by Adel Beshara
* * *
The first attitude looks at society as a comprehensive human totality, whose life is composed of human interactions forged from various aspects of humanity. It secures the society’s interests and facilitates all manifestations of its activities. From within the life of this society, and as manifestations of it, specific efforts, interests, and institutions (the state and economic, cultural, religious, and social systems) emerge to secure these political, economic, and cultural interests and other interests of the society. These manifestations and institutions are not separate from each other, nor are their interests final or their standards independent. Rather, they are all manifestations that develop from within the comprehensive life of society. The interests are ultimately the comprehensive interest of society: the interest of the comprehensive entity of man.
In relation to this human entity, the value of these social manifestations is measured. This attitude sees human entity as the avenue that is available for man to redress his personal deficiencies and individual limits and to cooperate with other humans to express his own entity. This avenue is available for one to return from within this rich human life to himself at moments of seclusion and to attain within his innermost being a connection with the spiritual entity existing in the depth of the universe (i.e. the ultimate reality connected to the depths of human character).
The other attitude does not see this basic unity in society that encompasses all aspects of its life. It sees these manifestations and the institutions that ensure them as independent systems that are neither connected nor coherent. It sees a state that works and dominates by and for its own interests, enslaving people and institutions to its will and laws. Alternatively, it sees an economic system that espouses a certain ideology, functions, and exploits social classes while denying their rights to life and freedom, acknowledging only the interests of the institutions or individuals who run it. Otherwise, it sees practical science and its by-products of mechanical civilization as the ultimate objective and idol of man rather than a means to make human life easy. It sees these idols (state, economics, and applied science) taking over and enslaving the entity of the person and acquiring the status of a self-existing entity.
III
These two tendencies contend in the human soul. They emanate from two different perspectives of human nature, take shape in two different types of upbringing and social structure, and form two different civilizations.
As we gaze from our country at the Western world, we do so from a level of preparedness to take an attitude toward its conflict. In recent years, at the height of its turmoil, our nation reverted and adopted the second attitude. The dangers surrounding our nation have pushed it into choosing this easy way, deluding it into believing that the only weapon we can face impending dangers with is through political alliance, the application of mechanical civilization, or economic prosperity. Our nation has clearly forgotten that these are the paths to its doom, not its salvation. It has forgotten that its living message to attain sublimity is not in its contributions to these domains; but rather, in its rush to build humans with full human potential and in its consideration of them as its real wealth, real source of pride, and real weapon in combating corruption. The path that our nation has opted for is the easy way. It is the external, superficial, and misguided path. In reality, the correct path is the practical, internal, and spiritually challenging human way.
Our national revival, centered on our institution, has endorsed this other path as our nation’s duty and course to its salvation. It has proceeded to build the sound person and thrust him into daily life as a messenger of the nation’s new life in the midst of the prevailing corruption. Our institution, in its members, agencies, the currents it has set off, and the illuminating lights it has emitted, is the nucleus of the new nation. This new nation has taken a stand on the conflict of the two basic human tendencies, knows how to demonstrate its humanity, and has rejected the disfigured form of humanity that turns society into an inhuman apparatus that eliminates man and enslaves him to idols that he created for his own enslavement.
Our national revival is established on the principle of respect for man as he is. It develops man in a way that coheres with his real nature. It thus declares that man in this country will ‘be’!
In doing so, our national revival has realized that our nation’s recent descent into the easy way is a peculiar descent from its eternal spiritual heritage.
* * *
Our nation, standing as it is at a crossroad today, finds in our national revival a decisive decision that we will be a human society, that we will have human spiritual courage, and that from the heart of this nation, real humans will emerge instead of deformed creatures who have decided to eliminate their own humanity.
In this lies the merit of our national revival.
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INTERNET
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