Prayer Plastered
By
"Drunkenness (is) an expression identical with ruin." (Pythagoras, cited by Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. tr: C. D. Yonge)
Many years ago, I had an argument where I asserted that alcohol was no ordinary drug like tobacco because even though it is legal it is implicated as a cause of most crime, if not most of it. Years later I found proof that that was the case, but, frustratingly, the person with whom I had the argument had forgotten the discussion completely. What is the good of knowing something if you cannot use it to put somebody down? Anyway, even though it is useless trivia, I lately came across the following news item proving that point even more incontrovertibly.
"Five months ago, a report by a British commission found that the financial health costs of alcohol and tobacco were equal. Tobacco was by far the bigger killer, but when the analysis moved beyond self-destruction to harming others, the annual death toll from alcohol-related car accidents exceeded the toll from secondhand smoke in the workplace. Drinking, unlike smoking, played a role in 78 percent of assaults and 88 percent of criminal damage. The commission concluded that if legal drugs were classified like illegal ones, alcohol would be judged more serious than tobacco. Instead, British law allows advertising of booze but not cigarettes." (Slate Magazine, "Kicking Butt; The international jihad against tobacco." William Saletan
One of the most important elements of wisdom, in my opinion, is to act upon the understanding that knowledge is contextual. For example, imagine that you are introduced to a speaker with these words: "Our group knew that X would soon be speaking here and we have been keeping a close eye on him. We have observed over the past week that he has picked his nose x number of times and pumped x quarts of sewage to our already overtaxed environment. It is therefore with a great sense of awe that we introduce, X." What would you think of such a person? Would you pay attention to what he had to say? Yet the same discreditable data, with minor differences, could be said of anybody. So this should not prejudice us, but it does. The context in which a person comes out of an information background is all-important.
Yet, you hear people all the time dividing the human race into good and bad, or criminals and good citizens. In the media and politics, such labeling goes unchallenged. That is why it is important to go back to those psychology experiments where they divided random students into guards and concentration camp prisoners (where the resultant sadism was so severe that the experimenters had to stop the exercise for ethical reasons). They were living proof for all time that it is circumstances that make for good or evil, not some inner quality. If we want to eliminate evil in the world, we need just to improve the circumstances that give rise to wrong.
And, getting back to booze as cause of crime, surely one of the quickest and easiest ways to change the internal factors that lead to outer circumstances would be to keep a clear head as often as possible. The quickest way to do that would be eliminate alcohol from social interaction, and from individual cogitation. As it is, one third of the lives of people you meet have been fractured at one point by alcohol.
"Alcohol problems hit nearly 1 in 3 adults. Nearly one in three recently surveyed
That is just the severe fractures, it says nothing about the minor contusions, cuts, bruises and infections far too numerous to count in a society where over 90 percent of the population drink.
It is wise to bear this problem in mind. Intoxication first of all degrades the soul, and circumstances most often are an expression of the state of many souls in a state of intoxication. Thus it is not addiction itself that is the problem (if it were, cigarette smoking would be the more harmful social problem). The problem is that inebriation weakens our already glimmering tie to reason. And power is of the essence of the soul -- it was no coincidence that MLK's motto for washing away the inner ravages of slavery without violence was "soul power." This is because of the nature of soul is dealing with power; once the soul takes power, circumstances change of themselves. Consider the Qu'ran's definition of the soul:
"And they ask you about the soul. Say: The soul is one of the commands of my Lord, and you are not given aught of knowledge but a little." (Q17:85, Shakir)
We have tiny, interspersed moments in life to change things. The quantity of knowledge and power given the soul are flimsy to begin with. But at least we can, sometimes, given the right attitude, rule a percentage of our thoughts. That is why we pray. We beg to be inspired to change our thoughts, and then our circumstances. We are not asking for magic, just a tiny spark of love and knowledge that, with divine confirmations, may start a fire of soul energy to change circumstances for the better. Here my favorite Baha'i writer, Marzieh Gail, points to the opposition between prayer and alcohol,
"And if, as often happens, people are longing for God, trying to pray and yet not succeeding, they will easily find Him through service in accordance with the dictates of His Manifestations. It is not surprising that a prayerless people are driven to drugs and stimulants and a hundred forms of useless activity. They have no antidote for life, and no effective means of achieving the 'respite and nepenthe' for which they long. It is not surprising that people cheat one another, desert one another, kill one another, because only universal prayer can make the world safe for us to live in. No doubt future generations will look back at this prayerless age with the same uneasiness with which we contemplate the unwashed courtiers of Queen Elizabeth." (Marzieh Gail, Dawn Over
Soul power is especially endangered by alcohol because it works through words. It is not a coincidence that an increase in drinking leads to the spread not only of punishable crimes, but also of the kind of crime that cannot be touched by human law, backbiting, gossip, profanity and all round truculence in the public forum. Issues that should be approached with concern and a common purpose are, when bad language predominates, politicized, polarized and neutered. This happens because a soul whose power is compromised tends to assert its will directly, ignoring the intermediation of reason. In other words, we lie, we hold that might makes right.
"When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean neither more or less. The question is, said
No comments:
Post a Comment