Beyond these implications of technological and economic change, scientific advancement seemed to encourage easy assumptions about human nature, the almost unnoticed overlay that Bahá’u’lláh has termed “the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge”.[36] These unexamined views communicated themselves to ever-widening audiences. Sensationalism in the popular press, fiery debates between scientists or scholars, on the one hand, and theologians or influential clergymen, on the other, along with the rapid spread of public education, continued to undermine the authority of accepted religious doctrines, as well as of prevailing moral standards.
These seismic forces of the new century combined to make the situation facing the Western world in 1914 intensely volatile. When the great conflagration did break out, therefore, the nightmare far surpassed the worst fears of thoughtful minds. It would serve no purpose here to review the exhaustively analyzed cataclysm of World War I. The statistics themselves remain almost beyond the ability of the human mind to encompass: an estimated sixty million men eventually being thrown into the most horrific inferno that history had ever known, eight million of them perishing in the course of the war and an additional ten million or more being permanently disabled by crippling injuries, burned-out lungs and appalling disfigurements.[37] Historians have suggested that the total financial cost may have reached thirty billion dollars, wiping out a substantial portion of the total capital wealth of Europe.
Even such massive losses do not begin to suggest the full scope of the ruin. One of the considerations that long held back President Woodrow Wilson from proposing to the United States Congress the declaration of war that had by then become virtually inescapable was his awareness of the moral damage that would ensue. Not the least of the distinctions that characterized this extraordinary man—a statesman whose vision both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi have praised—was his understanding of the brutalization of human nature that would be the worst legacy of the tragedy that was by then engulfing Europe, a legacy beyond human capacity to reverse.[38]
Reflection on the magnitude of the suffering experienced by humankind in the war’s four years—and the resulting setback to the long, painful process of the civilizing of human nature—lends tragic force to words the Master had addressed only two or three years earlier to audiences in such European cities as London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Stuttgart, as well as in North America. Speaking one evening in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland Maxwell in Montreal, He had said:
Today the world of humanity is walking in darkness because it is out of touch with the world of God. That is why we do not see the signs of God in the hearts of men. The power of the Holy Spirit has no influence. When a divine spiritual illumination becomes manifest in the world of humanity, when divine instruction and guidance appear, then enlightenment follows, a new spirit is realized within, a new power descends, and a new life is given. It is like the birth from the animal kingdom into the kingdom of man.... I will pray, and you must pray, likewise, that such heavenly bounty may be realized; that strife and enmity may be banished, warfare and bloodshed taken away; that hearts may attain ideal communication and that all people may drink from the same fountain.[39]
The vindictive peace treaty, imposed by the Allied powers on their defeated enemies, succeeded only, as both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi have pointed out, in planting the seeds of another, far more terrible conflict. The ruinous reparations demanded of the vanquished —and the injustice that required them to accept the full guilt for a war for which all parties had been, to one degree or another, responsible—were among the factors that would prepare demoralized peoples in Europe to embrace totalitarian promises of relief which they might not otherwise have contemplated.
Ironically, no matter how harsh were the reparations required of the defeated, the supposed victors awoke to the appalled realization that their triumph—and the demand for unconditional surrender that had driven it—had come at an equally crippling price. Staggering war debts ended forever the economic dominance which these European nations had acquired through three centuries of imperialist exploitation of the rest of the planet. The deaths of millions of young men who would have been urgently needed to meet the challenges of the coming decades was a loss that could never be recovered. Indeed, Europe itself—which only four brief years earlier had represented the apparent summit of civilization and world influence—lost at one stroke this pre-eminence, and began the inexorable slide during the following decades toward the status of an auxiliary to a rising new centre of power in North America.
Initially, it seemed that the vision of the future conceived by Woodrow Wilson would now be realized. In part, this proved to be the case as subject peoples throughout Europe gained the freedom to work out their own destinies through the emergence from the ruin of the former empires of a series of new nation-states. Further, the president’s “Fourteen Points” briefly endowed his public statements with so great a moral authority in the minds of millions of Europeans that not even the most recalcitrant of his fellow leaders among the Allied powers could entirely disregard his wishes. Despite months of wrangling over colonies, borders, and clauses in the text of the peace treaty, the Versailles settlement eventually incorporated an attenuated form of the proposed League of Nations, an institution which it was hoped could adjust future disputes between nations and harmonize international affairs.
Shoghi Effendi’s commentary on the significance of this historic initiative commands reflection on the part of every Bahá’í who seeks to understand the events of this turbulent century. Describing two closely interrelated developments that are associated with the dawn of world peace, he lays emphasis on the fact that they are “destined to culminate, in the fullness of time, in a single glorious consummation”.[40] The first, the Guardian describes as associated with the mission of the Bahá’í community in the North American continent; the second, with the destiny of the United States as a nation. Speaking of this latter phenomenon, which dated back to the outbreak of the first world war, Shoghi Effendi writes:
It received its initial impetus through the formulation of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, closely associating for the first time that republic with the fortunes of the Old World. It suffered its first setback through the dissociation of that republic from the newly born League of Nations which that president had labored to create.... It must, however long and tortuous the way, lead, through a series of victories and reverses, to the political unification of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, to the emergence of a world government and the establishment of the Lesser Peace, as foretold by Bahá’u’lláh and foreshadowed by the Prophet Isaiah. It must, in the end, culminate in the unfurling of the banner of the Most Great Peace, in the Golden Age of the Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh.[41]