Winston E. Langley
March 21, 2023
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One who is living in this century is faced with certain major challenges (inherited from previous centuries, or the previous century), defined by aggravated intensity and expanding threats. Among these challenges are the menaces posed to the planetary life-producing and support system (PLSS), as evidenced by climate change; weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; increasing social and economic inequality; underdeveloped national and global public health systems; the rise of ethno-national and racial differences and the hatreds ensuing from them; and the persistence of a “war culture” that feeds those hatreds. Solutions to these challenges will not be found in our “homes of safety,” such as family, village, province, and nation, or the divided international system we now know. Neither will favorable responses to the challenges be identified from the broader cultural inheritance we call modernism, as its present dominant emphasis informs us.
That emphasis, in its assigned priority on secularism, has sought to sideline religion, especially religion as represented by those often referred to as the great religions–Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism-Confucianism.[1] That prioritizing has come at the price of the impoverishment of our individual and collective sense of being. The great religions hold that, in the stress on secularism, important features of human make-up have been cast aside, at least stifled.
First, each of these great religions claim that human beings, above and beyond anything else, are spiritual entities. This spirituality is in fact the center of who one is and can become–one is not first and foremost an economic, game-playing, political (power-seeking) or social being. One, rather, aspires to experience, have one’s being reflect, and continuingly express that spirituality, which is partly manifested in what we have come to call the imagination, a principal source of human creativity. The latter, properly understood, is the means by which human beings–in science, in technology, in sports, cooking, drawing, or writing, and every other activity, brings into being that which had not previously existed. Bringing into being the new, what had not earlier existed, is precisely what the world needs, if it is to deal with the problems mentioned above. All the alternatives tried, thus far, have failed.
A second position that is common to the great religions is the view which argues that what transcends (and every act of creating the new is an act of transcendence, an act of surpassing some presumed limit) is also that which most profoundly elicits human passion. Tied to the imagination, this passion is enabling of almost everything. All great religions, therefore, boasts a faith in what is not yet, but possible.
Identified as we are and have been, emotionally and psychologically, with the nation-state and the system it composes, we generally think of solutions to the most formidable of problems in terms of the nation; so, too, we think of our highest achievements, symbolically and otherwise (Olympic medals, Nobel prizes, military honors). The unity the world needs to achieve, to serve as a political and moral basis to address the challenges touched on, is rightly seen as difficult (often viewed as impossible). The great religions offer us an answer, at least a partial one, is that which goes beyond the nation.
Buddhism, which speak to humankind as a whole, contends that each of us has the capacity for Buddhahood, which can be brought about by a devotion that results in the merger of one’s own being with the fundamental Law of the universe. Its embodiment of what is called the “greater self” that encompasses all (not the miserable narrowness whose aims are selfish returns) represents and espouses unity. The entire cosmos is imbedded in one.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, (sometimes referred to as the Abrahamic religions), are linked in the sense that their communicants share a belief in the same God, the same prophets, and can trace their respective religion’s origins to Abraham. There is, for our discussion, a deeper link. This God (whether His name be Jehovah, Lord, or Allah) is the creator and sustainer of the universe, which exhibits His universal laws, which govern everything. Humans were and are created in the likeness and image of God and, therefore, partake of His creative and transcendent powers. This makes human not only kins (a common father), but, as well, holders of the capacity for transcendence.
Hinduism comes to us somewhat differently, but with the same conclusions. It holds that human origins are from a common body, with particular expressions representing categories of the very order and process of things. Although the particulars express a hierarchy (socially, in the form of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Dalits), neither the whole can function properly without the specialized parts, in the hierarchy, nor the specialized parts without the whole. All complexity, including that of the digital age, partakes of a hierarchy.
Taoism speaks of our being part of nature, with which there ought to be harmony; and Confucianism, which, in many respects has been culturally merged with Taoism, urges a social order that is harmonious with the cosmos. This is not harmony based on theory, only, but what the accurate reading from the text of the “instructions” nature offers and vetted experience confirms. Among the confirmations is the interdependence of all things, the mutualism and reciprocity (including rights and duties) which flow from that interdependence. When the latter is understood and cultivated, one comes to see that there is no independence; there is but relational autonomy.
And how do all of these features (and there are many other features, but we must confine ourselves to few, given space and other limitations) mentioned above bear on the challenges we have identified? Answer to this question has been attempted in the next part of the article.
[1] There are religious groupings that share all or a number of the principles and values we will be discussing. The Baha’I, the Druze, the Rastafarians, and the Samaritans, among others, which are associated with Christianity, for example. Others, such as Jainism, which has shared some values, such as non-violence, with Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as others of the great religions; and Sufism, which is really a branch of Islam that if often mistakenly treated separately. One should always remember Zoroastrianism, as well, and its focus on the value of truth.
Winston E. Langley is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB). He served as Provost and Vice Chancellor for academic affairs for almost a decade at UMB. His academic interests are broad and include models of global order, human rights, nuclear weapons proliferation, and the role of film and literature social and political change. He has published widely, with recent publications including “War Between US and China” and “Human Rights in Turkey.” He holds degrees in biology, diplomatic history, law, and political science and international relations.
