The Fourth Part of Prosperity

It is not merely material well-being that people need. What they desperately need is to know how to live their lives — they need to know who they are, to what purpose they exist, and how they should act towards one another; and, once they know the answers to these questions they need to be helped to gradually apply these answers to everyday behaviour. 

(Messages from the Universal House of Justice 1963-1986: 283)

I said at the beginning of these posts on the moral economy that to solve our economic crisis two kinds of education were required, spiritual, or ideal education, and material, or practical education.  Of these two, spiritual education is by far the more important one, so I have dwelt at some length upon it, as it not only gives us a new paradigm for economic study, but also points to the way out of our economic malaise. But to do as the House of Justice advises and apply the answers to the first three questions—i.e. who are you?, to what purpose do you exist?, and how should we act towards one another?—“to everyday behavior”, takes us to the practical side.   

In practical education are learned the arts and sciences and skills for employment, the finding of one’s calling and performing acts of service.   Many educational systems today focus solely on preparing students for career, for employment, and for going about the business of earning a living.  But many students leave their “education” without being able to find a job.  In my opinion, this is because conceptualizing the moral context for study remains an elusive goal.  While jobs are obviously important, the proper moral context is larger than that of achieving merely personal comfort.  Achieving comfort seems practical, but it is only self-centeredly so.  It is ego-practical.  The practical education I have in mind must promote a moral context of, among other things, empowering the disempowered, of generating sustainable material wealth by focusing upon stewardship of the renewable energy sources of sun, wind and water in the physical environment, and of removing all material incentives to engage in war and exploitation, or that legitimate an unchecked profit-motive. 

Too, besides obtaining skills for employment, a spiritually practical education would inculcate moral principles of behavior and develop the intellectual skills of critical thinking and evaluation that enable students to comprehensively analyze their social and intellectual environment in the light of spiritual principles.  Further they must be helped to understand the interplay of spiritual principles and material forces to know how to build a sustainable social system, and, if their current system is not sustainable, then execute the means to bring about a progressive change. 

The House of Justice wrote that youth must have a program that “engages their expanding consciousness in an exploration of reality that helps them to analyse the constructive and destructive forces operating in society and to recognize the influence these forces exert on their thoughts and actions, sharpening their spiritual perception, enhancing their powers of expression and reinforcing moral structures that will serve them throughout their lives. At an age when burgeoning intellectual, spiritual and physical powers become accessible to them, they are being given the tools needed to combat the forces that would rob them of their true identity as noble beings and to work for the common good.” (Universal House of Justice Ridvan 2010)

We are created rich in the spiritual wealth of virtue, but we need to know how to bring these riches out of our higher nature and apply them in order to transform an increasingly dysfunctional materialist order into a functioning spiritual one.  A realignment of the material and social forces and values of the current order will not be sufficient to make the needed change.  Something far more fundamental is required.  Spiritually-inspired action is needed.

Bahá’u’lláh in one short statement indicated how any individual can apply spiritual principles: “Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility.” (Gleanings: 284)

By now it should be obvious that the inherently divisive and obsessively polarizing ego-based reason that has dominated human thought and action for centuries is not the source of attitudes of cooperation, altruism, sharing and giving that are the basis of human prosperity, but are the very antithesis of them.  There is no doubt that spiritual behavior can not appear so long as we remain at the level of ego-consciousness, however idealistic it can appear to be.  Ego-consciousness is founded upon seeing another as the other.  ‘Abdu’l-Bahá warns: “See ye no strangers; rather see all men as friends, for love and unity come hard when ye fix your gaze on otherness.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha: 24)   If prosperity is to be achieved for all we must first be infused with a consciousness of humanity’s oneness and recognize the need for greater cooperation.  This is the prerequisite for all other activity.   

Greater wealth and real growth is created more by cooperation than by competition, no matter what the theorists of unbridled free-market capitalism say.  Modern physics tell us that all visible matter represents about 4% of the known matter in the known universe.  If a similar ratio holds between the known forms of wealth and the unmanifest potential for wealth, then only 4% of our wealth capacities are known and in use and circulation.  We humans spend a great deal of time competing to get a piece of that 4%.  But in doing so we are missing out on the 96% of wealth that is possible to create through cooperation.  To bring these untapped possibilities into existence requires that: “We should continually be establishing new bases for human happiness and creating and promoting new instrumentalities toward this end.”  (The Secret of Divine Civilization:3)  We must learn to cooperate not compete.  Until that point, though, we can compete to cooperate.  I'll discuss that in detail next post. 

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred, is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a.  It is now also in Kindle.