55.2 F
Spokane
Thursday, February 27, 2025
spot_img
HomeCommentaryCan Shared Understanding Lead to a Better World?

Can Shared Understanding Lead to a Better World?

Date:

Related stories

One God. Many world religions. Can that be?

Marking 1,700 years since Nicaea, the author shows how the Baha'i faith sees spiritual evolution with increasing knowledge, which results in uniting all world religions under one divine source.

Trump’s abuse of power puts U.S. democracy in peril

Trump’s actions challenge the Constitution, undermine justice and threaten democracy with abuse of power, attacks on the press and disregard for laws.

Embrace Lent without the guilt: Read a book or share a smile

Lent has shifted from guilt-driven rituals to spiritual renewal, with prayer, good works and reflection. Benedictines also encourage reading a new book!

Shed old skin: Learn the Year of the Snake’s power

In this Year of the Snake, what old skins might need shedding for your personal renewal? The author notes he needs to shed racial prejudice and hostility to snakes.

Could empathy stem from our shared atoms and humanity?

As she ages, the author values efficiency, embraces absurdity and deep questions and finds empathy in humanity's shared atoms.

Our Sponsors

spot_img

Can Shared Understanding Lead to a Better World?

By Pete Haug

Creation myths reflect shared understanding of Earth’s natural bounties when people recognized their dependence on their surroundings. Greeks in the 12th century BCE recognized our “earth mother” in “Mother Gaia,” symbol of birth or regeneration. Indigenous societies still feel close connections with, and maintain deep respect for, our common “mother.”

This appreciation of natural resources embraces spiritual as well as material sustenance. It’s led some to try to conserve those resources. Yet most continue to destroy and conquer Mother Earth, exploiting her bounty to their own ends. We really don’t understand what we’re doing. Our ignorance is infinitely vaster than our knowledge, so we plunge recklessly on.

Environmental movements

During the 1960s and 1970s, it appeared that such recklessness might be changing as we better understood the consequences of our activities. Environmental awareness spurred many countries to mitigate and repair such damage, but vested interests worked to undermine that movement.

The natural world operates according to biophysical-chemical laws. Nature’s complexities serve as metaphor for human society. Although we humans are bound by natural law, we also have free will. We create societal laws, then ignore them when it suits our purpose. We don’t like being told what to do. This leads us to do really stupid things — like building homes in flood plains.

Interactions between society and nature are often termed “wicked problems,” not because they’re intrinsically evil, but because they’re wickedly intractable. The term “wicked” denotes resistance to resolution. Because of complex interdependencies, solving one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. As an ecologist, I can testify that when we impinge on nature, we never do just one thing.

Shared unity of purpose

We need unity to solve problems we’ve gotten ourselves into. From air and water pollution, through droughts, wildfires, and floods exacerbated by new weather patterns and driven by climate change, humanity faces serious challenges from our natural surroundings. We can’t ignore those biophysical-chemical laws and the consequences they generate.

We can quit fighting over things that continue to shred our social fabric. We can begin working together to save and restore our global commons. We can start with the love universally reflected in the Golden Rule. We can work toward a fundamentally just civilization in which discrimination against poverty, race, gender, religion, and similar marginalizations is eradicated. Our love can motivate us to view and treat all with respect and empathy.

The human genome demonstrates the biological oneness of all humanity — an infinite variety of individual humans who are, at their core, all one. Religious belief systems, despite myriad differences, recognize one human spirit: we are all spiritual beings created by God.

The human spirit

This human spirit advances from conception until it expresses itself in maturity “with the utmost splendor and radiance,” according to Abdu’l-Baha. Over centuries, enlightened human spirits have advanced society’s collective maturity. In 1776, visionary men recognized self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those men were slaveholders, seriously flawed, but imbued with a spiritual vision that has inspired generations and nations over centuries. Internationally a similar vision sprang from a collective wish to create world peace by treating all humanity with justice.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed the inherent dignity, the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” It observes that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” It proclaims “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want as the highest aspiration of the common people.”

Shared understanding

We’re seeing such shared understanding growing and sweeping the planet. In unnumbered rural, as well as urban, localities, groups seek the betterment of humankind at all levels of society. Some apply Baha’i principles to improve human conditions far beyond the Baha’i community.

A metaphor of human development has been used to explain the turmoil humankind is experiencing: “The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the human race had to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is now experiencing the commotions invariably associated with the most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax, and must gradually be superseded by the calmness, the wisdom, and the maturity that characterize the stage of manhood. Then will the human race reach that stature of ripeness which will enable it to acquire all the powers and capacities upon which its ultimate development must depend.”

Pete Haug
Pete Haug
Pete plunged into journalism fresh out of college, putting his English literature degree to use for five years. He started in industrial and academic public relations, edited a rural weekly and reported for a metropolitan daily, abandoning all for graduate school. He finished with an M.S. in wildlife biology and a Ph.D. in systems ecology. After teaching college briefly, he analyzed environmental impacts for federal, state, Native American and private agencies over a couple of decades. His last hurrah was an 11-year gig teaching English in China. After retiring in 2007, he began learning about climate change and fake news, giving talks about both. He started writing columns for the Moscow-Pullman Daily News and continues to do so. He first published for favs.news in 2020. Pete’s columns alternate weekly between FāVS and the Daily News. His live-in editor, Jolie, infinitely patient wife for 63 years, scrutinizes all columns with her watchful draconian eye. Both have been Baha’is since the 1960s. Pete’s columns on the Baha’i Faith represent his own understanding and not any official position.

Our Sponsors

spot_img
spot_img
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
spot_img
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x