that
impressive scientific advances continue or that economic conditions
improve for a portion of humankind--all without seeing in such developments
anything resembling hope of a secure life for oneself, or more
importantly, for one's children. The sense of disillusionment which, as
Shoghi Effendi warned, the spread of political corruption would create in
the minds of the mass of humankind is now widespread. Outbreaks of
lawlessness have become pandemic in both urban and rural life in many
lands. The failure of social controls, the effort to justify the most
extreme forms of aberrant behaviour as primarily civil rights issues, and
an almost universal celebration in the arts and media of degeneracy and
violence--these and similar manifestations of a condition approaching moral
anarchy suggest a future that paralyzes the imagination. Against the
background of this desolate landscape the intellectual vogue of the age,
seeking to make a virtue out of grim necessity, has adopted for itself the
appellation and mission of "deconstructionism".

The second of the two developments undermining faith in the future was the
focus of some of the Millennium Summit's most anguished debates. The
information revolution set off in the closing decade of the century by the
invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human
activity. The process of "globalization" that had been following a long
rising curve over a period of several centuries was galvanized by new
powers beyond the imaginations of most people. Economic forces, breaking
free of traditional restraints, brought into being during the closing
decade of the century a new global order in the designing, generation and
distribution of wealth. Knowledge itself became a significantly more
valuable commodity than even financial capital and material resources. In
a breathtakingly short space of time, national borders, already under
assault, became permeable, with the result that vast sums now pass
instantly through them at the command of a computer signal. Complex
production operations are so reconfigured as to integrate and maximize the
economies available from the contributions of a range of specializing
participants, without regard to their national locations. If one were to
lower one's horizon to purely material considerations, the earth has
already taken on something of the character of "one country" and the
inhabitants of various lands the status of its consumer "