CHAPTER SEVEN:
America at the Crossroads - 7

Many years ago Abdul Baha, son of Baha'u'llah, the Persian Prophet who over a century ago founded the Baha'i Faith, stressed this ideal of service in a spiritual-religious sense, and his whole life became a perfect manifestation of that ideal. In 1945-48 I wrote about the Server type as a new type of human being required for the harmonious operation of a complex global society, and I presented a new interpretation and evaluation of the concept of management. The immense scope and complexity of a global society, and first of all the ever-expanding American society, cannot be solved by computers alone; the men dealing with them have to understand in a new way their function and responsibility in a New Age society. Moreover, the entire concept of "production" has to be transformed and we must realize that it may be impossible to do this within the established pattern of national sovereignty and rivalry. Here I would like to quote what I wrote in the fall of 1945, because it is as relevant today as it was nearly thirty years ago:

Every new release of power establishes the undismissable need for a new type of human being to handle the vast potential of energy, which, if not used by a new type of men and women, must destroy all men and all women within its radius of action. There will be new institutions, new mechanisms of control, new techniques; but these will prove a blessing to man, only if they come as the creation of the new type of human beings, when this new type has definitely established its ascendancy over the long-ruling "elite" of an outdated society.
      Here is the entire world-problem in a nutshell: The democratic reliance upon the individual person must stay; but total productivity on a global scale must be established for all men and also in all men — thus by all men. The values arising from the five-century development of nations as cultural fields for the integration of diverse races, and superseding those of archaic societies based on the tribal ideal, must be retained in a form purified from political exclusivism and from the fallacy of the principle of absolute sovereignty; but atomic power must become the foundation of a global economy and an all-human world-society which will leave no one out and will discriminate against no race, no class, no group.
      These two pairs of apparent opposites can be reconciled only as the man of tomorrow harmonizes within himself the still more basic conflict between the ego, structuring his conscious life and his newly acquired sense of individual responsibility as a self, and those powers which, because they are rooted in the usually unconscious depths of man's common humanity, belong, not to the individual, but to Man as a whole.
      Harmonization, reconciliation, integration are needed today in every sphere of human endeavor. They are needed in all these spheres simultaneously. But the center of the total process of harmonization can only be the human being. In him, psychology and sociology, atomic engineering and economics, arts and the sciences of management, meet. Man is the measure of all revolutions because he is the only key to everything human. In man, therefore, we must place our faith. And to have faith means here to gain the power to summon forth out of the womb of human futurity the image of the new man, the man whose hands and mind can control the universal energy locked in the heart of the atom, because his own heart has learnt how to beat in tune to the ordered rhythm of the universe.

It is not by returning to Christian fundamentalism and "crusades for Christ" conducted in the hypnotic emotionalism of highly publicized mass assemblies that the new type of human being can ever emerge. The close relationship between President Nixon and Billy Graham is a significant symbol of what every fascistically inclined ruler instinctively knows: that is, the need to ground the restlessness of the people whose lives have become spiritually devitalized and devoid of creative incentives once they have been torn away from their roots in a particular soil and ancestral conditioning. On the one hand, we have the moral rectitude of Billy Graham, carried around in the White House as a holy shield to ward off the danger of too basic a transformation and to recruit Puritan ghosts to bless technocratic behavior; on the other hand, we witness the spread of "Jesus freak" groups that entice youngsters returning frustrated and mentally confused from excursions to India or other forms of psychic trips.
      I do believe that Christianity can be revitalized and made a fecund power in the dawning future; Teilhard de Chardin's works are there to prove it. But the doctrines of American fundamentalists have little to do with what Jesus brought to mankind and with the early Christianity that was a powerful force of social transformation.