Only compassion can save—the wordless knowledge of my own responsibility for whatever is being done to the least of God’s children. This is knowledge of the spirit.
Society needs a return to spiritual values—not to offset the material but to make it fully productive. However remote its realization for the great mass of mankind, there is today the promise of material abundance or at least of material sufficiency. Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share. In an age of terror, of persecution, and of mass murder, such as ours, the hard shell of moral callousness may be necessary to survival. Without it we might yield to paralyzing despair. But moral numbness is also a terrible disease of mind and soul, and a terrible danger. It abets, even if it does not condone, cruelty and persecution. We have learned that the ethical humanitarianism of the nineteenth century cannot prevent man from becoming beast.
The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and physiological being but also a spiritual being, that is, creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him. Only thus can the individual know that the threat of instant physical annihilation of the species does not invalidate his own existence, its meaning, and its responsibility.
ACTION POINT: In the presence of the threat of instant annihilation, how can we maintain meaning and responsibility without spiritual value?
Landmarks of Tomorrow
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker