[RonPrice]

THE YEARS OF THE LESSER PEACE


My pioneering days began the year Marshall McLuhan pegged the phrase ‘global village’ in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy. This was 1962, the year before the Kennedy assassination and Viet-Nam, the living-room war. This pioneering venture began about ten months before the first election of the Universal House of Justice. The Lesser Peace, it could be argued, had been playing on history’s horizon for some 45 years by 1962, on the horizon of my days as it would for probably my entire life. -Ron Price, “A Reflection on the Years Of The Lesser Peace”, Unpubished Essay.

From 1988 to 1993 I taught a course in ancient history: Greece in the fifth century BC and Rome from 133 BC to 14 AD. I was enthralled by the many parallels between our own age and these two ancient societies. This poem is a reflection on one of the many points of comparison.-Ron Price, 4 October, 12:10 pm, Rivervale, WA.

W.G. Runciman discusses the emergence of protostates in post-Mycenean Greece, especially Sparta and Athens. It seems to me that what we are witnessing in our time is the emergence of a global state coextensive with the Revelations of the Bab and Baha’u’llah. -W.G. Runciman,” Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.24, pp. 364-377.
_________________________________________________________

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the days
before a latter-day Pentecontaetia1,
a modern half-century: on the gentle side,
crazy days they’ll be, decades of slow building,
burning, some absolutely staggering burgeoning,
hot tears of light amidst a sea of darkness
in the second century of this Formative Age,
an age amusing itself to death
on an unconsciously rehearsed spontaneity
with an immense, a profound, triviality,
some long night before the dawn
or even in the early hours of morning,
on the brink, years of the tempest
with bleeding humanity behind them
brought to its knees--at last--
in a common remedial effort,
a new spiritual and moral attitude,
some collective identification
with catastrophe, shock and trauma.

Years of obsessions: Liz, Marilyn
and Elvis; anchor men, Oprah Winfrey,
ET, Shwarznegger, monopoly, scrabble
and Sylvia Plath blowing it all away
just before the House was elected,
an apex crowning the new Order
growing slowly, unobtrusively
amidst the detritus, the exploding
knowledge of this latter age:
years of the Lesser Peace.

Ron Price
4/10/96
Revised: 17/1/05.


1The term given to the period 479 to 435 BC. During these years Athens laid the foundation for her superior strength in Greece. (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Penguin, 1972, p.87.) The days before this Pentecontaetia, it could be argued, was the century or more after 594 BC when Solon was appointed mediator in Athens.

The modern period preceding a modern Pentecontaetia could be seen as a ‘prelude,’ a hundred-or-more year period beginning in, say, phase one:1917-1937 with Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points at the start of the League of Nations; then phase two: 1937-1963 when the international teaching campaign was launched; and phase three: 1963-2021 when the process of ‘entry-by-troops’ proceded apace in the 1st century of the Formative Age. In 1921 the Guardian began to create the instrument of the Administrative Order; in 1912 ‘Abdu’l-Baha came West and in 1892 Baha’u’llah passed away--these events could mark the years before the ‘prelude.’

I’m going to choose 1944 to 2044, the second century of Baha’i experience when the first stirrings of a World Order, which this Baha’i Administration is but the precursor, crystallize and radiate over the planet as the years of my part in this ‘prelude’ to Thucydides’ Pentecontaetia which he describes at the beginning of his ‘History of The Peloponnesian War.’ These were the years when the process of the Lesser Peace was engaging the energies of history. Arguably, this was the period before a modern Pentecontaetia.