The Revolt Against Materialism II

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 may be instructive and interesting at this juncture to trace some of the imagery used to describe materialism in the Bahá’í Writings.

Shoghi Effendi gives us the first lead when he states: “It is this same cancerous materialism, born originally in Europe, carried to excess in the North American continent, contaminating the Asiatic peoples and nations, spreading its ominous tentacles to the borders of Africa, and now invading its very heart, which Bahá'u'lláh in unequivocal and emphatic language denounced in His Writings, comparing it to a devouring flame and regarding it as the chief factor in precipitating the dire ordeals and world-shaking crises that must necessarily involve the burning of cities and the spread of terror and consternation in the hearts of men.” (Citadel of Faith: 124)

When Shoghi Effendi says that Baha’u’llah compares materialism to “a devouring flame”, he is, likely, making reference to this statement: “Paradise is on your right hand, and hath been brought nigh unto you, while Hell hath been made to blaze. Witness its devouring flame.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 44) 

           But in other places, too, Baha’u’llah contrasts hell being made to blaze (the fires of desire and frustrated desire burning in the hearts of those attached to this world) with the image of Paradise.  For example:  “Paradise is decked with mystic roses, and hell hath been made to blaze with the fire of the impious.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:119)  These images of Paradise and Hell are conditions of belief in the heart, for He, in another place states: “They say: 'Where is Paradise, and where is Hell?' Say: 'The one is reunion with Me; the other thine own self, O thou who dost associate a partner with God and doubtest.'” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:118)  They are the twin opposite effects of Revelation appearing in this world of oppositions; i.e. both poles of the opposition are energized.

        Inwardly, the twin effects of Revelation are to attract the believing heart and to repel the deniers of spiritual reality.  But there is, too, twin social effects resulting from the release of such powerful spiritual forces.  The first is to unite peoples into a new social order, but the second is to release forces of dissension to break apart the existing social structure. A well-known example of such a statement is when Baha’u’llah speaks of the effects of the Revelation of the Bab: “No sooner had that Revelation been unveiled to men's eyes than the signs of universal discord appeared among the peoples of the world, and commotion seized the dwellers of earth and heaven, and the foundations of all things were shaken. The forces of dissension were released, the meaning of the Word was unfolded, and every several atom in all created things acquired its own distinct and separate character. Hell was made to blaze, and the delights of Paradise were uncovered to men's eyes.” (Prayers and Meditations by Baha'u'llah:296)  Another is: “And all this, when the Day of Resurrection hath been ushered in, and the Trumpet hath been sounded, and all the denizens of earth and heaven have been gathered together, and the Balance hath  been appointed, and the Bridge hath been laid, and the Verses have been sent down, and the Sun hath shone forth, and the stars have been blotted out, and the souls have been raised to life, and the breath of the Spirit hath blown, and the angels have been arrayed in ranks, and Paradise hath been brought nigh, and Hell made to blaze! These things have all come to pass, and yet to this day not a single one of these people hath recognized them!” (Gems of Divine Mysteries: 20)

          Perhaps of significance in this regard is the Conference of Badasht in 1848 where, according to Shoghi Effendi, the severing of the Babi Faith from the shackles of Islam and its proclamation as a new, independent religion was effected.  Simultaneously, upheavals in Europe that same year, 1848, occurred.  This series of republican revolts against the monarchies of Europe, beginning in Sicily and spreading through western and central Europe, became known as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history, though reactionary forces soon regained control, and the revolutions collapsed.

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.  

  

   

Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together IV

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)

A brief overview of the book: The first chapter follows the advice of the House of Justice and seeks to identify the fundamental spiritual principles involved in establishing a context for creating prosperity.  It is titled, Wisdom and Wealth: The Catalyst of Transformation, because both spiritual wisdom and material wealth are needed for humanity to achieve prosperity.  The prerequisite for that achievement, however, is what the House of Justice calls a spiritual revival that works to transform individuals who, in turn, can become the catalyst for changes in the social, political and economic spheres of collective life.  This is social change through spiritual transformation.  To see what would constitute such a spiritual revival the chapter explores a quotation from the Universal House of Justice found in a letter dated November 19, 1974.  There the House of Justice states that people desperately need to know how to live their lives.  Knowing how to do this is actually a product of answering four questions, which the reader will find stated there.  (Reader: Here is the quote from the House of Justice.  In the book, this statement appears in the first chapter, not this introduction.  But I felt blog readers should also know it: “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.  It is to the solution of this basic problem of mankind that the greater part of all our energy and resources should be directed.”  (The Universal House of Justice, Messages from the Universal House of Justice 1963-1986: 283)

 Each chapter thereafter answers one of the four central questions.  This book ends with a statement called Final Thoughts.  (Reader: As my book was going to print another book, With Thine Own Eyes, (George Ronald Press) came to my attention.  Authors, Tomanio, Iverson, and Ring, explore with subtlety and insight the implications of these same questions within a context of investigating spiritual reality.  Though written independently, the two books can easily be viewed as complementary studies.)

Finally, I should point out that, while the following discussion is supported almost entirely by statements from the Bahá’í Writings, this does not mean that I am presenting the “Bahá’í” solution to the economic problem.  I am not.  No official Bahá’í solution to the economic problem exists as yet, beyond certain general statements on ways to bring the material and spiritual dimensions of life into coherence.  An example of such statements is, again, Appendix Two.  This essay is but one Baha’i’s attempt to address the economic problem, an attempt that grew from study of the Bahá’í Writings, yes, but it is not “the” Bahá’í perspective, rather, from first to last it is my own.

I chose this approach because the Bahá’í Writings are the ones I am most familiar with in this field of study.  Other works, such as Martin Nowak’s Super Cooperators  or Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation, work similar ground from a scientific perspective.  Too, there is a whole stream of books and articles appearing that explore topics like the relation between happiness and increased productivity, altruism as a drive shaping economic behavior, and the inverse correlation between class and ethical behavior. 

Noteworthy here is the work of Paul Piff and his co-researchers in the study, Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.  Piff et al. demonstrated a direct and inverse correlation between wealth and increasingly unethical behavior, with behaviors such as selfishness, lying and cheating, more prevalent among the most well-to-do.  They found that the unethical behavior of the rich stems from a strong sense of personal entitlement, which, in turn, is rationalized by self-deceiving validations of their right to possess great wealth fortified by moral justifications for selfishness.  All seems, finally, to be grounded in their more favorable attitudes toward greed, as was brilliantly dramatized, for example, in the movie Wall Street. 

As one moves up the ladder of “success”, the ideology of self-interest becomes more attractive, and dreams of personal accomplishment are increasingly pursued to the detriment of others and to one’s own higher impulses.  Unsurprisingly, then, among the advantaged classes there is a corresponding falling off of feelings of compassion, of community, and of cooperation.  This leads to a cascade of pernicious effects, all ending in the unprecedented levels of economic inequality now present in American society and elsewhere. But the studies also show that higher impulses can often be reawakened and measureable levels of change in values can be detected when the rich are exposed to scenes that evoke compassion and sympathy. That is, through appeals to higher human nature, the destructive ideology of selfish competition can be changed into a constructive life of selfless cooperation. 

This is fascinating and timely scholarship and such works need to be read to round out the whole picture and to put the argument of this essay on a more scientific footing.  But scripture has its place, both as generator of knowledge and motivator of moral behavior, so that any discussion wishing to advance the field of economics can take account of both science and religion, for each sheds valuable light upon the other and on the whole field.

Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together Part III

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)

In this book I mean economics in its Aristotelian sense of “household” relations between family members.  But I mean these relations, which I name the moral economy, to refer to exchanges of values that spiritually bind together the members of the family of man: the household of humanity.  These are the actions that you and I can do for each other when we meet on the street or at work, or get together in our homes, parks, malls, and neighborhoods.  As the material economy generates more material wealth, so the moral economy increases society’s moral wealth, which I call riches.

The moral economy appears and comes into view at this interpersonal level that operates in-between the individual and the institutional.  As I see it, it works through three core principles: sharing, service, and self-sacrifice.  That is, individuals sharing their material wealth, serving others, and sacrificing their personal interests for a common or collective good.  Now, all economies have a moral dimension to them.  But the moral economy of any materialist society is built on values opposed to the moral economy of this essay.  The moral economy of materialism, especially its modern consumerist form, is composed of values and principles that promote actions and attitudes that are selfish, self-serving and self-centered.  This is supposed to generate wealth, security and well-being, and for a time it does, but over time it does just the opposite.  If one wants wealth, security, and well-being one must follow the principle of Jesus: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (The Book of Matthew 16:25)

To build a real moral economy means, then, to return to our sacred origins, not historically but essentially, not to the past but to the roots of our being, for the moral economy is part of a larger economy, what Shoghi Effendi called the Divine Economy, “that social code”, (The World Order of Baha'u'llah: 60) which is human collective relations mediated and enhanced through institutions and laws that regulate the global household on divine principles, a relationship captured in the Christian prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven”.  Exploring the nature and structure of that Divine Economy is another work.  (A concise but comprehensive outline of the workings of such a system was given by ‘Abdu’l-Baha early last century.  It can be found as Appendix One at the end of the book.)

In a rapidly globalizing world, a true moral economy can only be founded upon the principle and ideal of the oneness of humanity, and the moral virtues of economic life must express, support and reinforce that ideal. The oneness of humanity appears and operates within economic life when sharing spirit, not material gain, is the goal of human exchange, though, again, a proper material gain for everyone involved is needed.  The moral economy works best when we spend material wealth for the common good, along with our inner spiritual riches, such as love, trust, and justice, which are as the different denominations of a spiritual currency.  What are primarily exchanged through currency and labor in the material economy are goods and services. What is primarily exchanged through values in the moral economy is our noble humanity.  In the first each values his personal profit, in the second each values the other.

Being victims of an improper education we must ask: What is a proper one?  It cannot be simply a matter of wringing new information from an old and dry paradigm of understanding of human nature and the world.  One comprehensive model of a proper education is found in my book, Renewing the Sacred, and the statements on education woven throughout this essay are in a very real sense supplemental to Renewing the Sacred.  This education is, at this point, idealistic of course, but short-sighted pragmatism, whether as educational philosophy or philosophy of action and purpose, has failed to inspire and give any clear direction.  It merely careens from one crisis to the next with no vision of how to develop human society let alone stabilize itself.

There is another kind of practicality.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha was once rightly praised for walking the mystical path with practical feet.  For the practical-minded, the following pages may seem an example of walking the practical path with mystical feet.  But this higher path of practicality is not a Neverland of impossibly rosy wishes and Peter Pan happy thoughts.  Just because something is not practiced does not necessarily mean it is not practical.  Regarding the other practicality, the Universal House of Justice wrote:  “There are spiritual principles, or what some call human values, by which solutions can be found for every social problem. Any well-intentioned group can in a general sense devise practical solutions to its problems, but good intentions and practical knowledge are usually not enough. The essential merit of spiritual principle is that it not only presents a perspective which harmonizes with that which is immanent in human nature, it also induces an attitude, a dynamic, a will, an aspiration, which facilitate the discovery and implementation of practical measures. Leaders of governments and all in authority would be well served in their efforts to solve problems if they would first seek to identify the principles involved and then be guided by them.” (Universal House of Justice, The Promise World Peace: 3)

Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together Part II

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.  

Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together

(This post and the next few posts that follow will present the Introduction to my new book, Gettin' Through Hard Times Together: Creating Prosperity Through Sharing, Service and Sacrifice)

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)

We live in a time of chaos and confusion, despair and degradation, and people everywhere search desperately for a way out of a darkening horizon.  Of course, this is not new in any absolute sense.  People have lived through numerous such times.  What is new is that upheaval is everywhere.  Humanity itself is threatened.  We are not just experiencing cultural exhaustion, massive civil unrest, or yet another crisis of government or economy, depending upon what land or people one is observing.  We are not just at the end of an era or even an age, but of an entire order of human life and thought.

A new way of looking at our selves and the world is necessary; a new light is required to shine within human beings that enables us to see and formulate new answers—perhaps even new kinds of answers—to urgent questions that cannot be answered in the usual way. 

Changing our view of human nature changes our understanding of everything else.  This internal paradigm-shift is difficult for many reasons, chief of which is, in my view, the misinformation we receive about ourselves.  We are victims of what Bahá’u’lláh calls “lack of a proper education”. (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 161)  There is always a connection between social crisis and new moral possibility.   Yet full response-ability cannot be achieved when one suffers under the burden of a puny form of belief in oneself or in higher and greater spiritual powers.   Because of an improper education, we believe our humanity is something less, much less, than it really is.  We say things like “We are only human”, because we want to rationalize or excuse a sorry piece of thought or stupid bit of behavior.  But we also say it because we don’t know or no longer remember that a human being is the most powerful, wonderful, and noble creature in the cosmos.  We can’t hear our inner voices, put no faith in our imagination, are no longer fired by the sacred longings of the human spirit.  We are without vision, and are left with only dreams. 

Solving our most intractable problems starts, I feel, with a new vision of humanity. The Book of Proverbs puts this truth well:  “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (The Holy Bible, The Book of Proverbs 29:18)  Vision, then, is at least as important as bread, but fear and wrong conditioning delays understanding of this truth.  No doubt vision without the means to implement it is just fine words and wonderful pictures.  Too great a gap between possibility and “reality” often ends in frustration and despair.  But, too, means without vision are destined for only short-sighted pragmatic goals.  A great vision fires the imagination which taps the energies of motivation which, in turn, generates the means to execute the vision.  This means a transfer of energy from pragmatic to idealistic purposes.  Where to find such a vision?  I find it in the Bahá’í Teachings.  The Universal House of Justice writes that the guidance that the Bahá’í teachings offer “does not comprise a series of specific answers to current problems, but rather the illumination of an entirely new way of life.  Without this way of life the problems are insoluble; with it they will either not arise or, if they arise, can be resolved.” (The Universal House of Justice, message dated July 21, 1968 to a National Spiritual Assembly.

Announcing New Publication

Dear Friends,

After more than a month I am posting again.  But I have been silent on the blog because I have been very busy finishing up a project.

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Gettin' Through Hard Times Together: Creating Prosperity Through Sharing, Service and Sacrifice.  The book is the product of my search into one of the main pillars of human economy, what I call the moral economy.  While the phrase "the moral economy" is not new, I use it in a new way.  For many, the moral economy is concepts like the just price for a commodity, so that the idea is restricted to the moral aspect of the exchange of goods--don't try to gouge your neighbor or seek only personal advantage in the exchange of goods and services.

But I use the moral economy to identify that area of economy that is the morality of all human interrelations.  That is, the exchange of goods is secondary, or, rather, the material medium through which moral virtues, such as love and justice, are expressed and exchanged. Thus, in my concept of the moral economy the primary exchange is that of spirit, or virtue.  All economies have a moral dimension to them.  But the moral economy of a materialist society exchanges a morality of selfish , self-serving and self-centered values.  That is, it is an economy of me-first.  The moral economy that we must create is the exchange of virtues, but the core virtues in economic life are, I believe, sharing, service and self-sacrifice.  This is an economy of you-before-me.

The moral economy of human interrelations occupies a place mid-way between the material economy of goods and services and the divine economy identified by Shoghi Effendi, as the social code of human relations that includes global divinely conceived and inspired institutional arrangements.  The "pattern and nucleus" of that global divine economy is, according to the Baha'i Teachings, the Baha'i Administrative Order.  But its full expression will be that future global commonwealth that the vision of Baha'u'llah anticipates, and toward which all constructive forces in society are taking us.

The content of Gettin' Through Hard Times Together is an exploration of one sentence of a letter of the Universal House of Justice composed in 1974 and addressed to a National Spiritual Assembly.  In that letter the House of Justice says: “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.  It is to the solution of this basic problem of mankind that the greater part of all our energy and resources should be directed.”  (Messages from the Universal House of Justice 1963-1986: 283)  The book seeks to answer these four central questions, but not in a scholarly way.  The text is, I believe, simple and straight forward, and, I hope, insightful.

As the title Gettin' Through Hard Times Together says, we must get through these hard times together.  All attempts by any fraction of humanity to use the current economic crisis for their own purposes, or to their own advantage, only exacerbates an already critical situation.  By sharing our wealth, serving each other and sacrificing personal interest to a common or larger good, we can get through these hard times and help lay the foundation of an enduring civilization of peace and prosperity: for prosperity must be defined as every person on earth having enough and not a person before.

There is much more to the book than is in this post of course.  But I hope that I have piqued your interest.

Thanks so much for support until now.