Bahai Philosophy and the Question of the Environment

One’s approach towards the environment is informed by one’s conceptions of nature, culture, self, body, others, and the sacred. In other words, the complex of beliefs and attitudes concerning the relation of God to nature, the relation of human beings with each other, the relation of soul and body, and the relation of culture to nature determines the normative premises of one’s approach towards the environment. With the rise of the modern, industrial, capitalist, nationalist, and technological social order, a materialistic and mechanistic worldview began to develop and dominate Western consciousness. The outcome of this approach to life has been an obsessive emphasis on material values and selfish desires which has defined the meaning and purpose of life in terms of the maximization of consumption and material gratification in the context of a competitive, aggressive, and unequal world economy. The result has been mass poverty on the one hand, and an increasing disparity between the masses of the desperately poor and comfortably rich on the other, as well as the increasing degradation and destruction of the environment. Because of the significance of this foundational (and mostly unconscious) determination of behavior we need to examine the phenomenology of this materialistic consciousness and the history of its emergence, lest we fall into the mistake of considering the current dominant worldview as natural and normal or an eternal curse of humanity. In fact, the materialistic and mechanistic worldview is only a recent and historically specific phenomenon which is linked to a particular type of organization of life and society, and one which can and must be transcended if humanity’s will to life is to be realized. In the next section we will briefly review the premodern conception of nature and culture and the two stages of the development of the modern mechanistic worldview. Although there have been various interpretations of nature and culture in nonindustrialized and premodern societies, all those interpretations and worldviews shared a fundamental principle in their understanding of nature and society. This fundamental principle was the organic conception of both nature and culture. This organic conception of nature and culture was rooted in an organic definition of reality. Consequently, the premodern worldview not only maintained the organic character of both nature and culture but also emphasized the existence of an organic interrelation, exchange, harmony, and unity between the two realms. In that traditional A. The Premodern conception of nature and culture

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