
Coronavirus Structure (for source of image, see link)
At the risk of repeating what I said in an earlier post but spurred on by the strength of my reaction to this testing pandemic, I feel I need to expand on what I said then.
I’ll pick up from where I left off.
I wrote then that the very magnitude of the increasingly imminent threat of climate change and the totality of its potentially destructive power may just be the trigger to our recognising our essential unity and mobilising a more effective and unified response. As David Wallace-Wells puts it in his apocalyptic warning, The Uninhabitable Earth :[1]
If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it.
However, in the light of more recent experience, Covid-19 may be a better candidate for this awakening than climate change, because its impact is more immediate.
More than ever we have to transcend our divisive differences and collaborate more creatively together if we are to rise to these challenges and survive, and we must do this without causing further damage to the earth which is our home.
Ideology
An important factor which can either enhance our ability to do this or thwart all our efforts, is the ideology or belief system with which we passionately identify. As readers of this blog will already know, I am writing from the perspective of a particular religion, but much of what I say can be fruitfully applied to any belief system, even to a nihilism which believes in nothing.
Religion is often vilified as divisive as well as deluded. If you want to hear what I think about the validity of spiritual beliefs you’ll need to explore the links at the bottom of this post. There isn’t time for all that now.
It is not just religion that is divisive when it loses the plot: any ideology can become as dangerously divisive. Terrorism is not unique to distortions of Islam, as recent history illustrates with the painful consequences of bombings and assassinations at the hands of the new IRA or of right-wing extremists.
Once we have taken the fatal step into mistaken devotion we are in the danger zone of idealism. Jonathan Haidt in his humane and compassionate book The Happiness Hypothesis indicates that, in his view, idealism has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing:[2]
The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.
Eric Fromm provides a plausible explanation for why we are drawn to seek such destructive certainty. In his attempt to understand the horrors of Nazism, he writes in his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a dog-eared disintegrating paperback copy of which I bought in 1976 and still cling onto, something which deserves our attention here:[3]
The intensity of the need for a frame of orientation explains a fact that has puzzled many students of man, namely the ease with which people fall under the spell of irrational doctrines, either political or religious or of any other nature, when to the one who is not under their influence it seems obvious that they are worthless constructs. . . . . Man would probably not be so suggestive were it not that his need for a cohesive frame of orientation is so vital. The more an ideology pretends to give answers to all questions, the more attractive it is; here may lie the reason why irrational or even plainly insane thought systems can so easily attract the minds of men.
His idea in this respect is also to be found at various key points in the Bahá’í Writings. For example, in this quotation from Bahá’u’lláh:[4]
Arise, O people, and, by the power of God’s might, resolve to gain the victory over your own selves, that haply the whole earth may be freed and sanctified from its servitude to the gods of its idle fancies—gods that have inflicted such loss upon, and are responsible for the misery of their wretched worshippers. These idols form the obstacle that impedeth man in his efforts to advance in the path of perfection.’
I will be focusing mainly on how to reduce the hold of this poisonous temptation in the realm of religion, but I hope I’ve said enough to clarify that this extends beyond that to all forms of belief in one way or another.
Oneness and Interconnectedness
One of the traps that religion can fall into is explained by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in a useful analogy:[5]
The Sun of Reality is one Sun but it has different dawning-places, just as the phenomenal sun is one although it appears at various points of the horizon. . . . Souls who focus their vision upon the Sun of Reality will be the recipients of light no matter from what point it rises, but those who are fettered by adoration of the dawning-point are deprived when it appears in a different station upon the spiritual horizon.
At any point in history, revelations can appear expressed in terms that the people of that place and time can understand, with practical remedies suited to their circumstances. For example, dietary laws can vary between faiths, but the spiritual core of their message, such as in the Golden Rule ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ is almost identical, differing only in the terminology, not the essential meaning. To divisively reduce the religion to its local variations and to the literal interpretation of the metaphors it uses to convey the inexpressible, as fundamentalists of all faiths tend to do, is an error with huge destructive potential. It’s important to emphasise here that fundamentalists and zealots are not unique to religion, as the world I was born into in 1943 proves beyond any shadow of doubt. The atrocities committed by states in thrall to Stalin, Mao and Hitler were made possible largely by our tendency to espouse ‘insane thought systems.’ I accept that other factors such as craven conformity were also at work, but I don’t think they were the main driver.
From the Bahá’í point of view on religion, it is imperative that we recognise that all religions are in essence one:[6]
. . the time has come when religious leadership must face honestly and without further evasion the implications of the truth that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one. It was intimations of this truth that originally inspired the interfaith movement and that have sustained it through the vicissitudes of the past one hundred years. Far from challenging the validity of any of the great revealed faiths, the principle has the capacity to ensure their continuing relevance. In order to exert its influence, however, recognition of this reality must operate at the heart of religious discourse . . .
If we do not, then we will fail to operate effectively at this time of crisis, and in consequence our divided world will career towards its eventual destruction.
Beyond that we have to recognise that humanity is in essence one. As Bahá’u’lláh writes:
It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.[7]
It is important to emphasise here that a recognition of the unity of humankind is not restricted to those who follow a religious path. We all need to accept our inescapable interconnectedness. Tom Oliver is not a believer in God. His evidence base lies in science. But he is unequivocal in his book The Self Delusion that we share the dangerous delusion that we are independent selves:[8]
. . . We have one . . . big myth dispel: that we exist as independent selves at the centre of a subjective universe.
We are seamlessly connected to one another and the world around us. Independence is simply an illusion that was once adaptive but now threatens our success as species.
If we can bring ourselves to accept that consciousness-raising truth, something which the impact of Covid-19 should help us do, then certain potentially life-changing implications follow.
The Universal House of Justice addressed the following words to all those gathered on Mount Carmel to mark the completion of the project there on 24th May 2001 (my emphasis):
Humanity’s crying need will not be met by a struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness, for a wholehearted embrace of Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching that 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 revolutionizing principle will increasingly empower individual believers and Bahá’í institutions alike in awakening others to the Day of God and to the latent spiritual and moral capacities that can change this world into another world.
There is no get out clause here. We cannot draw arbitrary convenient distinctions between people of the kind that help us ignore their obvious needs. It doesn’t matter if they are of a different colour, nation, faith or gender: they are human beings like us and deserve the same compassion and support as we would wish for ourselves. The Universal House of Justice made this explicitly clear in an earlier message:[10]
The primary question to be resolved is how the present world, with its entrenched pattern of conflict, can change to a world in which harmony and co-operation will prevail.
World order can be founded only on an unshakeable consciousness of the oneness of mankind, a spiritual truth which all the human sciences confirm. Anthropology, physiology, psychology, recognize only one human species, albeit infinitely varied in the secondary aspects of life. Recognition of this truth requires abandonment of prejudice—prejudice of every kind—race, class, colour, creed, nation, sex, degree of material civilization, everything which enables people to consider themselves superior to others.
So what’s the problem then? If it’s so obvious, why don’t we do it? That will have to wait till next time.
Some posts that suggest matter is not all there is
Psychology and Spirit
- Irreducible Mind – a review (1/3): how psychology lost the plot
- Irreducible Mind – a review (2/3): Myers & the mind-body problem
- Irreducible Mind – a review (3/3): the self & the Self
Self and Soul
- The Self and the Soul – The Ghost in the Machine (1/5)
- The Self and the Soul: Approaching the Heart of the Matter (2/5)
- The Self and the Soul: Mirrorwork Practice (3/5)
- The Self and the Soul: Implications of Mirrorwork (4/5)
- The Self and the Soul: the Promise of a Rose Garden? (5/5)
Concerning Religion and Science
- Where the Conflict Really Lies (1/4): preparing the ground
- Where the Conflict Really Lies (2/4): a superficial conflict
- Where the Conflict Really Lies (3/4): a deep compatibility
- Where the Conflict Really Lies (4/4): the deep conflict
References
[1]. The Uninhabitable Earth – page 25.
[2]. The Happiness Hypothesis – page 75.
[3] The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness – pages 260-61.
[4]. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh – page 87.
[5] Selected Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Section Only) – page 255 – The Sun of Reality.
[6]. From the introduction by the Universal House of Justice to One Common Faith 21 March 2005.
[7]. Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, from Lawh-i-Maqsúd.
[8]. The Self Delusion – page 3.
[9]. The Self Delusion – page 4.
[10]. Universal House of Justice The Promise of World Peace Section III – 1985)