Worldviews and human potential for change

Several course participants have gone out and talked to people about their views on human potential for sociocultural change towards a culture of peace, which has been a very enriching exercise.

Some have said that God created us as rational animals –by nature greedy and selfish– so that we can defend ourselves against those who, because of the same characteristics, would put our interests in danger. This seems like a contradiction, because if God had created all humans generous and kind, there would be no-one to defend ourselves against!

Others have said that even love is for our own self-benefit. This echoes something that Eric Fromm said in “The Art of Loving", that when we are morally immature we love others because we need them, and when we mature morally we need others because we love them.

Another idea is that we can enjoy others’ successes as long as they do not interfere with our own. This is a common theory that breaks down in the case of our inner circle family and close friends, for whom we are often willing to make tremendous self-sacrifices. Most social scientists believe that our sense of identity is determined by our interests. For example, the common interests of the taxi drivers in a city give them a sense of common identity. Michael Karlberg, however, suggests that our perception of what our interests are may be determined by our sense of identity. If we identify WITH others, we come to perceive that their interests are the same as ours. If this is true, then that explains why we can promote the interests of others as if they were our own. It also opens the door to the possibility of developing a sense of common identity among segments of society that were formerly believed to have opposing interests, thereby uniting apparently divergent interests as one and the same. How does this relate to the principal of the oneness of humanity?

Some think that a world of peace would be entirely free from pain and sorrow. This reflects the notion of peace as a state of final perfection, and not as an on-going process. It is especially found to be true of a certain Western Christian worldview that sees everything in terms of absolutes: black and white, true and false, good and evil.

Then there are the fatalistic worldviews, including the “original sin” doctrine by which “evil” is not something that we can overcome through effort, but can only come from above through individual “salvation” and the descent of God's Kingdom from heaven, which shares similarities with the Muslim belief in the coming of a world savior in the form of the “Imam-e-Zaman” to fix the world for us.

These ideas can free us from blame for the way the world is, on the one hand, and from responsibility for changing it, on the other. They leave us with the “soft” morality of making life more bearable for others through small acts of charity and kindness, as a religious duty. However, these acts are not expected to achieve any fundamental changes in the structure of society, but only relieve some of the suffering caused by those structures.

There is also a group that believes that human beings are not selfish by nature, but that socialization and education lead us to think about our own self benefit. This is similar to Rousseau and Pestalozzi’s formula that man is created good but that society corrupts him. Perhaps one difference, in this case, would be the idea that peace and unity are achievable through appropriate education, whereas Rousseau and Pestalozzi thought that human goodness would bubble up naturally if children received as little interference from adults as possible.

In this vein, it is important not to confuse the Bahá'í concept of a double human nature with the old body / soul dichotomy of having an animal nature that is bad and a spiritual nature that is good. According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, it is the human spirit itself that has a double nature, because it is simultaneously drawn towards the “world” (meaning all things that separate us from God) and towards perfection (approaching God).

Justice, unity and peace are dynamic processes in which we will always be moving from less to more, will always have new problems to solve, will always have to struggle with the “insistent self” or ego, and will never be entirely free from pain and sorrow. In such a world, justice, unity and peace would not eliminate all difficulties forever, but will make is possible to deal with issues that currently are not even tractable.

Then there is the group that believes that we will not “necessarily” achieve justice, unity and peace, but only through hard work, self-sacrifice and controlling our animal nature and instincts. In its "Promise of World Peace", the Universal House of Justice says that we will inevitably reach it, but that it is up to us to decide whether we will do it proactively through conscious choice or only as a last-ditch effort after “unimaginable horrors” have occurred.

The urgency of training agents of social change is precisely to lessen and shorten the suffering that humankind will need to undergo before it chooses justice, unity and peace, even if only in its own self-interest! That is why arising to serve the transformation of both individuals and society is the only truly “moral position” that a fully aware person can take at this critical juncture in human history. Any lesser position –avoiding vices, being nice to others, etc.– falls far short of the magnitude of what is morally demanded of us today.

There also arose mention of Conspiracy Theory, according to which powerful economic and political interest groups are colluding against the unsuspecting masses of both East and West, which has been and continues to be cause for much speculation. Noam Chomski is one author of note in this regard. In “Beyond the Culture of Contest”, Karlberg opines that when people work under the same basic assumptions, they do not have to conspire in order to act in unison, because how we think determines how we act, and if we all have a similar worldview or paradigm we will act similarly.

Be this as it may, more important than the Conspiracy Theory itself is the associated attitude of being victims of an external power or authority. This tendency to blame others for our own problems sounds like nonconformity on the surface, but is actually a way to conform without appearing to do so. It is a tricky self-delusion designed to free ourselves from the moral responsibility to make the tremendous efforts needed to achieve real change. It is just another mental model that we knit for ourselves in order to live a tranquil life while the world around us is steeped in misery and falling apart at the seams.

Today’s youth have been trained to believe that they cannot bring about any changes in the world, and that trying to do so is useless. The “moral position” mentioned above, then, requires helping them overcome this self-defeating attitude, become more fully cognizant of the “power of agency” that each individual and group truly has, and then exploit that awareness through concrete actions that address real, identifiable priorities. Luckily, it would seem that younger generation are less fatalistic and are also willing to challenge their mental models more easily.