Building to the Rational Scientific Era

The outcome of this intellectual endowment is science, which is especially characteristic of man.

(Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 29.)

Continuing the discussion on the topic: The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence

          The dominant form of intellectual perception of the Adamic Cycle has exhausted its possibilities of expression and development, and so a spiritual one is being awakened within us.  The exhaustion/awakening, death and birth moment, that period when the not yet gone occupies the same “space” as the not yet born, creates the disorder of knowledge.  Responses to the disorder of knowledge take three basic forms: to simply continue with the dominant scientific paradigm; to return to earlier traditions of knowing to create a complete paradigm of understanding; to find new knowledge within Revelation.  I will take these up in turn.  But first we must understand how we got to where we are.

         All periods of history possess certain conditions of truth that constitute what is acceptable as knowledgeable discourse.  These conditions of discourse have changed over time, from what Foucault calls one period's episteme to another. (See Foucault’s The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge.) But the tradition of modern western civilization, starting in its earliest emergence about the twelfth century, is unique in that it is the first civilization to establish an episteme, a knowledge-base, upon assumptions other than those provided by religion.  I mean that Christendom not only refused to be spiritually enlightened by Muhammad, but also went on to repudiate its own spiritual foundations of Christianity, and with disastrous spiritual and moral results.  Rather it took its spiritual lead from the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans and unleashed a tremendous intellectual quest to understand all things from what we have come to call a materialist point of view.

            Without the transcendent coordinating power and moral authority of religion as the Word, anarchy everywhere appears in the human system.  Baha’u’llah warned: “Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world and of tranquillity amongst its peoples. The weakening of the pillars of religion hath strengthened the foolish and emboldened them and made them more arrogant. Verily I say: The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to chaos and confusion.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 63-64)  And: “Should the lamp of religion be obscured, chaos and confusion will ensue, and the lights of fairness and justice, of tranquility and peace cease to shine. Unto this will bear witness every man of true understanding.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:125)

            From about the twelfth-century, slowly but with increasing acceleration, like a snowball coursing down a mountain achieving avalanche speed and destructive power, chaos and confusion began to grow in European Christendom, attaining an acme of disjunction in the United States.  A violent commotion and competition arose, first between church and state but later involving more claimants to social leadership, for two things.  First, for the guiding metaphors and principles to direct intelligence and, second,  to find a social structure to direct power in order to govern what was quickly becoming, by historical standards, an ungovernable situation.

            These were both necessary because when religion loses its hold on the mind and heart the soul’s relation with the transcendent is broken, and we are left with only the human view of the superhuman.  Culture, the arts and humanities, and the secular knowledge system of science are drawn into this void to become the symbol-producing center of society while secular government becomes its actual center.  Belief becomes humanistic and this-worldly, the gods are psychologized and morph into human projections, the sacred and spiritual are deemed vestiges of past mythical days, mere fetishes of superstition, or are thrown into that rubbish heap in the cellar of the mind called the unconscious, and in social government we get competing theories like the democratic will of the people and the divine right of Kings.  Knowledge proliferated, yes, but wisdom and understanding were overwhelmed and retreated; a situation described by ‘Abdu’l-Baha as “civilization conjoined with barbarism.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha: 284)

            But in any belief or knowledge system an anarchy of truths always results when the coordinating epistemological vision becomes exhausted and the manifold differentiated empirical facts it discovered and generated move to a free-floating limbo world awaiting some theory to capture them and put them to effective use.   I mean that the driving forces that created modernity were left unchecked to reach the negative end of their logical conclusions.  This is another way of describing the disorder of knowledge.

            Economically, as Wallerstein demonstrated, starting around the fifteenth-century, (See: The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century) a market economy formed and grew into the modern capitalist world system that has encircled the globe.  Polanyi went farther and claimed that the market economy expanded as both belief system about human nature and as economic system until it emancipated itself from the social relations it was traditionally embedded within, turned and swallowed established political and social relations and reformed them upon capitalist market principles, creating a market society that has crushed all human relations into relations of commodities. (See Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation)

            During this phase, science as we know the term is invented, both in name and practice.  Economics, sociology, psychology, and political science were born as rational inquiries into human nature and society, but solely upon ego, material and sociological principles devoid of any reference to spiritual or transcendent ideals, and sooner or later anarchy was discovered to co-exist with order in each of these domains also.  Thus, where Adam Smith saw a shadowy guiding hand structuring the market, Marx saw, beneath the supposed rationality of personal choices, the anarchy of the market.  Shoghi Effendi discerned “the anarchy inherent in state sovereignty” and ominously warned in 1936 that it was “moving toward a climax”, (The World Order of Baha'u'llah:202)  meaning that its full destructive power was about to burst asunder the bonds holding nation-states together and bring the entire international political order crashing down.  Psychologically, the ego was gradually liberated from all social and moral restraint until he became the imperial self, and society was no longer constituted around a divine covenant, but covenanted around human constitutions.

            Poets usually see things first.  In the sixteenth century, that is, at the very start of the modern age, John Donne saw the breakdown of the whole medieval system and the appearance of something not only psychologically new but also dangerous.  He wrote in his poem The Anatomy of the World:

And freely men confess that this world’s spent,

When in the planets and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies.

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, and all relation;

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that then can be

None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

This is the world’s condition now…

In European letters, between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when Wallerstein’s “modern world-system” was achieving real material shape , T.S. Eliot described what he called a “dissociation of sensibility” happening in the western psyche.  By that phrase he meant a shift in style and even content, but mostly in how thought was expressed.  In his essay, The Metaphysical Poets, Eliot wrote: “We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino.  In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered….” (The Metaphysical Poets in in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot: 64)

McLuhan saw the fragmentation of perception brought on by “Gutenberg technology” behind all this dissociation.  The elevation of what he called the visual sense over all other senses, leading to mechanization, an assembly line of linear thought and organization invading all areas of human life, a homogenization of Newtonian space, and the standardization of time into work-discipline. (See Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy)

The Age of Reason in the 17th century with its heady brew of atheism, material science and mathematical law—Blake’s “single vision and Newton’s sleep”—begins the last and most concrete stage of this paradigm of knowing, when rational philosophical thought crystallized into a positivist scientific thought-form.  

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

The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguring of Human Intelligence

Unveiled and unconcealed, this Wronged One hath, at all times, proclaimed before the face of all the peoples of the world that which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.

   (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 96)

These next few posts will be the transcript of a talk I just gave at the Desert Rose Artists and Scholars Symposium.  Actually, what I will post in this series is the longer essay from which I drew the material for the talk.  I hope that you enjoy these posts, and look forward to any responses you might have.

First we need to locate ourselves in what is called the context of history.  To do that we must look at where we were, where we are, and where we are going.    

The disorder of knowledge is occurring because, through the power and authority of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, humanity is being born collectively into the spiritual reality from the current mental one.  The world’s equilibrium hath been upset, and this includes the equilibrium of the world of knowledge.  We are in-between worlds, a confusing condition where the old knowledges still hold sway in our minds, at least our pat assumptions, unchallenged notions, unexamined conclusions, received opinions and inherited beliefs about Reality do, but at the same time, the new spiritual knowledge to be built on principles of the nature of Reality found in Baha’u’llah’s Revelation are silently and gradually inserting themselves into our consciousness in their stead. 

Humankind has been here before, at least by analogy and metaphor.   I mean that six thousand years ago when our ancestors stepped out of the nomadic wilderness into the settled garden they also stepped out of a sensory knowledge made of the earthy exteriority of material signs into a reflexive intellectual knowledge built out of the airy interiority of symbols.  It was a change from cognition to re-cognition, from consciousness to self-consciousness. 

This evolutionary leap is told in the great culture myths of every people, specifically in the Judeo-Christian tradition in what is known as the Genesis story where a Manifestation of God inaugurated a new cycle of human power by naming things: “In the beginning was the Word”—though before the action of the creative Word was the creatable substance to receive the Word, i.e. the One matter to be acted upon.  Naming commences the Adamic Cycle of human intellectual evolution.  Now, we must avoid the creationist fallacy of the Bishop Ussher’s who believe that Genesis is the actual historical beginning 6,000 years ago of this leap.  No, Genesis is the mythical account of this leap, a leap that actually took many centuries, a leap from one universal cycle to another, and only myth can tell that sort of story. 

This new cycle initiated by the Figure we call Adam was characterized by the flowering of symbol systems such as language, art and number to encode our thought, the building of a mental universe as rich and complex as the natural one, a universe of knowing that found its conclusion where it started, in sensory knowledge.  But sensory knowledge was in this latter time not directly apprehended, rather it was rerouted and re-rooted in a Descartian mathematico-mechanistic philosophy of extension, the classification knowledge into a proliferating number of disciplines, a determinedly, reductionist, empirical science whose language is digital, all spewing forth libraries of facts communicated via the apparatus of knowledge dispersion, but lacking any coordinating principle. 

The mental abilities opened by Adam and the succession of Manifestations after him, emerged, unfolded, and evolved within the open field of intellectual life through a kind of morphic resonance, the formative mental causation of that species of cultural life and learning called human, as the biological forms evolve in the biosphere.  The term “formative causation” comes from Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist from Britain, whose theory is named morphic resonance.  He believes that morphogenetic fields are self-organizing systems arranged and fashioned by "Morphic fields" which are responsible for the characteristic form and organization of systems in biology, chemistry, and physics.

At higher levels these fields provide the templates for the ways in which organisms develop and are also responsible for the behavior and social and cultural development of organisms and social groups. These are not static fields, they are able to learn and unfold and establish new patterns and habits across time and space, a process which is termed "Morphic resonance."  Mental forms or templates for social forms of consciousness are first-order likenesses of spiritual forms, or archetypes: material forms are the second-order likeness, the material imitation or embodiment of the intellectual models of spiritual Reality, if you will.

For Sheldrake, morphic fields are traditions of accumulated species-experience encoded in memory that organically develop by the innovations that come from meeting novel situations that reconfigure past ideas to express new potentials.  A similar idea in cultural history and development was articulated by T.S. Eliot in a famous essay titled, Tradition and the Individual Talent. He wrote: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.” 

 

Rebuilding Civilization from the Ground Up

Alas, notwithstanding the laudable efforts, in every land, of well-intentioned individuals working to improve circumstances in society, the obstacles preventing the realization of such vision seem insurmountable to many.  Their hopes founder on erroneous assumptions about human nature that so permeate the structures and traditions of much of present-day living as to have attained the status of established fact.  These assumptions appear to make no allowance for the extraordinary reservoir of spiritual potential available to any illumined soul who draws upon it; instead, they rely for justification on humanity’s failings, examples of which daily reinforce a common sense of despair.  A layered veil of false premises thus obscures a fundamental truth: The state of the world reflects a distortion of the human spirit, not its essential nature.

(The Universal House of Justice Ridvan 2012)

            These posts on the divine economy have been but a long exploration of the above statement from the Universal House of Justice.  They have presented a “spiritual” perspective on our common and complex economic crisis, because the real crisis stems from a terrible misapprehension of our true nature. The crisis in our material life resides not in what Marxists would call “the relations of production”; rather, it is in our human relations: not in our material economy but in our moral economy; not in our knowledge, but in our self-knowledge.  They presented a view on achieving general prosperity that is strongly self-sacrificing rather than self-centered in focus, altruistic rather than avaricious in motivation.  This view, that the solution to our economic and social woes is fundamentally spiritual in character, can, it is hoped, shed some light into our current darkness and show a way out for all of us.  The darkness that we need to escape, though, is within us.  It is the dark distortion generated by false assumptions of the nature of the human being, that have crystallized into an educational philosophy whose social system that it both supports and draws legitimacy from deprives us of that which we inherently possess.

            The call of God is both to the soul of the individual and to the spirit of humanity.  The spiritualization of the individual begins with a fundamental change in self-consciousness from a center within humanity to a center within divinity, and out from this new center flow attitudes and behaviors demonstrating that a “spiritual transformation” is underway.  The power released by spiritual transformation has always been and will always be the mightiest engine driving social change, for it is the spiritual catalyst that sets off a whole chain of widening effects. 

            Knowing one is created rich in essence gives one the freedom and resources to determine, so far as determination, initiative and thought can do, one’s life and destiny.  Further, if every individual is rich, then the collective, humanity, must be innately a colossus of wealth.  Bringing ourselves down to poverty is to strap our souls to the wheel of grim material necessity, that endlessly revolving gerbil wheel of natural causation and cycles which are impersonal, irresistible and beyond our control.  It is to live in a de-humanized state of nature, existing in a condition of perpetual want and misery, enslaved to biological and psychological needs, to be bottle-fed on anxiety and nursed by fear, captive to the urgencies of physical life and ferociously competitive about getting them.  This is the person that must be transformed.   

But, transformed individuals are not sufficient by themselves to effect the scale and speed of change needed for social advance to occur. Indeed, until a new society takes root, such individuals are actually ramping up the confusion in the system that is “lamentably defective”, because that system cannot assimilate the energy and patterns of behavior that flow from spiritual principles.  Changes must also occur in our collective consciousness and in our outer mode of collective life.  Inner individual changes that are not outwardly supported by new patterns of collective behavior and through mediating institutions will eventually become as water in the sand.  If only a few are spiritually transformed, there is no appreciable seismic activity set off in the social landscape, though the dynamic force of example does have powerful effect.  But if large numbers of people undergo transformation, society undergoes a transformation in its structure which means one form blows apart so another may be built in its stead.  A groundswell of spiritual transformations is occurring.  Thus a letter from Shoghi Effendi explains: “The primary consideration is the Spirit that has to permeate our economic life, and this will gradually crystallize itself into definite institutions and principles that will help to bring about the ideal conditions foretold by Baha’u’llah.” (Lights of Guidance p. 548#1864)  Thus, abundance will flow to everyone when justly formed civil and humanitarian agencies are built and function on spiritual principles that embody a consciousness of the oneness of humanity, so that the poor, the disadvantaged, those caught by natural disasters and in temporary need, are not only helped but whose needs are given precedence.  This is pure justice. 

If we are to structure society and social institutions along spiritual impulses emanating from our higher nature there is no doubt that they will have to push up through layers of hardened assumptions in our minds and hearts that is the legacy of an improper education.  Humanity may well be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world, but enter we will, or perish.  That is why an organic social structure that already embodies spiritual principles provides the needed organization and power to drive social advance and save humanity from its own destructive impulses.  That organic structure is Baha'u'llah's Divine Economy, the global public household.

The World Order of Baha’u’llah is the Kingdom of God on earth.  It is a complete entity in its own right, a gift from God with a consciousness and social institutions that embody and reflect back this consciousness.  In this regard it is like all human civilizations, which are also a consciousness embodied in social institutions that reflect back to it, thus creating a kind of closed circuit of mind and behavior, a period of history, humanity and thought. 

But the divine Order of Baha’u’llah is altogether something new.  It is the collective embodiment and shape of our higher, divine nature.  It is the social form that humanity will put on like a tailor-made suit, one in which the “justice of God” not of men, shall rule.  We cannot enter it by ourselves, especially our ego selves.  Our higher nature must be aroused to perception and action if we are to play the part required of each of us. We cannot simply make some adjustments to our current situation and think that alone will bring us into the new order.  It is not any higher degree of existing consciousness that will work, rather a new consciousness expressed through new faculties of mind and heart is needed.  It is not more of the same only better.  It is a whole new order of life, thought, feeling and action. 

            With this statement we have revolved back to the very purpose and beginnings of these essays, to the imperative need for a proper education, an education that can be a transformative matrix for human souls to effect personal and social transformation.  We can meet every challenge that our lower nature has created by bringing forth the higher nature that is innately composed of qualities that transcend narrow self-interest and by building a supportive institutional network built upon spiritual qualities in resonant harmony with the spiritualized individual.   A complete model of that education can be found in my book, Renewing the Sacred.  

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