Changes of Mind – a review (3b/3): . . . close to the top

Narcissus by Caravaggio

The Risk of Stagnation

As we have seen in the previous post, conflicts and discomforts begin to make our existing level of consciousness unsatisfactory. This drives us to look for ways beyond that dissonance. This can move us to a higher level of understanding, a more effective model of reality. However, if our level of understanding is one that our culture values discomfort with it may be harder to come by and we can get stuck.

Both Achievement and Affiliative levels of consciousness have a significant value for our societies (pages 145 & 153):

… Prestige-seeking self-oriented traits are admired and rewarded in capitalistic cultures.… a number of studies have shown that many highly narcissistic individuals are successful and valued members of capitalistic societies… They are especially rewarded in business organisations…

Despite the . . . cultural biases against intuition and right-hemispheric processing, a strong bias for aspects of Affiliative consciousness exists as well. The desire to help others, sustain intimate relationships, and be uncritical of others’ differences has historically commanded great respect in western cultures.

All Is Not Lost

At the end of their road also lies an inadequacy in the paradigm that creates discontent (page 158):

Authentic consciousness resolves both the Achievement and Affiliation dilemmas using a synergistic blend of both solutions this is greater than the sum of its parts. If love will not conquer all and power does not obtain the more important things in life, the Authentic resolution is fulfilling one’s own personal mission and supporting the personal growth of others along the way.

According to Wade (page 159) ‘Authentic consciousness represents the height of most conventional developmental theory.’ I think we would need to include Dabrowski’s TPD in that list, as his thinking about development appears to stop at the level of authenticity.

For Wade, and, I must admit for me also, this is where it all begins to get really interesting. Wade nails the core of that interest when she writes (page 162):

The most significant shift in this arena is disappearance of the fear of death . . . ., closely associated with the marked drop in neurotic behaviour. The ego is at last secure. This is a paradox of ego maturity: just as the person reaches the peak of self-expression, he also becomes receptive to letting the self go.

The Shift from Dissonance to Autonomy

At this level much of the earlier dissonance fades away: motivation is far more an autonomous choice than a flight from conflict. People at this level tend, as Dabrowski also describes it, to identify with higher values conducive to compassion (page 163-164):

Authentic people identify not with a particular group or society, but with the human race. . . . . The authentic person pursues what he desires, but never at the expense of others, and in such a manner that serves the greater good, not his alone.

There is a beautiful first person description of how this feels (page 165):

This is how life will be. I must be wholehearted while tentative, fight for my values, yet respect others, believe my deepest values right yet be ready to learn. I see that I shall be retracing this whole journey over and over – but, I hope, more wisely.

As well as being value-driven, people at this level are more flexible and less phased by dissonance (page 168):

Authentic subjects are more likely to change their behaviour to conform to their beliefs once they are aware of the inconsistency. People functioning at the Authentic level adapt more easily than others because they are more open to, and less defended against, dystonic information.

And so autonomous choice, not compulsion by dissonance, is the driver at this level (page 171-172):

At earlier levels, change comes about through exterior events’ impinging painfully on the individual and creating a sort of tension. But from the Authentic stage onward, change appears to be driven internally, as a matter of will and a result of tensions caused by increasing internal activity.

Tintern Abbey

Glimmerings of Transcendence

Whether there is a ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’ is an interesting question. Wade addresses this (page 172):

Conviction of an uncertain but presumably meaningful existence is often initially linked to an agnostic or completely nontheistic stance, but it incorporates a belief – often quite vague – in some existence beyond the physical plane . . . . Exactly what this may be, or whether it exists at all, is unknown to the Authentic person and unimportant as a motivator, though death is tentatively construed as a transition to some other kind of existence.

In the end, a person at this level comes to realise that their ego is simply a construct. Anxiety sets in. The Ground of Being may even break through ‘in the form of transcendent events.’ When it does (page 174):

. . . The ego is caught in another dilemma: it is irresistibly drawn to the Dynamic Ground at the same time that it is afraid of being engulfed and destroyed.

We are on the cusp of Transcendent consciousness.

That would need another series of posts altogether to deal with adequately. It is probably best to end this consideration of the dissonance that has driven transitions from one level of consciousness to the next with a sense of what her conclusions on this matter are at the end of the book. On page 265 she summarises it:

Below the Authentic level, change seems to be driven exclusively by external events causing sufficient suffering for movement [to take place]. Transition is much easier by the time the individual has arrived at the level of Authentic consciousness, because egoic survival is not threatened in the least. . . . Authentic people are open to critical input and, if faced with the fact that their behaviour is not in accord with their beliefs, will tend to change their behaviour. Thus from the Authentic level on, change is driven by the will, not by environmental events, though it may be assisted by others (e.g. a spirit guide or grace).

With this I think Dabrowski would be in complete agreement, except for the mention of ‘grace.’ It is interesting to find such close correspondence on key points between such otherwise diverse viewpoints. It has made this process of revisiting Jenny Wade’s book after all these years a most worthwhile exercise for me, at least. Heaven knows whether anyone else will feel the same.

Read Full Post »

Changes of Mind – a review (3a/3): moving on up . .

The two previous posts have given a brief overview of Jenny Wade’s thesis and looked at her treatment of near-death experiences and lateralisation.  At last we have reached the core theme of her brilliant book, Changes of Mind.

Transitions between Levels

This theme relates strongly to one of my most recent preoccupations: Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. He speaks of five levels of personality development (see diagram above from my earlier post on the subject). To oversimplify for present purposes, we move from an overly conformist self-gratifying level through conflict to increasingly autonomous levels where we strive to enact our ideals rather than indulge our desires. Authenticity and empathy become increasingly influential states of mind. He is though more concerned with creativity than mysticism and, as far as I can tell, he has little or nothing to say about transcendence.

From Wade’s point of view he joins the many others whose theory of development stops too soon, probably at her Authentic level (see next post).

The two theories begin at different points. Dabrowski, in the treatments I have so far read of his theory, does not include prenatal and infantile stages. He seems to be concerned with adult functioning and his Level One conflates Wade’s Achievement and Conformist levels. Also, whereas she tracks in detail subsequent developments towards the autonomy he sees as becoming increasingly evident through his Levels Two to Four, he seems to leave it as simply something that occurs if the challenges of inner conflict are met, without specifying what kinds of challenges might be typical of various developmental levels.

I think, therefore, Wade complements his thinking in an important way and would like to spend some time outlining some of the details in her model to illustrate this.

The Driver of Dissonance

Wade contributes, thanks to her close examination of many thinkers including Piaget, Kohlberg, and Wilber amongst others, a crucial conceptual clarification at each stage. Whereas it seems to me from the secondary sources that Dabrowski contents himself with using words like ‘suffering’ and ‘conflict’ to give a catchall description of what in general goes on, Wade is far more precise. Even in childhood states of consciousness, whether they have persisted into adulthood or not, she detects specific conflicts that trigger development. Take for example her description of the move upwards from Naïve to Egocentric Consciousness (page 94):

The essentials – corroborated by anthropological research and theory – are that the individual’s needs fail to be met consistently enough by the environment, creating a conflict that simultaneously gives birth to the self-encapsulated ego and the fear that it can be destroyed. In both children and adults, this seems to occur through exposure to information that cannot be assimilated at their present level of functioning.

In Naïve Consciousness the individual feels safely embodied in their context. When they feel exposed to danger by a separation from that context, the dissonance begins to operate that will drive them to a different level of understanding.

She is clear though that this same basic principle applies across many stages of development (ibid.):

In essence, cognitive conflict results from repeated exchanges that cannot be resolved using resources and solutions available to the present developmental level. The problem does not go away, the motivation to solve it remains strong, and yet the individual’s resources are not competent to resolve the dilemma.

She uses Kuhn’s terminology in saying ‘the limits of a paradigm [have been] reached.’

Where Dissonance Might Be Elusive

Dissonance at the Egocentric level is harder to come by (page 106):

Cleckly and Smith point out that lots of people function primarily at the Egocentric level in modern society, many of them rather successfully.

How, then, is a desire for a transition to the conformist level created? One possibility is particularly intriguing (page 117):

[Many researchers converge on the belief] that socialisation results from the certainty, as opposed to the possibility, of one’s own death.

Clearly, such a fear would seem to be enough to derail all but the most intransigent of narcissists. Conformist awareness (ibid.) ‘is thought to represent the mainstream consciousness in civilised cultures, and it is tellingly labelled institutional, conventional, traditional, and conformist – the designation used here.’

Not surprisingly, dissonance at this level is even harder to come by than at the Egocentric level (page 130):

Transition from the Conformist stage is usually very difficult, because the individual is in a fairly stable equilibrium with his social environment and will tend to rationalise away information that does not align with his worldview or self image. When sufficient cognitive dissonance arises, however, change to the next stage no longer follows the invariant pattern of most developmental theories: instead, two paths are available.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference. (Robert Frost)

A Fork in the Path

In effect, the path forks between Achievement and Affiliative Consciousness. There is no clear consensus about exactly what triggers the shift towards either of these higher levels. There is a sense that the exact direction may be partly determined by gender (page 132), women moving towards the Affiliative option and men the Achievement one.

This is one choice point at which I feel Dabrowski may be the more illuminating of the two about the possible trigger. He is clear that a conflict between what a person feels ought to be the case and what they see is the case precipitates a shift from conformity towards autonomy. Wade (page 148) quotes the view that a transition ‘occurs when a dramatic life event destroys faith in established authority.” She amplifies on this later (page 156-157):

When forced to acknowledge that the rules do not work, evolving Conformists will choose either the Achievement solution, “get it while you can” or the Affiliative solution, “love conquers all,” depending upon predisposition and compelling environmental factors.

Dabrowski is also clear that this sense of ‘what is’ conflicting with ‘what ought to be’ may be relatively rare, something with which Wade clearly agrees (page 133):

Researchers have observed that, comparatively, very few adults even in industrialised societies function consistently above the Conformist level.

She accepts that this may be in part because developmentalists do not have the tools to study this level and/or the database may be too poor to contain such information. My own sense is that such states of mind, in terms of stepping up to either Affiliative or Achievement levels, while they may not constitute a majority in any population, in advanced Western societies will not be all that rare. People going beyond these next two levels, however, will be much thinner on the ground. It is more likely to be absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence that is at work concerning the frequency with which people pass beyond conformism. A closer look at what might follow must wait until next time.

Read Full Post »

Liberalism vs Conservatism: reflections in the wake of an election

Divided We Fall

Now we have the results of the US Presidential election, there may be an opportunity to reflect upon some underlying aspects of the polarised debate between left and right without getting pulverised with arguments from one side of the divide or the other. A fascinating treatment of some of these underlying issues is to be found in Jonathan Haidt‘s recent book, The Righteous Mind.

He begins his analysis with a study of how well each side of the divide understands the other side’s mind set, acknowledging that he tends to favour the liberal emphasis on the individual rather than society.

He reckons the findings were unequivocal (page 287):

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

Haidt is very honest about his own initial biases (page 289):

As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.

The source of the study data takes a different view (ibid):

But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances.

Moral and Social Capital

He reviews his previous position and admits (pages 289-90):

I began to see that [conservatives] had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital.

This is strongly linked to another kind of capital (page 290):

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors.

He spells out the link with morality (page 291):

To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital.

And he goes on to state (page 292):

. . . . . we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community . . . . . .  and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

Unfortunately, this moral and social capital is a mixed blessing (page 293):

Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.

He feels that the liberal-left is prone to discounting or ignoring the value of this kind of capital and that is a risky position to take (page 293):

. . . . .if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism.

The Need for Balance

He feels that both political perspectives are necessary for a state to be healthy. He quotes John Stuart Mill (page 294):

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

He proceeds to examine various aspects of the moral matrices of the two camps. This clarifies that on the American political scene the word ‘libertarian’ denotes someone of a conservative mind set.  He teases out some important aspects of this world view in order to get out from under his preconceptions about it (pages 305-306):

[Libertarians] do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family).

He unpacks this (page 307):

We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital. . . . . To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

John Stuart Mill

So, after this analysis of the way that liberals, with whom he identifies, fail to understand some of the crucial insights of their political opponents (and of course vice versa), he reflects upon a disturbing trend (page 309):

America’s political class has become far more Manichaean since the early 1990s, first in Washington and then in many state capitals. The result is an increase in acrimony and gridlock, a decrease in the ability to find bipartisan solutions. . . . .

The recent election has done nothing to reduce the potential damage that might ensue from this mutual incomprehension and increased polarisation. The US still has a Democratic President and a Republican Congress. This polarisation does not stop there though, he argues (page 311):

Our counties and towns are becoming increasingly segregated into “lifestyle enclaves,” in which ways of voting, eating, working, and worshipping are increasingly aligned.

Transcending the Divide

So, it seems pretty clear that a society that is divided, to put it simply, between those who place individual rights and freedoms first on the grounds of compassion and those who most value community solidarity on the grounds of fairness and responsibility, may not be able to sink its differences effectively enough to achieve the objectivity and unity of vision that will enable it to solve its problems.

From my point of view as a Bahá’í the way out of this stalemate is as plain as a pikestaff – not that you see many of those about these days. We need to develop a perspective that balances the rights of the individual with the needs of society. Even at this early stage in its development the Bahá’í Faith offers some fruitful insights into how this balance might ultimately be achieved.

The central body of the Bahá’ís has shared some profound reflections on this subject:

Freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of action are among the freedoms which have received the ardent attention of social thinkers across the centuries. The resulting outflow of such profound thought has exerted a tremendous liberating influence in the shaping of modern society. Generations of the oppressed have fought and died in the name of freedom. Certainly the want of freedom from oppression has been a dominant factor in the turmoil of the times: witness the plethora of movements which have resulted in the rapid emergence of new nations in the latter part of the twentieth century. A true reading of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh leaves no doubt as to the high importance of these freedoms to constructive social processes.

They are in no doubt though that we cannot uncritically espouse the ideal of freedom at all costs:

Bahá’u’lláh’s assertions clearly call for an examination of current assumptions. Should liberty be as free as is supposed in contemporary Western thought? Where does freedom limit our possibilities for progress, and where do limits free us to thrive? What are the limits to the expansion of freedom?

Their feeling is that the system of elected and appointed institutions within the Bahá’í Faith offers exactly the right counter-balance to the dangers of unbridled freedom. Clearly, the fact that all Bahá’ís have chosen to believe that these institutions are divinely ordained creates a consensus about their supreme value that is hard to match in the wider world. However, it brings very significant benefits in its train:

Within this framework of freedom a pattern is set for institutional and individual behavior which depends for its efficacy not so much on the force of law, which admittedly must be respected, as on the recognition of a mutuality of benefits, and on the spirit of cooperation maintained by the willingness, the courage, the sense of responsibility, and the initiative of individuals — these being expressions of their devotion and submission to the will of God. Thus there is a balance of freedom between the institution, whether national or local, and the individuals who sustain its existence.

Of course, the core value underpinning this system is the belief in the oneness of all humanity and the preeminent need to combine the compassion of the individual with the fairmindedness of an institution within the one system.  This makes it even easier to tread the fine line between liberty and anarchy on the one hand and fairness and oppression on the other.

Bahá’ís acknowledge that learning how to understand and implement such insights as these will take generations, partly because parenting and education are key factors in the process. But it is also true that every crisis, and Americans as well as most of the rest of us are surely in the grip of one, provides a great opportunity to begin to learn how to shake off old values and methods that have grown unhelpful and replace them with new more constructive ones.

Read Full Post »

Humanity is our Business (2/5): The Vision of Civilisation-Building

This is the second of the two posts I thought it worth re-publishing. It follows on in a way from the need highlighted by the the poem I recently posted as well as suiting the climate of fellow-feeling created by the Olympics and Paralympics.

If One Common Faith helps the Bahá’í community understand the current context of the vision we are seeking to implement (see previous post), Century of Light helps us see how our understanding of this vision developed by slow degrees.

Obstacles to Understanding

Secularisation partly explains the difficulty humanity as a whole has in grasping a transcendent vision of global transformation: the failure of religion makes a contribution too.

. . . the secularization of society’s upper levels seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general population.

(Century of Light: Sec I, page 6)

We also all lack precedents to aid our understanding:

Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.

(Century of Light: page 10)

British Museum: London

People might, for example, claim that Marx had developed what seemed to be a global vision but it is not in fact comparable. It was a muddled reductionist vision. It was reductionist in the way that it relegated ideas to the back seat and promoted material conditions to the driving seat of history. It was muddled because, at the same time, it used exhortation to enlist the persuadable to throw their weight behind the idea of a supposedly impersonal dialectic of change. Also all the attempts to implement the vision have so far been catastrophically destructive, involving Chekhov‘s pet hates of ‘violence and lies‘ in abundance. Not only that but Marx had the benefit of one of the best libraries in the world – the British Museum’s reading room – and still failed to achieve the breadth, depth, complexity, compassion and ultimate practical efficacy of  the vision expounded by Bahá’u'lláh in prison and from exile.

An Unfolding Understanding

Guardian’s Resting Place: London

Even within the Bahá’í community understanding of the vision evolved over a period of  time. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his role as expounder of the words of Bahá’u'lláh, emphasised the role of the recognition of the oneness of the human race (Century of Light: page 23). Later, Shoghi Effendi, who was appointed in his turn as interpreter of the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh and died in London in 1957, drew out the implications:

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind – the pivot round which all the teachings of Bahá’u'lláh revolve – is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. . . . . . It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not experienced…. It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world – a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.

(World Order of Bahá’u'lláh: pages 42-43. Quoted in Century of Light: page 50)

To one degree or another, most Bahá’ís no doubt appreciated that the Assemblies they were being called on to form had a significance far beyond the mere management of practical affairs with which they were charged (op. cit: Page 54). Century of Light again quoted Shoghi Effendi:

. . . . they were integral parts of an Administrative Order that will, in time, “assert its claim and demonstrate its capacity to be regarded not only as the nucleus but the very pattern of the New World Order destined to embrace in the fullness of time the whole of mankind”.

(Century of Light: Page 55)

A word of explanation is perhaps needed here. The Bahá’í Faith has an administrative system that involves electing local and national assemblies on an annual basis. This is done without electioneering: the Bahá’í voter in a secret ballot votes for anyone within the community, local or national as appropriate, who seems to him or her to have the necessary qualities of character and experience to execute the role of Assembly member conscientiously and well. Processes such as consultation (see the earlier post on this subject) are vital decision making tools of these institutions. The pattern can be studied and borrowed from by all, whether Bahá’í or not, and in this way the future shape of the world can be influenced by this pattern.

‘The Bahá’í community,’ it goes on to explain, ‘now embarked [on a stage of development] in which the Administrative Order would be erected throughout the planet, its institutions established and the “society building” powers inherent in it fully revealed’ (Century of Light: Pages 55-56). 

It continues with the words of the Guardian  (Page 68):

Theirs is the duty to hold, aloft and undimmed, the torch of Divine guidance, as the shades of night descend upon, and ultimately envelop the entire human race. Theirs is the function, amidst its tumults, perils and agonies, to witness to the vision, and proclaim the approach, of that re-created society, that Christ-promised Kingdom, that World Order whose generative impulse is the spirit of none other than Bahá’u'lláh Himself, whose dominion is the entire planet, whose watchword is unity, whose animating power is the force of Justice, whose directive purpose is the reign of righteousness and truth, and whose supreme glory is the complete, the undisturbed and everlasting felicity of the whole of human kind.

Moving Towards Empowerment

Century of Light speaks of the role of planning not as though ‘the Bahá’í community has assumed the responsibility of “designing” a future for itself’, but as striving ‘to align the work of the Cause with the Divinely impelled process they see steadily unfolding in the world.’ This is a purpose, of course, which can influence all peoples of good will, whether Bahá’í or not. Their duty is to align their efforts with the spirit of the age in their way just as Bahá’ís do in this particular fashion. By these combined efforts the world will change. However:

The challenge to the Administrative Order is to ensure that, as Providence allows, Bahá’í efforts are in harmony with this Greater Plan of God, because it is in doing so that the potentialities implanted in the Cause by Bahá’u'lláh bear their fruit.

(Century of Light: Page 69)

The Greater Plan of God, the spirit of the age seen as the organising principle of unity in diversity, requires the efforts of the whole of humanity. As a Bahá’í community we have to make sure that we provide a kind of catalyst by means of what we do within our administrative system and in collaboration with all people’s good will, the Lesser Plan of God.

Century of Light continues:

. . . . . The organic unity of the body of believers – and the Administrative Order that makes it possible – are evidences of what Shoghi Effendi termed “the society-building power which their Faith possesses.”

(Century of Light: Page 97)

By 1996, it had become possible, as the Faith grew, to see all of the distinct strands of this complex enterprise as integral parts of one coherent whole (Century of Light: page 108). There were still challenges though.

For the most part, however, these [new Bahá'í] friends were essentially recipients of teaching programmes conducted by teachers and pioneers from outside. One of the great strengths of the masses of humankind from among whom the newly enrolled believers came lies in an openness of heart that has the potentiality to generate lasting social transformation. The greatest handicap of these same populations has so far been a passivity learned through generations of exposure to outside influences which, no matter how great their material advantages, have pursued agendas that were often related only tangentially – if at all – to the realities of the needs and daily lives of indigenous peoples.

(Century of Light: pages 108-109)

This highlighted a need, the meeting of which led to the creation of the Training Institute process (page 109) that empowered people to take initiatives and persist in action even under difficult circumstances:

. . . beginning in the 1970s in Colombia, where a systematic and sustained programme of education in the Writings was devised and soon adopted in neighbouring countries. Influenced by the Colombian community’s parallel efforts in the field of social and economic development, the breakthrough was all the more impressive in the fact that it was achieved against a background of violence and lawlessness that was deranging the life of the surrounding society.

The Colombian achievement has proved a source of great inspiration and example to Bahá’í communities elsewhere in the world.

The process of transformation the Cause has set in motion advances by inducing a fundamental change of consciousness, and the challenge it poses for all those of us who would serve it is to free ourselves from attachment to inherited assumptions and preferences that are irreconcilable with the Will of God for humanity’s coming of age (page 136).

Seat of the Universal House of Justice: Haifa

Century of Light towards the end (pages 139-140) concludes:

. . . . With the successful establishment in 1963 of the Universal House of Justice, the Bahá’ís of the world set out on the first stage of a mission of long duration: the spiritual empowerment of the whole body of humankind as the protagonists of their own advancement.

We must not underestimate the significance of this achievement:

The process leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice . . . .  very likely constituted history’s first global democratic election. Each of the successive elections since then has been carried out by an ever broader and more diverse body of the community’s chosen delegates, a development that has now reached the point that it incontestably represents the will of a cross-section of the entire human race. There is nothing in existence – nothing indeed envisioned by any group of people – that in any way resembles this achievement.

(Century of Light: page 92)

See links below to the subsequent five posts which examine in more detail some of the specific components of this process of empowerment.

Related Articles

Humanity is our Business (3/5): Capacity Building (a)

Humanity is our Business (3/5): Capacity Building (b)

Humanity is our Business (4/5): Devotional Meetings

Humanity is our Business (5/5): (a) The Plight of Children

Humanity is our Business (5/5): (b) What can we do for our children?

Read Full Post »

Humanity Is Our Business (1/5): The Vision

The poem I recently published as well as the spirit of global understanding generated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games led me to feel that it would be worthwhile re-publishing the first two posts in this sequence. At the foot are links to the five more specifically focused posts of the sequence.

Who Do You Think You Are?

We are half way through a new series of the popular BBC show, Who Do You Think You Are, which sees celebrities exploring the secrets of their family trees, reacting to their unpredictable discoveries with a combination of tears and elation. It’s fascinating viewing and its popularity tells us a lot about where we look when we are seeking clues to our identity.

Our search could take another direction altogether. Instead of looking to the past we could look towards the future. Instead of seeing ourselves shaped by ancestral experiences and our genetic heritage, and behaving accordingly, we could define our identities in terms of the purpose we see our lives having. What are we here for? What do we want to achieve?

And these ambitions need not be constrained by relatively short-term purely personal purposes. In this sequence of posts I want to explore the possibility that we could create a meaningful identity for ourselves around the notion that we are here to contribute to the shaping of the future of our society.

The Bahá’í Perspective

This is not just for Bahá’ís. While it is true that we see a role for the Bahá’í Community in the betterment of the world, it is also true that the vast majority of the world’s population has to become involved. This entails a combination of consciousness-raising and empowerment. How, exactly, are we going to achieve that?

Realization of the uniqueness of what Bahá’u'lláh has brought into being opens the imagination to the contribution that the Cause can make to the unification of humankind and the building of a global society. The immediate responsibility of establishing world government rests on the shoulders of the nation-states. What the Bahá’í community is called on to do, at this stage in humanity’s social and political evolution, is to contribute by every means in its power to the creation of conditions that will encourage and facilitate this enormously demanding undertaking.

(Century of Light: page 94)

In 1985 our international governing body issued a statement to the leaders and the peoples of the world concerning world peace, which they see as something for all of us to work for. They wrote:

Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth.

They speak of the change of consciousness that is needed if this is to come about:

Acceptance of the oneness of mankind is the first fundamental prerequisite for reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind. Universal acceptance of this spiritual principle is essential to any successful attempt to establish world peace. It should therefore be universally proclaimed, taught in schools, and constantly asserted in every nation as preparation for the organic change in the structure of society which it implies.

(Promise of World Peace: Section III)

Clearly this will take time and dedicated effort. Something else is also necessary:

Some form of a world super-state must needs be evolved, in whose favour all the nations of the world will have willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining internal order within their respective dominions. Such a state will have to include within its orbit an International Executive adequate to enforce supreme and unchallengeable authority on every recalcitrant member of the commonwealth; a World Parliament whose members shall be elected by the people in their respective countries and whose election shall be confirmed by their respective governments; and a Supreme Tribunal whose judgement will have a binding effect even in such cases where the parties concerned did not voluntarily agree to submit their case to its consideration.

(ibid.)

They urge us all to lend our weight to this mighty and essential project:

Let men and women, youth and children everywhere recognize the eternal merit of this imperative action for all peoples and lift up their voices in willing assent. Indeed, let it be this generation that inaugurates this glorious stage in the evolution of social life on the planet.

(ibid.)

Even that though will not be enough. Our daily lives need to be imbued with this vision of civilisation-building.

Responsibility for the Welfare of the Entire Human Family

The Universal House of Justice has already unpacked very clearly what this must mean to us (see my earlier post on Working for a Divine Arkitect). When the buildings on Mount Carmel were complete, the following words were read at the opening ceremony:

. . . the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family. Commitment to this revolutionising principle will increasingly empower individuals and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to . . . the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.

(Universal House of Justice: 24 May 2001 in Turning Point page 164)

For ‘individuals’ I think it’s fair to read ‘everyone’ whether Bahá’í or not.

The Bahá’ís have a particular role to play:

The rest of humanity has every right to expect that a body of people genuinely committed to the vision of unity embodied in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh will be an increasingly vigorous contributor to programmes of social betterment that depend for their success precisely on the force of unity. Responding to the expectation will require the Bahá’í community to grow at an ever-accelerating pace, greatly multiplying the human and material resources invested in its work and diversifying still further the range of talents that equip it to be a useful partner with like-minded organizations.

(One Common Faith: page 50)

It goes on to unpack the implications of this:

If Bahá’ís are to fulfil Bahá’u’lláh’s mandate, however, it is obviously vital that they come to appreciate that the parallel efforts of promoting the betterment of society and of teaching the Bahá’í Faith are not activities competing for attention. Rather, are they reciprocal features of one coherent global programme.

(One Common Faith: pages 51-52)

So, it is important to recognise that these aims are not incompatible but reciprocally reinforcing. The next post will attempt to clarify how the vision of the Bahá’í community has developed over the years in terms of how to give these insights practical expression in the alienated complexities of the modern world. Subsequent posts (see list below) looked at three aspects of the work Bahá’ís do that are responses to the call of this vision of civilisation-building.

Related Articles

Humanity is our Business (3/5): Capacity Building (a)

Humanity is our Business (3/5): Capacity Building (b)

Humanity is our Business (4/5): Devotional Meetings

Humanity is our Business (5/5): (a) The Plight of Children

Humanity is our Business (5/5): (b) What can we do for our children?

Read Full Post »

Religion & Community (2/2): ‘cooperation without kinship’

 . . . . . religion must be conducive to love and unity among mankind; for if it be the cause of enmity and strife, the absence of religion is preferable.

( ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Promulgation of Universal Peace page 128)

In the previous post, focusing on the role of religion in society, I tried to convey some of Jonathan Haidt‘s key points, from his penetrating overview of the area - The Righteous Mind. He contends amongst other things that the sense of belonging religion brings is an essential foundation stone for more general human cooperation. He tested this idea against the evidence and found it rang true. He then moves on to look at other evidence that provides a test from a different angle.

Long-Term Social Glue

What was really interesting to me was that he finds that religions are better than other ideologies at binding communities together long-term. He quotes evidence of where communes were compared (page 256):

Communes can survive only to the extent that they can bind a group together, suppress self-interest, and solve the free rider problem. . . . Which kind of commune survived longer? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.

He looks at the analysis of the key ingredient of this superiority (ibid.):

What was the secret ingredient that gave the religious communes a longer shelf life? . . . . He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. . . . . . For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted.

This did not work for secular communes even though such sacrifices are necessary for longevity (ibid.): for them, ‘demands for sacrifice did not help.’

The inescapable conclusion seems to be, as Sosis argues, that (ibid.):

. . .  rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. . . . In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.

As we have already seen, Haidt is very aware that there is a sting in the tail of this position that absolutely needs to be acknowledged (pages 265-266).

So religions do what they are supposed to do. As Wilson put it, they help people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.” But that job description applies equally well to the Mafia.

This is where Haidt’s close analysis of the kind of community a religion helps develop kicks in (pages 266-267):

Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon … none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people. . . . “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”

The Downside not Unique to Religion

As we have already seen, he looks closely at the old and thorny problem. You certainly can’t accuse him of ducking it (page 268).

Anything that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonising another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.

The subtle point he makes, which should be obvious to anyone who looks dispassionately at the history of atheist regimes such as those under Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, is that the problem is not religion per se, but the loss of a compassionate perspective that can come from identifying strongly with a group of any kind rather than with humanity as a whole.

This is the potential cost of the tool that can bring huge collective benefits in its wake that help everyone. However, to focus simply on the costs of religion without also weighing in the same scale the costs of secularism is hardly fair and certainly not objective. Haidt makes it very clear that even in terms of evolutionary success, i.e. reproductive superiority, secularism isn’t doing very well, let alone in terms of more subjective measures such as happiness and well-being (ibid.).

We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. . . . the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

He accepts that it is still early days in the history of such societies but feels that extreme caution is warranted before we can conclude that societies without a God can function any better on average than those with one, and he suspects that in the end they might come out worse for the comparison.

The Seed of Universal Fellow Feeling?

So, in spite of the well-attested dark side of belonging to a group, Haidt still feels that the potential is basically benign. He sees groups, which are demonised as the source of division and prejudice, also as the seedbed of fellow feeling (page 307):

We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital. . . . . To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

It helps if we factor in what Robert Wright has written in his book The Evolution of God. One of his key ideas could also apply with equal force to any ideology (page 439):

Any religion whose prerequisites for individual salvation don’t conduce to the salvation of the whole world is a religion whose time has passed.

His ultimate contention builds on what Haidt is saying here (page 428-429):

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

In Haidt’s words (page 307):

Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish.

Neither of these authors is complacent. They are very aware of the pitfalls that lie in wait. Haidt finds evidence, for example, that proximity to other groups does not necessarily breed tolerance and understanding (pages 307-308):

Putnam examined the level of social capital in hundreds of American communities and discovered that high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital. . . . . . Putnam’s survey was able to distinguish two different kinds of social capital: bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups. Putnam found that diversity reduced both kinds of social capital. . . . . people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down”—that is, to pull in like a turtle.

Another Complicating Factor

Jeremy Rifkin, in his searching book, The Empathic Civilisation, highlights the contradiction that might still sink us even if we learn to love all our neighbours. It is true that he is convinced of the positive power of such a kind of empathy (page 16):

Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is the core of our nature. Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilisation.

But he’s also aware of the entropy such wide connections bring in their train. As wider empathy creates bigger civilisations we need to consume more resources to sustain them, until what we need becomes unsustainable. One of the starkest statements of that principle comes early in his book (page 44):

The tragic flaw of history is that our increased empathic concern and sensitivity grows in direct proportion to the wreaking of greater entropic damage to the world we all cohabit and rely on for our existence and perpetuation.

Even so, even though all these writers understand the risks, there is tremendous hope in their more optimistic analysis of human potential and the value of religion at its best to bring that out. And if religion can help us extend our effective empathy beyond even our fellow human beings to include future generations, all life on the planet and even the planet itself, we might have some hope of long-term survival. Of course there are powerful forces that militate against this. We are all aware of them. But there are powerfully constructive forces within our nature upon which we can draw to effectively oppose them:

The faculties needed to construct a more just and sustainable social order—moderation, justice, love, reason, sacrifice and service to the common good—have too often been dismissed as naïve ideals. Yet, it is these, and related, qualities that must be harnessed to overcome the traits of ego, greed, apathy and violence, which are often rewarded by the market and political forces driving current patterns of unsustainable consumption and production.

(From a statement by the Bahá’í International Community.)

Read Full Post »