The Great Challenge

Abstract

What will Europe’s relations with other continents be like in 2000? Is there any magnanimous and overarching vision that we can transmit in 1970 so that a viable programme of preparation can be actualized during the coming decades? Do we even know what it means to possess the visionary power of kriyashakti, the “faculty divine” of Phaedrus and The Prelude, which is associated with “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, and reason in her most exalted mood”? Questions of this order of magnitude should be explored by a permanent form of free spirits in the context of a continuing dialogue that is bound by no constraints save those of reason and of relevance. The task calls for nothing less than a truly inspired exercise in creative imagination. It is a sad degradation of the term “vision” to apply it to any merely mechanical extrapolation of existing trends, or to narrowly self-flattering images of the future that consolidate current fads and predilections. The present moment may seem to be the most unfavourable for a Promethean, let alone a Demiurgic, fashioning out of contemporary chaos of an architectonic conception of the world of the future, of Europe’s role in it, and especially of its relation to the vast majority of mankind who are now excluded from “the banquet of life.”

“Our hopes, as to the future condition of the human species, may be reduced to three points: the destruction of inequality between different nations; the progress of equality in one and the same nation; and lastly, the real improvement of man.”

Marquis de Condorcet