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World Order

SPRING 1975

THE EQUALITY OF THE SEXES

Editorial

CONCERNING THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN

Bahá’í International Community

A LOOK AT ANTIFEMINIST LITERATURE

Gayle Morrison

THE UNITY OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE

William S. Hatcher

[Page 0]

World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 9 NUMBER 3 • 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

Editorial Assistant

MARTHA PATRICK

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

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

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

Copyright © 1975, 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 The Equality of the Sexes

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

4 Thought

poem by William Stafford

7 Concerning the Rights of Women

by the Bahá’í International Community

22 The Unity of Religion and Science

by William S. Hatcher

38 Remembering a Scene

poem by Eva Kahn

40 A Look at Antifeminist Literature

by Gayle Morrison

60 Authors and Artists in This Issue

[Page 1]

The Equality of the Sexes

ON THE LONG AND PAINFUL ROAD from primitive herd to modern society humanity traversed hundreds of stages, adopting and rejecting ideas, building and tearing down institutions, acquiring and discarding customs. In the process there grew up rigid concepts of rank, status, and importance, based largely on possession of power. Racial, ethnic, national, religious, and class prejudices have often been a means of preserving the dominant position of one segment of society over another. Cutting across every category of discrimination was the universal determinant of sex. Beyond all other accidents of life, to be born a female was to be held inferior to the male.

Today the old order is in collapse. In the disequilibrium of our time the oppressed are recovering their voice, the deprived are clamoring for their rights. There is no longer any justification for prejudice, exploitation, oppression. Our challenge is to abandon division and turn toward the inescapable reality of the oneness of humanity. Only by meeting this challenge will we achieve equilibrium in a just and peaceful new order.

The oneness of mankind means that all are children of the same Creator. Every individual is endowed with a spiritual essence which transcends differences. The soul is neither black nor white, neither rich nor poor, neither male nor female. Therefore, such distinctions are not the measure of human value. Rather they are an expression of the endless variety of life. Humanity is one not in its sameness but in its diversity.

Men and women are like the wings of the bird of humanity. If they are not equal in strength, equal in the ideals they contribute, humanity is crippled, earthbound. Inequality has stunted the growth of countless individuals and denied women full participation in all departments of life. The predominance of masculine over feminine values, as these have been traditionally defined, has reinforced some of the worst human traits and served to ensure the dominance of men over women. Only through the affirmation of women’s equal worth will we achieve the perfect balance of God’s creation and become at last fully human—gentle as well as strong, protective as well as constructive, merciful as well as just.

The equality of sexes entails equal education and equal opportunity. It implies that women will embrace new possibilities, not that they will reject their natural procreative functions or become identical with men. Moreover, it requires a profound change in attitudes, for woman cannot gain equality as long as her striving is checked by man’s sense of superiority which in turn produces a sense of hopelessness and robs her of self-esteem.

Ultimately the equality of men and women demands a revolutionary commitment to the dignity of every individual and to the interdependence of all in one united human family. To step into the unknown is always difficult, frightening as well as exhilarating. However, we will not falter or fail if we are firmly convinced that ahead of us lies world unity—a new and necessary stage in the evolution of mankind.

[Page 2]

Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

EQUALITY, development, and peace. That is the theme of International Women’s Year 1975, to which we are pleased to offer several articles in this issue (others will appear during the year) as a contribution toward greater understanding of the equality of men and women. WORLD ORDER, however, is no newcomer to the topic. In Spring 1972 we published Mildred R. Mottahedeh’s “Educating Women for Their Rights.” That issue, incidentally, also carried articles on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and a number of early American Bahá’ís, many of whom were distinguished and indomitable women who championed the Faith in the early decades of this century, and on “Anne Frank: The Child and the Legend,” a young woman who needs no introduction. In Summer 1972 we devoted an entire issue to the equality of men and women, anticipating International Women’s Year by three years. Marzieh Gail’s and Dimitri Marianoff’s “Thralls of Yearning Love: A Story of Ṭáhirih” brought to fruition Mr. Marianoff’s dream of writing an account of Ṭáhirih, the invincible heroine of the Bábí Era and the sole woman among the Báb’s first eighteen followers. Mr. Marianoff’s sudden death thwarted his wish, but Mrs. Gail brought his notes and outline of Ṭáhirih’s life and death to a rich conclusion. In the same issue WORLD ORDER published Constance Conrader’s “Women: Attaining Their Birthright”—a survey of the puzzlingly “unnatural relationship which has existed between men and women throughout recorded history” and a comprehensive discussion of Bahá’í teachings on the subject. Fittingly, the article has just been reprinted by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust as a handsome pamphlet.

International Women’s Year has been in the planning for several years; and we should see, on the local, national, regional, and international levels, many activities and programs organized to promote a greater understanding of the equality of men and women.

* * *

We are grateful to the Bahá’í International Community for the series of documents featured in this issue. The Bahá’í International Community (represented by Dr. Victor DeAraujo) has offices in New York and is accredited to the United Nations Economic and Social Council to which it submits documents, on a wide variety of topics, for consideration and use.

We are equally grateful to Ms. Gayle Morrison who for two years has been living in Brazil but accepted the difficult assignment of reviewing a number of antifeminist books which have appeared in recent years in the United States. The books were mailed to her more than a year ago; and she has worked, as she puts it, more or less in a vacuum—away from regular access to magazine and newspaper articles on the topic, away from the milieu to which the books by and large address themselves, away from a regular opportunity to discuss the concepts with which [Page 3] she was working. We think the “vacuum” mattered little enough: the excellence of her work and insights speak for themselves.

* * *

No matter how careful the Editors are, occasionally unfortunate blunders slip by the many eyes which go over the galley proofs, page proofs, and silver prints of each issue. The Editors were mortified at the way Robert Hayden’s poem “Stars” appeared in the Fall 1974 issue. The opening lines of sections two, three, and five, which were meant to stand as titles, were run into the bodies of the sections. And the subtle pattern of stanzas was ignored throughout the poem. This was particularly unfortunate in the final section, which was meant to have three stanzas of three lines each. We hope that the author and our readers can forgive our unfortunate oversight in this exquisite poem which had never before appeared in print.

* * *

To the Editor

I simply wanted to compliment you on the remarkable work which I feel you have been doing in the editorship of WORLD ORDER magazine. The diversified areas of thought and of interest, which you present in your publication, are, to me, a clear indication of your sincere effort to fulfill in your magazine the glorious station given to man’s intellect by Bahá’u’lláh.

When in the Summer 1972 issue you presented the story of Ṭáhirih, the first representative, on a religious platform at least, of the equality of man and woman, it was a great achievement. This, coupled with “Women: Attaining Their Birthright” exposes the relevancy of the Bahá’í Faith to the public view.

Standing, as we do, at the confluence of two world orders, you seem to have acquired the rare gift of being able to propose workable solutions to the problems in which society, gripped in the reigns of a crumbling, materialistically oriented world order, is now sadly enmeshed.

Bahá’ís are exhorted to be rational human beings. Your magazine shows to its readers how Bahá’í thought can hold its own in the scrape of modern-day issues. Please continue in this course.

MARK ALAN FOSTER

Levittown, New York

I am very interested in what you have set out to do in your publication . . . WORLD ORDER. I wholeheartedly agree that we all need a broader and better informed mind in order to be able to cope with problems of modern industrial society. Indeed the parochial attitude with which those pressing problems have tried to be solved seems to have retarded the very development and improvements it has set out to accomplish.

SHAHBAZ FATHEA’AZAM

Hants, Nova Scotia, Canada

May I say that I find WORLD ORDER one of the most stimulating and inspiring magazines to which I have ever subscribed. The editorial and the article entitled “Oriental Scholarship and the Bahá’í Faith” in the Summer 1974 issue are merely two recent examples of the quality of its content.

ALLAN F. RAYNOR

Willowdale, Ontario, Canada

[Page 4]

Thought

1.

When I think I fall off the world.

The muscles of my face become accomplices,

then one single look, then other, other. . . .

I think: The truth leads back.

I find it, threaded certain ways, and—

among all—the right thread is

the one that breaks. I go back and

go back: failure is the place the world is.

Again I settle there, at home a while;

then, I think; then—fall off the world.

2.

Thought in stillness rustles out

through the curtain, comes upon

deep shadows added to the world.

On the deep world, what are these added

things, to come upon? They are

what thought makes, a returned presence,

the immediate that we expelled.

Think wider: somewhere all the animals

own what we forsook, starting

from dirt. On still days like this

thought rustles back, finds it all again.

—William Stafford

[Page 5]

[Page 6]

[Page 7]

Concerning the Rights of Women

DOCUMENTS BY THE BAHÁ’Í INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

INTRODUCTION: Equality of men and women is one of the cardinal principles of the Bahá’í Faith. WorLD ORDER is happy to respond to the United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year with the publication, in this and subsequent issues, of a series of documents, articles, and book reviews dealing with the role of women in the modern world. Below we offer our readers a number of documents submitted to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council and to the Center for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs, Promotion for Equality of Men and Women Branch, in 1973 and 1974 by the Bahá’í International Community. These illustrate at least to some extent the commitment of the Bahá’ís to the achievement of the equality of the sexes.

UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL

COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Twenty-fifth session

14 January-1 February 1974

Item 10 of the provisional agenda

E/CN.6/NGO/247

26 December 1973

ORIGINAL: ENGLISH

WORK PROGRAMME AND MEDIUM-TERM PLAN

Statement submitted by the Bahá’í International Community (in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, Category II)

1. The Bahá’í International Community, comprising Bahá’í communities in 335 countries and territories, in which its members—men and women representing over 1,600 tribes and ethnic groups—express a world-wide unity in diversity, appreciates this opportunity to make a few observations bearing on the place of education in the successful integration of women in development.

2. In the view of the Bahá’í International Community, particular emphasis should be placed on the education of women and the importance of their unique contribution to the advancement of civilization. While universal compulsory education applies to both sexes, because of woman’s role as mother and first educator of the child, the education of women is more important than that of men, and if parents are unable to fulfil their duty to educate both boy and girl in a family, the girl should be given preference. This is not to imply that women are to be considered only in relationship to the rearing of children and the duties of the household; for it is important that women develop all latent capacities, obtaining by way of their constructive pursuits the recognition of complete equality.

[Page 8] 3. Furthermore, while some of the qualities and functions of men and women differ, neither sex is inherently superior or inferior, nor should this affect the expectation of equal rights. In a world in which the forceful and aggressive qualities by which men have dominated over women are becoming neither necessary for survival nor desirable for the solution of human problems, mental alertness, intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service in which the woman is strong are gaining in importance. The new age will surely be one in which the so-called masculine and feminine elements of civilization will be more properly balanced. As women receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women is universally recognized, the natural inclination of women to peace and the fact that they find it more difficult to sacrifice their children and to sanction war will prove of great benefit to the world.

4. It is our belief and experience that it is possible to maintain the constructive cultural differences and the unique contribution which each person as well as each local and national group can make to the development and advancement of mankind, while at the same time freeing men and women from their divisive prejudices. To achieve this, it is necessary, however, to provide all humanity with an education that will awaken both men and women to the particular requirement of our age—the unity of mankind. In the view of the Bahá’í International Community, there must be education towards a consciousness of the organic unity of all life, towards the development of qualities and virtues which are the true and distinguishing characteristics of the human race, and towards a dedication to the solving of human problems in a spirit of service.

5. While education is recognized as significant to motivation and change in attitudes, if women—and indeed men also—are to make a meaningful contribution to society, it should be an education that goes beyond the training of human beings intellectually or for the acquisition of skills. The experience of the Bahá’í International Community for over a century is that a deeper understanding of the purpose and value of human life resting on a spiritual foundation which ensures the full growth of qualities such as trustworthiness, honesty and justice is an important aspect of such an education. A sense of worth, assurance and courage, as well as knowledge of direction, are dependent upon the attainment of spiritual as well as material goals. Progress, often considered in terms of man’s physical well-being, and development expressed as use of human resources to provide a higher standard of living, should have other dimensions if human beings are to attain full realization of their potentialities and the willingness to use their talents in helping others attain happiness.

[Page 9]

UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL

COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Twenty-fifth session

Item 3 of the provisional agenda

E/CN.6/NGO/251

11 January 1974

ORIGINAL: ENGLISH

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR

Statement submitted by the Bahá’í International Community (in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, category I)

The Secretary-General has received the following statement which is circulated in accordance with paragraphs 29 and 30 of Economic and Social Council resolution 1296 (XLIV).

SUGGESTIONS AND PROPOSALS FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S YEAR

The Bahá’í International Community, bearing in mind the purpose for which International Women’s Year has been dedicated (General Assembly resolution 3010 (X:XVII)), and the report of the Secretary-General on International Women’s Year (E/CN.6/576), would like to offer several observations and proposals which we feel may be a contribution to the draft programme of action for that Year to be presented to the Commission on the Status of Women at its twenty-fifth session in 1974. These suggestions are made in view of the particular interest of the Bahá’í International Community in the principle of the equality of men and women, as well as the role of women in relationship to development and the advancement of peace in the world, which the Bahá’í teachings emphasize, and which Bahá’í communities around the world are already aware of and committed to.

In a statement concerning the advancement of women, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme said that “the key to development in the coming decade is the universal acceptance of the need to progress.” In making proposals for International Women’s Year we feel that certain points might be considered which would help to define “progress”—to give a clearer sense of direction, as well as to determine the most effective and constructive form of action. Progress is often considered only in terms of man’s physical well-being, his material needs, development being directed to the accomplishment of a higher standard of living. While the Bahá’í International Community feels that such development is essential to the well-being and hap- piness of human beings, we would suggest that there are other dimensions of progress which must be included if human beings are to attain full realization of their potentialities. A deeper understanding of the value of human life and of its quality, resting on a spiritual foundation which will lead ultimately to the attainment of co-operation between nations for the advancement of all mankind; the loving assistance which human beings, men and women, must give to each other; the qualities of trustworthiness, honesty and justice which must [Page 10] be developed if humanity is to advance—are all important aspects of education which must be included. Most people would agree that education is the key to the motivation and the change in attitudes necessary if the generality of women are to make a meaningful contribution to society; but it should be an education that goes beyond the training of human beings intellectually or the acquisition of skills. A sense of worth, assurance and courage are dependent upon the realization of moral and spiritual character—a fact that is becoming increasingly apparent in both the rich and the poor countries of the world.

The Bahá’í International Community would like to offer the following suggestions which the Branch for the Promotion of the Equality of Men and Women may wish to consider incorporating in some manner in the programmes for International Women’s Year.

1. To encourage the independent search for truth, free of influence of family, community or nation. This is not to say that women are to be taught a truth, but rather that the spirit of free, impartial and independent investigation should lead in a constructive way to the breaking of inhibiting and outmoded traditional patterns and lead ultimately to unity of understanding and of action. The spirit of independent thought must be fostered if women are to gain knowledge, conviction and courage to take initiative in abandoning traditional ways which impede not only their own advancement but the advancement of men as well.

2. To place emphasis on the responsibility of women to acquire education, to become proficient in the arts and sciences, proving by their accomplishments that their abilities and powers have merely been latent. The devotion of women to the industrial and agricultural sciences, for example, in a spirit of service to the greatest needs of mankind at the present time, will demonstrate their capability and ensure the recognition of equality in the social and economic areas of life. The promotion of the rights of women by means of demonstration or by pressure groups may result in divisiveness; while constructive contributions will be recognized and appreciated. It is mentioned in the Bahá’í writings that “when the actions of women show their power there will be no need to proclaim it by words,” and that when men recognize the equality of women “there will be no need for them to struggle for their rights”.

3. To stress that the principle of equality in rights does not necessarily imply that men and women should, or must, exercise the same functions. There are differences between men and women in qualities and powers: mental alertness, intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service are qualities in which women are strong. There is need for greater emphasis on these qualities and a better balance between spiritual and material powers if humanity is to progress. However, “the fact that there is not equality in functions between the sexes should not infer that either sex is inherently superior or inferior to the other, or that they are unequal in their rights”. (From the Bahá’í writings.)

4. To place greater emphasis on the importance of the contribution of women as mothers and as educators of children. The Bahá’í teachings point out that “the education of women is more necessary and important than that of man, for the woman is the trainer of the child from infancy. If she be defective and imperfect herself, the child will necessarily be deficient; therefore imperfection [Page 11] of woman implies a condition of imperfection in all mankind, for it is the mother who rears, nurtures and guides the growth of the child”. It is for this reason that Bahá’í parents are urged to give preference to the education of girls if both boys and girls in the family cannot be given equal opportunity for education.

It is not the Bahá’í view, however, that women are to be considered important only in relationship to the rearing of children and attending to the duties of the household. The importance placed on the education of women in the Bahá’í faith is intended to bring about the equality of men and women.

5. To place emphasis on the assistance which women can give to humanity as peace-makers. Because women by nature are more inclined to peace, and find it more difficult than men to sanction war, as they participate in human affairs, gaining the right to vote and exercise this right, their voice will naturally influence humanity towards peace. The Bahá’í writings make clear that “when all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be utterly destroyed. Equality between men and women is conducive to the abolition of warfare for the reason that women will never be willing to sanction it”.

6. To educate every person towards the realization of the organic oneness of mankind. Since it is a Bahá’í conviction that the good of any part is dependent upon the good of the whole, as long as women are held in an inferior position and do not attain equality with men, men too will be unable to “achieve the greatness which might be theirs”. This principle operates in all areas, whether in relationship to race, class or national differences in the world. As is true of the family—in which all the rights and prerogatives of each and every member must be preserved, while at the same time sustaining the unity of the family—the well-being of humanity is dependent on an equitable and just relationship between nations and the orientation of national Governments towards the whole of mankind.

UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCIL

COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Twenty-fifth session

Item 4(a) of the provisional agenda

E/CN.6/NGO/252

11 January 1974

ORIGINAL: ENGLISH

INTERNATIONAL INSTRUMENTS AND NATIONAL STANDARDS RELATING TO THE STATUS OF WOMEN

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DECLARATION ON THE ELIMINATION OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN AND RELATED INSTRUMENTS

Statement submitted by the Bahá’í International Community (in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, category II)

The Secretary-General has received the following statement which is circulated in accordance with paragraphs 29 and 30 of Economic and Social Council resolution 1296 (XLIV).

[Page 12] Since this is the first occasion we have had to report on publicity given to the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, we would like to mention that as far back as 1968 we were making available to our affiliates information on that United Nations instrument, as well as mailing supplies for United Nations Day or Human Rights Day meetings. In a circular letter of 12 February 1968, sent to Bahá’í National Spiritual Assemblies, offering suggestions for kinds of activities their communities might undertake during the International Year for Human Rights, we suggested sponsoring “some activity or celebration built around women’s rights, to stress our belief in the equality of men and women.” That year our records indicate that supplies of the Declaration were sent to several countries, as has been true since.

We are very pleased to report, however, that, in a circular letter of 15 June 1973, we offered to supply our National Spiritual Assemblies with quantities of the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, to assist them “to emphasize the need for a better understanding of the principle of the equality of men and women” in their United Nations Day and Human Rights Day observances. The response was most encouraging. We shipped almost 4,000 copies of the Declaration—in English, French, or Spanish—and over 100 copies of the new brochure, “The Equality of Rights for Women”. These materials were sent to the following Assemblies, representing quite a range of peoples and cultures: Alaska, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Dahomey, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, Ghana, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Guatemala, Hawaii, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya, Laos, Mauritius, Netherlands, Niger, Réunion, Spain, Swaziland, Thailand, Togo, United Republic of Tanzania and the Windward Islands.

On 21 July 1972, the Bahá’í International Community sent copies of the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to 113 National Spiritual Assemblies—national administrative bodies of communities which are our member-affiliates. Particular attention was called to articles I, III, and XI, paragraph 2, as it was in these areas that Bahá’í communities could make a most effective contribution. A compilation of quotations from the Bahá’í writings on the equality of men and women—a basic teaching of the Bahá’í Faith—as well as specific quotations on the importance of women in assuming an equal role in community life, were included.

A detailed questionnaire to determine the degree of activity of Bahá’í women in each national community was included in the same mailing. To date replies have been received from 81 administrative bodies, and these questionnaires are being reviewed and a report prepared. The forms included questions on changing attitudes of both men and women—the influence of traditions and customs, the participation of Bahá’í women in Bahá’í community life (administrative activity, elections, consultation, service on Bahá’í administrative bodies, teaching activity etc.), as well as questions relating to education (literacy programmes, school enrolment and the education of children in the equality of the sexes) and inquiring as to whether women were assuming roles considered traditionally masculine.

[Page 13] It is our hope that the measures referred to above, as well as our plans for International Women’s Year, which we are at the present time in the process of formulating, may be a contribution to the implementation of the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against women.

Because of their commitment to the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’ís the world over continue to deepen their understanding of the principle of equality, and a gradual but steady change in attitudes can be counted upon because of the roots from which such action springs. The programme of the Bahá’í International Community for International Women’s Year will serve to re-emphasize important aspects of the status of women and help Bahá’í communities relate to other organizations and to the work of the United Nations in the promotion of the principle of the equality of both sexes.

PRELIMINARY ENQUIRY INTO THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE BAHÁ’Í WORLD COMMUNITY

Report submitted on January 7, 1974, by the Bahá’í International Community to the Center for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs, Promotion for Equality of Men and Women Branch, in connection with preparations for International Women’s Year

INTRODUCTION

On July 21, 1972, the Bahá’í International Community sent [a] . . . questionnaire on the participation of women in the life of Bahá’í communities to its member-affiliates—113 National Spiritual Assemblies, national administrative bodies of those communities—to determine the extent to which changing attitudes among Bahá’ís have affected the position of women. The topics covered in the broad range of questions were of interest, directly or indirectly, to the work of the United Nations in the area of the status of women.

In addition to the questionnaire, the Bahá’í International Community provided National Spiritual Assemblies with a selection of important passages from the Bahá’í Writings on the equality of men and women, which not only emphasized in a concise way the goals toward which all Bahá’í communities are striving, but provided material which could be used for the education of local and national communities. Many communities, not fortunate in having a full library of Bahá’í literature on this subject, are now provided with a brief but powerful summary of authoritative statements on the importance of the principle of the equality of men and women—one of the significant teachings of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

Also enclosed with the questionnaire was a copy of the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, calling specific attention to those sections in which the Bahá’í International Community, [Page 14] a Non-Governmental Organization accredited to the Economic and Social Council, can make, and is already making, a contribution to the work of the United Nations.

We find that this questionnaire and enclosures have increased the interest of Bahá’í communities in the subject of the equality of men and women and have encouraged plans for discussions, conferences, and institutes.

It should be pointed out that all individual Bahá’ís and Bahá’í institutions are committed to the belief that the teachings of their Faith are invested with Divine authority and that the principles of these Teachings are the guidance toward which Bahá’ís continually turn for new insight and understanding. It is inevitable at this time in the history of the Bahá’í world community that there are wide differences in the understanding, as well as in the application, of these principles, and that the full appreciation of their significance, and its demonstration in action, are dependent upon many factors in the life of the individual and in society. Bahá’í communities, although very different one from another, since they include a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds, are also very similar. They express a unique unity in diversity, unity in that all are committed to Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of their Faith, as the Divine Revelator for this period in human history; diversity in that they are an unusual blend of nationalities, races, creeds, classes, and temperaments—all welcomed and appreciated in the Bahá’í Faith.

Certainly the problems which individual Bahá’ís and local and national Bahá’í communities must face in gradually educating and raising themselves to the high standards inculcated in the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh may be different; but the direction is determined, and the growth and achievement already evident, as the answers to the questionnaire indicate.

Since the way in which Bahá’í communities function is part of the learning process in which Bahá’ís voluntarily participate as they become voting members, a few words about the Bahá’í administrative order that fosters the development of the Bahá’í community would be helpful to understand the results of the questionnaire.

The local and National Spiritual Assemblies, each consisting of nine adult Bahá’ís, are elected annually by secret ballot, without nomination or electioneering. The Universal House of Justice, the supreme institution of the Bahá’í administrative order, is elected every five years by the members of the National Spiritual Assemblies. The Local Spiritual Assembly receives recommendations from the community at large during the regular community meeting held every 19 days—the Bahá’í Feast. Decisions of an Assembly are made by majority vote on all matters, which even now, on a small scale, reflect the gamut of human problems and activities. Although the same tensions and antagonisms may exist as are found outside the Bahá’í community, separatism caused by such conflict has been made impossible, since no doctrine representing an individual or any one group can gain ascendancy, and all Bahá’ís are subject to one authority in the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. Pressure groups do not arise, since those elected are responsible not to a constituency, but to God and their own consciences. Consultation on any matter calls for participation in an open manner—each member of the Assembly putting forth his views and in [Page 15] turn learning from the views expressed by all the other members. When a decision is made, everyone in the Bahá’í community must abide by it, preserving the unity at each stage of growth.

This report on the questionnaire points out the very rapid assimilation of all Bahá’ís in the Bahá’í community. The Bahá’í administrative system provides the means for the accomplishment of the Bahá’í teaching of the abolition of all prejudice, whether based on race, religion, class, nationality or sex, and is oriented toward the establishment of a world order, in which the contribution of all people is valued, and is understood to contribute toward the development of a world civilization.

The report which follows is based on replies from 81 countries (list attached) and significant territories, and while not yet complete, presents trends which are already definite and promising. In many instances progress is either more marked in the Bahá’í community than in the society in which Bahá’ís live, or is in quite a different direction. In other places perceptible but only very gradual change in attitudes can be seen, either due to the small numbers of Bahá’ís or to the strong influence of traditional patterns. It is evident that where Bahá’í communities are firmly established, where numbers are large, and where there has been opportunity for deeper understanding and development over a considerable period of time, a greater security for the individual and for the family provides a sense of greater freedom—and a concomitant desire—to practise the Bahá’í belief in the equality of rights, privileges, and opportunities for members of both sexes.

PARTICIPATION IN ELECTIONS

An important trend was noted in the replies received regarding the participation of women in elections in the Bahá’í community. In all national Bahá’í communities thus far reporting, except one, Bahá’í women actively participate in voting, an easy process for them since there is no electioneering or nominations, and the ballot is secret. Many communities, still very undeveloped from the standpoint of the acceptance of equal status for women, indicate that Bahá’í women vote in Bahá’í elections. Sometimes, “this participation is their first attempt at freedom of expression”; or “this activity (elections) has given women their first opportunity to take part in administrative affairs” in village and rural areas. Even in the most remote village areas, women participate in Bahá’í elections, though they are more reticent in other activities, and customs are more inhibiting in villages further away from urban centres. In certain areas, participation in Bahá’í elections is the extent of the activity of Bahá’í women, and in some countries where, because of tradition, women have not as yet taken as active a part in Bahá’í community life as men, they do, however, participate in elections; and one National Spiritual Assembly remarks: “It is our policy to make sure that by and by women take part in Bahá’í elections to the same degree as men.”

The activity of Bahá’í women is often directly dependent on cultural background. One National Spiritual Assembly reports that the younger generation has changed its attitude, but the “older generation is still holding on to old prejudices.” In countries where the western tradition prevails women have [Page 16] played a key role in the Bahá’í community from the beginning and “women have found in the Faith an arena of service in which they can become more and more sure that they form a concrete part.” The replies mention, however, that new issues will be posed by the influx now of women of other races who are entering the Bahá’í community.

In older Bahá’í communities progress in the participation of women is most marked, “particularly in elections and voting for women.” There is, however, outstanding evidence that in countries where tradition is very strongly against the participation of women in community life, Bahá’í women are also already participating in elections, in consultation, and in teaching activity, and one report mentions that “Bahá’í women are not only more active (than men) in teaching, in discussion of themes and on teaching trips,” but are often “a decisive factor in elections.” In Melanesian society, “among the indigenous people, Bahá’í women, though shyer than men, participate fully in Bahá’í elections and express their ideas as much as men in consultation.”

ELECTION OF WOMEN TO OFFICE

Following closely upon this participation in the election process, women are elected to serve on Local and National Bahá’í Assemblies. This fact is dramatically illustrated in some countries, where “by tradition, women seldom speak when men are present,” and where great discrimination exists, yet where a number of Bahá’í women are serving on different Local Assemblies. One such Assembly has, in fact, four women members, one of them serving as Chairman, another as Secretary, and it is by no means unique for women to serve as officers of the Spiritual Assemblies. In places where only men serve on village councils, women are elected to the Bahá’í Assemblies, and “it is apparent that Bahá’í men have a changed attitude as they vote for some women.” In many parts of Africa women are often elected Treasurers, as they are “considered good managers of money and are reliable.” In some areas of Africa, when it is explained to village Bahá’ís that both men and women are elected to our Assemblies, as we have no prejudice, often women are elected on their new Local Assembly, though all may be very new Bahá’ís.

CONSULTATION

In some countries women, as they participate in Bahá’í consultation, are being encouraged for the first time to take part in community affairs. In others, although women take part in elections and in consultation, progress is slow, while in yet others the questionnaire notes the changing attitudes of men and women among Bahá’ís in spite of the fact that custom is against freedom for women. One country notes that men are becoming more respectful of women, inviting their participation; women then join in the consultation. One reply indicates that women often do not attend as many meetings as men, but they participate fully in Bahá’í elections, express their views in consultation and are more active than before they were Bahá’ís. Another notes that although women are reluctant to express their views in consultation when in a mixed group, unless they have been Bahda’is for a long time, it is evident that [Page 17] they are coming to the fore. Sometimes Bahá’í women seem to wait for the men to make decisions, but some of strong personality “are quick to disagree if they feel strongly about a subject.”

One very interesting comment on an important aspect of Bahá’í life was that “Women try, in many cases more effectively than men, to set themselves a higher standard of behaviour and integrity.”

Traditional patterns are seen to vary in the way in which they inhibit the freedom of women. Some countries report more equality in participation in rural areas, others in the urban centres. A number of questionnaires reported that although men in the beginning attended more meetings, took a more active part in Bahá’í consultation and in teaching activity, now attitudes were seen to have changed to permit the greater participation of women.

It is apparent from the replies received that women, as they become Bahá’ís, are assuming responsibilities which they would otherwise have been reluctant to undertake, and that as they become more educated in the Bahá’í way of life their activity increases.

An important point should be added as to how this education in the Bahá’í life directly bears on participation in the consultative process. Because of the Bahá’í emphasis on the spiritual worth of every individual and the recognition that the acquisition of character and virtues is a primary goal of human life, it follows that every person’s contribution in Bahá’í consultation is not only sought after, but is considered of great importance. The redefinition of values in regard to human life does away with the feelings of inferiority and lack of worth which an over-emphasis on material values produces and which inhibits the participation of women. In addition, the encouragement which women experience in the Bahá’í community because of its recognition of the organic oneness of mankind, and the great importance placed on the universal participation of all members of the Bahá’í Faith, is unique.

CHANGE IN ATTITUDES

Answers to questions relating to a change in the attitudes of both men and women when they become Bahá’ís show a very encouraging trend. Bahá’ís are striving, often with marked success, to change their attitudes toward the education and participation of women.

Almost universally the replies indicated that Bahá’í men encourage the active participation of their wives in Bahá’í community life, even where tradition has kept women out of affairs and even where the women themselves are shy or reluctant to assume active roles in community life. “Bahá’í men encourage their wives both to participate more fully in Bahá’í community life and to take a more equal position in home life,” and “Bahá’í men appreciate seeing their wives participate in Bahá’í activities.” Very few examples of male intransigence are reported among Bahá’í men.

It is evident from the reports received from National Spiritual Assemblies that the degree of freedom for women in Bahá’í communities varies a great deal, although the Bahá’í viewpoint on the equality of men and women seems to have become established. However, the pattern of life for women has certainly been affected by many elements in society in general. Remote areas [Page 18] make slow progress away from tradition, but in parts which have had long contact with the outside world, progress has been remarkable. In one Bahá’í village, the women are outstanding and have a notable place in civil as well as Bahá’í affairs. A few National Spiritual Assemblies have mentioned the fact that traditions and customs encourage the participation of women and women have played an important role in the history of the country. One reports that women in the indigenous communities are more active than men and when these communities become Bahá’í they continue this tradition. (It is quite clear from the replies to the questionnaires that belief in and dedication to the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith have resulted in progressive change in all Bahá’í communities—and these communities will be found to be working diligently for the advancement of women in every part of the world.)

In general the reports indicate that when women become Bahá’ís, progress in their community activity is speeded up: “after becoming Bahá’ís, the women work as much as the men.”

EDUCATION

The Bahá’í Teachings place great importance on the education of members of the female sex. . . . The Bahá’í Writings stress the principle of equality of education for men and women, as well as that of compulsory universal education, and elaborate the responsibilities of parents and of Bahá’í institutions toward equal opportunities in the education of children. There is at the same time a statement in the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh that if parents are not able to educate both boy and girl, the girl should be given preference because she is the future mother and first educator of the child.

Bahá’í institutions bear responsibility for education of the members of the community, and every individual Bahá’í has a relationship to all Bahá’í institutions —local, national and international. Thus the Bahá’í administrative order provides means for the expression of religious teachings in the private action of individuals and in society.

Although a few National Spiritual Assemblies commented on the lack of interest in education on the part of individuals, because of a number of obstacles, the overwhelming majority confirmed that Bahá’í parents and Bahá’í institutions wanted the young to acquire an education, as did the youth themselves.

Many National Spiritual Assemblies reported that teaching conferences and special meetings have been held for the purpose of increasing Bahá’í awareness of the role of women in society. A Bahá’í conference on the status of women was held and a number of prominent women were invited to participate. In many countries the role of women is discussed as a matter of course in public meetings, discussions and institutes where Bahá’ís gather to deepen in their understanding of the Bahá’í teachings.

The desire for education has found expression in various ways. There is indication that illiterate Bahá’ís are often motivated toward learning to read and write, and in general Bahá’ís are interested in furthering their education in order to help them better understand the Bahá’í teachings and the Bahá’í life, as well as to enable them to contribute to the advancement of society as a whole [Page 19] by acquiring knowledge, training and skills. Women are enrolled in university night classes; Bahá’í girls are studying medicine, architecture, and a few Bahá’í women are very prominent in their countries because of their contributions.

Bahá’ís also help each other within the community; individual Bahá’ís help each other in learning to read and “women, because of their commitment to Bahá’u’lláh, have been actively involved in the establishment of alcohol education programs, taking dramatic presentations to . . . villages, working with handicapped children, etc.” One eminent Bahá’í woman has been responsible for founding a Council of Women in her country and for changing laws on the status of women.

Literacy programs have been established and provision made for the education of older illiterate women.

The influence of the younger generation upon the old is seen in one report; “some daughters teach their mothers to read and write.” Another mentions the fact that Bahá’ís from other countries, as a part of the community, help the indigenous people to gradually accept the new standards of the Faith, pointing out the educative influence which Bahá’ís in their diversity have on each other. One individual Bahá’í is making it possible for some girls to go to public school. There is awareness of the importance of attitudes toward education, one report noting that sometimes girls enter “active life, leaving their schools to marry and assume family responsibilities,” because there are many children in the family or because the parents, before becoming Bahá’ís, did not encourage their girls enough in the matter of education.

TEACHING CHILDREN THE EQUALITY OF MEN AND WOMEN

The importance of teaching children the equality of men and women seems to have taken strong root in many Bahá’í communities all over the world, and both Bahá’í parents and Bahá’í institutions are actively promoting this principle in a variety of ways. A number of Assemblies indicate that this represents a different attitude from that of people outside the Bahá’í community. One report elaborates on this difference in commenting that equality outside the Bahá’í community is considered more in terms of study or job goals only. Others state that Bahá’ís are teaching their children in the principle of equality and have a desire to secure education for themselves in spite of the fact that “society here is not sympathetic.”

Children’s classes generally make a very successful contribution to community life, and offer opportunities for Bahá’í women to “contribute their share of service by conducting Bahá’í children’s classes.” One Assembly has founded a national committee on women and children for the coming year, to study the problem of women in the Faith.

The general conclusion may be made that within the Bahá’í International Community great advances have already been made towards equality of the sexes, and the advancement of women is constantly pursued. The influence of Bahá’í communities on the societies within which they exist varies in respect of this matter, but all Bahá’í communities teach equality of the sexes and act to eliminate as far as possible prejudice and discrimination against women.

[Page 20] It is noteworthy that women are numbered among the highest-ranking officers of the Faith, and are active in all its work. In Europe there are 17 National Spiritual Assemblies, each composed of nine members; 15 have women members. In Africa 24 out of 31 National Spiritual Assemblies have women members. In Asia the figures are 25 National Spiritual Assemblies, 15 of which have women members; in the Americas 30 and 29, and in Australasia 11 and 10.

NATIONAL SPIRITUAL ASSEMBLIES REPLYING TO QUESTIONNAIRE ON STATUS OF WOMEN

AFRICA

Botswana	Kenya	Seychelles
Central African Republic	Nigeria	Swaziland and Mozambique
Chad	North East Africa	Tanzania
Congo Republic	North West Africa	Upper West Africa
Dahomey	Réunion	West Africa
Ghana	Rhodesia	Zambia
Ivory Coast, Mali and Upper Volta	Rwanda

AMERICAS

Alaska	Dominican Republic	Jamaica
Argentina	Ecuador	Mexico
Belize	El Salvador	Nicaragua
Bolivia	Guatemala	Panama
Brazil	Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana	Peru
Canada	Haiti	Puerto Rico
Colombia	Honduras	Trinidad and Tobago
Costa Rica

ASIA

Eastern Malaysia and Brunei	Laos	Pakistan
India	Malaysia	Philippines
Indonesia	Near East	Singapore
Korea	North East Asia	Thailand

AUSTRALASIA

Australia	New Zealand	Solomon Islands
Fiji Islands	North West Pacific Ocean	South West Pacific Ocean*
Gilbert and Ellice Islands	Papua and New Guinea	Tonga & Cook Islands
Hawaiian Islands	Samoa

EUROPE

Austria	Iceland	Portugal
Belgium	Ireland, Republic of	Spain
Denmark	Italy	Sweden
Finland	Luxembourg	Switzerland
France	Norway	United Kingdom
Germany

*Two replies sent: one for New Caledonia and one for New Hebrides

[Page 21]

[Page 22]

The Unity of Religion and Science

BY WILLIAM S. HATCHER

OF ALL THE CONFLICTS which exist in contemporary society none is more destructive both for individual and social life than the conflict between religion and science. For the individual, religion is the expression of a need for self-transcendence, a need to feel a purpose which is God-given and not self-created. For society, religion represents the need for unity, love, harmony, and cooperation. Science, by contrast, represents the need to know, to understand, to gain mastery over ourselves and our environment. This is true both for the individual who needs knowledge in order to function in his own life and for society which needs organized knowledge in order to progress.

Returning for the moment to the individual’s viewpoint, we might say that the religious urge is an urge to be encompassed. It is an urge to feel oneself a part of something greater. The scientific urge is an urge to encompass. It is an urge to manipulate, control, direct, and dominate. There is no contradiction in these two urges since it is clearly possible for us to be in control on one level of our functioning while, at the same time, being controlled or encompassed on another level. Indeed, since our knowledge is always relative, we are in fact constantly in the position of having a relative mastery over part of our environment (including the self) while being encompassed by that part which we do not know. Moreover, the further we make progress in knowledge, the more we realize just how great our ignorance is. There is an increasing realization of being encompassed by the unknown which accompanies the extension of the boundaries of the known, for new knowledge also reveals the existence of hitherto unsuspected unknowns. Greater knowledge gives greater mastery and, at the same time, greater humility before the ever-increasing vastness of the unknown which lies before us.

Basically, then, the religious urge and the scientific urge are complementary, as each reinforces the other.

Of course, the thrill of first mastery which the adolescent experiences gives him a sense of omnipotence and an exaggerated pride in his knowledge. Some people never outgrow this immature response to knowledge and, therefore, become blind or insensitive to the vastness of their ignorance. This is the state of an individual or a society in which the scientific urge prevails while the religious urge is excluded.

In such a case people have a sense of being in absolute control when, in reality, their control is very limited and relative. This is the situation which largely characterizes modern Western technological society. Western man has given in almost totally to the scientific urge, the urge to dominate, manipulate, control, and direct. Because he has lost his humility before his ignorance, he has gradually overproduced, overdirected, and overcontrolled. The results of this immoderation are to be seen everywhere. It has led to pollution and destruction of the natural cycle, as we begin to discover, perhaps too late, just how much damage we may have unwittingly done. It has led to manipulation of the public through mass media. It has produced engines of war of unimaginable destructive power.

On the personal level, the use of the social science of psychology, without the counterbalance of religion, has resulted in a painful self-consciousness of the individual as he enters an increasingly vicious circle of self-analysis and introspection in a futile attempt to encompass himself with his own mind.

We might say, then, that modern society is adolescent in that it is characterized by the false sense of omnipotence that comes from having abandoned itself to the scientific urge to the exclusion of the religious urge. Let anyone who feels that science alone can provide [Page 23] the basis for human progress ask himself whether, at this moment, the future of society stands in greater danger from science and its fruits or from religion and its fruits.

What happens when society abandons itself to the religious urge to the exclusion of the scientific urge? Since there will be a common feeling of humility before the unknown, there will be a strong sense of unity within such a society. People will be drawn together by the shared awareness of being encompassed by and submitted to unknown (generally nonhuman) forces. The feeling or sense of unity will be strong, but if the scientific urge is neglected, the concrete realization of that sense of unity will be very limited.

For example, without the means of organization, education, communication, and transportation, which come only from a certain mastery of the environment, the gathering of large groups of people will be difficult as will the communication between the physically separate groups. It will, therefore, be difficult for people to share ideas, languages, history, and the like. Society will remain organized in small villages, each with its particular expression of the felt unity and its particular history. There will be many different dialects and religious experiences. The relative lack of mastery of the environment will prevent the communication and sharing of experiences to a degree that will permit the inhabitants of different villages from going beyond superficial differences to see the basic unity underlying their different experiences.

The dominant feature of such a society will be its dependence on the unknown forces. We might say, then, that such a society is childlike because the lack of mastery, the dependence, and the passivity with respect to the environment are all characteristics of the stage of development in the life of an individual which we call childhood.

Maturity or adulthood in the life of the individual comes with the integration and balance of these two urges. It does not come by remaining continually adolescent. The adolescent, because he is unsure of himself, needs, in his typical Western manifestation, continually to prove his independence by rebellious and exaggerated gestures. The adult, however, knows how to accept a mature and conscious dependence. The adult knows, for example, that he is dependent on society, and so he obeys its laws. The extreme form of adolescent independence is lawlessness.

To be sure, the dependence of the adult is no longer the absolute dependence of childhood. It is a dependence based on the relative mastery of the adolescent. It is a dependence which is conscious because the adult is aware of his limitations as well as of his mastery. He thus abandons his adolescent sense of omnipotence for a more realistic give and take. The giving results from the degree of mastery, and the taking from an intelligent realization of need. It is the foolish person who thinks that, because he is adult, he has no genuine needs and, therefore, does not have to take. It is the immature adult who remains in a childish state of exaggerated dependence and crippled mastery.

The Bahá’í principle of the unity of religion and science applies this same principle of complementarity, so clearly true for individuals, to human society as a whole. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said:

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also [Page 24] make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.

Concerning the state of religion without science, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has further stated:

Any religion that contradicts science or that is opposed to it, is only ignorance—for ignorance is the opposite of knowledge.

Religion which consists only of rites and ceremonies of prejudice is not the truth.

And again:

All religions of the present day have fallen into superstitious practices out of harmony alike with the true principles of the teaching they represent and with the scientific discoveries of the time.

Concerning the positive effects of the unity of religion and science, He says:

When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science, then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and struggles—and then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God.

Concerning the result of science without religion, Bahá’u’lláh has written:

The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation.

Concerning the attempt of man to find happiness through purely material pursuits, He has also written:

Say: O people! Let not this life and its deceits deceive you, for the world and all that is therein is held firmly in the grasp of His Will. . . . Ave ye rejoicing in the things which, according to the estimate of God, are contemptible and worthless, things wherewith He proveth the hearts of the doubtful?

In another passage He states flatly:

Your sciences shall not profit you in this day, nor your arts, nor your treasure, nor your glory. Cast them all behind your backs, and set your faces towards the Most Sublime Word through which the Scriptures and the Books and this lucid Tablet have been distinctly set forth.

Since it is the adolescent excess of the scientific urge that characterizes the modern world, the move to maturity can only come by the rebirth of religion on a mature, adult level. Man must acquire again a genuine humility and deep respect for God, the creative force of the universe. He must realize that it is only by this force, and this force alone, that all of his discoveries and technological advances have been made. In this regard, Bahá’u’lláh says:

Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God is endowed with such potency as can instill new life into every human frame, if ye be of them that comprehend this truth. All the wondrous works ye behold in this world have been manifested through the operation of His supreme and most exalted Will, His wondrous and inflexible Purpose.

Obstacles to the Unity of Science and Religion

A HALF CENTURY AGO, the prime obstacle to the unity of science and religion was probably [Page 25] religion. In 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá affirmed as much when he described the results of prevailing religious dissension and discord:

The outcome of all this dissension is the belief of many cultured men that religion and science are contradictory terms, that religion needs no powers of reflection, and should in no wise be regulated by science, but must of necessity be opposed, the one to the other. The unfortunate effect of this is that science has drifted apart from religion, and religion has become a mere blind and more or less apathetic following of the precepts of certain religious teachers, who insist on their favourite dogmas being accepted even when they are contrary to science.

Thus it was the outmoded and narrow views of religionists which initially created the opposition between religion and science.

This opposition has, if anything, worsened in the years since ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made the above statement. Religious dogmatism and dissension have continued, giving rise to open religious conflict in such places as the Middle East, India, and Northern Ireland. Each of the traditional religious orthodoxies has continued to press, harder and harder, its claims to possess an absolute or final truth, excluding the possibility of reconciliation with other orthodoxies. Even such a movement as Christian Ecumenism is severely limited in that its goal is only an institutional unity of certain Christian denominations rather than a genuine move towards universal religious reconciliation.

Moreover, to the voices of traditional orthodoxy have been added a host of newer movements, each with its own claim to possess a unique or absolute path to the truth. Various cults, various forms of meditation, of spiritual and physical discipline have been put forth as the answer to man’s religious quest. At the same time, a rebirth of interest in astrology, in occultism, in satanism, in witchcraft, and in other forms of supernatural experience has taken place.

Since it is clearly impossible to reconcile the absolute and exclusive claim of each of the various sects, movements, and orthodoxies in the world today, what is the rational seeker after religious truth to do? One common-sense answer, and one which many individuals have undoubtedly adopted as a solution, is to consider that there is some truth in each of these movements and that their basic fault lies precisely in their arrogant attempt to erect a partial and relative vision of truth into an absolute. The historian and religious thinker Arnold Toynbee has described poignantly his own reaction to this dilemma:

It is, of course, impossible that each of the higher religions can be right in believing that it has a monopoly of truth and salvation, but it is not impossible that all of them should have found alternative roads to salvation and should have seen truth, “through a glass, darkly”, in one or other of truth’s different facets. . . . A belief in the relative truth and relative saving-power of all the higher religions alike will seem tantamount to unbelief in the eyes of an orthodox believer in any one of them.

. . . It lies with the orthodox, not with me, to decide whether, in their eyes, I am within their pale or am beyond it. But it lies with me, not with them, to feel the feelings I, too, feel towards those sublime figures that are revered and adored by me as well as by their orthodox followers or worshippers. No human writ of excommunication can come between those saviours and me.

One senses a strong integrity in a position such as that taken by Toynbee. Yet such a position, though helpful for the individual himself, does not solve the social problems resulting from the religion-science opposition. For there is no identifiable community of the [Page 26] various individuals who may have arrived at a view like Toynbee’s. Indeed, Toynbee himself makes a similar remark in a footnote to the above-quoted passage:

In any case, whatever light my critics may or may not have thrown on my position, they have thrown much light, I should say, on a far more interesting point. They have brought out the truth that, at the present time, the Western World is a house divided against itself on the fundamental issue of religious attitude and belief.

We may summarize, then, by saying that the first major obstacle to the unity of science and religion is the widespread feeling that there is no religious voice which recognizes the relativity of religious truth and which, at the same time, speaks with deep wisdom and authority on the spiritual questions of life which every man sooner or later must face and ask himself. There is widespread confusion in the realm of religion, and this confusion has been made worse, rather than being helped, by the multiplication of claims to absolute authority and absolute truth which are now heard from all directions.

Another major obstacle to the unity of religion and science derives from the fact that a complex of science and technology, divorced from all moral and ethical influence, has now become the dominant force in society. This all-pervasiveness of science and technology has led many to a feeling of hopelessness. People often feel that science has shown religion to be a farce, and yet they recognize that science and technology have not made us deeply happy. In fact, widespread unhappiness—unhappiness on a scale never before seen—is one of the most striking features of the contemporary scene.

In spite of this dissatisfaction with the sterility of modern technological existence, many still feel that they cannot turn with integrity to religion since, they believe, science has proved that God does not exist and that religious experience is a sham. Because religious experience is much more intensely subjective than technology, people are led to mistrust their own deepest emotions and their profoundest religious and spiritual longings. In this way does the misguided belief about technology lead to a certain self-alienation— people are led to deny the validity of their own truest needs and deepest longings. These longings are relegated to the domain of childish and immature emotions (perhaps to be “cured” by psychoanalysis).

This second major obstacle to the unity of religion and science is, then, the feeling that science has somehow proved the nonexistence of God or at least invalidated spiritual and religious experience and longings.

We now want to discuss certain aspects of some of these obstacles.

The Obstacle of Scientistic Materialism

THE CHARACTERISTIC FEATURE of science, and the basis of its unity, is scientific method. Scientific method consists in the systematic and organized use of our various mental faculties in an effort to arrive at a coherent understanding of whatever phenomenon is being investigated.

Of course, every human being on earth knows things and uses his mental faculties in order to attain this knowledge. What distinguishes the method of science is the systematic, organized, and conscious nature of the process. Science is self-conscious common sense. Instead of relying on chance experiences, one systematically invokes certain types of experiences. This is experimentation (the conscious use of experience). Instead of relying on common-sense reasoning, one formalizes hypotheses explicitly and formalizes the reasoning leading from hypothesis to conclusion. This is mathematics and logic (the conscious use of reason). Instead of relying on occasional flashes of insight, one systematically meditates on problems. This is [Page 27] reflection (the conscious use of intuition).

The practice of this method is not linked to the study of any particular phenomenon. It can be applied to the study of unseen forces and mysterious phenomena as well as everyday, common occurrences. Failure to appreciate this universality of scientific method has led many people to feel that science is really only the study of matter and purely material phenomena. This narrow philosophical outlook, plus the historical fact that physics was the first science to develop a high degree of mathematical objectivity, has led to a common misconception that scientific knowledge is inherently limited only to physical reality and material phenomena. Such a misconception naturally retards the unity of science and religion since religion definitely claims to have knowledge of nonmaterial aspects of reality. Once we see that the basis of science is its method and not any particular object of study, we can discard this misconception.

We get physics and chemistry when we turn scientific method to the study of the phenomena of nonliving matter. But if, keeping the same method, we turn to the study of living matter, we get biology. If we turn to human beings as the objects of our study, we get psychology, sociology, and the other “human sciences.” Bahá’u’lláh has referred to religion as the “science of the love of God.” Thus religion results when we turn scientific method to the study of the unseen creative force of the universe which we call God.

It might be objected by some that the unity of science lies not in its method but in its goal, which is to know. However, there are other disciplines such as magic and occultism, both contemporary and historical, which claim knowledge as their objective. Yet these disciplines are not compatible with science and are rejected by science because their method is unscientific. Thus to be scientific it is not sufficient to desire knowledge or to proclaim knowledge as one’s goal.

Another feature of scientific knowledge is its relativity. Because science is the self-conscious use of our faculties, we become aware that man has no absolute measure of truth. The conclusions of scientific investigations are always more or less probable. They are never absolute proofs. Of course, if a conclusion is highly probable and its contrary highly improbable, we may feel very confident in the results, especially if we have been very thorough in our investigation. But realization and acceptance of this essential incertitude and relativity of our knowledge is important, for the exigencies of human existence are often such that we are forced to act in some instances before we have had time to make such a thorough investigation. It, therefore, behooves us to remain constantly alert to the possibility that we may, in fact, be wrong.

Such a realization is also important for the unity of science and religion, for there are many who take the materialistic personal philosophy of some scientists as indication that science has proved that God does not exist. There are even some scientists who claim that science has proved that God does not exist. Such claims are foolish and ridiculous in the light of the universally recognized relativity of scientific conclusions, and especially as no scientist or scientific discipline has ever claimed to have undertaken a systematic, scientific study of the question of God’s existence and come up with the carefully [Page 28] validated conclusion that there is no God.

We should not be overly surprised at such contradictions in behavior, however, since scientists are men and are subject to some of the same disastrous prejudices which afflict the generality of mankind.

There are, in fact, those who have consciously attempted to use science as a “cover” or support to buttress some particular social or philosophical prejudice, or to justify some desired (but not necessarily justifiable) course of action. We must be constantly on our guard against such false uses of science; for they corrupt science, and they block effective attempts to establish the unity of science and religion. Such false uses of science are comparable to false uses of religion, as, for example, when religious institutions in the past have lent support to oppressive and immoral persecution of minorities.

It is heartening to note that, in recent years, increasing numbers of scientists have become sensitive to such false uses of science and have begun to raise their voices in public to point them out. Over the years there has been a small but persistent intellectual tradition of intelligent criticism of the false uses of science. The writings of Lewis Mumford are a strong contemporary example of this tradition. The closing paragraphs of his cogent The Pentagon of Power are virtually poetic in their appeal:

Reformers who would treat the campaign against environmental and human degradation solely in terms of improved technological facilities, like the reduction of gasoline exhaust in motor cars, see only a small part of the problem. Nothing less than a profound re-orientation of our vaunted technological “way of life” will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert . . . For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers . . . Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

Toynbee states a similar conclusion in more general terms:

Religion is Man’s attempt to get into touch with an absolute spiritual Reality behind the phenomena of the Universe, and, having made contact with It, to live in harmony with It. This activity is all-pervading. It comprehends all the others. Moreover, it is Man’s lifeline. When once a creature has acquired, as Man has, a conscious intellect and a free will, this creature must either seek and find God or destroy itself.

Scientistic Atheism

EVEN THOUGH science has not disproved the existence of God, there still persists a feeling that the success of science and technology, independent of any religious orientation, has undermined the credibility of such belief. Belief in God is often seen as a hangover from primitivism. Primitive man saw God, the unseen creative force, in everything. He was in awe of the forces of nature. This sense of awe of primitive man is commonly attributed to his ignorance of the basis of natural phenomena. To many, our modern scientific understanding of these phenomena seems to have taken all the “mystery” out of reality. Modern man feels guilty or childish about such feelings of awe—about his need to be encompassed. Science seems to have gradually reduced the possible domain of God’s existence to a vanishing point. Physics [Page 29] has removed God from nature, and psychology has removed Him from the human heart.

Again, further analysis reveals such an attitude as a misconception. For science has revealed to man not only “facts” and “things” but also a fascinating world of energy and unseen forces. Consider, for example, the view of matter and the material world which physics soberly presents to us for our consideration as the rational explanation for natural phenomena. The astonishing diversity of matter which we daily encounter is really due, we are told, only to different combinations of a small number of basic elements. Moreover, these elemental substances are themselves just different configurations of certain basic elementary particles which, in themselves, have no individuality. Furthermore, these basic particles are really just relatively stable forms of energy, and each of them is convertible, under suitable conditions, into energy. Thus all the stuff of everyday experience is ultimately just different configurations of energy.

And what, we may ask, is energy? We may be successful in describing some of the ways energy works—some of the effects it produces. But when we ask what energy is, we come up against a mystery. And if we are humble enough, we realize that this is the same mystery primitive man intuitively perceived. Our science has served only to render our ultimate ignorance more explicit by showing how truly universal is this mysterious force, for now we see everything as a configuration of this one force.

The most striking feature of this energy, this ultimate mysterious force whose existence has been so strongly confirmed by science, is its ability to organize itself in ever more subtle forms and configurations. It is easy, for example, to characterize the direction of biological evolution. Biological evolution represents the organization of matter (thus energy) in ever more complex units, involving greater and greater complexity and specialization, and greater interdependence among the component parts. Man is “higher” than other mammals precisely because of his relatively greater complexity of physiological organization.

Let us compare man with, say, a colony of one-celled organisms of comparable size. On the one hand, there is man with his cells specialized to form tissues which combine to make organs which combine to form systems which combine to form the human organism. This hierarchical structure enables man to function in an incredibly multifaceted way. Moreover, the continued, moment-to-moment existence of man is dependent on a host of favorable conditions. On the other hand, we have the colony of, let us say, bacteria which are capable of functioning only individually on the crudest level, each individual being virtually immortal (some bacteria can remain dormant for centuries without dying).

In particular, the human brain is the most complex physical structure known to us in the universe. Even the galaxies of stars and the movements of the planets cannot begin to compare in complexity to the subtle and highly organized human brain. The most complex computers invented to date are roughly equivalent to the brain of an ant when compared with the structure and complexity of the human brain.

Now, one well-known feature of the human organism is its self-awareness. Furthermore, scientific investigation has confirmed what man has always suspected: he did not create himself. It is not man who has organized himself in this subtle and complex way. Rather man awoke to his self-awareness and his subjectivity which he owes rather to the energy of which he is but a configuration.

We can thus pose the following clear question: Is it more reasonable to assume that a force capable of producing an effect (man) which is endowed with subjectivity and intelligence has also such characteristics, or is it more reasonable to assume that this force is deprived of such features? It is

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[Page 32] (Continued from page 29)

clearly more reasonable to suppose that such a force is at least as subtle as the effect it has produced. In fact, we know that energy is capable of subjectivity and intelligence because we have self-awareness and intelligence and we are configurations of this energy. Moreover, this force has produced other effects which man cannot produce (namely, it has produced man as well as the universe). Man has discovered himself and the universe, but he has not produced these phenomena. Thus we are inevitably led to hypothesize that this force is, in fact, even more subtle than man himself. Following a long-established tradition, we call this force God.

Thus an unprejudiced application of scientific method to the facts of human existence leads to the probable conclusion that God exists and that He has consciousness and intelligence. Notice, however, that although reasoning and logic can lead us to the existence of God, they cannot give to us the experience of God. This is the role of religion, of which more will be said later on.

It is as if we had arrived at the conclusion, by scientific investigation, that there must be humanoid creatures on a planet which we lacked the technical means of visiting. The knowledge of the existence of these creatures would not in itself give us the intersubjective experience of their personalities.

There are several objections which are often raised against the otherwise clear conclusions

we have drawn in the preceding. It

is often objected that the process which has produced man is due to chance and not to any force. Let us examine briefly this contention.

In scientific observation, a phenomenon is said to be due to chance when all logical possibilities occur with equal relative frequency. When such is not the case, and more especially when such deviations occur in some consistent way, we infer the existence of a force which is said to “cause” the deviation from random behavior. For example, it is logically possible for a dropped object to move in any direction (or not to move at all). But we observe that dropped objects do not move at random. They all move perversely in a downward direction. We infer the existence of an unseen force, called gravity, which produces this effect. The effect is, in a word, a consistent deviation from presumed equiprobability. We do not call gravity God because the effect produced by this force (the downward falling of objects) is not so marvelous as the effect we call man. Notice also that in space, when one is outside the reaches of the earth’s gravity, randomly dropped objects do move in a random manner.

In scientific investigations of phenomena it, therefore, becomes important to decide what events are probable and what events are improbable. In this way we can have some idea when a phenomenon is due to an unseen force and when it is due to chance. Science has discovered such a principle. It is called the second law of thermodynamics or Carnot’s principle. This principle says, simply stated, that order is improbable and disorder is probable. This is so because order represents a limited number of stable configurations whereas any possible configuration represents disorder.

Let us compare, for example, a brick house and a pile of bricks. I can transform a brick house into a pile of bricks by moving the bricks one by one in any possible sequence. I am free to take a top brick or a bottom brick or a middle brick first. But to build the house, it is physically impossible to put in a top brick before putting in any bottom brick. Only a certain limited number of possible sequences will produce the house. The house represents order, and the pile of bricks disorder (relative to each other).

Thus Carnot’s principle is nothing more than a precise statement of what we all intuitively feel about chance phenomena. The nonscientist would be just as shocked as the scientist to find that the wind or a thunderstorm had transformed a pile of bricks into a well-built house (even if we [Page 33] had left the pile of bricks to itself for many years). But we are not at all shocked if such a storm transforms a house into a pile of bricks.

Now we have earlier on remarked that man, in particular man’s brain, is the most highly ordered structure in the universe. Thus, by Carnot’s principle, it is also the least probable. It is, therefore, the least likely to have been produced by a purely random process.

Biologists point out that the mechanism of biological evolution is mutation, by which is meant spontaneous genetic change, and natural selection. Natural selection depends on mutation since if there are no mutations there is nothing from which nature can select. But since the direction of evolution is precisely from lower (that is, less ordered and thus more probable) to higher (that is, more ordered and thus less probable) forms, it is unreasonable to suppose that mutations are wholly or primarily due to chance. We cannot reason from the fact of mutation to the conclusion that the cause of mutations in evolution is chance.

Moreover, what is needed to explain biological evolution is not just an occasional favorable mutation (almost all observed mutations are unfavorable) but a consistent sequence of favorable mutations in the right place and at the right time (if the first one happens in Australia and the next one in Europe there cannot be any process of evolution). Nor did evolution take place in an “unlimited” amount of time. Rather the whole process took place in a period of roughly one-half billion years. Thus there was not time for an “infinite” or unlimited “experimentation” to take place.

It is obviously impossible in a short article such as this to enter into extended detailed discussion of these points on which scores of books have been written. The reader who is interested in pursuing the technical side of the question can do so on his own.

In closing this discussion, let us treat one last point, however. Recent advances in biology have led to speculation that man may one day be able to reproduce life in a test tube. Such knowledge or control over the vital process would, it is sometimes said, show that God does not exist after all because man would have discovered the secret of life. But no such conclusion is logically forthcoming. After all, man already knows how to reproduce life. Babies are born every day. What man clearly did not create is the process by which life is reproduced. Thus, even if the human brain finally succeeds in discovering the secret of life, this will not change the fact that man did not create the vital process which he would then understand. Moreover, man’s brain which does the understanding would itself owe its existence to this vital process which it did not create. Discovery is not creation.

Indeed, no discoveries that man can ever make in the future can change the eternal fact that man is not responsible for bringing into being the process which has produced his brain and its understanding. Man is not responsible for his own existence; and he depends, therefore, on something other than himself to which he owes his existence.

A Solution to Religious Dissension

FALSE CONCEPTS and false uses of science are only one-half of the problem. For even if one is quite willing and desires to turn to religion, the question remains: where to turn? For the author of this article, and for many others on this planet, the answer to this question has turned out to be: the Bahá’í Faith. Rather than engaging in any abstract dissertation on the details of Bahá’í doctrine —which are already adequately available in other sources—we have thought better to describe in a straightforward manner those features of the Bahá’í experience which have led so many to feel that it furnishes a deeply satisfying answer to their religious quest.

First, and most important, the Bahá’í Faith renders accessible to the individual that experience of self-transcendence and mystic communion with the Spirit of God which is [Page 34] the heart of religion. We have previously remarked that logic and reason can prove to us the existence of God but cannot give us intersubjective communion with God. Concerning proofs of the existence of God, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said:

. . . apply thyself to rational and authoritative arguments. For arguments are a guide to the path and by this the heart will be turned unto the Sun of Truth. And when the heart is turned unto the Sun, then the eye will be opened and will recognize the Sun through the Sun itself. Then (man) will be in no need of arguments (or proofs), for the Sun is altogether independent, . . .

In other words, the reality of the experience of communion with God carries with it a deeper conviction and sense of the reality of God than the purely intellectual acknowledgement of God’s existence which comes from logic and reasoning.

How, we might well ask, is this communion obtained? How does God reveal to us something of His personal and subjective nature in a way that is accessible to us? Since, as we have already observed, man is the most highly ordered and refined phenomenon accessible to us, it would be only logical that God might choose precisely this instrument for his Self-Revelation. It is clearly impossible for God to reveal His most personal and subjective attributes to man through an instrument such as a rock or a tree which does not itself possess consciousness. Bahá’ís believe that this act of Self-Revelation through a chosen human instrument has occurred periodically in history (our collective experience). This is clearly necessary if the intersubjective knowledge of God is to remain constantly accessible to us, for with the passage of time the immediacy and force of such a revelation tends to be lost and dissipated.

Bahá’ís call these chosen human instruments Manifestations of God. The Manifestations are none other than the great religious founders of history, some of whose names we know: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad, Buddha, Zoroaster, and most recently Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. Concerning the revelation of God through these Manifestations, Bahá’u’lláh has said:

. . . all things, in their inmost reality, testify to the revelation of the names and attributes of God within them. . . . Man, the noblest and most perfect of all created things, excelleth them all in the intensity of this revelation, and is a fuller expression of its glory. And of all men, the most accomplished, the most distinguished, and the most excellent are the Manifestations of the Sun of Truth, Nay, all else besides these Manifestations, live by the operation of their Will, and move and have their being through the outpourings of their grace.

Is is, therefore, as a result of the comings of these Manifestations that man has the possibility of communion with God. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá puts it simply:

The knowledge of the Reality of the Divinity is impossible and unattainable, but the knowledge of the Manifestations of God is the knowledge of God, for the bounties, splendours, and divine attributes are apparent in them. Therefore if man attains to the knowledge of the Manifestations of God, he will attain to the knowledge of God; and if he be neglectful of the knowledge of the Holy Manifestation, he will be bereft of the knowledge of God.

The primary key to maintaining this intersubjective communion of consciousness with God is the daily discipline of prayer and meditation on the words of the Manifestation. Bahá’u’lláh states:

[Page 35]

Say: The first and foremost testimony establishing His truth is His own Self. Next to this testimony is His Revelation. For whoso faileth to recognize either the one or the other He hath established the words He hath revealed as proof of His reality and truth. This is, verily, an evidence of His tender mercy unto men. He hath endowed every soul with the capacity to recognize the signs of God. How could He, otherwise, have fulfilled His testimony unto men . . .

These words are the instrument which creates the consciousness of the presence of God; for meditation, to be successful, must have some object or focus.

Although the experience of communion with God is an individual, subjective one, there are two things in the Bahá’í experience which tend to give it a sense of universality and objectivity. First, it is repeatable for the individual. If one had only an occasional “flash” of mystic feeling, one could well doubt whether such experience was valid and was not, rather, some form of autosuggestion. But Bahá’ís find that when they practice the daily discipline of prayer and meditation on the words of Bahá’u’lláh, the experience of communion is constantly renewed, accessible, and repeatable.

In a striking statement, Bahá’u’lláh boldly promises that the experience of communion with God will always be accessible through this discipline:

Intone, O My servant, the verses of God that have been received by thee, as intoned by them who have drawn nigh unto Him, that the sweetness of thy melody may kindle thine own soul, and attract the hearts of all men. Whoso reciteth, in the privacy of his chamber, the verses revealed by God, the scattering angels of the Almighty shall scatter abroad the fragrance of the words uttered by his mouth, and shall cause the heart of every righteous man to throb. Though he may, at first, remain unaware of its effect, yet the virtue of the grace vouchsafed unto him must needs sooner or later exercise its influence upon his soul.

Second, the experience is general or universal. It is not reserved for some elite and withheld from others. It is not vague or uncommunicable. All Bahá’ís experience it and find that they can discuss it and share it with others with the same feeling of clarity and coherence that one naturally has about any other multisubjective experience such as seeing a red object or eating a delicious meal.

Another important feature of Bahá’í experience is the explicit acceptance by the Bahá’í Faith of the principle of relativity of religious truth. Shoghi Effendi has said:

The Revelation proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh, His followers believe, is divine in origin, all-embracing in scope, broad in its outlook, scientific in its method, humanitarian in its principles and dynamic in the influence it exerts on the hearts and minds of men. The mission of the Founder of their Faith, they conceive it to be to proclaim that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is continuous and progressive . . .

Such total and explicit recognition of the principle of the relativity of religious truth is a hallmark of the Bahá’í Faith and an important element in permitting its followers to reconcile scientific method with religious and spiritual needs.

The Bahá’í Faith is not exclusive and creates unity rather than dissension. This aspect of Bahá’í experience naturally derives from the fundamental principle of the relativity and progressive nature of truth mentioned above. Bahá’u’lláh has said that the fundamental purpose of religion is to create love and unity and that whenever it happens that a religion ceases to perform this function and creates division and opposition, then it is [Page 36] better for such a religion not to exist.

Some people who are otherwise attracted to Bahá’í teachings and principles sometimes hesitate to identify themselves with the movement for fear that such identification will somehow cut them off from other people. Because the Bahá’í Faith is numerically smaller than some other religious groups, or because the Bahá’í Faith is new and therefore sometimes unknown to or misinterpreted by the public, individuals perhaps fear that identification with it will subject them to similar attitudes of mistrust on the part of people.

However apparently reasonable such fears may seem, this is not the experience which Bahá’ís have. Genuine human relations are based on truth, honesty, love, and the ability to communicate deeply with others. Bahá’ís find that their Faith gives them new inner resources and tools which permit them to approach human relationships in the light of these principles. Rather than feeling “cut off,” Bahá’ís experience a feeling of vastly increased ability to communicate and indeed commune with others, be they Bahá’í or non-Bahá’í. These new personal resources compensate a hundredfold for any superficial and ignorant criticism which may, from time to time, be forthcoming. Moreover, both psychologists and philosophers have pointed out that the crowd togetherness and superficial conformities of modern life are only a poor substitute for genuine human relationships. Such genuine relationships are seen to be largely absent from modern life due to the “self-alienation” created in part by the illusion of easy togetherness which leads the individual to suppose that satisfying human relationships can be attained without a strong and conscious effort of will on his part. Once the individual pierces the veil of this illusion and accepts the fact that effort and suffering are necessary to attain deep friendship and lasting love, he will naturally seek that which will give him the resources necessary for the task. It is the experience of Bahá’ís that their Faith gives them these resources.

Moreover, because the Bahá’í Faith is a living community, and not just an abstract idea, the striving for love and unity can take place in a new context not otherwise available. It is the context of a community in which each individual member has a similar commitment to this new quality of human relationship based on communion with God, Who is the ultimate source of man’s ability to love in the first place.

The Bahá’í Faith illuminates our history and our personal experience. The inclusiveness of the Bahá’í Faith is not just a passive principle of tolerance. It is experienced by Bahá’ís rather as a clarifying and ordering force which enables them to “see” the truth in other movements, perhaps even truths which orthodox followers of these movements may have missed. In talking about their Faith, Bahá’ís often find themselves in the position of defending or explaining the validity of certain teachings of past Prophets which the followers themselves have abandoned or rejected. The dedication which Bahá’ís feel to such founders of religions as Christ, Muḥammad, Moses, and Buddha, is very real. It often surprises and amazes the followers of these religions, for it has even happened that Bahá’ís have vigorously defended the rights and doctrines of religious communities who have actively persecuted the Bahá’ís themselves.

Another important aspect of Bahá’í ex- perience is that it does not tend to extremes in any form. At its basis is a principle of moderation. This principle of moderation means that the individual feels continually pulled towards greater balance, calm, and integration in his life. He does not feel torn between extreme desires or called upon to become fanatical or unbalanced in his dealings with others or with himself. This sense of moderation does not imply a static or passive state or an indifference. It means rather the integration and balance among the deep emotions one feels.

A final and extremely important aspect of the Bahá’í experience is its focus on society [Page 37] and its goal of establishing world unity. We have seen religion as an answer to man’s need to be encompassed by something greater than himself. Quite clearly the individual is already encompassed by society as a whole. Therefore, there can be no ultimate answer to man’s religious quest and his religious needs unless and until society itself is spiritualized. The individual cells of a body cannot long remain healthy if the body itself is sick. Society’s influence on the individual is too great and too pervasive to be neglected. Indeed, the focus on the social aspects of religion and the goal of establishing world unity constitute the most fundamental con- tribution of the Bahá’í Faith to man’s collec- tive religious consciousness. Shoghi Effendi states:

Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. . . .

The unity of the human race, as envisaged by Bahá’u’lláh implies the establishment of a world commonwealth in which all nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united, and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are definitely and completely safeguarded.

Moreover, this consummation of human society can only be accomplished on the basis of religion:

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind, as proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh, carries with it no more and no less than a solemn assertion that attainment to this final stage in this stupendous evolution is not only necessary but inevitable, that its realization is fast approaching, and that nothing short of a power that is born of God can succeed in establishing it.

The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh contain a veritable blueprint for the establishment of this new planetary society, involving, among others, such principles as the establishment of a universal auxiliary language, a world court, a world legislature, a world police force, and universal education. The Bahá’í community is viewed as, in some sense, the spiritual embryo of this future society. Thus the common goal of working to achieve unity gives a sense of purpose to the life of each individual in the Bahá’í community, while the experience within the community itself furnishes practical opportunities for growth and for the practice of this oneness.

To anyone seriously seeking a solution to the current disunity and opposition between religion and science, the answer given by the Bahá’í Faith merits deep investigation.

Who, contemplating the helplessness, the fears and miseries of humanity in this day, can any longer question the necessity for a fresh revelation of the quickening power of God’s redemptive love and guidance? Who, witnessing on one hand the stupendous advance achieved in the realm of human knowledge, of power, of skill and inventiveness, and viewing on the other the unprecedented character of the sufferings that afflict, and the dangers that beset, present-day society, can be so blind as to doubt that the hour has at last struck for the advent of a new Revelation, for a re-statement of the Divine Purpose, and for the consequent revival of those spiritual forces that have, at fixed intervals, rehabilitated the fortunes of human society? Does not the very operation of the world-unifying forces that are at work in this age necessitate that He Who is the Bearer of the Message of God in this day should not only reaffirm that self-same exalted standard of individual conduct inculcated by the Prophets [Page 38] gone before Him, but embody in His appeal, to all governments and peoples, the essentials of that social code, that Divine Economy, which must guide humanity’s concerted efforts in establishing that all-embracing federation which is to signalize the advent of the Kingdom of God on this earth?

Remembering a Scene

Once on a peaceful land

I seemed all alone.

There I lived my own life

upon the turquoise hills.

Guiding me

through sunlit days

the whispering

of sacred leaves.

There I stood,

firm and straight

as the rainbow stretched

embracing me.

There, deep within

the echoing canyons,

I drank

of the clear waters.

Coming down

the turquoise hills

I walked

picking wild tea.

There, where now

only the dry creeks

stretch

I yearn for raindrops.

There on the trail

with patience,

homeward bound

I feel peace.

—Yilhazba’ (Eva Kahn)

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[Page 40]

A Look at Antifeminist Literature

A REVIEW ESSAY ON FOUR BOOKS: MIDGE DECTER’S “THE NEW CHASTITY AND OTHER ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN’S LIBERATION,” GEORGE F. GILDER’S “SEXUAL SUICIDE,” STEVEN GOLDBERG’S “THE INEVITABILITY OF PATRIARCHY,” AND NORMAN MAILER’S “THE PRISONER OF SEX”

BY GAYLE MORRISON

ONLY a decade ago the first signs of the resurgence of feminism appeared, like most first signs, virtually unnoticed. Almost no one was looking at the status of women in the United States in terms of reform or revolution. Social activism was channeled toward integration in the South, Free Speech at Berkeley, ending American involvement in Vietnam. Many women participated in such movements. But it seemed that their own cause—that of sexual equality—had reached its culmination forty years earlier when women gained the vote. American women in the mid-1960s were better educated and freer than any other women in the world or indeed in human history. In the future, it was assumed, they would simply become better and better off.

Since then, years of rampant inflation, economic uncertainty, and serious predictions of disaster have shadowed the American ideal of material progress. Political divisiveness, ending in unprecedented scandal, has tarnished the ideal of good government. The rapid expansion of education at all levels has given way to fiscal problems and cynicism about the goals of education. Optimism for the future, confidence in the system, material comfort and security, all have receded even among the middle class. With them has [Page 41] gone, to a large extent, the commitment to liberal or radical reform.

But if, economically, most American women are no better off than they were a decade ago, their position has changed in other ways. They are moving beyond the conspicuous consumption of the 1950s and 1960s to new levels of participation in political, professional, and economic life, as well as in the arts, trades, sports, religion, and communications. Even among men there now appears to be little doubt that women will and should win equality of opportunity. Today American women are daring to envision manifold possibilities instead of just more of the same; and, as their material well-being has been the model for women everywhere, their vision of equality is also spreading in various parts of the globe.

These changes, it seems, have come about largely through the efforts of a small but growing band of feminist women and an even smaller number of sympathetic men. A milestone in the progress of the women’s movement occurred in August 1974 when President Gerald Ford said he wanted to be president of “women’s liberationists and male chauvinists, and all the rest of us somewhere in between.” While that statement is hardly an espousal of their cause, it recognizes the feminists, employs their terminology, and acknowledges their importance by seeking a middle ground. Among the intelligentsia feminism has made even more of an impression. James C. Haden wrote in a recent issue of World Order:

It is probably not too far wrong to say that feminism has been taken up as the main liberal cause, largely displacing racial problems. . . . 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.

Haden undoubtedly exaggerated the point (“It is probably not too far wrong to say . . .”) in order to lay the groundwork for a guarded attack on the women’s movement. Even so, the cause of women’s equality has achieved a great deal when a President must reckon with it and a liberal critic pose as the underdog to win a hearing. Feminism has indeed raised consciousnesses right and left. And, especially toward the Left, it receives token support. In many circles liberation is, above all, fashionable.

The rapid rise of feminism may perhaps be best explained by a well-worn cliche: it must be an idea whose time has come. For the women’s movement has succeeded despite an almost universally bad press. It has been the subject of innumerable jokes and television sitcoms. It has gained support in the face of the exaggerated notice given to its eccentrics and rabid extremists. It has been misrepresented by its opponents and at times by those from its own ranks. I can think of no better example than a television show several years ago during which Dick Cavett introduced a group of women of differing ideologies and then presided over the ensuing fight—an old trick but effective and amusing.

Yet to their credit the feminists have maintained a certain loyalty to one another in spite of their widely diverging views. Haden termed this a “life-or-death syndrome, preserving the façade grimly against the enemy come what may . . .” I believe rather that it is a flexibility-or-failure syndrome. Feminists know that they are at the beginning of a journey over uncharted ground. Individual feminists may air their theories confidently, but few are willing to dictate dogma or afraid to modify their views. The women’s movement in general has served more to question and probe stereotypic sexual roles than to provide simplistic formulas for equality.

What, after all, does feminism mean? [Page 42] According to Webster, it is “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” or “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.” No feminist, however impassioned, can be absolutely sure what equality entails or what women’s rights and interests actually are. No feminist can claim with total conviction that her path is the only right one. The main thing is to be on the journey toward sexual equality, to be on any path at all.

Thus, although the women’s movement has achieved a kind of superficial success, the equality of men and women remains a vaguely discerned goal even for the feminists themselves. Most Americans, as President Ford suggested, are far from joining the women on the barricades. They are indeed somewhere in between the feminists and the male supremacists, open to change on some points, clinging desperately to their views on others. For the most part they have agreed that the status of women must be improved, that women cannot be second-class citizens. But the agreement is neither given in the name of feminism, nor is it profound. Beneath the surface lurk all the old stereotypes of masculinity and femininity—unfashionable, perhaps, unproven, yet undying. Even among men and women who reject stereotypes for what they are, the accumulated prejudices and preconceptions of the ages, the traditional notions of masculinity and femininity exert their influence. Stereotypes of whatever kind create blind spots, preventing society from recognizing either the full range of human possibilities or of human limitations, preventing individuals and whole categories of human beings from developing their particular capacities.

If women’s gains of the past few years are to continue, more and more people, men and women alike, will be forced to face their prejudices and their fears about the equality of the sexes. In an era of great uncertainty this task will be especially difficult. The Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita achieved wide popularity in the early 1960s, recently characterized the present mood:

The sense of catastrophe that was inherent in La Dolce Vita has grown. . . .

People are losing faith in the future. . . . They are preoccupied with protecting, brutally if necessary, those little personal gains, one’s little body, one’s little sensual appetites. To me, this is the most dangerous feature of the ’70s.

Turning to the subject of feminism Fellini continues:

. . . women are changing. I have complete respect for the attempt of women to liberate themselves, but I fear that the feminist movement has also made men feel less secure. Man has always been accustomed to look at woman as a mystery onto which he projects his fantasies. . . . Man through the ages has continued to cover woman’s face with masks that to his subconscious, probably, represented the unknown part of himself. . . . Suddenly, the feminist movement has revealed a totally new aspect of woman, unknown to man, unsuspected. Another reason for men to distrust the future.

Thus, in a time of fear and uncertainty, if Fellini is right, feminism cannot gain easy acceptance even by those who are most likely to be sympathetic to its goals.

When, a little over a year ago, I read a Harper’s cover article by George Gilder, I was struck by the same theme that Fellini touches upon: the effect of the women’s movement on the foundering security of our time. Like Fellini, Gilder noted the current preoccupation with “one’s little body, one’s little sensual appetites.” But, together with what he termed an “extraordinary chorus” of “happy hookers,” “sensuous psychiatrists,” and “playboy philosophers,” Gilder included [Page 43] the feminists as well. However dissimilar, all of these were advocates of sexual freedom, in Gilder’s view; and as such they were in reality undermining not only true sexuality but the social fabric itself. Hence the sensational title and the somewhat misleading but equally sensational cover design: a moist red mouth pictured in two frames, the full lips parting to reveal strong white teeth, and above them the caption “Woman in Pursuit: The Suicide of the Sexes.”

Fellini, with an artist’s vision and sensitivity, assessed the impact of feminism on our uncertain times, noted the dangers, yet affirmed the positive value of change: “If ours is truly an apocalyptic time, it may promise a new beginning rather than an end. We could not go on living with stale ideas. . . . A season of change does not necessarily mean the collapse of civilization.” Gilder, noting the same uncertainty and dangers, comes to the opposite conclusion: a season of change in the relations between the sexes will surely cause civilization to collapse. He calls for the return to the family and to a moral standard based on respect for the procreative power of sex—ideals which, although they are under fire, are shared by many who are at the same time committed to sexual equality. Under the umbrella of these ideals, however, he brings along such a wide array of traditional and discredited notions about masculinity and femininity, work and the meaning of life, that even one who shares his basic concerns is unlikely to agree with him. If Gilder asks a few of the right questions about the relationship between men and women, he gives virtually all of the wrong answers.

I might, therefore, have dismissed the article with some indignation as patent nonsense. But it was actually a condensation from his then forthcoming book Sexual Suicide, which was in turn only one of several recent antifeminist books. The protests against “Women’s Lib” by happy housewives, dyed-in-the-wool male supremacists, and political and religious conservatives had never stilled. Now, however, they were being joined by writers from intellectual circles (Mr. Haden not being such a lonely nonconformist as he led us to believe) with more convincing styles and arguments. What were these antifeminists saying, I wondered, to all of the people whose ambivalent attitudes toward sexual equality include a degree of fear and mistrust of feminism? What stereotypes were they reinforcing? What implications were there for the equality of men and women in the dissent of serious critics?

THESE QUESTIONS led me to immerse myself for many months in antifeminist literature. Shortly after its publication I read Sexual Suicide and Steven Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy, which Gilder praised as “a brilliant new scholarly study.” Then I turned back to two somewhat older works (circa 1971-72), Midge Decter’s The New Chastity and Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex. Gilder, a former fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard, has been an editor of the Ripon Forum and the New Leader, Goldberg is a sociology professor at the City College of New York. Midge Decter is a highly regarded writer and a former editor of Harper’s magazine. Norman Mailer, being his own best promoter, needs no introduction. Such opponents of feminism cannot be easily dismissed. Decter’s clear, well-reasoned prose, Gilder’s passionate argument, Goldberg’s logic and scholarship, Mailer’s distinctive way with words—all make their impact: how can such talented, respected people be entirely wrong?

The answer, of course, is that they are not entirely wrong, just as the feminists are not entirely right. The antifeminists raise some valid questions and make some worthwhile points. Their books have strengths as well as weaknesses. But, regardless of their strengths and weaknesses, it is probably an easier task [Page 44] for them to persuade their readers than for the feminists, who in the eyes of many are still upstarts causing unnecessary upheaval. The antifeminists reinforce rather than revolutionize the way most of us were brought up to regard the sexes and our own sexual natures. They echo all the doubts and fears about changing sexual roles that we inevitably experience. Undoubtedly, large numbers of people, on reading any of these antifeminist books, would agree with a reader’s comment on Gilder’s article: “This is the first essay in years—I mean years—from which I have been able to learn something about myself . . .” The truth is, perhaps, that a reaffirmation of sexual myths is just what many readers are waiting for. They respond on impulse to the antifeminists’ longing for stable values and unthreatened identities.

Still, there is no united antifeminist front. The authors converge on some issues but elsewhere contradict one another. The one idea central to them all is that it is wrong to proclaim that there are no necessary differences between men and women. It is a point well-founded. But to make this point is not to demolish feminism. The equality of men and women does not mean that they are identical. For every feminist who thinks society will be unjust in its treatment of women until they are interchangeable with men, there are many more who believe that, whatever natural differences between the sexes exist and will remain, these must no longer be the basis for denying women equal respect, equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal participation.

Hence, even if they put down a Shulamith Firestone here or a Kate Millett there, the antifeminists have scarcely vanquished their foe. This leads them to another approach. On the basis of a biased interpretation of feminism they announce: “This is what the feminists say, this is what they really mean, and this will be the result (regardless of what they say or mean).” Like the therapist telling the patient she is self-deluded, the antifeminists claim that their subjects do not know what they are doing or why or where it will all lead.

The best example of this tactic is found in The New Chastity. Decter is not opposed to the idea of equal rights for women, but like James Haden she strongly disapproves of the issues, such as the burden of housework, and the style of the women’s liberation movement. Women have in her view already won all their theoretical battles:

The early Feminists were forced not only to demand the vote but to establish in theory their right to it, as they did their right to be educated, to own property, to run for public office, or to sue someone in a court of law. But where there is no disagreement as to what constitutes an injustice—as there is none with respect to issues bearing on the rights of women today—the constant vociferous harping on it tends to lead to the suspicion that one is here witnessing the beating of a dead horse.

This takes us to the heart of Decter’s argument with the women’s movement:

. . . Women’s Liberation does not embody a new wave of demand for equal rights. Nor does its preoccupation with oppression signal a yearning for freedom. The movement on close examination turns out to be about something else altogether; it is about, in fact, the difficulties women are experiencing with the rights and freedoms they already enjoy.

Women are undoubtedly conditioned by society, but they are still freer than they have ever been, Decter argues, to have a career or not, to define the limits of their sexual and childbearing activity, and perhaps eventually, through biological engineering, to opt out of [Page 45] the procreative role altogether. It is anxiety over their unprecedented freedom that makes passive, neurotic housewives, frustrated secretaries, and radical feminists as well. The notion of male supremacy tells us nothing about the relationship between the sexes. Rather, it appears as a sort of feminist myth, serving “not to explain women but to excuse them, in both senses of the term—to offer an excuse for their retreat from power and to grant them release from responsibility.”

In each of four sections—on work, sex, marriage, and motherhood—Decter presents some of the key arguments put forward in feminist writings, then advances her analysis of what these arguments tell us about the women’s liberationists themselves. In rejecting the tedium of women’s work, Decter states, the feminists are really rejecting the adult responsibility of caring for others. In claiming that women are treated as sex objects, the feminists are actually demonstrating their anxiety about deep involvements with others. In criticizing the traditional wifely role, the feminists are in effect renouncing the obligation to come to terms with an opposing principle. Finally, in condemning the growing emphasis in modern society on motherhood as a career, the liberationists are revealing their “true grievance”: that of being women. Decter sees self-hatred woven through all feminist thinking. She argues, however, that the feminists do not want to become men; rather, they long to become irresponsible, uninvolved, immature maidens—little girls once again. Thus, with the self-assurance of mature wisdom, Decter likens certain feminist issues to “the tantrum of a young child.”

No feminist could fail to be surprised at the image of herself which emerges from The New Chastity. Nonetheless, were she secure enough, she might recognize insights here and there. It is true that freedom is frightening, and many women do pull back from the unknown as much because of their own fears as because of the disapproval of society. Women do flee from adult responsibility —to the security of a women’s commune or a consciousness-raising group as well as to a “safe” marriage in the suburbs. Moreover, Decter is particularly convincing when she argues that for a woman to have a baby in an age of contraception and abortion —“control over their own bodies,” to use the feminist phrase—is to accept responsibility on entirely new terms; a mother is not only responsible for the well-being of her children but truly responsible for “the very fact of their existence.”

Still, feminism is not the only way that women escape from their unprecedented freedom. Moreover, it is naive to suppose that the validity of the feminist cause rests solely upon the emotional health of its proponents. No revolution or movement for change is led by satisfied, happy, well-adjusted people. The agents of change are perforce misfits to some degree. This may be because society denies their real strengths or because they had a miserable childhood or both. Like most human beings, they may hold their ideas for some of the wrong reasons as well as the right ones. But if their ideals are sound, these “misfits” will finally lead all the “well-adjusted” to a new state of equilibrium.

Even if Decter were right that the feminists are self-deluded, angry little girls at heart, rebelling against a world of adult choices, longing for the convent, who else is more successful in applying pressure to the “wrongdoers,” as she calls them, who are denying women the rights that were won decades ago? Is it not also possible that modern feminism makes an important point about women’s rights: that rights count for very little as long as ancient prejudices continue to shape our thinking and influence our actions? Can Decter be so sure that the rights of women are really a “dead horse” [Page 46] about which there is no disagreement?

We need only to turn to a fellow antifeminist, George Gilder, for the answer. Gilder attacks the feminists because they seek the very rights which Decter regards as indisputable: equal opportunity, encouragement toward professional training, equal pay for equal work. For Gilder the issue of women’s rights, far from being a dead horse, poses an active threat to the sexual constitution upon which civilization rests. In this constitution there can be no terms of equality between the sexes; equal opportunity means sexual suicide.

GILDER is a sexual determinist: “There are no human beings; there are just men and women . . .” He claims that sexual differences constitute “the single most important fact of human society.” Eros, he says, is “the generator of our will, commitment, vitality, creativity” and sex “the life force—and cohesive impulse—of a people” and “the single most important motivating force in human life.” Thus sexuality is “a broad pageant of relations and differences between the sexes, embracing every aspect of our lives.” All social problems—unrest, drug abuse, family breakdown, rising crime rates—result from “a fundamental deformation of sexuality.”

But Gilder is not a male supremacist, he says. Women control “the economy of eros,” while men are “the sexual outsiders and inferiors.” Male sexual activity is limited to the short-term, to “a brief performance,” whereas “female sexuality is a long, unfolding process” leading from monthly cycles, through the sex act, to pregnancy, childbirth, and suckling of the young. Thus Gilder finds woman to be sexually superior; he assumes that she is assured of her identity in a way that man, whose role as father is assigned only by culture, is not. For their part men must seek their identity in activity external to their bodies. If they are to be civilized and constructive, rather than violent and obsessed with immediate gratifications, men must be persuaded to accept the superiority of female sexual cycles. “The crucial process of civilization,” Gilder contends, “is the subordination of male sexual impulses and psychology to long-term horizons of female biology”—monogamous family life, the masculine role of father and provider, work, commitment to the future. Gilder clothes the Protestant ethic in the robes of mystical sexuality.

Inherently, therefore, civilization is founded upon a bribe: woman offers man her body and allows him to know his children so that he will become part of civilized society, and man accepts sex on her terms as long as he is given unchallenged supremacy in nonsexual realms. It is not that women are incapable of equal achievement in such realms (in fact girls usually excel in school), Gilder states, but that such achievement is not worth the price—that is, male outlawry and societal chaos. Woman finds her real freedom in a secure order, for “the woman’s place is in the home, and she does her best when she can get the man there too.”

By promoting “alternatives to loving sexuality,” which he defines as monogamous, procreative sex, the sexual revolution menaces “the enduring structures of civilized sexuality.” In the forefront of this revolution is feminism; and any feminist, regardless of her particular views, is in Gilder’s judgment destructive and tragically misdirected. No feminist program is moderate. In fact the moderates, not being obviously eccentric, are actually more dangerous than the extremists because they are successfully attaining their [Page 47] goals through legislation and influence. Behind their superficial respectability even the moderate feminists are, he says, “products of distended education and stinted experience, permissive sex and cynical love; or else they are wives and mothers manqué, having their revenge on the world of men.” When the feminists speak of humanizing men, Gilder suggests, they really mean to emasculate them. Ultimately, however, unable to love the effeminate males of their own program, they tend to develop a “prurient obsession with rape” or to get “vicarious kicks out of the macho violence—the sexy terminal swaggers and the gun fetishism—of the black guerrilla.” Even more than Decter and the other antifeminists, Gilder cannot resist the temptation of dragging those he disagrees with through the mud.

Gilder’s style is considerably cruder than Decter’s and his thinking shallower. Nevertheless at his best he does reaffirm the simple common sense of the collective human experience —that “the sexual drive, whatever adaptations it may have, is fundamentally procreative—the product of millions of years of human evolution designed to perpetuate the species.” When such an intelligent proponent of world order as W. Warren Wagar is asserting that “piety in the sexual realm prescribes . . . the final dissolution of the moral nexus between sexuality and reproduction” and advocating “a glad acceptance of group or orgiastic sex, of homosexuality and bisexuality, of explicitly erotic art and literature, of the consenting enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies and of voluntary prostitution by either sex,” it is valuable to be reminded that “Through family and kinship people gain their connections with both the past and future.”

Gilder shortchanges humanity, however, by identifying eros (“the generator of our will, commitment, vitality, creativity”) with sex (“the life force—and cohesive impulse —of a people”). It is true, as Rollo May states in Love and Will, that “Eros is the drive for union and reproduction in the biological realm.” But May tells us also that, according to the Greeks, eros was “the power that binds all things and all men together,” [Page 48] that which “incites in man the yearning for knowledge and drives him passionately to seek union with the truth,” “the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, form to our otherwise impoverishing formlessness, integration to counter our disintegrative trends,” “the bridge between being and becoming.” With St. Augustine, he adds, eros became “the power which drives men toward God.” All of these definitions of eros lead us far beyond sex and sexuality, even as Gilder broadly, or carelessly, defines them.

SEX EXISTS in the biological realm, but eros transcends it. Eros is part of that human realm which Gilder denies when he insists that “There are no human beings; there are just men and women . . .” Sex and sexuality have to do with biological survival and thus have been a primary need of the human race. But in this age of “the development of human values and choices,” as May puts it, sexuality is no longer a primary need. “Now,” he says, “it is in the shift from drive to desire that we see human evolution.” Desire combines eros, rather than sex, with will; it takes us beyond biological drives and agendas inscribed upon our bodies to human capacities for discipline, choice, and purpose.

If Gilder is unconvincing on the subject of sex, he is even less so on the sexes. Any woman could tell him that her “unimpeachable sexual identity,” as he calls it, has its own perils. Although she may have the “civilized role or agenda” of motherhood inscribed upon her body, that role in itself can be the lonely and fearful burden that Decter describes so vividly. And, beyond the dread of this “one irrevocable act,” as Decter calls it, lies the greater dread of not being able to fulfill her assigned role—a reality which comes sooner to the sterile or diseased woman and later to all in the process of menopause. Gilder claims that the feminists know nothing about men, but he fails even to consider what happens to a woman when the monthly reaffirmation of her sexuality ceases and the “long, unfolding process” of female sexuality comes to an end, with twenty or more years of life without “secure” identity yet to be lived. He laments that middle-aged men are drawn to affairs with young women by the emphasis in our culture on youthful sexuality. But what happens to a woman’s “enormous power over men” when her physical attractiveness deteriorates, she can no longer bear children, and her husband—as have husbands through the ages, Gilder’s emphasis on the present notwithstanding—turns to a younger woman with whom he has at least the potential, well into old age, of fathering children?

Furthermore, women’s hallowed procreative role is in reality their lowest common denominator. Simply by doing what comes naturally, Gilder asserts, women bring about order and civilization. This is a remarkably dispiriting view of human possibilities; for motherhood, regardless of its virtues, is still a biological function, an animal instinct. Fatherhood, as Gilder describes it, is a greater achievement; tenuous beyond the moment of fertilization, fatherhood is the product of human culture, a choice far more than a necessity.

Many writers tend to flounder on the subject of the opposite sex, loving or hating blindly, envying without real understanding. [Page 49] With their own sex, however, they are usually more perceptive. In Gilder’s case it may be that he has indeed much of value to say about men’s emotions. Perhaps, for example, men really do feel like the outsiders in life (strangely enough, so do women in their own way). Maybe it is true that a man needs to feel “affirmed sexually by his work environment” and this affirmation consists mainly of trivial “rites and symbols.” It is barely possible that “Athletics for men is an ideal of purity and truth” and that when a boy catches a fly ball “He will never be closer to God.” One may even concur that for men guns serve as “an emblem of the male as hunter,” thus that “gun restrictions pose a serious psychological threat.” To pander to such silly, egotistic emotions is, nonetheless, inexcusable.

If, as Fellini observed, man has covered the face of woman with masks that probably represent the unknown within himself, Gilder suggests that the reverse is equally true; woman has covered the face of man with masks representing her own unacknowledged strengths. Now Gilder strips away the mask of manhood and reveals a shallow creature, sexually inferior, frail in his sense of self, prone to destructiveness and nihilism. He has undoubtedly done to men what Decter claims that the feminists have done to women—that is, demeaned them far more effectively than any one of the opposite sex ever could.

Gilder further reveals the narrowness of his position by making a religion of the family: “The family is the only institution that works on the deep interior formations of human character and commitment.” In the service of that religion Gilder glorifies women and diminishes men. Yet families flourish throughout the animal kingdom. Surely they are not the source of human values but the primary means of conveying them from generation to generation.

In Gilder’s religion of procreative sexuality, Norman Mailer is perhaps the leading guru. For him too the meaning of sex, far from “sensuous massage,” is procreation— not simply the potentiality but the unimpeded probability of conception. The womb is Mailer’s mandala. Masculinity and femininity, he suggests, are a matter of instinct (“a passion to be masculine rooted in the flesh and existence of a Creation deeper than reason”) and of will (males “must work to become men” and females “must take a creative leap into becoming women”); yet masculinity and femininity depend also upon the presence of the womb, which gives to men in the act of love the power to become more masculine and to women the capacity to be more feminine. Without the fertile womb we descend from the temple to the marketplace:

For whatever else is in the [sexual] act, lust, cruelty, the desire to dominate, or simple desire, the result can be little more than a transaction—complex and pleasurable, but a transaction—when no hint remains of the awe that a life in these circumstances can be conceived. Heterosexual sex with contraception is become by this logic a form of sexual currency closer to the homosexual than the heterosexual . . .

Even Gilder does not go so far. He claims only that love is essentially the aspiration for progeny and thus normal heterosexual relations between two people who are in love are “instinctively” and “symbolically” procreative. Under these circumstances, even if a child is not to be conceived, “a sex act will be a symbolic ritual enactment of procreative intercourse.” With Mailer, however, there is no place in the temple of [Page 50] sexuality for the practice of contraception, let alone for sterility or the climacteric. His concept of the human sexual constitution is thus more limited than Gilder’s. He too dislikes the single permissive sexual standard (“a species of primitive capitalism”). For him too procreative sex attains overshadowing importance in life (“give meaning to sex and one was the prisoner of sex—the more meaning one gave it, the more it assumed”). And, if one rejects the single permissive sexual standard, to be the prisoner of sex is to be the prisoner of wedlock as well. But long-term commitment between a man and a woman is not in itself enough for Mailer. His sexual order is based solely upon the impregnating male and the fecund female. Thus Gilder would be well advised to blame Mailer for contributing to the tendency of middle-aged men to seek young women; for, according to Mailer’s philosophy, a middle-aged woman is evidently little better as a partner than a male prostitute. Only the man, he implies, retains into the last third of his lifetime the capacity for meaningful sexual relations.

Mailer’s convictions about sex led inevitably to one of the “irritating remarks” that earned for him the enmity of the feminists: “‘The fact of the matter is that the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.’” Intended to be outrageous, the comment yet had a germ of truth for Mailer. “The Prisoner of Sex,” after being a critique of the writings of liberationists and especially a rejoinder to Kate Millett, who devoted a chapter to him in her Sexual Politics, is a justification of that germ of truth.

For woman, according to Mailer as well as Gilder, is consecrated by the womb. Mailer could not help but feel that:

Men were by comparison to women as simple meat; men were merely human beings equipped to travel through space at a variety of speeds, but women were human beings traveling through the same variety of space in full possession of a mysterious space within. In that purse of flesh were psychic tendrils, waves of communication to some conceivable source of human life, some manifest of life come into human beings from a beyond which persisted in remaining stubbornly beyond. Women, like men, were human beings, but they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence. . . .

Yet, despite his mysticism, Mailer allows what Gilder does not: women are human beings too, not wholly other, and to be a woman requires courage and will.

MAILER SHARES Gilder’s view, the correlate to female sexual superiority, that men are “relatively fragile.” He attacks the feminists’ “dull assumption that the sexual force of a man was the luck of his birth, rather than his finest moral product, or if not his . . . then a local gift passed along by something well achieved in his mother, his father, or farther back the line.” He defends D. H. Lawrence as “a man more beautiful perhaps than we can guess,” a mother’s boy who became “a man by an act of will,” a man struggling with homosexuality and needing to tyrannize women simply to feel equal to them, but finally a writer who “understood women as they had never been understood before, understood them with all the tortured fever of a man who had the soul of a beautiful, imperious, and passionate woman . . .”

Nonetheless Mailer readily admits his sexual bias, that he held “the firmest male prejudice of them all, which is that women might possess the better half of life already,” and he concedes that to be a woman may be [Page 51] difficult after all. Woman’s links to eternity do not give her unquestioned superiority in the realm of eros, as Gilder claims. Women have the edge, but

. . . the claim could hardly be entered that men were helpless before women. It was a near-equal war after all, a brutal bloody war with wounds growing within and the surgeons collecting the profit from either sex.

The “prisoner” is trapped between his fantasies and his sensibilities. He feels uneasy before the strength of women, before the mystic power with which he imbues them, yet he is a complex, intelligent man, neither a misogynist nor an idolator. His sympathy for women extends to the feminists, Kate Millett excepted. Mailer admires the tough, obscene language of some of the liberationists. He is willing to credit the insights they offer and further to grant them the right to express “the anger of the centuries.” He even respects some feminists—Gloria Steinem, whom he calls “wise, responsible, and never unattractive,” and, by implication, the “redoubtable” Bella Abzug as well.

Too honest in his sensibilities to adopt Decter’s tactic of dogmatic interpretation of the feminist movement as a whole, Mailer simply attacks Millett for being “central to the age” in her mediocrity and her reliance on “the liberal use of technology for any solution to human pain”; he speculates that Millett may be women’s liberation and implies that hers is the way of the future; he suggests that revolution always leads to fanatical excesses; but he can never explain away the notes that ring true in other feminist voices, any more than he can relinquish his own obsession with the mystical procreative force of sex. Finally, he returns to his “irritating” remark about “the prime responsibility of a woman” and puts it in a new context. It is not a demeaning responsibility at all, he argues, and it is so important that women must be liberated to fulfill it properly: “So let woman be what she would, and what she could” as long as she does not ask “to quit the womb.”

Mailer sees the womb as the destiny of woman, transcending all she would or could be. The feminists, of whatever sort, see the womb as a “could-be” on the way to some higher reality of human existence. Perhaps Mailer’s emphasis on feminist writings through 1970—Millett, Atkinson, and a handful of others—limits his perspective. In any case he fails to discern in the ferment of women’s liberation that which all the feminists share: a vision, a leap of faith (which a believer in struggle such as Mailer should at least recognize), a commitment to the idea that, whatever the limits of sexuality, there is much more to the human being. The feminists are metaphysicians too, searching for the transcendent, for some finer “moral product” than sexual potency and some deeper fulfillment than the orgasm of procreation. On Mailer’s terms the creative leap toward becoming a woman lands one irrevocably in the prison of sex. For the feminists the leap is toward the unknown, a new life in which woman is neither inferior nor idol, thus freed at last to possess a womb without being imprisoned by it.

If Mailer pleads for procreation as the ultimate symbol of sexual difference, if Gilder asks woman to keep her end of the bargain by shoring up sexual differences, if Decter claims that women are recoiling from sexual differences because they hate being women, none implies that sexual differences actually prevent women from competing on equal terms with men. In The Inevitability of Patriarchy sociologist Steven Goldberg carries the idea of biological differences between the sexes a step further and concludes that the very nature of those differences insures male domination.

[Page 52] Goldberg proposes the theory that the universality of patriarchy and male dominance, even in those societies where male and female roles vary widely, results from hormonal differences which give men an aggression advantage over women. He bases his argument on a body of recent scientific research which indicates that among mammals the male hormone “testosterone is related not only to sexual differentiation but to aggression itself.” Thus “the hormonal renders the social inevitable,” Male aggression leads to “attainment,” regardless of all the other aspects of human personality in which sexual differences may play no part. Attainment means, in Goldberg’s view, roles “in any non-child related area rewarded by high status in any society,” and it is given the most play in modern, mobile, democratic societies.

If women were socialized to compete on equal terms with men, Goldberg says, some would succeed and gain high status positions, but most would be “doomed to adult lifetimes of failure to live up to their own expectations.” Male aggression does not oppress women, because it is not directed toward them; rather, “these male energies are directed toward attainment of desired positions and toward succeeding in whatever areas a particular society considers important.” Women are oppressed, he implies, only by the limitations of their own physiology. For a woman to deny these limitations is to invite dissatisfaction; to accept them is to have power on feminine terms, by getting around men, and simply by having the “central role” in life, by setting “the rhythm of things.” Thus Goldberg too determines that woman’s place is in the home, not, however, because men cannot stand the competition of women—as Gilder maintains— but because women themselves are not up to it.

Goldberg seeks further to reinforce male dominance by hypothesizing male superiority in the aptitude for logical abstraction. This is, of course, hardly a new idea, being perhaps the prevailing traditional notion about the differences between the sexes. Goldberg admits that the evidence for this theory is less convincing than that for patriarchy based on male aggression, but he concludes that it is quite possible that stereotypes and socialization in fact have corresponded to “limits set by innate differences in cognitive aptitudes.”

Adult men as a group, he says, always perform as well as or better than women in intelligence tests, although the performance of children shows no such superiority (because “male superiority has not yet developed to the point where it manifests itself on the tests” or because of the pubertal increase in male hormonalization). The game of chess is dominated by males, he claims, to the extent that no Grand Master has ever been a woman nor do women number among the five hundred best chess players in history. Furthermore, he argues that it is not without reason that “all the Aristotles, the Leonardos, the Rembrandts, the Bachs, the Marxes” have been men. Whereas women have attained equality in the performing arts and “perhaps” in literature, “there is not a single woman whose genius has approached that of any number of men in philosophy, mathematics, composing, theorizing of any kind, or even painting.” He concludes that genius in such areas most likely depends upon “the aptitude for dealing with logical abstractions” in which males are demonstrably superior.

The Inevitability of Patriarchy is intended [Page 53] to strike a death blow at feminism. Goldberg devotes an entire chapter to “Confusion and Fallacy in the Feminist Analysis.” But, according to his theory, all the logic in the world will not help the feminists (who, if they are women, are not capable of superior logical reasoning anyway). How can there be equality if women are less aggressive and less intelligent than men—in other words, if they have neither the drive nor the ability to succeed in high-status positions? Goldberg is careful to note that to judge one sex superior to the other would be unscientific; he is talking, he avers, only about differences in demonstrable capacities for aggression and logical abstraction, not about male capacities being better than the complementary female ones. Yet the vehemence of his attack on the feminists leaves no doubt whatsoever that he has an ax to grind.

GOLDBERG CLAIMS in his introductory remarks to have addressed the question “what are men and women and to what degree must male-female differences be manifested in societal expectations, values, and institutions” and to have found his theory emerging from the answers. He criticizes the feminists for grounding theory in ideology. But one can scarcely conclude that he came to his own theory reluctantly. He goes beyond the bare bones of theory to indulge in not only a “strong” tone, which he defends in the preface, but in gratuitous philosophizing. He states, for example, “One wonders if Mother Nature’s anger at her children’s denial of her is particularly strong when the renegades are of her own sex,” and “while there are more brilliant men than brilliant women, there are more good women than good men” (or has social science really given us an objective test for goodness, let alone brilliance, on a scale of 1 to 10?). Such comments, the heart of Gilder’s book, seem somewhat inappropriate coming from the spokesman of science and reason, who has instructed us that “science can never validate or invalidate subjective appraisals. Science speaks only of what is and what, within the limits of mathematical probability, must be.”

It is worth noting that, for one who is so ready to fault the feminists for ignoring research that works against them, Goldberg fails even to mention some significant evidence favoring the environmentalists, particularly a series of studies indicating that expectations influence performance (when teachers, for example, were told that certain randomly selected students were promising, those students began to improve, finally showing significant increases in their I.Q.s).

Goldberg also claims that, when blacks fail to perform as well as whites, the results are not surprising considering “the educational discrimination forced on blacks”; but as women’s performance is markedly inferior solely in abstract reasoning, only “an unbelievably specialized form of oppression” could cause this inferiority “in one narrow area of cognition” (never mind that this “narrow area” of logic is, as he has just told us, the key to all truly superior intellectual performance). Women are socialized as they are for good reason, Goldberg says, because they are doomed to fail in competition with men. Yet fifty, a hundred, five hundred years ago, when women were excluded from intellectual activities of any sort, could one have implied correctly that this was because they were incapable of reading and writing as well as men, of being as good experimental scientists, or doctors, or literary critics, or any of the things that even Goldberg admits that they have proved capable of being? If socialization corresponds to innate differences in ability between men and women, [Page 54] can Goldberg explain why socialization today is any more appropriate than in the past, when women were treated as virtually ineducable creatures although they now appear to be, even on Goldberg’s terms, almost as quick-witted as men?

It is apparent that Goldberg’s vision is kept “within the limits of mathematical probability” when he wishes and pure bias the rest of the time. Only such narrow vision could produce the smug statement: “Perhaps in literature one might take the position that Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontës were the equals of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky.” It should have been obvious to an unbiased observer that one could indeed hold these women writers to be equal or superior to male novelists writing in English in the nineteenth century. The question is not are they as good as Shakespeare (for the leading male novelists of their day were not his equals either) but why is it that they had no counterparts in Shakespeare’s time? Is biology really sufficient explanation for the emergence of so many outstanding women writers in the past two hundred years, particularly in Britain and America?

An excellent rejoinder to Goldberg’s assertion that there are no female geniuses is provided by Eva Figes, one of the feminists whom he disparages. In her Patriarchal Attitudes she quotes a remarkably similar passage from Anthony Storr’s On Aggression (p. 62), which was published in 1968 but is nowhere mentioned by Goldberg, and she replies:

Apart from the fact that there are remarkably few Beethovens and Michelangelos anyway, which is what makes them worthy of mention, it would seem to me that the ratio of opportunity to achievement is at least comparable, if not slightly in favour of the mindless ones. One wonders what the ratio was between men and women in the physics class at the Sorbonne when Marie Curie studied in Paris.

Figes also notes that in addition to opportunity, “One has to consider motivation.”

However, such nonbiological factors are precisely what Goldberg refuses to consider: “I suspect that those who explain the preponderance of male genius in environmental terms have never had the fortune to be exposed to a mind of genius for long.” Although we know very little about genius (and subjective opinions add little to our knowledge), we can be sure that no human quality—whether biologically-based or not —exists in a vacuum. The environment impinges even upon the mind of genius. Were one to agree with Goldberg that geniuses are neither motivated nor deterred by society, it would nonetheless be obvious that genius is of no consequence unless it is eventually recognized by society, as it often is not during the genius’ lifetime. Furthermore, the work of genius must be preserved and available to society if it is to make a contribution to human civilization. To explain genius in purely biological terms is thus incredibly simplistic. How could society have recognized or preserved works of female genius when women were not even deemed worthy of education until a century ago? It is not insignificant that all of the women he brings into his discussion of genius made their contributions in the nineteenth century, the dawn of women’s emerging equality.

If Goldberg’s opinions on sex and intelligence are not the last words on the subject, [Page 55] neither is the scientific research on which he bases his arguments completely conclusive. Men are not mice, even if the same hormones are at work in their bodies. If men are more aggressive than women, they will fill all high-status roles only until women lose the fear of being beaten or raped into submission. (It is not surprising that women have become more assertive at a time in history when personal physical aggressiveness is considered uncivilized in everyday life.) For aggression is not necessarily the best qualification for such roles in a complex society. Remove the element of force, and women’s capabilities begin to emerge, as we see in the history of the last hundred years. Then if women are indeed naturally inferior to men in logical reasoning—and Goldberg is not convincing on this—perhaps we will discover that, all those men in high-status roles having stacked [Page 56] the deck, society has neglected the intellectual qualities in which women are strong. Goldberg himself recognizes this even as he sends women to the back of the bus:

we are trapped in what could be the final irony: the biological factors that underlie women’s life-sustaining abilities—the qualities most vital to the survival of our species—preclude women’s ever manifesting the psychological predisposition, the obsessive need of power, or the abilities necessary for the attainment of significant amounts of political power.

Thus for Goldberg human history is quite possibly a dead end. We are trapped by our hormones, as we always have been. The only way out is for society to separate aggression from attainment and thus nullify the masculine advantage, but this is for him scarcely conceivable. The rational mind would have to be “capable of overriding the filter system, the hypothalamus, that invests all thought with emotion.” If one even wanted “to give primacy to rational man” and do away with emotion, Goldberg argues, it seems an unlikely prospect:

It is true that man has some capabilities in this area that other species do not (no one has ever heard of a chicken who was celibate for moral reasons), but to expect that a large number of the members of any society will ever be able to override emotions would seem to me pure utopianism.

If morally induced celibacy is a rational capacity, then so is monogamy or even polygamy, which do not do away with emotion but channel it. Large numbers of the members of society have maintained premarital chastity, fidelity to their partners, and marriage itself despite the undeniable strength of the sex drive. If lust is susceptible to control, surely male aggression, which has already been channelled considerably in the development of civilization, can be controled further without having to be eradicated.

Yet Goldberg rejects the logic of change, of social evolution which entangles hormones with a multitude of other factors governing human behavior and institutions. Perhaps the fundamental weakness in Goldberg’s theory of the inevitability of patriarchy may be seen in the statement that “At the bottom of it all man’s job is to protect woman and woman’s is to protect her infant; in nature all else is luxury.” Man in the twentieth century has proved entirely incapable of protecting woman. Indeed, his aggressiveness threatens her and her infant as well. Seen even in biological terms, there is nothing luxurious about the emancipation of women if they can change the deadly course that the world’s male leaders have set. Women en masse have never before been put to the proof of their nurturant role. If they are as strong and as good as Goldberg claims, if they indeed “set the rhythm of things,” can they not extend their “life-sustaining abilities” to the realms where crucial decisions are made?

IT 1s above all in their lack of an evolutionary or historical perspective that the antifeminists fail to discern the challenge and potential of the movement for sexual equality. For sexual determinism offers neither a past nor a future. What is the possibility for social evolution if one is the prisoner of sex, if the human sexual constitution is irrevocably fixed, if women are really only fit for motherhood after all? How can one escape the confines of the present?

Decter includes in her book numerous references to the history of feminism, but she fails entirely to take into account the influence of the past upon the present: the residual attitudes and deep-seated prejudices that impinge upon all of us in this first century of freedom for women. Thus she dismisses the issues of women’s rights that [Page 57] some regard as central to feminism. Granting that women have not gained equality of opportunity, she claims that women’s rights are already evident and, when they are not recognized, that such “issues of injustice” are not suited to “the large-scale analyses of a liberation movement but to the particular and practical application of pressure against the wrongdoers.” Yet if women do not have equality of opportunity, there must be a great deal of wrongdoing going on. Why, if not because women’s rights are still in dispute, as Gilder and Goldberg demonstrate? And who in any case is doing more than the moderate feminists to pressure wrongdoers in such areas as credit and equal pay for equal work? Furthermore, who is doing more than the movement as a whole to cast doubt upon all the attitudes about women, our legacy from less enlightened times, which her fellow antifeminists are trying to restore? To ignore the achievements of modern feminism is to deny the process of history, the way in which historic change unfolds.

For Gilder the movement of history strands us in the present. We have attained civilization through the sexual compact, he declares. That compact is our future; alter it, and there is nothing ahead but the abyss. Gilder’s inability to perceive the present in historical perspective leads him to conclude that the feminists and their fellow sexual revolutionaries are accentuating all of our social problems by weakening the family. He mistakes the symptom, the weakening of the family, for the disease. Families are disintegrating and losing their power to convey moral values as a result of the spiritual vacuum in which modern man struggles for meaning. The feminists did not create this age of transformation; if the old order had not proved itself to be inadequate, they would not in fact exist. Revolutions are not made because of revolutionaries but because of conditions which create an intense desire for change.

The existence of the preconditions for feminism does not, of course, make the feminists right on all counts. But it is absurd to make them the scapegoats for all of society’s problems. Gilder goes so far as to call the moderate wing of the women’s movement “the most important remaining organized enemy of black progress in America” since it opposes programs focusing on “the black male as the chief provider and supporter of the ghetto family.” As Gilder claims to have the key to black progress, blacks may judge whether warmed-over Moynihan meets their needs. In the meantime, however, it is hardly fair of Gilder to ignore the close historical and ideological ties between feminism and the movement for racial equality in the United States and to heap upon the feminists’ shoulders the effects of a system of economic exploitation which started back in the halcyon days before Seneca Falls, when women knew their place. It appears in fact to be a crude attempt to use the tactic of divide and conquer.

For Mailer history is something to be overcome. He finds respite from the impetus of history, finds intervals of eternity, in the act of procreation. It is the last defense against the forces of technology, mediocrity, and homogenization which he perceives as the probable forces of history, the levelers of human creativity. Real liberation consists in cutting through all the impediments of society to that one existential reality. The future, menaced by Millett on the one hand and “the corporations of the conservatives” on the other, disappears in gloom beyond the last viable act of love.

Yet in place of a concept of social evolution leading to the equality of men and women, what future do the antifeminists [Page 58] offer? I cannot accept that men are so inherently fragile in their sense of self, so completely governed by their physiology, that they are unable to bear the equal participation of women. It seems unlikely that women are so passive that they would watch the world falling to ruin without lifting a finger. Whatever one thinks about the importance of hormones or the womb or procreative sex, to come to the conclusion that males must dominate at all costs is more nihilistic, more lacking in common sense, perhaps even more patently absurd than the most far-fetched feminist fantasy. The human being is more than hormones, is not defined solely by its reproductive organs, or we would not be living in an age of such tremendous achievements or such terrifying problems. It is as wrong, as much in ignorance of human nature, to say that sex is all as to deny it completely.

The antifeminists are mistaken also in claiming that the denial of sexual differences is inherent in feminism. Perhaps some feminists are seriously committed to androgyny or even to female supremacy, or such theories may constitute a phase that some are going through. In either case I suspect that in five years the tone and concerns of feminist writings will be at least as different as they are today compared with five years ago. The movement is maturing; the stridence of insecurity is giving way to reasonable assurance. Enough gains have been made in five years to show that the time is ripe for change in attitudes toward the sexes.

There can be no doubt, however, that change will not finally consist of a law here and a woman executive there. Nor are such things in themselves ultimately beneficial to society. Gilder is right when he says that adding large numbers of aspiring career women to the work force in a time of economic contraction could be disastrous. Moreover, most women do not prefer typing all day to being a housewife, and they would not be any happier, as he implies, in the drudgery of some job traditionally assigned to males. Mailer gives a partial answer when he quotes a radical feminist on the need to change our present economic system and agrees with her that “women (and men as well) would not get anything fundamental without changing the economic system.” But he gets caught up in fear of “the enigma of revolution,” and of the sexual revolution beyond the economic one, and misses the point. Neither he nor perhaps even the socialist writer herself appreciated the wider significance of her assertion that “‘women will never . . . move for anything less than NEW LIVES.’”

The issue of new lives is inseparable from consideration of historical evolution. If there is any meaning in this anxiety-ridden age, it is that the twentieth century is leading us toward new lives in a new kind of social order. To come to this conclusion is a matter of pragmatism rather than utopianism. Recently the U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, espoused this view when he declared:

We are faced . . . with the accelerating momentum of our interdependence. . . . We are stranded between old conceptions of political conduct and a wholly new environment, between the inadequacy of the nation-state and the emerging imperative of global community.

His choice of the term “global community” is significant. For a community is not an imposed system but a grouping of people linked by economic, cultural, political, and spiritual ties. A world community has never existed before. It is obvious that in the process of forming a global community we will all be changed.

Feminism is in fact integral to the attainment of global community. While we cannot be certain where the untraveled path of [Page 59] sexual equality is taking us—any more than we can grasp all the implications of world peace or of coordinated worldwide cooperation on scientific and economic problems— we must recognize that feminism is in the forefront of change.

The movement for equal opportunity for women in the working world is one of many factors impelling us toward fundamental changes in the world’s economic systems. The only alternative to cut-throat competition for a limited number of jobs consists in new patterns of and attitudes toward work, productivity, education, leisure time, and sexual roles themselves.

However, if the human being is not ultimately definable in economic terms, such changes are only an improvement upon the distribution of privileges in existing economic systems. New lives can only have meaning in a global community—a spiritual and practical reality to fill our moral vacuum, embracing both sexes, all races, religions, and groups; according each individual equal rights and equal human dignity; and affirming the interdependence of all. Such sweeping changes will take us far beyond the more ephemeral concerns of today’s feminists. James Haden used an appropriate term when he called the women’s movement “hydra-headed.” The attacks of the antifeminists perhaps even increase its regenerative powers. They serve to reveal that feminism is not the theories of one feminist (or of fifty) but it is above all one of the forces leading us toward a desperately needed new definition of what it means to be a human being in a united world order.

The antifeminists seek to elaborate stereotypes and myths about the sexes with notions of hormonal imperatives, unchangeable sexual constitutions, subconscious motivations, and mysterious links with the powers of creation. They are ensnared, however, in an irrelevant set of priorities. It is essential for us to put the rational mind in control of the compulsions which threaten to destroy us. Myths and stereotypes of any sort, even if they are based on some shred of reality, divide people and support all the injustices which lead in turn to dissatisfaction and finally to the dissolution of whatever community once existed. They pervade the relationship between men and women and arm the participants in that ancient form of warfare, the battle between the sexes. But there is no place in global community for either war or prejudice. Once global community is created, it cannot be allowed to fail; for beyond it, truly, is nothing but the abyss. By casting doubt on myths and stereotypes and compelling equal rights for women in society, the women’s movement is helping to create the conditions for unbiased scientific inquiry into the nature of masculinity and femininity, for appreciation of whatever differences may be inherent in men and women, and above all for recognition of the transcendent human reality which unites us all.

Sitting in the park,

the old men hear the laughter

of children at play. . .

—Wanda J. Reid

[Page 60]

Authors & Artists

WILLIAM S. HATCHER, Professor of mathematics at Laval University, holds two degrees from Vanderbilt University and a doctorate of sciences from the University of Neuchatel. His publications include Foundation of Mathematics and numerous articles on mathematics, logic, computer science, and philosophy. Our veteran readers will remember his “Bahá’u’lláh to the Christians” (Winter 1966), “Science and Religion” (Spring 1969), and “Economics and Moral Values” (Winter 1974-75).

EVA KAHN, a school teacher who likes to write, is a member of the first Navajo family to embrace the Bahá’í Faith.

GAYLE MORRISON makes a welcome return to the pages of World Order, her “Education for Worldmindedness” having appeared in Summer 1971 and “Art in Apocalypse” (co-authored with her husband) in Summer 1970. Ms. Morrison served on the Editorial Board of World Order from Fall 1969 through Fall 1972. She has done graduate work in Southeast Asia studies at Yale University and received her M.A. in social education from the University of Massachusetts. She has published A Guide to Books on Southeast Asian History: 1961-1966. Ms. Morrison is currently living in Brazil with her husband and small daughter.

WANDA J. REID is a civil service employee in the State of Washington.

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 anthologies, 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. In 1974 he was named Poet Laureate of the State of Oregon.

ART CREDITS: P. 5, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 6, photograph of the bust of a lady (Titus’ daughter) at the time of the Trojan War, courtesy The Bettmann Archive; p. 21, photograph of a marching suffragette, courtesy The Bettmann Archive; pp. 30-31, pen and ink drawing by David S. Ruhe; p. 39, photograph of a view of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 40, courtesy The Bettmann Archive; p. 47, photograph, courtesy The Bettmann Archive; p. 55, woodcut, courtesy The Bettmann Archive; backcover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL is managing editor of World Order.

DAVID S. RUHE, a former professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Kansas Medical School and Center, studied art in his youth. He serves currently as a member of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme administrative body of the Bahá’í Faith.

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International Womens Year 1975

Symbol for International Women’s Year 1975 which was designed and donated by Valerie Pettis of the United States. The symbol includes a dove for peace, the scientific symbol for the female sex—a cross under a circle, and the mathematical sign of equality.—Courtesy United Nations

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