A new version of the Bahá’í Reference Library is now available. This ‘old version’ of the Bahá’í Reference Library will be replaced at a later date.
The new version of the Bahá’i Reference Library can be accessed here »
“The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having reached…” |
The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having reached
its peak, in either its explicitly religious or its less definable
spiritual manifestations. On the contrary.
8
The phenomenon is the
product of historical forces that steadily gather momentum. Their
common effect is to erode the certainty, bequeathed to the world by
the twentieth century, that material existence represents ultimate
reality.
|
The most obvious cause of these re-evaluations has been the bankruptcy
of the materialist enterprise itself. For well over a hundred years,
the idea of progress was identified with economic development and with
its capacity to motivate and shape social improvement. Those
differences of opinion that existed did not challenge this world view,
but only conceptions as to how its goals might best be attained. Its
most extreme form, the iron dogma of “scientific materialism”, sought
to reinterpret every aspect of history and human behaviour in its own
narrow terms. Whatever humanitarian ideals may have inspired some of
its early proponents, the universal consequence was to produce regimes
of totalitarian control prepared to use any means of coercion in
regulating the lives of hapless populations subjected to them. The
goal held up as justification of such abuses was the creation of a new
kind of society that would ensure not only freedom from want but
fulfilment for the human spirit. At the end, after eight decades of
mounting folly and brutality, the movement collapsed as a credible
guide to the world’s future.
|
Other systems of social experimentation, while repudiating recourse to
inhumane methods, nevertheless derived their moral and intellectual
thrust from the same limited conception of reality. The view took root
9
that, since people were essentially self-interested actors in matters
pertaining to their economic well-being, the building of just and
prosperous societies could be ensured by one or another scheme of what
was described as modernization. The closing decades of the twentieth
century, however, sagged under a mounting burden of evidence to the
contrary: the breakdown of family life, soaring crime, dysfunctional
educational systems, and a catalogue of other social pathologies that
bring to mind the sombre words of Bahá’u’lláh’s
warning about the impending condition of human society: “Such shall be
its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly.”
1
|
The fate of what the world has learned to call social and economic
development has left no doubt that not even the most idealistic
motives can correct materialism’s fundamental flaws. Born in the wake
of the chaos of the Second World War, “development” became by far the
largest and most ambitious collective undertaking on which the human
race has ever embarked. Its humanitarian motivation matched its
enormous material and technological investment. Fifty years later,
while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has brought,
the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening
failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the
small segment of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity
and the condition of the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the
collective effort that began with such high hopes has seen the gap
widen into an abyss.
10
|
Consumer culture, today’s inheritor by default of materialism’s gospel
of human betterment, is unembarrassed by the ephemeral nature of the
goals that inspire it. For the small minority of people who can afford
them, the benefits it offers are immediate, and the rationale
unapologetic. Emboldened by the breakdown of traditional morality,
the advance of the new creed is essentially no more than the triumph
of animal impulse, as instinctive and blind as appetite, released at
long last from the restraints of supernatural sanctions. Its most
obvious casualty has been language. Tendencies once universally
castigated as moral failings mutate into necessities of social
progress. Selfishness becomes a prized commercial resource; falsehood
reinvents itself as public information; perversions of various kinds
unabashedly claim the status of civil rights. Under appropriate
euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence, pride—even violence—acquire not
merely broad acceptance but social and economic value. Ironically, as
words have been drained of meaning, so have the very material comforts
and acquisitions for which truth has been casually sacrificed.
|
Clearly, materialism’s error has lain not in the laudable effort to
improve the conditions of life, but in the narrowness of mind and
unjustified self-confidence that have defined its mission. The
importance both of material prosperity and of the scientific and
technological advances necessary to its achievement is a theme that
runs through the writings of the Bahá’í Faith. As was
inevitable from the outset, however, arbitrary efforts to disengage
such physical and material well-being from humanity’s
11
spiritual and
moral development have ended by forfeiting the allegiance of the very
populations whose interests a materialistic culture purports to
serve. “Witness how the world is being afflicted with a fresh calamity
every day”, Bahá’u’lláh warns. “Its sickness is
approaching the stage of utter hopelessness, inasmuch as the true
Physician is debarred from administering the remedy, whilst unskilled
practitioners are regarded with favour, and are accorded full freedom
to act.”
2
|
1. | Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1983), section LXI. [ Back To Reference] |
2. | ibid., section XVI. [ Back To Reference] |