to be placed in the archives. He untied the handkerchief and with great reverence lifted out a manuscript in book form, and, placing it in a position that every one could see, added that it contained two original Tablets in the handwriting of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. One was the Íqán and the other was a Tablet the name of which I do not now [Page 41] remember.

These manuscripts, Shoghi Effendi stated, were transcribed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His beautiful calligraphy, when He was about eighteen years old, and bore some additions in the Hand of Bahá’u’lláh, insertions which He had written on the margins of many pages in reviewing the manuscripts. Shoghi Effendi had never before seen the original of the Íqán and was deeply astonished to discover that the phrase he had chosen from this book and placed on the title page of his translation of Nabíl’s Narrative, The Dawn-Breakers, was an after-reflection of Bahá’u’lláh’s, written by Himself, on the margin of one page. The phrase in question is the one starting: “I stand, life in hand, ready; that perchance . . .”

The Guardian, that evening, was not only astonished but overjoyed as well, because he was conscious that through a mysterious process he had been inspired to adopt that phrase as an eternal testimonial to Bahá’u’lláh’s yearning to sacrifice His life for the Báb, the Primal Point. All of us who were seated at the table were awed and profoundly stirred, and I, in particular, felt that the existence of a spiritual link between our Guardian and the invisible world of God was something that no one should ever doubt.

On other occasions he told us how the archives were being enriched with the “sword of Mullá Ḥusayn,” the “rings of the beloved Bab,” some of His garments, and many other relics which he had placed on exhibit accompanied by small inscriptions on cardboard written by his own hand. Shoghi Effendi was always eager to increase the knowledge of every one who came close to him, and did not spare any effort to reveal or explain episodes and facts that were part of his heritage and vast culture, particularly when they referred to the history and the development of the Cause.

On the subject of the archives, one evening he revealed how the Tablets of the Báb to the Letters of the Living were found. He started by saying, “Where did the original Tablets come from, and how is it we have them all in the archives?”

“When the Master passed away,” he continued, “we found the whole set of these Tablets, in the original, twenty in all. They must have been in the papers of the secretary of Bahá’u’lláh, Mírzá Áqá Ján, and must have been given to Bahá’u’lláh years ago. The Bahá’ís had no knowledge of them during the days of the Master. One Tablet is addressed to the Báb, Himself; the last one, written on blue paper, is addressed to Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Him Whom God has manifested and will manifest’; these last two bear three seals each. In addition we found in the Master’s papers Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh addressed to the Master.”

The reader can well understand the Guardian’s decision to assure a new and larger home for all the precious objects and manuscripts, as a part of the development of the World Administrative Centre of the Faith on Mt. [Page 42] Carmel.

When one year later, in October 1953, I reached New Delhi for the last of the Intercontinental Conferences, I was given a message from Shoghi Effendi and a drawing, to be displayed at the Conference. It was a rough pen and ink drawing of the edifice to be built for the International Archives, and to be shown to the assembled believers to make them conscious, as the message suggested, of the immediate necessity of assisting the Guardian in carrying out his project. All the days of the Conference the drawing was placed at the front of the speakers’ table. It represented, in a general manner, a Greek temple reminiscent of the Parthenon, and also of temples in Paestum near Salerno, Italy, and in Agrigento in Sicily. The style was Ionic and showed a monumental and spacious building. Shoghi Effendi’s message instructed me to take the drawing to Italy and secure an approximate estimate of cost, an important element for the Guardian to know in order to reach a decision. Knowing well the eagerness of Shoghi Effendi, and being myself anxious to render to him some additional service, now that the Shrine of the Báb had been completed, I wrote an explanatory letter and dispatched it, together with the drawing, to a trusted friend in Italy to start some inquiries pending my arrival.

Because of a prolonged stopover in Persia, I did not reach Rome before the end of December, and was then able to send the information requested by Shoghi Effendi immediately after the festivities of the New Year. A well-developed plan of the building, incorporating all the characteristics shown in the sketch, was dispatched to the Guardian together with an approximate estimate of cost, which had been secured from one firm only. Some changes in the approaches and the front of the building were suggested in return by Shoghi Effendi, and this process was repeated once more until the drawings prepared by Architect Rocca were accepted by the Guardian with enthusiastic approval. The first tentative estimate had been encouraging to the point of inducing Shoghi Effendi to seek a definite and set cost that would guarantee the execution of the work within a certain time and without additional increase because of material or labor problems.

As with the Shrine of the Báb, there was indeed a divine intervention which permitted the Guardian to consummate his much longed for plan for the International Archives. With his approval, after the working drawings had been perfected and completed, I called for bids from four different firms to provide the marble carved and ready to be loaded on ships sailing from one of the main Italian ports. It was an interesting and challenging experience because although the firms in question seemed eager to secure the work, they must have committed some errors of judgment, as three of the bids were so far apart from the first estimate that it would have been almost impossible for the Guardian even to consider them. As the marble was to be the same “Chiampo Paglierino,” already used for the Shrine of the Báb, I felt it would be a considerable saving if the work could be done as close to the quarries as possible; it was our good fortune to receive the fourth bid from the firm which owned the quarries and had a well-equipped laboratory in the little town of Chiampo. Their bid was so reasonable that for a while I thought it to be a [Page 43] mistake, the difference from the other estimates received being quite considerable. All this work occupied a good part of the year, particularly because detailed plans had to be made to enable the engineering staff of the laboratory to become acquainted with and conscious of the work they would have to undertake. There was still another element which for some time delayed the Guardian’s final decision; namely the acquisition of a piece of land which belonged to an enemy of the Faith, and which was essential as it formed part of the plot on which it was decided to erect the Archives building. It took many months of difficult and involved negotiations, culminating with the intervention of the Israeli Government, before settlement was reached. On the eve of the thirty-third anniversary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ascension, the contract to secure the land was signed, with much relief and thankfulness on the part of Shoghi Effendi, who expressed his feelings in his historical message to the Bahá’í world of 27 November 1954. The way was now free to initiate what he defined as “. . . one of the foremost objectives of the Ten-Year Plan.”

The whole year of 1954 had been one of great achievements, following the power released by the four Intercontinental Conferences which had spurred the Bahá’ís of all continents of the globe to accomplish magnificent, selfless deeds that brought encouragement and satisfaction to the beloved Guardian. His gratitude to the “pioneers” who responded to his call—by him named the Knights of Bahá’u’lláh—was perpetuated in his creation of a Roll of Honor, for their activities added much prestige and strength to the process of the spiritualization of the masses. The acquisition of the site of the Síyáh-Chál, in [Page 44] Ṭihrán, and the evolution of the Institution of the Hands of the Cause of God, with the appointment of Auxiliary Boards throughout the Bahá’í world, were two other outstanding victories of that propitious year.

Indeed it was also an auspicious year for ourselves, because on 25 November we received a cable from Shoghi Effendi reading as follows: “Permitted pilgrimage you and Angeline dearest love Shoghi.” Our elation could not be contained and we made immediate plans to leave Rome within a few days. But another cable came requesting us to postpone our pilgrimage by one week. Late in the evening of Saturday, 11 December, we left Rome’s airport for Lydda where we arrived early the following morning. For Angeline, it was the greatest happening of her life, to be at the World Centre and meet Shoghi Effendi, as it had been for me some years earlier. At dinner time, Shoghi Effendi received us most lovingly and asked Angeline to sit in the place of honor. He was extremely happy and spoke of the progress of the Faith in Africa, which seemed to be at the time his favorite subject. In the days that followed, he mentioned the work to be undertaken in Italy for the International Archives, and requested me to verify personally the delimitation of the area upon which the building would be erected—already tentatively made by himself—a difficult task to accomplish considering the roughness of the ground chosen on the slope of Mt. Carmel and the lack of surveyor’s instruments. When I went to the site the following morning, I was amazed to see how well the marking had been done under his direction, with the assistance only of his chauffeur, using wooden pickets and white strings. The salient point—part of the whole plan for the establishment of the edifices of the Administrative Centre of the Faith—which was paramount in the mind of the Guardian, was the orientation of these Structures towards the “heart and Qiblih of the Bahá’í world.” To the countless pilgrims who have since then visited that blessed spot on the holy mountain, as well as to the endless stream of visitors who daily wander throughout the whole area, the beauty and perfect order may appear the result of skilled engineering calculations done over a number of years. Nothing could be farther from the real truth, as the credit beyond all praise goes to the talent, versatility and ingenuity of Shoghi Effendi alone.

The succession of days during the pilgrimage was filled with joy and delightful new experiences. The Guardian had already started to landscape the ground in the immediate vicinity of the chosen site, and I well remember his satisfaction and jubilation when on one of those evenings at table, turning to Angeline, he said: “I have just finished planting eleven cypress trees along the future path leading to the Archives building.” Vision and unswerving determination! What an edifying lesson to all of us sitting at the table! As the days passed, Shoghi Effendi requested us to remain longer than the normal duration of the pilgrimage. As we were reveling in this added bounty and making plans to use the precious time to the best spiritual advantage, on 24 December at table, the Guardian, turning again to Angeline, said: “I would very much like to keep you and Ugo here indefinitely, but Ugo must return to Italy and start immediately to work on the International Archives.”

Although we would have loved to remain near to him for a longer time, we rejoiced because here was the opportunity to render him another great service [Page 45] that would bring much solace and happiness to his heart. The following evening was parting time, and the impending departure next day cast a shadow of sadness upon us. Shoghi Effendi, conscious of the atmosphere brought by the occasion, spoke with a brilliancy surpassing in my memory that of any previous evening spent with him. Again, visions of the things to come were unveiled before our eyes as a certainty in the immediate future. The spiritual conquest of the various continents of the world and the multiplication of the institutions of the Faith were assured by his warm and melodious voice. We were not leaving his presence, but carrying away, to be with us forever, his dreams, his vision and the certainty of extraordinary things that were to happen.

[Page 46]

Notes on Women’s Liberation

BY JAMES C. HADEN

THE CURRENT feminist movement seems, to one who has been following it with great interest for the past five or six years, to have survived the fevers of its inception and the growing pains and confusions of its infancy. There was a time, the heyday of rallies against the war in Vietnam, when a crowd gathered to protest would be harangued by a parade of speakers in behalf of a motley assortment of liberation movements, women’s liberation being just one among them.

The war has faded into the background as a cause, and feminism has emerged as likely to last for quite a while. It has its right, center, and left wings; but it bids well to have left behind a few of its more colorful manifestations, such as SCUM—The Society for Cutting Up Men—whose manifesto can still be seen in Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful. The National Organization for Women (NOW) is by comparison extremely sedate, but it carries noticeably more weight in political circles.

The trickle of books, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which appeared in this country in 1953, and followed ten years later by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, has swollen to a flood; and the movement has its own glossy magazine, Ms. Anthologies memorialize articles which appeared in the early, more ephemeral publications.

It is probably not too far wrong to say that feminism has been taken up as the main liberal cause, largely displacing racial problems. Sexual differentiation reaches vastly farther into every corner of life and culture than racial differences, after all, and is considerably more ineluctable. But in intellectual circles it is now simply accepted by most people that one supports the feminist movement; and to question it in any aspect is most often to incur a combination of suspicion, incredulity, and ire.

The movement is still exceedingly hydra-headed, and it would be totally impossible to analyze it at all thoroughly save in a volume the size and density of Beauvoir’s. But surely it has reached a new level of maturity when the life-or-death syndrome, preserving the façade grimly against the enemy come what may, has slackened enough to allow one of its éminences grises, Betty Friedan, to be critical of certain others of its leaders publicly, even though the act provoked a storm of protest. So what is offered here consists of some notes toward a fuller and cooler consideration.

One very important thing which is emerging more and more clearly is that the women’s liberation movement has a two-fold nature. On the one hand, it is directly practical, aimed at such concrete issues as equal pay for equal work, equality in the property matters of marriage, right-to-abortion laws, full participation in the political process, and so on. On the Other, it is mystical and almost metaphysical, given to claims of a universal and transcendent sort, what might be called the feminist mystique. For instance, it is sometimes said that, if women were in political control, the world would be peaceful and prosperous, since its ills are due to male aggressiveness and insensitivity. This is typical of the a priori nature of such claims and arguments, since if one points to those countries where women are in fact the heads of government and where peace and prosperity are not the main facts of life, these data are not allowed to bear on the claim at all.

In its simplest, plainest form this side of the movement sounds like this: “The truth is that the whole point of liberation is choice. If a girl wants a career, she should be free to follow her stars; if she wants to devote herself to homemaking, that’s fine too.” Or, [Page 47] somewhat more grandly: “Women’s liberation cries out for human freedom, for the right of every individual to create his or her own life and to develop fully his or her potential.”

But now listen to this quotation from Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (the emphases are in the original):

. . . the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally . . . The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.

And with it the psychology of power.

This is admittedly the radical case, bluntly put. It is the kind of program rarely taken seriously enough by genteel, moyen passionnel supporters of the movement, whose inclination is to avert their eyes as from an indiscretion or aberration. But the question is whether there may not be some real connection between these minimal and maximal pleas for feminism. Perhaps it is, as one advocate has said, the “ultimate revolution.”

All large scale movements for change are fueled in part by grand visions of this kind and in part by other passions which are usually animosities. The excitation of strong passions requires that deep levels of one’s self be stirred, and the activity of women’s liberation which is called “consciousness raising” seems to be mainly this kind of excitation. Caroline Bird, a major spokesman for feminism, says:

A consciousness-raising session is informal, intimate. Ideally, a dozen or more women get together to talk about their experiences as women, to call to mind the little slights, frustrations and hangups they have put out of mind as inevitable.

There is, say the feminists, a well of anger hidden somewhere inside the gentlest women. Consciousness raising lets the genie out of the bottle. Once a woman admits to herself how she has been victimized, she can never go back to the Garden of Eden. She gets angrier and angrier and she infects the women around her. . . . The anger feeds on itself, and it is contagious. That’s what Women’s Lib is all about. It is less a movement than a revolutionary state of mind.

Once aroused, this aggrieved state of mind has to be molded and guided and given an object of some kind. The movement, like all movements, therefore makes extensive use of terms like “oppression” and “oppressors,” and indeed “liberation” itself, all of which are highly charged semantically. Next, the oppressors have to be identified, and here divergences arise. Sometimes it is men as such who oppress; sometimes it is that amorphous ogre called The System, which is alleged to victimize men equally with women, so that all must unite to overthrow it and liberate everyone. Here the program often becomes economic and political, and most usually neo-Marxist, although more radical thinkers like Firestone push past this to the biological; and in some sense she is probably more nearly right than the neo-Marxists.

What does all this signify? Certainly that [Page 48] we are dealing with something terribly profound. There is a fundamental power and mystery in sexuality, as the Greeks well knew. It may be that the visionary approach is indispensable in any attempts to reconsider it.

Somewhere in those depths sexuality and the religious nature of man are intimately intertwined. Religion is only secondarily a matter of the intellect, despite the labors of the theologians. Here also we find the double nature of the movement: first, growing agitation for the admission of women to the priesthood in those denominations which bar them, which is a straightforward practical aim; and, second, the appearance of a more theoretical or theological point raised by women like the one who, when asked if she attended church, replied that she had given it up, since it had become impossible for her to worship a male deity sincerely. If this latter attitude were to gain primacy, the former activity would actually begin to look almost misguided and trivial.

BUT I would like to turn from these high things to what at first glance may itself seem trivial, a brief examination of the feminists’ battle with language. My reason is that in this area there are exhibited some traits which may have a more general and profound tale to tell. The nature of the women’s movement may here be written in a readable fashion.

Concern about language is constant and prominent among militant feminists and their supporters. They are mainly middle class, urban, educated folk; and many of them are extremely verbal. They have great faith in academia—the main burden of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was that women should go back to school and take degrees—and they share the academician’s propensity to take words as virtually the equivalents of things. Words are a primary target for change because the reformers live in the midst of them, and they are likely to consider a verbal change a triumph. Otherwise it is immensely difficult to explain the satisfaction obtained from their vigorous efforts to have signs on restroom doors read “WOMEN” instead of “LADIES.”

At a freshman mixer held at a women’s college a few years ago, most of the girls were dressed in the traditional feminine way for a dance; but in the crowd were a few clothed very casually, even grubbily, in sneakers, jeans, and denim shirts. Around their necks hung signs reading “WOMAN.” Obviously the intent was to ridicule the conventional, sexually oriented clothing and grooming; but the interesting thing is the felt need to supply a verbal cue for the males to replace the non-verbal ones.

A question which is seldom or never asked is why the women’s movement has been so barren of vigorous linguistic innovation. The term “sexist” is constructed straight from the previous term “racist.” The term “male chauvinist” reeks of the pedant’s study. The black liberation movement vivified words like “honky” which were powerful inventions: literally the word means nothing, but simply in itself it conveys a world of contempt. Women’s liberation has nothing comparable, and it has even had to borrow the word “pig” and annex it to “male chauvinist” to lend it force.

The trouble seems to be an excess of intellectualism and a lack of spontaneity. This shows up clearly in the official designation “Ms.” which is intended to replace both “Mrs.” and “Miss” and obliterate distinctions of marital status in address. It may well endure, but possibly not for the reasons the feminists would urge. It neatly fits, for example, the needs of publishers and direct-mail advertisers who have large mailing lists and whose labors would be much simplified if the dual designations were abolished. (In fact, the very same designation was tried out [Page 49] years ago by commercial interests; but its time had not come.)

It is at best an awkward, Frankenstein monster of a term, with the knobs by which artificial life was instilled in it still projecting from its neck. Like Harry S Truman’s middle initial, it doesn’t stand for anything at all; hence it has to be pronounced in a way (miz) that is an earsore in cultivated speech. One wonders why its authors did not elect instead to go back to the common term which was the origin by elision of both “Miss” and “Mrs,” namely “Mistress.” That was a perfectly normal mode of address up into the seventeenth century and has in itself a good deal of gracefulness and style.

What appears plain is that it is only an aping of the male title “Mr.” by a direct parallel. But notice that the parallel is a purely visual one, while the ear is left with an unpleasant buzzing sound not at all like “Mister.” Why should eye dominate ear? The reason seems to be the leading role that the eye takes among intellectualistic minds. The term is derived entirely from the visual Mr./Ms. parity, and everything else is of no consequence. A final irony is that many feminists who insist on the non-sexist term of address still cling to the custom of wearing engagement and wedding rings. This is another instance where word is deemed more important than thing.

One borrowed term has gotten considerable currency: “s—work.” It is an unintellectual word with the kind of semantic strength needed to feed the passions, and it serves as an all-purpose name for anything the movement defines as undesirable for reasons of low intellectual content and challenge. Housework is the chief recipient; but feminist secretaries, for instance, tend to label any of their repetitive labors with that heading. It seems to make little or no difference to them that in most or all male occupations there is the same high percentage of noncreative activity: the impression the word is used to give is that the women would be freed from such work if only they could change their occupations.

The point I want to make by this extremely abbreviated look at the dealings of some of the feminists with language has to do with their surprising insensitivity to that astonishing and primary human phenomenon. Language has been held to have a profound and unique relation to being human by thinkers from Heraclitus in the fifth century B.C. to Noam Chomsky, alive and well in our own day. “In the beginning [or, at the heart of things] was the logos,” says the Fourth Gospel, logos meaning equally “word” and “rational order of things.” To ask about someone’s attitude to language is not to traffic in the trivial but to ask how it is he is trying to be human.

Over and over the militants seem to be adopting a radically voluntaristic stance. Like Marx, consciously or unconsciously, they say or imply that man has finally reached that stage of his evolution when he is no longer enslaved to the world around him, thanks to his own active intelligence, and can by his own efforts shatter and remake that world, first the natural and then the social, and in the remaking reconstruct himself. It is precisely this voluntaristic, radically humanistic spirit that underlies Firestone’s exhortation to stamp out the biological family, with the aid of modern technology, and also the assault on the nuances and complexities of natural language.

The claim that ordinary language (which in this case principally means English) is sex-based and rivets the chains of false sexual polarity on us unperceived from the cradle is frequently supported by some version of a theory of Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguistic expert who said some thirty years or more ago that syntaxes and vocabularies shape how we actually perceive our world and hence our thinking. It follows that those steeped in divergent tongues must live in distinct worlds, he said. Hopi or Chinese or Greek each articulates a world of its own, by controlling what one can or cannot say in them. It is worth noting that our own State [Page 50] Department thought highly enough of this thesis at one point to require its prospective foreign service officers to read Whorf’s articles during their training.

Here, as in so many places, the militants are not interested in raising any doubts about the thesis. There is a special attack on pronouns, and mostly on the custom of allowing the male forms to function in collective situations, so that one must say “he or she,” “he/she,” or even “she/he.” Yet in Turkish, there is no grammatical gender and only one third person pronoun, not three. There is the same term of address for both married and single women, and even one word for both brother and sister. If the claim that language forms determine social forms has force, it looks as though women should enjoy uncontested equality in Turkey. They obviously do not and have not, but this kind of pedestrian empirical evidence is not allowed to tell against the doctrine. Regardless of what enthusiasts may hold, there is no proof that language forms do in fact inexorably rule our thinking, but it is useless to say this to a militant feminist.

THE GREATEST OFFENSE, of course, is to the aesthetic sense: the clear implication of the movement’s demands on language is that all previous literature will either have to be suppressed or else bowdlerized to erase the taint of sexism. One male supporter of the movement writes that he bought a toy tool chest for his girl child, but felt he had to black out the name “Busy Boy Tool Box” from the lid to protect her. And this man is a literary critic for The New York Times.

This effort has an unhappy resemblance to that Victorian state of mind in which one could not use the word “leg” for a female nether limb, and even the legs of chairs and tables had to be swathed from tender eyes, evidently for fear they would provoke the corrupting word. On a higher plane, it sounds rather like Plato’s proposals in The Republic, where he urges that poets and their works be banished from the community unless they sing only the themes socially approved for the right nurturance of the young.

Indeed, various strains of low-grade Platonism run through the thinking of the movement. The insistence that human reason is something totally independent of the body and the physical world is a typical instance. This goes naturally with a derogation of the physical, which Plato himself sometimes seems to verge on; and it leads to the sort of ultra-Platonism which he had to condemn in one of his late dialogues. There Plato shows that if one lets himself become a dogmatic proponent of the formal entities of reason, living mind with its subtleties is extruded from one’s cosmos. Too much devotion to the similarities of things stamps out their differences. For the kind of mind that sees nothing to shudder at in terms like “chairperson” and “spokespeople,” and even “genkind” (though thankfully that one is merely proposed at present), no polarity or even nuance related to sexuality is tolerable.

Literature can be beaten to death with this kind of blunt instrument. An instructive example is Kate Millett’s widely read book Sexual Politics, in which she undertook feminist literary criticism of several authors she considered pernicious. One of them was Norman Mailer, and virtually the only effective part of his essay The Prisoner of Sex is that section where he shows in meticulous detail just how she distorts the novels in order to force them mercilessly into the service of her argument. Mailer is a brillant critic in his own right; and this is not least because he sees literature as something independent, [Page 51] powerful, mysterious, against which he has to measure himself, and not something to subserve extraneous ends. He describes Millett’s mind and method accurately when he says:

By any major literary perspective the land of Millett is a barren and mediocre terrain, its flora reminiscent of a Ph.D. tract, its roads a narrow argument, and its horizon low. . . . Her lack of fidelity to the material she read [is] equaled only by her authority in characterizing it. . . . and the yaws of her distortion [are] nicely hidden by the smudge pots of her indignation.

In fact, this matter of aesthetic sensitivity seems to me to be the crux of the matter, quite in contrast to the terms in which the debate is normally carried on. Consider the question of anthropological evidence for any natural and necessary male-female cultural differentiation. This usually comes first in the discussion, but I have here reserved it for the last.

We are surrounded and confronted by a host of sex-related differences in every culture. Their source is either human nature itself or some kind of cultural conditioning, or both. The extreme form of the first thesis is that anatomy is destiny, that of the second that everything in human behavior, save perhaps that needed barely to survive, is artificial and learned, that mankind is essentially plastic and makes himself.

The truth is much more likely to lie with the third alternative, whatever the titanic struggles between partisans of the other two theses. But if so, then how are we to disentangle the contributions of nature and nurture in culture? It certainly cannot be done by adopting any a priori attitude. Nor is it a simple matter to devise a scientific procedure to make the distinction. Only an aesthetic sense will work as a useful guide, for all of its uncertainties, to scent out possible distinctions which can then be clarified.

And the message of art seems to be that there are sexual polarities of some sort, that these are configurations which incorporate many sorts of elements into a delicate whole. The best artists have always known this; and today a writer like Doris Lessing, whose sympathy is clearly with women’s liberation, writes books far nearer to the classic conventions of male and female than radical ideology finds it easy to admit. Art and ideology are inevitable incompatibles, whatever revolutionists would like to believe. Art must always break through any levelings and constrictions; and we do well to ally ourselves with it, since it is a true liberating force.

Our age is an axial one, to borrow Karl Jasper’s word: a time in which the wheel of things is turning to a new position, carrying us with it. In that sense those who say that the feminist revolution is the ultimate revolution are right; but that does not certify Firestone’s brave new world as what must come or ought to come. Feminism says that it wants a world in which the spirit is freed and made larger, and this is the highest and best aim of all of us. But that cannot be done by a narrow and dogmatic Jacobinism which obliterates nuance and sterilizes the richness of life and the world. Without differences, without fineness, without polarities each of which defines itself constantly through the other, our world is a moonscape, hostile and bleak, though brilliant.

Amidst the ideological thunder and lightning, and the revolutionary whirlwind, it is not at all easy to hear the voice of patience and sensitivity though it too speaks of the needs for real change. But we must learn to hear it, and to let it speak through us as well.

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Design for Living

A REVIEW OF RENÉ DUBOS’ So Human an Animal (NEW YORK: SCRIBNERS, 1968), 267 PAGES

BY SHEILA BANÁNÍ

IN AN AGE in which it seems to many of us that science is abandoning its essential function of investigating the unknown in favor of an increasing concern with technology, René Dubos, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, So Human An Animal, stands as a beacon to help us return to our primary role as human beings. Dr. Dubos, as a scientist (his specialty is microbiology), has become aware of the distinctive differences between the responses (physiological and behavioral) of animals to their environment and those of men. “. . . the most frightening aspect of human life,” he writes, “is that man can become adapted to almost anything, even to conditions that will inevitably destroy the very values that have given mankind its uniqueness.” Man has the distinctive capacity to transcend some biological urges through another human gift, the ability to imagine future possibilities, to entertain anticipations based on factual knowledge, fear, or wishful thinking. Although man is constrained by his nature, he enjoys a great degree of freedom to “choose, eliminate, organize, and thereby create.” This ability, says Dubos, may be the most important of all human attributes. “Since the physical and social environment plays such a large role in the exercise of freedom, environments should be designed to provide conditions for enlarging as much as possible the range of choices.”

In a heedless indifference to the powerful effects of manipulation of our environment, we ignore the vulnerability of human beings as biological organisms to radical changes in the environment. Dr. Dubos expresses his concern in the following eloquent terms:

We have accumulated an immense body of knowledge about matter, and powerful techniques to control and exploit the external world. However, we are grossly ignorant of the effects likely to result from these manipulations; we behave often as if we were the last generation to inhabit the earth.

The danger consists in man’s capacity to alter his environment without regard to his own organismic or spiritual ability to adapt to it, and in technical change which may vastly outrun the infinitely slower process of biological evolutionary change. “While civilization obviously conditions what man becomes, it does not significantly affect his biological nature; what changes is the social milieu.”

Dr. Dubos disposes of the tired polemic of “nature” versus “nurture” by promoting the view that genetics and environment are complementary forces in the development of all living things, from microbe to man. The chapter on “Biological Remembrance of Things Past” emphasizes the lasting effects of early life experiences on the adult and elucidates the relationships among such conditioning influences on behavioral and physiological development as nutrition, growth, mental development, population density, infection, and variety and intensity of stimuli. Just as it is true, he makes clear, that the biological system, having completed its organization, becomes increasingly resistant to change, so it is with the emergence of social attitudes.

“History, both individual and social,” Dubos says, “is the account of the ways by which men meet the challenges of their environment through the instrumentality of their innate endowment, steered at every step by the vision of their goals.” He specifically includes such “challenges” in our environment as racial conflicts, poverty, and the urban ugliness of crowding and pollution. These are the diseases of civilization to which man, shortsightedly, adapts or which he can, with vision, seek to heal. The shocking paradox is that we seem to prefer adaptation or resignation to the very conditions we ourselves have brought into being. This is [Page 54] not the primitive’s acceptance of natural calamities; this is the madness of persevering in creating the means of our own destruction, whether that destruction be catastrophic or the slow spiritual wearing-down process we undergo in our great urban collectivities. Dubos attributes our failure to develop really desirable habitations—cities and dwellings— to a single-minded concern with productivity and efficiency which interferes with the basic and distinctive goal of man: the pursuit of meaning. But the common action which this pursuit presupposes, if it is to be effectively prosecuted, “cannot be mustered because it demands a common faith that does not exist. It is because we need a common faith that the search for significance is the most important task of our times.” The common element of various forms of faith, according to Dubos, is a “sense of universal relatedness” which comes to man as he develops an awareness that “his whole being is related to the cosmos, to the past, to the future, and to the rest of mankind. . . .”

Dubos’ book, timely, optimistic, impressive for its vast familiarity with man in his biological and psychological aspects, reminds us above all of our continuity with the past. We cannot return in any literal sense to the past, but we can recognize that the applications of science have had and will continue to have unforeseen reverberations at every level of our material and spiritual universe. We can and must direct our energies and intelligence to the resolutions of these incredibly complex reverberations, through a recognition of our place in the biosphere and a steadfast loyalty to our own distinctive humanness. Solutions to our problems must avoid the extremes represented, on the one hand, by denial of our material reality, of our biological needs, limits, and potentialities, and, on the other hand, by the denial of our spiritual reality, a denial which takes the form of that vulgar reductionism according to which man is “nothing but” an animal. Dubos’ balanced view, with its combination of sobriety, sensitivity, and imagination, merits high praise and a most enthusiastic recommendation.

Hope for Living

A REVIEW OF GEORGE B. LEONARD’S The Transformation (NEW YORK: DELACORTE PRESS, 1972), 258 PAGES

BY ARTHUR L. DAHL

DURING his long and distinguished career as a journalist (seventeen years as a senior editor of Look magazine) George Leonard came into contact with many of the exciting areas of human study, thought, and activity, as well as some of the most creative minds of this era. In addition, he has acquired over the years much first-hand experience with the new explorations into human feelings, sensitivities, and interrelationships loosely termed the human potential movement.

At heart Leonard is a social philosopher and a generalist. His mind is keen and sharp and able to see pattern and significance in many diverse facts and bodies of knowledge. Recently I heard him challenge the oft-repeated notion that knowledge is growing faster than it can be absorbed and applied by the human mind. He believes the main ideas of various intellectual disciplines can be grasped and related and general conclusions reached regarding large trends in society. The Transformation is his own impressive effort to do just that.

While still a practising journalist he focused on the field of education and produced in 1968 Education and Ecstasy, a book which offered radical criticism of the philosophy underlying most systems of education today, and a vision of a realizable ideal. It had quite an impact on the teaching profession. Now, after more than two years of full-time effort, he presents in The Transformation a broad view of a society which we call civilization coming to its end and transforming [Page 55] itself into something so entirely different that its nature can only be perceived in broad outline. Unlike Orwell, Huxley, Wells, and other futurists, Leonard does not describe the specifics of this world to come but rather the principles underlying its human relationships, its technology, and its political, economic, and social structures. On the whole it is a beautiful picture, and one consonant with the Bahá’í vision of the future in most respects. People with archaic convictions and unwilling to accept vast change have already dismissed it as hopelessly utopian. But Leonard builds a strong case, and his readable book performs a useful function in reaching many non-technical people with both information and important conclusions.

In his analysis Leonard draws on a considerable amount of knowledge in the fields of anthropology, economics, science, philosophy, and religion. He presents a view different from that usually found in such works, for his experience makes him appreciate more than most the cost to the human psyche of our modern technology. His skill as a writer enables him to delineate how feelings have been stifled by many centuries of emphasis on production at the expense of awareness and the value of the human experience.

During the ages of hunting and tribal life there was a direct relationship between a human need, the action taken to satisfy it, and the satisfaction itself. With the coming of agriculture, delays occurred between performance of work and the use of the product; and more complex social institutions had to be created. Kinship was related to “kindness” but had to give ground to ever larger groupings. Eventually classes and castes emerged, together with prestige markers and ultimately money. With control over nature came control over human beings: “Whatever we have gained in dominance has been paid for with the stultification of consciousness, the atrophy of the senses, the withering away of being.”

Leonard is a sensitive man. He agonizes over the price people have paid for material success in warped sensibilities, destruction of the environment, stifling of love, friendship, sympathy, and joy, and the ability to feel with the body, the mind, and the soul. He points to the sixteenth-century practice of maiming children so that they could be more effective beggars and suggests that we may be doing similar things today. “Civilization’s most indispensable nonmaterial endowment to its children is some type of neurosis/disease/discontent. Each NDD, whatever its nature or origin, serves to keep the human individual in a state of dis-ease, to render each person’s here-and-now uncomfortable and distasteful. If properly programmed, the NDD also dulls the senses and cuts off the individual from nature and the cosmos. The best way of gaining temporary relief lies in forgetfulness of existence. This is generally achieved either by drugs or by the relentless getting and building that has characterized much of human life since the success of agriculture.”

One example Leonard cites with telling effect is the nineteenth-century blunting of the erotic impulse except with respect to the sexual act itself, which was needed to add to the population. He outlines the theories of Dr. Sylvester Graham, highly influential in America, which are so extreme as to be ridiculous if they did not tragically demonstrate how far people had gone in accepting repression in the interest of economic growth.

Equally strong is Leonard’s exploration of the scientific awareness that we have gone too far in plundering the planet. He sees in our economic activities an overemphasis on adaptations of matter requiring large expenditures of energy. Part of the transformation will be directing our goals toward those activities which bring large elements of human satisfaction but little consumption of heat.

Much of this is strong stuff, but we need it. The earlier chapters sound much like other warnings of the disasters which will come if society refuses to change. “It is my thesis,” [Page 56] Leonard writes, “. . . that the current period is indeed unique in history and that it represents the beginning of the most thoroughgoing change in the quality of human existence since the creation of an agricultural surplus brought about the birth of civilized states some five thousand years ago. . . . I shall attempt to demonstrate that the Transformation, despite surface similarities, is neither utopian nor millenarian, that it is not only possible but inevitable, that it is, most significantly, already under way, that it proceeds out of historical necessity, amenable to validation both by intuition and by reason.”

Some of the changes Leonard forecasts run closely along Bahá’í lines. He sees politics as one of our weakest and most corrupt areas, with power used too much for its own sake. He deplores our punitive system of treating criminals. He anticipates that greater value will be placed on old people when all of human experience takes its place as a major goal of life. He sees a turning away from artificial means of awareness, such as alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, when people learn how to find fulfillment by natural means. “The best alternative to drugs,” he says, “lies simply in not turning off young people in the first place.” He visualizes new means of dealing with racial problems. He knows that war no longer has a place in society; and since it seems to be essential to the civilization we have known, this is one more death knell to that civilization.

Of course, the great lack in Leonard’s book from the Bahá’í point of view is his concentration on the evolution of the transformation solely at the human level. He understands people well and visualizes all these changes from the perspective of human institutions and activities. He speaks of religion but does not seem to place much emphasis on the teachings and the spiritual power eminating from the Manifestations of God down through the ages as being the primary force behind the major transformations in society that have been documented in the past. Thus, he correctly states the problem and outlines the nature of the solution while omitting the source of power and authority which might be the key to bringing the solution into being. Of course, this realization, in the long run, is an act of faith. But much more study must be given to the gaps that exist between the Bahá’í concepts and those enlightened human concepts which Leonard so ably summarizes.

It is good that men of George Leonard’s intelligence, breadth of knowledge, and good will do see the long range implications of the changes that are going on in the world and present them with such eloquence and poetry. Here is a book for those who look at change as a source of hope rather than fear.

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Authors and Artists

SHEILA BANÁNÍ, the mother of two children, holds a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles and is now completing a master’s degree in architecture and urban planning at the same institution. She has worked, for the last three years, as an administrative analyst at the UCLA School of Public Health in the Division of Population, Family, and International Health Graduate Program.

PATRICK W. CONWAY is a member of the Anisa staff and a professor in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Conway holds a B.A. degree in psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an Ed.D. degree in educational psychology and planning from the University of Massachusetts. His interests include the nature of volition and anxiety; the relationship between metaphysics, science, and psychology; meteorology; and modern British music. He created and produced a twenty-six part series on modern British music for the public radio station WFCR.

ARTHUR L. DAHL is an investment counselor and a chartered financial analyst, who holds a B.A. degree in economics from Stanford University and an M.B.A. degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His interests include music, theatre, films, tennis, golf, hiking, the human potential movement, and art, especially that of Mark Tobey. A former president and still a Board Member of the Carmel Bach Festival, Mr. Dahl will publish an article on the Festival in the April 1974 Westways. He has also published articles on business and has been a faithful contributor of articles and reviews to World Order.

UGO GIACHERY has been introduced to the reader in a note accompanying his article.

JAMES C. HADEN is a professor of philosophy, who has taught at Oakland University, Hampshire College, and The College of Wooster. His article “The Ignorance of Socrates” appeared in the Winter 1968—69 issue of World Order.

DOUGLAS MARTIN holds degrees from the Universities of Waterloo and Western Ontario and is currently completing his doctorate at the University of Saskatchewan. His work has been concentrated in the field of North American social and cultural history. For a number of years he has served as secretary to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada.

WILLIAM STAFFORD, Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, has made previous appearances in World Order, His poems have been published widely in various literary magazines, and collections of his work appear in several collections, including Some Day, Maybe (1973) and Allegiances (1970). Professor Stafford was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, 1970-71, and, among other honors, has received the National Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

ART CREDITS: P. 2, photograph by Juan Caban; p. 13, drawing by Mark Hopkins; p. 22, photograph of a painting by Mark Hopkins; pp. 37, photograph of the Shrine of the Báb by Glenford E. Mitchell; p, 39, photograph of the illuminated dome of the Shrine of the Báb by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 43, photograph of the Bahá’í International Archives Building, courtesy Bahá’í Publishing Trust; p. 45, photograph of the resting place of Shoghi Effendi in London, courtesy Bahá’í Publishing Trust; p. 52, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; back cover, photograph by Juan Caban.

JUAN CABAN is Assistant Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Education, University of Massachusetts. Dr. Caban has worked in the Audio-Visual Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel.

MARK HOPKINS is making his first appearance in World Order. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, he has been living in Italy since 1971, but returned to the United States recently to exhibit his work in Seattle. Mr. Hopkins worked for the renowned artist Mark Tobey for some time both in Seattle and in Basel, Switzerland.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL is Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Managing Editor of World Order.

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