The Revolt Against Materialism

Likewise didst thou ask whether, in this Bahá'í Dispensation, the spiritual will ultimately prevail. It is certain that spirituality will defeat materialism, that the heavenly will subdue the human, and that through divine education the masses of mankind generally will take great steps forward in all degrees of life—except for those who are blind and deaf and mute and dead.

(Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha:191)

It is a commonplace to say that the world is in terrific danger, a perilous predicament.  While political remedies are tried and economic proposals are put forward to fix the troubles, social upheaval rapidly spreads to more lands and peoples.  No one seems able to stem the rising tide of trouble.  Why?  A letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi gives a deeper reason: "Indeed, the chief reason for the evils now rampant in society is the lack of spirituality. The materialistic civilization of our age has so much absorbed the energy and interest of mankind that people in general do no longer feel the necessity of raising themselves above the forces and conditions of their daily material existence. There is not sufficient demand for things that we should call spiritual to differentiate them from the needs and requirements of our physical existence.

"The universal crisis affecting mankind is, therefore, essentially spiritual in its causes. The spirit of the age, taken on the whole, is irreligious. Man's outlook on life is too crude and materialistic to enable him to elevate himself into the higher realms of the spirit.

"It is this condition, so sadly morbid, into which society has fallen, that religion seeks to improve and transform..." (From a letter written on behalf of the Guardian to an individual believer, December 8, 1935) (Lights of Guidance, p. 134)

Since 1935, the date this letter was composed, the situation nearly everywhere and among every class and race has only worsened.  Humanity stands in dire need of some guidance on how to extricate itself from its peril.  The Universal House of Justice in their introduction to the document, One Common Faith, sets the task for Baha’is:  “If they are to respond to the need, Baha’is must draw on a deep understanding of the process by which humanity’s spiritual life evolves.” (P.iii)   One Common Faith, itself, is a study of those inner and outer factors that combine to help cause and direct what the document calls “a sea change in human consciousness.” 

Materialism is an interpretation of reality which says that ultimate reality is material reality and, therefore, humanity’s proper goals are material ones.  As a philosophical view, materialism has a long pedigree.  Some philosophers in classic Greece held matter to be the fundamental substance, and that all emergent phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, the theory claims that reality consists entirely of physical matter whose interactions are the sole cause of every possible occurrence, including human thought, feeling, and action.

The so-called European Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century was essentially the triumph of a materialist interpretation of reality, decisively overthrowing the centuries-old doctrines of the church and religion in general.

Perhaps the best-known theory of materialism was put forward in the nineteenth-century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  They extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the world of human activity (praxis, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity. All social activities, culture, politics, etc. were in the nature of a mere superstructure built and dependent upon the structure of human action, especially the structure of economic activity, the overall “relations of production.” Later, Marxists developed the notion of dialectical materialism  which characterized Marxist philosophy and method.

Materialism of any stripe denies any reality usually named spiritual, along with any need of religion—in Marx’s famous phrase, religion was “the opiate of the people—asserting, instead, that human reason and inventiveness is adequate to any challenge.  Naturally, with no religion there is no God, eternity, soul, or Prophets.  Such a belief system is incompatible with all the great world religions, even those of India and the far east.  Among the perils of the human soul for the followers of the Hindu faith is Maya.  All matter is believed to be an illusion called Maya, blinding us from knowing the truth. Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya gets destroyed for a person when s/he perceives Brahman with transcendental knowledge.

Materialism, then, is not just a love, even an inordinate love, of material things, which can exist whether materialism exists or not.  It is not to be solely identified with any of the powers, processes and structures, such as capitalism, material science, or stock-market finance, humanity uses to produce and consume material wealth, goods and comforts, or to generate knowledge, which have grown up in the modern era.  These are the outer supports of a materialist belief that give it social form and intellectual justification, making a belief into a materialist order of life. In truth, it makes an shimmering illusion into a solid delusion.

Materialism is not any of these things, any more than racism is only a perverse personal hatred of people of a different race.  That is race prejudice.  Racism is a learned attitude—no child is born racist—that becomes a deep-seated collective prejudice that is difficult to dislodge, because institutional structures have been erected that systematically discriminate against one or more races to embody an answer to the question: Who is a human being, really?

In brief, in a racist society institutional relations are created to establish what is called a structural lack of opportunity in education, employment, health, housing, etc. against members of a certain race.  These arrangements reinforce and support each other to systematically deny a discriminated group the capital, knowledge, political voice, to advance themselves or to participate fully in society.  They are marginalized, and what are actually racist social arrangements “prove” to the naïve or prejudiced mind that one race is inherently superior to another, and that it is in the natural order of things that they rule.  It is a social construct that morphs into an assumed difference of nature.

Materialism is one answer, a modern answer, to the question: What is reality?  What are its boundaries and limits beyond which or outside of which lies the wilderness of the unreal?  But materialism is an extremely narrow conception of reality, an illusion that is called reality, and this can only mean that “true” reality is believed to be the illusion.  This has brought us to our current peril.