The Planetary Prince of Urantia

66:6.1The de­gree of a world’s cul­ture is mea­sured by the so­cial her­itage of its na­tive be­ings, and the rate of cul­tural ex­pan­sion is wholly de­ter­mined by the abil­ity of its in­hab­i­tants to com­pre­hend new and ad­vanced ideas.

66:6.2Slav­ery to tra­di­tion pro­duces sta­bil­ity and co-op­er­a­tion by sen­ti­men­tally link­ing the past with the pres­ent, but it like­wise sti­fles ini­tia­tive and en­slaves the cre­ative pow­ers of the per­son­al­ity. The whole world was caught in the stale­mate of tra­di­tion-bound mores when the Cali­gas­tia one hun­dred ar­rived and be­gan the procla­ma­tion of the new gospel of in­di­vid­ual ini­tia­tive within the so­cial groups of that day. But this benef­i­cent rule was so soon in­ter­rupted that the races never have been wholly lib­er­ated from the slav­ery of cus­tom; fash­ion still un­duly dom­i­nates Uran­tia.

66:6.3The Cali­gas­tia one hun­dred—grad­u­ates of the Sa­ta­nia man­sion worlds—well knew the arts and cul­ture of Je­ru­sem, but such knowl­edge is nearly val­ue­less on a bar­baric planet pop­u­lated by prim­i­tive hu­mans. These wise be­ings knew bet­ter than to un­der­take the sud­den trans­for­ma­tion, or the en masse up­lift­ing, of the prim­i­tive races of that day. They well un­der­stood the slow evo­lu­tion of the hu­man species, and they wisely re­frained from any rad­i­cal at­tempts at mod­i­fy­ing man’s mode of life on earth.

66:6.4Each of the ten plan­e­tary com­mis­sions set about slowly and nat­u­rally to ad­vance the in­ter­ests in­trusted to them. Their plan con­sisted in at­tract­ing the best minds of the sur­round­ing tribes and, af­ter train­ing them, send­ing them back to their peo­ple as emis­saries of so­cial up­lift.

66:6.5For­eign emis­saries were never sent to a race ex­cept upon the spe­cific re­quest of that peo­ple. Those who la­bored for the up­lift and ad­vance­ment of a given tribe or race were al­ways na­tives of that tribe or race. The one hun­dred would not at­tempt to im­pose the habits and mores of even a su­pe­rior race upon an­other tribe. Al­ways they pa­tiently worked to up­lift and ad­vance the time-tried mores of each race. The sim­ple folk of Uran­tia brought their so­cial cus­toms to Dala­ma­tia, not to ex­change them for new and bet­ter prac­tices, but to have them up­lifted by con­tact with a higher cul­ture and by as­so­ci­a­tion with su­pe­rior minds. The pro­cess was slow but very ef­fec­tual.

66:6.6The Dala­ma­tia teach­ers sought to add con­scious so­cial se­lec­tion to the purely nat­u­ral se­lec­tion of bi­o­logic evo­lu­tion. They did not de­range hu­man so­ci­ety, but they did markedly ac­cel­er­ate its nor­mal and nat­u­ral evo­lu­tion. Their mo­tive was pro­gres­sion by evo­lu­tion and not rev­o­lu­tion by rev­e­la­tion. The hu­man race had spent ages in ac­quir­ing the lit­tle re­li­gion and morals it had, and these super­men knew bet­ter than to rob man­kind of these few ad­vances by the con­fu­sion and dis­may which al­ways re­sult when en­light­ened and su­pe­rior be­ings un­der­take to up­lift the back­ward races by overteach­ing and over­en­light­en­ment.

66:6.7When Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies go into the heart of Africa, where sons and daugh­ters are sup­posed to re­main un­der the con­trol and di­rec­tion of their par­ents through­out the life­time of the par­ents, they only bring about con­fu­sion and the break­down of all au­thor­ity when they seek, in a sin­gle gen­er­a­tion, to sup­plant this prac­tice by teach­ing that these chil­dren should be free from all pa­ren­tal re­straint af­ter they have at­tained the age of twenty-one.