More than 1800 people attended the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Baha’i Studies in Vancouver, August 12 to 15. The conference challenged participants to rethink their understanding of human nature.
Presenters and participants reflected on some of the fundamental characteristics of human nature in the light of Baha’i concepts and principles, and made efforts to compare this understanding with both existing assumptions in contemporary society and ideas about human nature emerging in some scientific and specialized discourses.
The conference plenary sessions helped to articulate some of the features of a conception of human nature found in the thought and in the lives of Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha. A more daunting task seemed to be the work of correlating those Baha’i insights with concepts in various fields of study and professional work.
Several participants noted that, “we really are at a preliminary stage in this, aren’t we?”, while others commented how the conference theme “… was not easy, but quite complex, but sure seems necessary.”
At least one presenter said the complexity was due to the often fragmented ideas that influence current thinking on the subject of human nature. A few others mentioned the near monopoly on current thinking which materialism and an emphasis on self-interest and competition enjoys in social discourse, with disastrous social consequences. Others noted that ideas about human nature are superficial and merely implicit in much of contemporary thinking, whether in public policy discussions, in the culture at large or in professional and private business and management work. Too often, these assumptions about human nature go unquestioned. Others noted that there is evidence of new and encouraging efforts to draw on new concepts of human nature in science and in some professional fields, and Baha’is should try to work with those efforts. Similar comments were made in several break-out sessions of the conference but came into particular focus during a plenary session and a break-out session led by Dr. Michael Karlberg.
There was a widespread acknowledgement in both plenary and break-out sessions that a systematic effort to influence new thinking about the fundamentals of human reality is today more urgent than ever, however complicated the task may be, and however much modern lifestyles conspire against the provision of spaces where people can rethink these fundamentals of the human condition.
In the task of gaining clarity on a Baha’i approach to understanding human nature, the conference got off to an impressive start with an opening address by author, painter and former member of the Universal House of Justice, Mr. Hooper Dunbar. Having just published his book, “Forces of Our Time”, he drew on some of the themes in that book to address the dual aspect of human nature in his talk, highlighting, among other insights, how efforts to reflect the qualities and attributes of God, possible through the knowledge and love of His Manifestation, leads to a life, not merely of greater joy and happiness, but one full of motion and dynamism rather than a life that stalls out, becomes boring and repetitive characterized by a preoccupation with the material and lower side of human nature when life becomes consumed by self-interest, appetite and physical desires. An artist, as well as a thinker, Mr. Dunbar called to mind the contrast of darkness and light that attends human life and that calls out from a human being those choices that either reflect the light of the divine and the qualities of God or which deny the larger reality and excitement of life’s possibilities.
The Balyuzi lecturer this year, Dr. Julio Savi, continued the reflection begun by Mr. Dunbar on concepts central to a Baha’i view of human reality. Dr. Savi addressed the fundamental paradox that has puzzled thinkers through the centuries who have tried to make sense of a world of determination and cause and effect, with the freedom which human nature seems to be endowed.
Dr. Savi gave a tour through some of the most relevant commentaries of Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice on the seeming contradiction between a world of determination that generates ideas of fate and pre-established destiny, and ideas of freedom and choice. Dr. Savi’s well developed guide to an extensive body of authoritative commentary served to highlight the relationships among basic features of human existence: contingency, the limits and potential of human capacity (innate, inherited and acquired) and the nature of divine destiny, and the purpose and potentiality of human life. The presentation provided an answer to that superficial and one-dimensional misreading of human reality conveyed in materialistic conceptions, and demonstrated how freedom and submission to the Will of God are, in fact, one and indivisible, rather than contradictory.
The need for a sounder understanding of human nature was illustrated in another plenary session on perspectives and insights on the challenges and opportunities of creating social and cultural reconciliation. Several prominent Aboriginal speakers including Dr. Lee Brown, Chief Douglas White III Kwulasultun and Ms. Jacqueline Left Hand Bull provided a penetrating commentary on the damage and suffering which erroneous views of human nature have wrought in North American history. However, they also highlighted alternative understandings of human nature from indigenous perspectives that can contribute to a conceptual framework and understanding of human nature that is both intellectually compelling as well as emotionally and spiritually fulfilling – to the extent that reconciliation is genuinely advanced.
Ever present in the minds and hearts of participants throughout the days of the conference was the news of the 20-year prison sentences handed down to the seven members of the Yaran, the ad hoc committee looking after the minimal needs of the Baha’i community in Iran. One could hardly imagine a darker and more entirely misguided conception of human nature than what informs those responsible for such an outrage against justice and humanity. International human rights expert and McGill Law Professor Payam Akhavan addressed the conference on the subject. This reference to the darker forces at play in the world today, so dramatic in the case of Iran, could not help but inspire further reflection among participants on the sharp contrast of the Baha’i perspective on human nature and that view of human reality that divides humankind and desperately refuses to acknowledge the movement of history, the needs of the age and the common oneness of humanity. That human nature, when turned away from God, leads on to destruction and injustice, immense suffering and despair under the leadership of the ignorant and the evil could hardly have given the conference a more vivid lesson.
The conference’s closing session featured Continental Board of Counsellor Alison Milston who reviewed the Universal House of Justice’s references to community and how those references have been helping the Baha’i community learn a new language and a new self-understanding of their own community, one that takes in the larger human family, whether at the neighbourhood and local level, or globally. The talk not only served to stimulate thoughts of how religion has often wrongly conceived of human community in exclusive and divisive terms, and how this approach is at odds with a more mature Baha’i understanding of community.
Though merely a start, and at times one that seemed fitful and even painful to many of the participants, the ABS Conference on rethinking human nature was a learning experience involving over 1800 people from many different communities, backgrounds and ages, taking place in a brief few days, and in a space, mode and style of reflection that represents a learning event still at an early stage in its evolution.
If participants left with more questions than answers, as many surely did, the conference was an important step in the kind of effort required if Baha’i understanding is to advance and begin to engage contemporary thinking.