Three Temporal Loves

by John Taylor; 2010 Nov 17, Qudrat 14, 167 BE

God as Conservative, Liberal and Progressive

The nature of time is such that people orient themselves around three possible worldviews, each of which is rooted in the past, the present or the future. Conservatism is all about the past, liberalism the present and progressivism the future. In essence, each is a type or phase of love. Each is love playing itself out at a certain beat to the dance of time.



Conservatives Love What is Dead and Gone

Those who put the past first tend to be conservative. Conservatism is concerned with the ghost of culture past. It takes on the daunting challenge of learning from the experience of the Great Majority (it is estimated that, in spite of the recent spurt in human population, at least seven persons lived and died in the past for everyone living today). A conservative wants to carry the lessons of history into both present and future. Unless we do that, there will be no good at present or the future.

The prototypical agent of conservatism is the teacher. Many teachers, indeed perhaps most teachers may be liberal or progressive in personal taste and outlook, but professionally their burden is to see to it that the essentials in past knowledge are not lost. Imagine what would happen if all teaching and learning somehow stopped today. There would be a sudden collapse of civilization followed by a massive die-off. If any humans survive at all, they would be hunter-gatherers numbered in thousands rather than, as now, billions.

Who wants to be a conservative?

Conservatism is attractive to the powerful, anyone insulated from questions of brute survival. A conservative tends to be wealthy, since the rich are free to make many minor decisions in the here and now, choices that are rarely matters of life and death, at least not for themselves. Conservatives are happy with how life is treating them. They have enjoyed a prosperous life in the past and have secure prospects for the future. Anyone content with where they come from and where they are going will tend to be conservative. This is why conservatives tend to be older, and usually come from the dominant culture and speak the language of the majority. For them, the greater part of the struggle for influence and hegemony is already won.

What is the Conservative Value?

I think that wisdom is the great value that conservatism teaches. As one ancient philosopher puts it,

"Wisdom is a condition in a being that possesses repose. Think what happens when one has accomplished the reasoning process; as soon as we have discovered the right course, we cease to reason. We rest because we have come to wisdom." (Plotinus, qi Wisdom, Mortimer Adler, the Great Ideas, p. 939)

Liberals Love the Here and Now

The characteristic ability of intelligent beings is the exercise of free will. No decisions, no rational mind. If one cannot decide freely and independently, one is not entirely human. Decisions, right, wrong or indifferent, are part of our very reason for being. Our goal in life is to express ourselves, to exercise our personal freedom, and by that means to become fulfilled.

And when are decisions arrived at? Right now. Spend your time with the ghost of time present. That is the only time when it is ever possible to exercise the will. It is impossible to decide about what happened before or about what we think may come about sooner or later. That is why we ought to adore the present most of all. We should maximize what can be changed in the here and now. If everybody makes a sound free choice now, all other goods must come together for the best. Look to what is important at this moment and past and future will take care of themselves. Try to make free choice the default for every issue, for each social concern.

They tend to be individualists, happiest when alone with their own thoughts, living a solitary life of the mind. Personal choices matter more than socially derived decisions, if only because the latter cannot be done at this instant while social mores take a long time to determine. Like a ponderous, slow-turning supertanker, group decisions take even longer to alter course.

Who wants to be a liberal?

Liberalism is attractive to those who did not inherit great goods or lands from their ancestors, to anybody who is not nostalgic and has few memories, good or bad. That is, to youth. The decisions of the young have the greatest, longest lasting results. The old have already made the most important long-term choices, for better or worse.

Liberalism is also attractive to intellectuals. The learned are not heavily invested in past goods or future windfalls. They discount as uncertain the prospect of better things to come. Thought is more real than memories or expectations. They are confident that knowledge can make up for shortfalls in past or future. They delight in abstractions, look down on worldly goods and are willing to invest everything in the fleeting will-o-the-wisp that is the present moment.

What is the Liberal Value?

The virtue for liberals is justice, for what good is a decision if it is not the right decision? Justice takes in all other virtues, except for the conservative virtue, wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to see what was right in the past, justice is what is right at the moment. It is, as Baha'u'llah puts it, a kind of torch to be shone on what is right now.

"The light of men is Justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 66-7, Kalimat-i-Firdousiyyih, 6th leaf)

Progressives Love What is Coming Our Way

The belief in progress assumes that things now are better than they were, and we can make our future better than things are now. The future is the soul of past and present; whether we want to or not, we only see the past or the present in terms of what good it will do in future. Anyone who accepts such presuppositions as valid -- or at least desirable -- will value the future more than the past or present. Forced to make a choice, they will pick the future.

Progressivism, then, is a kind of optimism. However, a progressive does more than idly hope for a better future. He or she works to assure that the best is yet to come. Furthermore, a progressive believes that we spend our time most productively if we are anticipating future good and ameliorating what we have now. This means sacrificing what we had in the past and what we have now for future benefit. This is not easy to do. It is far easier for a progressive to show cowardice, to drop out or slip into hypocrisy than for a conservative or liberal.

Who wants to be a progressive?

Progressives have often had a miserable past. They tend to be excluded from participating in decision making in the here and now. They have good reason to invest everything in the future. The poor majority of humanity, I think, are progressives. Hence the saying, "Blessed are the poor." God is a progressive. The supreme example of a progressive is the Manifestation of God. Baha'u'llah said, "My object is none other than the betterment of the world and the tranquillity of its peoples." (Gl 286)

What is the progressive's virtue?

When we have wisdom and justice established in heart and mind, we can turn towards our ultimate purpose, the love of progress. Baha'u'llah makes it abundantly clear that whereas in the dispensation of Christ "God is love," today in effect, God is progress. The virtues that progressivism calls for are, socially, wisdom and justice. But for the individual, they are the "female" virtues of dignity, forbearance, mercy, compassion and Muhabat, or loving-kindness.

"All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization. The Almighty bearest Me witness: To act like the beasts of the field is unworthy of man. Those virtues that befit his dignity are forbearance, mercy, compassion and loving-kindness towards all the peoples and kindreds of the earth." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, CIX, p. 215)

The Physics of Spirit

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

A brief on "A Briefer History of Time"

 

By John Taylor; 2009 Feb 24, 18 Mulk, 165 BE

Back in the eighties I tried to read Stephen Hawking's A Short History of Time. I got through the first few chapters but when I came across wierd phenomena like singularities and event horizons -- just like it does the laws of classical physics -- it blew my mind, and I stopped. The other day in the Binbrook Library I came across the updated version, A Briefer History of Time, in audio book format, and decided to try again. The introduction to "Briefer" pointed out that the original book "Brief" sold well enough for there to be one copy for every seven people on the planet. My estimate of human intelligence went way up when I heard that, though I have also heard that it was the most unread bestseller in history too.

Being sick yesterday, I listened to one CD disk of "Briefer History" while playing tank battle on the Wii. This prepared my mind, ploughed the ground, and I would then listen to the same CD again doing nothing, giving the audio book my full attention. It turned out to be surprisingly clear science writing that brought together in one view the tremendous discoveries reported in science magazines in dribs and drabs over the past few decades. I awoke this morning with a Big Bang in my head, but my head did not explode, which is a good sign. 

Most impressive to me now is the unsettling discovery that space is expanding like a giant balloon. The further away you are from any point in space, the faster the distances are accelerating. The big bang is like an explosion, but one that is still picking up speed and energy, unlike any known detonations on earth. This has implications, I think, on our moral, spiritual and political understanding of our place in the universe.

Albert Einstein in his later years talked about capitalist society as a chaotic stage, an evil symptom of a "predatory phase of human development." I do not think of it so much as predatory as imitative of materiality. The human universe on the grand scale is just like that expanding balloon, each point accelerating in distance from every other point, with the further away points accelerating faster than the closer ones. This principle of expansion is the inherent nature of materialist thinking. In proportion to how much we reflect this in our thinking, the faster the human center of gravity will be torn apart and unbalanced.

This casts light on why in the first sentence of Comenius's chapter on individual reform he says: "Human corruption is largely if not wholly based on the fact that men are very busily concerned with their material goods and strenuously uphold the proverb `I am my own closest friend,' but they generally neglect their spiritual goods." (Panorthosia, Ch. 20, p. 20) The result of our inherent lack of perspective on the exploding nature of the material things that surround us is that we fly apart, inside as well as outside. "Many teach others, none teaches himself." The bigger and more universal the issue, the less power we have to hold ourselves together and make common sense. We feel normal as individuals and with those we meet, but as world citizens we fail because just like two near points on that expanding balloon of space-time, more distant points fly apart faster.

The way to reverse this dispersal and diffusion is to concentrate upon Spirit, which by nature collects and unifies because it is, as it were, a different kind of mirror of reality. It has a reverse curvature to the mirror of physical space-time. In the universe of the heart the most intimate relations come from proximity to the most distant point imaginable: God Himself -- or to speak more exactly, His Manifestation. Materiality is a convex mirror dispersing light while spirit is concave, concentrating it on a single point, the human heart. In the mirror of spirit the greater the distance between any two points, the stronger the attractive force between them and the more rapidly they come together. As Socrates is reported to have said,

"Where God is our teacher we all come to think alike. For example, all agree that it is better to wear warm clothes in winter..." (Oeconomicus 15:3)

Conversely, where materiality is the teacher, differences are the exemplar. All who look here come to varying standards and to think differently. They disagree about basics, such as whether to come in out of the rain or wear warm cloths when it is cold outside. Materiality, being dead matter itself, is inimical to life. Materiality, unlike God, does not teach, it splits and tears apart.

For those who turn to the Manifestation the greater the spiritual perception the more universal the concern, the more broad the love that dominates the personal. Whereas matter is ruled by energy mediated by light, the energy source of spirit is wisdom. Wisdom manifests itself in speech, in language which arouses selfless motives in the heart. Baha'u'llah wrote,

"The beginning of Wisdom and the origin thereof is to acknowledge whatsoever God hath clearly set forth, for through its potency the foundation of statesmanship, which is a shield for the preservation of the body of mankind, hath been firmly established. Ponder a while that ye may perceive what My most exalted Pen hath proclaimed in this wondrous Tablet." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 151)

Today's daily reading emailed from a news feed is also appropriate. It is from the Lawh-i-Hikmat:

"Know thou, moreover, that the Word of God -- exalted be His glory -- is higher and far superior to that which the senses can perceive, for it is sanctified from any property or substance. It transcendeth the limitations of known elements and is exalted above all the essential and recognized substances. It became manifest without any syllable or sound and is none but the Command of God which pervadeth all created things. It hath never been withheld from the world of being. It is God's all-pervasive grace, from which all grace doth emanate. It is an entity far removed above all that hath been and shall be." (Tablets, 141-142)

-- 

John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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