To say that materialism is an illusion does
not mean that it is without influence or reality. But these depend upon context of belief. Europeans, for example, believed that the
earth was flat, and lived within that reality for hundreds of years. But the “real” reality was both different
from and larger than the believed one.
Similarly, Newtonian physics was thought to explain all of physics for,
roughly, a similar number of years, yet Relativity Theory and Quantum Physics
have shown the “truth” of Newtonian physics is limited to ordinary sense
experience in a three-dimensional world.
A similar relation of larger reality to smaller one holds between
spiritual and material reality. The power of
Divine Revelation to periodically reshape human perception of material, social,
and spiritual reality is unmatched. But
human beings can perceive spiritual reality with fidelity only if “the faculty
of recognizing the one true God” is in healthy working order.
Materialism’s power, as I see it, is a kind
of febrile deception. This may seem
paradoxical, given that materialism achieved dominance over the minds and
hearts of people. The modern West, with
its powerful combination of capitalist production and liberal democratic state,
has been the great success story of the last four hundred years. Others, quite naturally and legitimately,
want those same material benefits. But
we should remember two things. First, while
materialism “enervates” and “enfeebles” the spiritual powers of the soul, (e.g.
the faculty of recognizing Him), the lower nature and its passions are greatly
strengthened. Secondly, materialism arose in Europe as a competing ideology
that overpowered religion because religion had become a narrow treadmill of
dogmatic assumptions and clamorous exhortations to blind faith in the church
and its moribund teachings. It was
riddled with what ‘Abdu’l-Baha often called imitations and superstitions. A
weakened spiritual perception, resulting from the loss of truth in religion and
the consequent degeneration of the faculty to recognize the Word of God, left
the heart, which is, I believe, the faculty that recognizes God, in search of an object or
power to love, for the heart’s nature is to love. I believe that the heart is that faculty
because Baha’u’llah wrote, for example, that “the heart is the throne, in which
the Revelation of God the All-Merciful is centered…”( Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah:185)
The primary illusion created by materialism
is from the curtained veil it throws up to hide the spirit from view. It does this through its dogmatic assertion
of the needlessness of religion, its lack of acknowledgement of the reality of
spirit, its obscuring of the heart’s power to perceive revealed truth, its
assertion of the sufficiency of material riches, and the success of physical
science to explain the workings of material reality.
The greatest success of the materialist era has
been the creation of vast material wealth, though that wealth is unjustly
distributed. This fact is both undisputed
and extremely alluring. But, it is not
materialism that has generated this wealth, but physical science, technology
and capitalism, “inventions” of the west, along with democracy. Materialism, again, is an interpretation of
reality, backed by a scientific epistemology that opposes religion’s
interpretation. This interpretation
seems to be correct, but that is from the false belief that material reality IS
reality, and, because the faculty that directly recognizes spiritual reality
has degenerated. It is like a blind man who
denies that color exists, because within the narrow reality of his own
experience it does not.
By itself materialism neither justifies nor
condemns capitalism, but uses it. Where
materialism directly influences economic arrangements is in the realm of values. Materialism subverts traditional values
honoring fair exchange and price, collective concern, and respect for the
natural environment. (I am not arguing that people held to these values, for
they obviously didn’t with any strength.
I am only saying that these were values that were supposed to be
followed. Materialists do not hold the
values at all.) Instead, it justifies,
rationalizes and legitimates, both in law and mores, unlimited private gain, a
self-regulating “free market”, dismisses concerns for future generations,
exploits the natural environment, and rationalizes lavish consumer spending. It turns the market economy into what Karl
Polanyi called, in a telling phrase, a “market society”—a society structured
upon and operating through not human values but market ones. Capitalism is simply, in this view, the economic
strategy materialism uses to accomplish these short-sighted goals. And “short-sighted” may be the key term when
describing materialism at every level and turn of the mind. If there is no reality beyond the physical,
if life ends in every sense at physical death, then one naturally wants to live
as comfortably as possible within the span of one’s life on earth, will work
hard to gain those riches, will justify one’s own comfort, will stigmatize
those less fortunate as unworthy or just lazy, will hold fast the levers of
social and political power to ensure uninterrupted comfort, and will see the
friend competitively as a real or potential enemy, all results of a deficient
moral code upheld by a good number of self-serving, self-deceptive reasons,
such as racial superiority, hardwork, greater natural intelligence, and the
like.
The first and perhaps worst damage that a
materialistic interpretation of reality inflicts upon human beings is what the
House of Justice calls an “agonizing disjunction between the inner and outer
experience”. (One Common Faith: 5) It
does this by denying altogether or marginalizing inner spiritual experiences,
calling them “nothing but” experiences—all in your head, imaginary, illusory,
psychotic, something to be drained from the mind like pus from an infection, so
“reality” can be seen. The disjunction
of inner and outer experience creates a false dichotomy in thought, and all
such polarities are created to set one pole against another and then to argue
one pole away, in this case the spiritual.
It becomes a moral thing. Rooting
out the spiritual becomes a holy war against the enemy who is a friend. Belief in God itself is a wicked heresy in a
godless world hell-bent on its own Inquisition against religion and faith.
There is no real dichotomy between the
spiritual and material aspects of the human being, the latter being the
instrument to carry out the commands of the former. But materialism inverts this relation,
calling the instrument the commander and calling the commander a ghost, a
specter, unreal, a product of weak minds seeking compensation for failure, an
anxiety-fix, wishful thinking, a sheep’s mentality.
But a real dichotomy exists between
spirituality, which is progress of any kind in the world of matter, and
materialism, which is a cancerous concern for material well-being that denies
the spiritual as real. When materialism
and its values are in control then the dominant impulses of the spirit are
selfish and avaricious. The Master
stated it best: “(W)hen man does not open his mind and heart to the blessing of
the spirit, but turns his soul towards the material side, towards the bodily
part of his nature, then is he fallen from his high place and he becomes
inferior to the inhabitants of the lower animal kingdom. In this case the man
is in a sorry plight! For if the spiritual qualities of the soul, open to the
breath of the Divine Spirit, are never used, they become atrophied, enfeebled,
and at last incapable; whilst the soul's material qualities alone being
exercised, they become terribly powerful—and the unhappy, misguided man,
becomes more savage, more unjust, more vile, more cruel, more malevolent than
the lower animals themselves. All his aspirations and desires being
strengthened by the lower side of the soul's nature, he becomes more and more
brutal, until his whole being is in no way superior to that of the beasts that
perish. Men such as this, plan to work evil, to hurt and to destroy; they are
entirely without the spirit of Divine compassion, for the celestial quality of
the soul has been dominated by that of the material. If, on the contrary, the
spiritual nature of the soul has been so strengthened that it holds the
material side in subjection, then does the man approach the Divine; his humanity
becomes so glorified that the virtues of the Celestial Assembly are manifested
in him; he radiates the Mercy of God, he stimulates the spiritual progress of
mankind, for he becomes a lamp to show light on their path.” (Paris Talks:96)
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