the Significance of this Age: part 2

This was originally an addendum on the end of the previous entry. But I decided to give it a space of its own. It builds on the ideas presented in the first entry's long quotation from Abdu'l Baha.
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Central to Abdu'l Baha's claim is that the world has shrunk in size. Whereas in past times a day's journey might have brought a traveler as far as the next town, now it might bringe the same traveler as far as another continent. But the immediate conclusion of this development is not necessarily that it will produces peace and prosperity for all people. After all he goes no further than stating the unity of all mankind can in this day be achieved. He does not say that it is being achieved. This is because old ways of doing things, developed while the peoples of the earth were still in relative isolation from each other, do not tend towards harmony and good will. They can also excite violence any disagreements or conflicts of interest that will always naturally arise. But the more that diverse peoples recognize their unavoidable interdependence the more that they recognize the need to get along.

So although the human race has been plunged into more famine, epidemic, warfare, and ecological destruction than at any point in its history, this does not mean that modernization and globalization are a straightforward fall from grace. It can also mean that humanity is merely in a process of transition, one fraught with opportunity as well as with pain. In 1936 Shoghi Effendi writes, We stand on the threshold of an age whose convulsions proclaim alike the death-pangs of the old order and the birth pangs of the new. Global unity here is not a distant dream to be realized but rather a concrete opportunity to be seized right now. And make no mistake about it, it is possible to fail to seize this opportunity.

The prolongation of this period of transition and adolescence is unnecessary. Globalization has made the unity of the human race a concrete reality. Whereas once we were strangers, now we are family. The choice before us is what to make of this new family arrangement. Will we manifest this new unity in its fullness through its recognition as the basis of a world order? Or will we continue to ignore it as the backdrop of increasingly internal conflicts, prolonging their corrosive effects. Forces beyond any individual's control have propelled us into a new era. But it is through the power of human choice that its actual content will be firmly determined.

In this way we return to the quote that introduces the previous entry.