material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the
collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the
system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its
assigned task.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, impulses to devise and promote any
formal materialistic belief system disappeared. Nor would any useful
purpose have been served by such efforts, as materialism was soon facing
no significant challenge in most parts of the world. Religion, where not
simply driven back into fanaticism and unthinking rejection of progress,
became progressively reduced to a kind of personal preference, a
predilection, a pursuit designed to satisfy spiritual and emotional needs
of the individual. The sense of historical mission that had defined the
major Faiths learned to content itself with providing religious
endorsement for campaigns of social change carried on by secular
movements. The academic world, once the scene of great exploits of the
mind and spirit, settled into the role of a kind of scholastic industry
preoccupied with tending its machinery of dissertations, symposia,
publication credits and grants.

Whether as world-view or simple appetite, materialism's effect is to leach
out of human motivation--and even interest--the spiritual impulses that
distinguish the rational soul. "For self-love," 'Abdu'l-Baha has said, "is
kneaded into the very clay of man, and it is not possible that, without
any hope of a substantial reward, he should neglect his own present
material good."(109) In the absence of conviction about the spiritual
nature of reality and the fulfilment it alone offers, it is not surprising
to find at the very heart of the current crisis of civilization a cult of
individualism that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates
acquisition and personal advancement to the status of major cultural
values. The resulting atomization of society has marked a new stage in the
process of disintegration about which the writings of Shoghi Effendi speak
so urgently.

To accept willingly the rupture of one after another strand of the moral
fabric that guides and disciplines individual life in any social system,
is a self-defeating approach to reality. If leaders of thought were to be
candid in their assessment of the evidence readily available, it is here
that one would find the root cause of such apparently unrelated problems
as the pollution of the envir