"...The task before UNESCO... is to help the emergence of a single world culture with its own philosophy and background of ideas and with its own broad purpose. This is opportune, since this the first time in history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available and also the first time that man has had the means... of laying a world-wide foundation for the minimum physical welfare of the entire human species. And it is necessary, for at the moment, two opposing philosophies of life confront each other from the West and from the East...." "You may categorize the two philosophies as two super-nationalisms, or as individualism versus collectivism; or as the American versus the Russian way of life, or as capitalism versus communism, or as Christianity versus Marxism. Can these opposites be reconciled, this antithesis be resolved in a higher synthesis? I believe not only that this can happen, but that, through the inexorable dialectic of evolution, it must happen....
"In pursuing this aim, we must eschew dogma - whether it be theological dogma or Marxist dogma.... East and West will not agree on a basis of the future if they merely hurl at each other the fixed ideas of the past. For that is what dogma's are -- the crystallizations of some dominant system of thought of a particular epoch. A dogma may of course crystallize tried and valid experience; but if it be dogma, it does so in a way which is rigid, uncompromising and intolerant.... If we are to achieve progress, we must learn to uncrystalize our dogmas."
"...society as such embodies no values comparable to those embodied in individuals; but individuals are meaningless except in relation to the community." - Julian Huxley, from his book, UNESCO: Its purpose and Its Philosophy, 1947 [page 61]
More information on UNESCO here:
http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/global...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/unesco_st...
