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During the century’s concluding years, many National Spiritual Assemblies won impressive victories of their own in the field of external affairs. Two outstanding examples suggest the character and importance of these advances.
She is a Frenchwoman, and has had about half a century’s experience of her present fleshly tabernacle, which is somewhat the worse for wear, although from the fossil remains of bygone beauty, still visible in her ancient countenance, her customer inclined to the belief that in some remote age she was comely and pleasant to the eye.
Throughout the planet, Western imperialism was pursuing among the populations of other lands what it regarded as its “civilizing mission”. In the words of one historian, the century’s opening decade appeared to be essentially a continuation of the “long nineteenth century”, an era whose boundless self-satisfaction was perhaps best epitomized by the celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, a parade that rolled for hours through the streets of London, with an imperial panoply and display of military power far surpassing anything attempted in past civilizations.
Locked into the nineteenth century’s conception of untrammelled national sovereignty, it could take decisions only with the unanimous assent of the member states, a requirement largely ruling out effective action.
These masses of humankind, despoiled and scorned—but representing most of the earth’s inhabitants—were seen not as protagonists but essentially as objects of the new century’s much vaunted civilizing process.
Among the chief developments giving substance to it, the Master may well have had in mind the dramatic extinction of colonialism and the consequent rise of self-determination as a dominant feature of national identity at century’s end. Whatever threats still hang over humanity’s future, the world has been transformed by the events of the twentieth century.
It exposed the depth of the crisis the world is experiencing at century’s end, in which the processes of both integration and disintegration that had gathered momentum during the past hundred years seem to accelerate with each passing day. Those who long to believe the visionary statements of world leaders struggle at the same time in the grip of two phenomena that undermine such confidence.
In India, one of the century’s most remarkable figures, Mohandas Gandhi, embarked on an enterprise that would not only revolutionize the fortunes of his country, but also demonstrate conclusively to the world what spiritual force can achieve.
In the perspective of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings, the greatest danger of both the moral crisis and the inequities associated with globalization in its current form is an entrenched philosophical attitude that seeks to justify and excuse these failures. The overthrow of the twentieth century’s totalitarian systems has not meant the end of ideology. On the contrary.
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