The fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature
and are associated with the world of the heart and spirit. This is fully
explained in the Baha'i teaching, and without knowledge of its principles no
improvement in the economic state can be realized…When the love of God is
established, everything else will be realized. This is the true foundation of
all economics.
(‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 238)
This book is not concerned
in any way with overhauling the political machinery of state, or shoring up the
weakened institutions of civil society, or with fixing the structural
inequalities of opportunity in the economy.
It advocates no political action, puts forth no social platforms, and suggests
no economic policies for creating jobs or innovations in either the relations
of production or the institutional distribution of wealth. Neither is it yet another manifesto of
artistic and cultural renewal, nor an anxious call to return to the foundations
of any religious tradition.
The view presented is that
of ideal education for an ideal community.
It is a vision of people creating prosperity, using spiritual virtues as
currency. Hence there are no personal
investment strategies and not even a side glance at topics like individual
financial planning. Neither will the
reader find stock market tips or the steps to be a millionaire by saving $10.00
a day. It is concerned only with the
spiritual state of human beings, both individual and in small groups, and with
identifying the advance guard of a new community. The people in this vision do not yet exist in
any significant numbers, though their numbers increase daily. But the vision includes every human being on
the planet. It is a vision of our true
selves acting in real ways, though this may not be recognized by many.
That’s because,
economically, applying a vision of real humanity focuses not on economics, but,
rather, on a larger idea, prosperity.
Modern economics is those principles and practices that have to do with
producing, distributing and consuming material wealth, goods and services. The more of these one has, consumes or
produces, the richer one supposedly is.
Yet even the colossally affluent among us vaguely sense that something
is really wrong with that equation.
Prosperity includes material plenty, of course. Without plenty, prosperity is a pipe-dream of
impracticality. Prosperity is based on
the shared sense of spiritual well-being and connection that flows from belonging
to a community of mutual care. True
prosperity will never be achieved by setting our sights solely upon gaining
ever more material wealth, for reasons that will become clear. Hence,
though wealth obviously plays an essential role in achieving prosperity, I
believe that it is human and moral relations of care that are the key to
prosperity and that point the way out of our malaise.
In this sense, the essay
is a throwback. Prior to our modern
materialist mania—i.e. from Aristotle till about the sixteenth century when the
Catholic Church lost its moral hold on European society and that ethical
transformation toward unbridled self-interest described first by Max Weber in
his classic, The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, took hold—economics in the “west” was the moral
relations of individuals in the household, and the public household operated
upon similar moral principles and relations, or at least pretended to, under
the name moral philosophy. Modern
economics became a subject of scientific and statistical inquiry when it
separated from both the actual household and from abstract moral
philosophy. And prior to Aristotle’s
discussion was what Mircea Eliade calls “the economy of the sacred,” the human
communal connection with divinity. For
archaic man the natural and human worlds were not separate from the sacred,
transcendent world. The first was its
physical embodiment, the second its cultural manifestation, the arena where
natural ecology was turned into human economy.
The early economy of the
sacred was the rites associated with women and fertility and men and virility,
with sky gods and earth goddesses uniting.
Later notions were cast in the language of the effulgence of life, of
divine overflow, of the gifts of God, the abundance of the divine storehouse,
with bounty and fecundity: indeed, with images and metaphors of wealth and
well-being of all kinds. The whole
multi-millennial movement from Earth Mother to Heavenly Father, and then from
divine Personality to abstract Principle, shows, even now, the vestiges of this
human relation with the Divine, the relation being the receiving of abundance when
living in accordance with our proper nature.
Put in modern conceptual
terms, these earlier formulations saw the material economy, so vaunted in the
modern world, as comprising the set of material relations embedded within and
reflecting a larger system of human moral relations which were, in turn,
expressions of a complex social relation with the sacred: this last kept
everything grounded in a higher moral and communal purpose. We have lost any real sense of the sacred and
in so doing have lost belief in ourselves, leaving only things and our
relations with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment