Struggle for Survival

Abdu’l-Baha’s Idea of “Struggle for Survival.”

The “struggle for survival.” You come across this expression periodically in studying the writings of Abdu’l-Baha. By it, He seems to signify that this struggle is a bad thing. His expression seems close to what Darwin’s bulldog, Herbert Spencer, called “survival of the fittest.” The poor are underfoot for a reason; we do not want the inferior to rise to the top. The scientific way is to let the natural mechanisms of evolution determine who gets to swim in the human gene pool. Eugenics seems cruel at first but in the long run we are all better off. This idea wove through and pervaded secular thinking for well over a century after Darwin died. It only seems to be subsiding now that violence is losing sway and women crowd into public life. Abdu’l-Baha pointed out the “struggle for survival” is the mark of the materialistic worldview. It causes brutalization and tyranny, but the spiritual mind set does the reverse.

“I hope that in this nether world thou shalt attain unto heavenly light, thou wilt free the souls from the gloom of nature, which is the animal kingdom, and cause them to reach lofty stations in the human kingdom. Today all people are immersed in the world of nature. That is why thou dost see jealousy, greed, the struggle for survival, deception, hypocrisy, tyranny, oppression, disputes, strife, bloodshed, looting and pillaging, which all emanate from the world of nature. Few are those who have been freed from this darkness, who have ascended from the world of nature to the world of man, who have followed the divine Teachings, have served the world of humanity, are resplendent, merciful, illumined and like unto a rose garden. Strive thine utmost to become godlike, characterized with His attributes, illumined and merciful, that thou mayest be freed from every bond and become attached at heart to the Kingdom of the incomparable Lord. This is Baha’i bounty, and this is heavenly light.” (Abdu’l-Baha, Selections, p. 206)

Interestingly, I just came across an entire “Tablet on the Struggle for Survival.” It makes his meaning by "struggle for survival" quite unambiguous. The letter has not been officially translated, but it is interesting nonetheless, being marked by the Master’s usual simple but brilliant exposition. Who could ask for a clearer picture of the difference between secular brutality and the compassion that marks the worldview of faith? If you know the name of the society is to which he addresses himself here, do let me know.

Tablet on the Struggle for Survival

Provisionally translated by Keven Brown, edited by Mehdi Wolf published in Khitabat, pages 711-3  Hofheim, Germany: Baha’i Verlag, 1984  originally written as “Lawh-i-TanA’zu’-i BaqA”. http://bahai-library.com/abdulbaha_lawh_tanazu_baqa 

O honored society [for the advancement] of humanity!  All mankind should be grateful on account of your noble purpose and lofty intentions. All should be thankful and well-pleased that you are selflessly engaged in such a high endeavor, which is the cause of universal peace amongst mankind, inasmuch as the peace and tranquility of the entire creation depends upon improving the character of man; and the greatest means for training man to possess praiseworthy characteristics is noble aspirations and the expansion of the mind. Humanity must be invited to partake of this mighty gift.

Observe that the primary principle adhered to by every individual of the human species is to attract benefit to himself and to avoid injury. His aim is to secure his own tranquility and happiness. This is his sole desire in life, and he strives to distinguish himself from all others through the ease, wealth, and fame he has obtained. This is the goal of every individual of the human species. But, in truth, this is a base, dangerous, and inferior notion.

If man advances a little in his thinking and his aspirations become nobler, he will realize that he should strive to benefit his whole family and to protect it from harm, for he perceives that by bringing comfort and affluence to the whole family, his own felicity and prosperity will increase. Should his thinking expand even more and his aspirations grow in depth, he will realize that he should endeavor to bring blessings to the children of his country and nation and to guard them from injury. Although this aspiration and thought are for his own sake and that of his family, all the children of the nation will benefit therefrom.

But this aspiration will become the cause of injury to other nations, for he then exerts the utmost effort to bring all the advantages of the human world to his own nation and the blessings of the earth to his own family, singling them out for the universal felicity of humankind. He imagines that the more other nations and neighboring countries decline, the more his own country and nation will advance, until by this means it surpasses and dominates the other nations in power, wealth, and influence.

However, a divine human being and a heavenly individual is sanctified from these limitations, and the expansion of his mind and the loftiness of his aspirations are in the utmost degree of perfection. The compass of his thinking is so vast that he recognizes in the gain of all mankind the basis of the prosperity of every individual member of his species. He considers the injury of any nation or state to be the same as injury to his own nation and state, indeed, the same as injury to his own family and to his own self.

Therefore, he strives with heart and soul as much as possible to bring prosperity and blessings to the entire human race and to protect all nations from harm. He endeavors to promote the exaltation, illumination, and felicity of all peoples, and makes no distinctions among them, for he regards humanity as a single family and considers all nations to be the members of that family. Indeed, he sees the entire human social body as one individual and perceives each one of the nations to be one of the organs of that body. Man must raise his aspiration to this degree so that he may serve the cause of establishing universal virtues and become the cause of the glory of humankind.

At present the state of the world is the opposite of this. All the nations are thinking of how to advance their own interests while working against the best interests of other nations. They desire their own personal advantage while seeking to undermine affairs in other countries. They call this the “struggle for survival” (tanazu’-i baqa), and assert that it is innate to human nature. But this is a grievous error; nay, there is no error greater than this. Gracious God! Even in the animal kingdom cooperation and mutual assistance for survival are observed among some species, especially in the case of danger to the whole group.

One day I was beside a small stream and noticed some young grasshoppers which had not yet developed wings seeking to cross to the other side in order to obtain food. To accomplish their goal, these wingless grasshoppers rushed forward into the water and vied with each other to form a bridge across the stream while the remaining grasshoppers crossed over on top of them. The grasshoppers were able to pass from one side of the stream to the other, but those insects which had formed the bridge in the water perished. Reflect how this incident illustrates co-operation for survival, not struggle for survival. Insofar as animals display such noble sentiments, how much more should man, who is the noblest of creatures; and how much more fitting it is in particular that, in view of the divine teachings and heavenly ordinances, man should be obliged to attain this excellence.

In the estimation of God, distinctions of race, divisions of borders, favoring one people over another, and all individual limitations are unworthy and rejected. All the prophets of God were sent down and all the sacred books were revealed for the purpose of assisting man to achieve this heavenly grace and this divine virtue.

All the divine teachings can be summarized as this: that these thoughts singling out advantages to one group may be banished from our midst, that human character may be improved, that equality and fellowship may be established amongst all mankind, until every individual is ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of his fellowman. This is the divine foundation. This is the law come down from heaven.

Such a firm foundation cannot be impregnated into human consciousness save by one universal and all-pervasive power, for every other power is helpless except for the power of the Holy Spirit. The outpourings of the Holy Spirit are such that they can transform man, imbuing him with all the virtues, bestowing upon him the second birth, baptizing him with the fire of the love of God, which is love for all created things, and quickening him with the water of eternal life, and the Holy Spirit itself.

The philosophers of old had the strongest resolve to improve human morals and strove to the utmost in this regard, but at most they succeeded in refining their own characters, not the virtues of all mankind. Refer to history and you will find that this is clear and evident.

But the power of the Holy Spirit brings forth the universal virtues with which man is potentially endowed, illuminates the human world, bestows true exaltation, and trains all people. Thus, the well-wishers of the world must endeavor to attract by this attractive power the confirmations of the Holy Spirit. My hope is that the members of this honored society dedicated to the welfare of humanity, like a mirror, may acquire illumination from the Sun of Reality, and become the cause of training mankind to acquire virtues. I pray that my utmost esteem be acceptable to that eminent organization.

A Divine Something Gives Me a Sign

On Bad Omens

By John Taylor; 2010 July 11, Rahmat 18, 167 BE

In case you did not notice it, we just suffered through a heat wave.

Our family has chosen not to have air conditioning; instead, we use ceiling fans. Fortunately, we do not listen to weather forecasts in the mass media, so the heat wave was almost over before we realized that we were undergoing a heat wave. Most human suffering comes from bad expectations.

My daughter is attending summer school at Hagersville High School to make up her mathematics course. Normally she takes a school bus but last Wednesday, in the sweltering heat, I drove her to school. Our car does not have air conditioning either, to speak of, so I drove with the windows down. Walking around this small town -- it is slightly smaller than Dunnville -- I discovered that it was market day. Hagersville has a much better farmer's market --by "better," I mean that its prices are actually lower than the grocery stores, and it has farmers who are willing to dicker; one even dropped his prices at closing time, "So that I won't have to carry it all home." That is my kind of market. I purchased a basket of soft cherries for a quarter of the normal price.

I had promised to pick up Silvie after school, so I drove slowly around town, checking out the attractions. I must have been going twenty kilometres an hour when a heavy object dropped onto my hood. It immediately disappeared, but a fluff of down on the windshield wipers indicated that it must have been a bird. It was so hot, birds were literally dropping dead out of the sky. That has never happened to me before.

I spent a few hours in the Hagersville branch of the Haldimand Public Library, which had its air conditioner turned up so high that it was almost cold. I basked in the cold, as I read over the draft of People Without Borders that I had printed out for the occasion. I was not pleased with what I was reading. I hung on until it was almost time to pick up Silvie.

Then there was an explosion. A woman ran in to say we should evacuate. Another couple of booms and a power outage had everybody out in a few minutes. I walked across the street and saw the source of the problem. Sparks were flying from a wire across from the library. Finally, in a shower of sparks the power line to the library fell onto the road. A couple of concerned citizens warned cars away turning onto the road with the live wire. The fire station was right next to the library, so I walked over to tell them, but the doors were locked. I do not believe in cell phones, so I left the others to contact the authorities.

The delay from the explosions meant that Silvie had already left in her school bus when I arrived at the High School, so I drove home alone. Later on we were sitting in the living room when another bird hit the living room window and dropped dead to the ground. It was a starling. Again, that has never happened before. I am enough of an ancient history buff to realize that if such things had happened to somebody living anywhere in the Ancient World, they would surely have regarded these occurrences as bad omens.

I did not worry about omens, but I was taken aback. As a Baha'i, I do believe that things happen for a reason; there is a wisdom behind every occurrence, even though there are also adequate scientific explanations as well. Still, I had been listening to lectures about the history of science. The belief in sympathetic magic dominated science until only a few centuries ago. Sympathetic magic is the idea that there are unseen links between objects that we now regard as entirely coincidental; for example, the "cordial" (latin for "heart") was a liquid medication that had things like sunflower seeds and gold dust in it. This was because of the magical idea that "heart" was connected to "sun," and "gold."

I would not have written about any of this if I had not come across the following passage at the start of Zenophon's Memorabilia, his memoirs about his experiences with his beloved teacher, Socrates.

"In the first place, what evidence did they produce that Socrates refused to recognise the gods acknowledged by the state?"

Like Plato, Zenophon was indignant about the false accusations that ended in the execution of Socrates. Unlike Plato, Zenophon emphasized the piety of Socrates in his defense. He continues,

"Was it that he did not sacrifice? or that he dispensed with divination? On the contrary, he was often to be seen engaged in sacrifice, at home or at the common altars of the state. Nor was his dependence on divination less manifest. Indeed that saying of his, "A divinity [or: a divine something] gives me a sign," was on everybody's lips. So much so that, if I am not mistaken, it lay at the root of the imputation that he imported novel divinities; though there was no greater novelty in his case than in that of other believers in oracular help, who commonly rely on omens of all sorts: the flight or cry of birds, the utterances of man, chance meetings, or a victim's entrails."

Oracles and divination no doubt acted like weather forecasts do for us. If you believe you know what is going to happen, be it a bird falling from the sky, or what the weatherman says it is going to be like, you are in effect throwing an emotional wrench into the works of how you relate to the world, to the past and the future. As I said at the start, even when the weatherman is right, it does not make it easier to take what is coming. Anticipation is often worse than the event.

Finally, I did hear a report in the news, which I found surprising. It seems that this heat wave was not a local phenomenon. It was happening around the world, from New York to Beijing to London. This may have happened before, but I do not remember such an event. A global heat wave? Surely, that is global warming at work.

When I heard that this was a global phenomenon, I began to rethink the divination thing. Maybe birds falling from the sky really is an omen. An ancient would be in a tizzy about such a dire event, and so should we. We know more about the science of global warming, but that should put us in a tizzy even more. The sort of tizzy that leads to act to save our skins. In that respect, we have no advantage over the ancients, since action, sacrifice, comes from a place beyond the comprehension of logic or science. As Socrates put it, "A divine something gives me a sign."

::

Bent Enlightenment

People Without Borders

Yet more material for the fourth draft of 

the introduction to my book-in-progress.

Rectifying a Bent Enlightenment

By John Taylor; 2010 April 19, Jalal 10, 167 BE

After centuries of bloody conflict, persecution and wars motivated by faith and doctrine, Europe's Enlightenment project of the 18th Century rejected religion. For the first time in over a thousand years, human rights were discussed without reference to faith. Many Enlightenment thinkers rejected spirituality altogether and took seriously the idea that progress toward an ideal society could be accomplished with science alone. Some openly abandoned religion and many anti-theists openly proclaimed it to be incorrigibly reactionary, corrupt and likely to encourage fanaticism. At best it is a distraction, at worst, inherently harmful.

For centuries there was no effective ecumenical, much less interfaith movement to belie the early "libertines." What is more, the spectacular advance of scientific research seemed to justify their attitude, especially in physics and medicine. Since the close of the 20th Century, however, it has become clear that in spite of its spectacular benefit, scientific knowledge is no panacea. It has also contributed hundreds of new, potentially lethal threats to human survival. If it were not for science we would not live under the constant threat of, to name only two dangers, nuclear Armageddon and accelerating global warming.

Today most non-believing intellectuals regard the Enlightenment as an essentially atheistic phenomenon, as did I. Then I came across John Amos Comenius. As soon as I read it, it became clear that here is the first enlightenment thinker. Like Bacon before him, Comenius did not regard the goals of the Bible as at all incompatible with reformist science and politics. The idea of enlightenment is the major theme throughout Panorthosia. Comenius calls upon his fellow believers to subject their precious dogma to rational enquiry and to work together with the new science for the general good. At the same time, unlike the Enlightenment thinkers who followed, Comenius did not let politicians or scientists (philosophers) off the hook,

"Let our Philosophy be simplified, provided that it satisfies moderate minds and circumstances. Let our Religion be simplified, provided that it satisfies God, the source of simplicity, and men of upright conscience. Let our Political System be simplified, provided that it serves its purpose of peacefulness in human affairs." (Panorthosia II, Ch. 10, para 3, p. 152)

This project of simplification would permit anybody to enter the inner sanctum of the learned. Everybody would be at least three things, a philosopher, a politician and a theologian. Specialist knowledge would be public property. It would serve liberal ends for the first time in history. This simplification project would give great intellectual power to the people, and would tear down the ivory towers of professional privilege. Comenius calls this philosophical stance towards universalism "pansophy," or universal philosophy and compares its universal abilities to a skeleton key. A specialist has a key to get into one room of a castle, but a universalist thinker can get into any room and feel at home there. Including the room of religious faith.

The cause of human betterment would have been better served had there been no divorce between science and religion, for ultimately the purposes of both are the same, the betterment of humanity. Although they have slightly different purposes and methods, and they tend to deal in vastly different scales of time and space, as long as all sides, scientists, believers and politicians recognize their own bounds and keep within their limitations, all can enrich human experience and conduce to progress and enlightenment.

By the way, scientists were universally called natural philosophers, not scientists, until a hundred and fifty years after Comenius's death. I am auditing a course on the history of science, and I recently learned from the lecturer that this change in nomenclature was originally suggested as a joke, a bit of satire against the arrogance of certain members of the profession. Calling natural phenomena "Scientia," knowledge, implies that other, broader, non-material ways of knowing are not knowledge. They might even be forms of ignorance. This divorces the study of nature not only from religion but art, literature, history, philosophy, and on and on. The fact that the name "science" stuck does not mean that it makes any sense. In my opinion it remains a huge mistake and scientists should make a concession to humility and reality by going back to calling themselves natural philosophers.

The Enlightenment project, as it turned out, had grave flaws. Yes, human rights were openly proclaimed and, to some extent, put into practice. But the Enlightenment also ensconced a bitter rivalry, if not hatred, among the three pursuits that should be the intimate concern of each and all, science, religion and politics.

One of the most noticeable and lamentable effects of this divorce was on ordinary conversation. In polite company today it is considered a grave mistake to bring up religion or politics. To do so is to invite conflict. The result? Most conversations must remain frivolous. The public forum is ineffectual. Sports and celebrity gossip are the best that we have to talk about. Nuclear war and global warming grow with each passing day, and we fritter away our chances for reform in useless banter.

==========

Rather than drawing false dichotomies and bringing the three essential kinds of knowledge into competition, we should heed the latter writings of that great pre-enlightenment genius, Comenius, who in his own life exemplified what he advocated for reform. He straddled all three of the great potential sources of human progress: politics, science and religion. John Amos Comenius was an experienced peace negotiator, a renowned educational reformer, a founding father of the Royal Society, and a leader in his religious community, the Moravian Brotherhood.

His long experience in these three fields inspired his posthumous masterpiece, the Panorthosia, or Universal Reform, a detailed proposal for a comprehensive reform program that works simultaneously on the personal, local and planetary levels. Panorthosia shows in great detail how we might unite science, religion and politics and thereby strike a happy balance for both individual and social progress.

Furthermore, his is by far the most persuasive proposal for a world government ever put forward. The Comenian model of world governance offers the best government conceivable. Properly implemented, it promises a world order far more reliable and efficient than any past ordering of the international system. By nature it stands against the "hard truth" that Barak Obama affirmed will remain unchanged in our lifetimes in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. It refutes all of the objections to a world government that have been brought up. We will discuss that in the next essay.

::

Planning

Brian Tracy: Four Steps to Getting Past Obstacles

Gerald Filson on panel about religious evolution

Media rep of Canadian NSA speaks on Ontario's public television network, TVO.

The Agenda - Broadcast - Religions: Old, New, Borrowed and Blue | David Hlynsky

The Agenda - Broadcast - Religions: Old, New, Borrowed and Blue | David Hlynsky