© 1996 William Wentworth
© 1996 International Urantia Association (IUA)
William Wentworth
Towamba, New South Wales, Australia
It has become a cliché to point out that western civilisation is changing more rapidly as the years go by, and that the pace of change confuses and worries us. Many of the changes do not appear to be improvements. We are accelerating sideways, and The URANTIA Book predicts that [t]his secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. UB 195:8.10. It certainly feels like it.
We are also informed that the foundations of civilisation are spiritual, and the only way to rehabilitate it is by renewed dedication of its citizens to live by true spiritual values. The pursuit of mere knowledge, without the attendant interpretation of wisdom and the spiritual insight of religious experience, eventually leads to pessimism and human despair. UB 195:6.3. No social system or political regime which denies the reality of God can contribute in any constructive and lasting manner to the advancement of human civilization. UB 195:10.7. Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization, wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the energy which really uplifts and advances human culture from one level of attainment to another. UB 81:6.27
This point is emphasised by many of the authors of The URANTIA Book. Our problem may be material, but its solution is spiritual. Our civilisation is stagnant and regressing. To revitalise it, to lift it to a higher plane, spiritual progress is necessary.
However, although social progress is collective, the spiritual idealism which generates it is individual and personal. Our civilisation advances in accordance with the spiritual experience of its people. But only a citizenry accustomed to sacrificing immediate gratification for more worthy goals will be interested in trying. Only people who have learned something of unselfishness will be motivated to pursue the self-forgetfulness of friendship with God. Only people who have experienced the thrill of altruism will be likely to seek a life of service.
In other words, the spiritual idealism which alone can motivate a people to true and lasting progress depends on a moral foundation. For a person to be inspired by true spiritual idealism, he must practise duty, loyalty, unselfishness and so forth to a certain degree. Morality is the essential pre-existent soil of personal God-consciousness… UB 196:3.25. And the institution which inculcates morality is the Home.
Now although the authors of The URANTIA Book are somewhat unflattering about many aspects of our civilisation, they are all unfailingly positive about the institution of the home.
There are so many references to it that they leave us in no doubt about its importance. The home is the basic institution of human progress UB 89:3.6, an exquisite enterprise UB 69:9.7, civilization’s only hope of survival UB 84:8.6, the crowning glory of … the evolutionary struggle, man’s supreme evolutionary acquirement UB 84:8.6, society’s veritable foundation UB 89:3.6, and so on, and on. For the revelators, the home is mankind’s most significant achievement—not building the pyramids, or going to the moon, or painting the Mona Lisa, or writing War and Peace. The home is IT, because it is the home which transmits culture from one generation to another, which civilises children, and inculcates basic ethics through the experience of everyday life. It is in the home (defined incidentally, as husband, wife and children) that such virtues as unselfishness, altruism and sacrifice are learned, and it is upon this foundation that civilised life is constructed.
Although some homes are better than others, on the average the home constitutes the only sure way of transmitting basic ethics. And we are warned that any attempt to shift parental responsibility to state or church will prove suicidal to the welfare and advancement of civilization. UB 84:7.27
It is in the home, the family, that morality begins. Family life is the progenitor of true morality, the ancestor of consciousness of loyalty to duty. UB 84:7.30
So, to recapitulate, civilisation requires spiritual progress, and spiritual progress requires morality. The source of morality is the institution of the home, or what we are accustomed to call “the nuclear family”. In order, then to rehabilitate our civilisation we should possibly be looking at the home and family life, with the view of supporting morality to enhance spiritual receptivity and invigorate spiritual idealism towards true social progress.
As things stand, traditional family life is often derided by current ideology, and undermined by policies which seem to value only paid work. Mothers are encouraged to work outside the home and have their children raised in professional child care. Formal training for marriage and parenting scarcely exists. The divorce rate is high and rising. Various minorities want the state to redefine the meaning of the “family” to include almost any group of people who choose to live together. Taxation policy forces mothers into paid work. Welfare discourages responsibility. Fashion gives family life a boring image. Schools teach children that overpopulation is destroying the environment, that humans are only one animal species among many, and that our civilisation is selfish and cruel in dominating the earth. They are also taught that they are likely to suffer “abuse” in their families, and are taught strategies to resist it.
The list is by no means exhaustive. The forces contributing to the decline of the family are many and varied. We are being argued out of family life by special interests skilled in public persuasion and political activism, but ignorant of, or indifferent to, the fundamental basis of civilised life.
The URANTIA Book recognises the threat, but confines itself to generalisations which cannot be used to support any particular set of policies. It is a work designed to inspire people in all cultures and political systems. No proponent of a specific policy or programme can claim a mandate from The URANTIA Book.
But that said, the authors do seem to be implying that the step up in spiritual idealism which civilisation urgently requires can be built only upon a foundation of moral enlightenment growing out of traditional family life.
Thinkers and groups offering public support for the traditional family are beginning to emerge. They are widely ridiculed by intellectuals as backward and unsophisticated. But there is profound support for the traditional family among ordinary people, and some readers of The URANTIA Book might like to give sincere thought to joining them. Those who do will need courage, as the anti-family forces are well entrenched socially, astute politically, and adept in the public use of abuse and ridicule.