What is the difference between material and spiritual visions of history?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Can you explain the difference between a material vision of history and a spiritual vision of history? Answer, a material or materialistic vision of history is basically that organic forces act upon society and people and people respond to those organic forces.
So, by organic forces, it can refer to the state of nature, the state of the political situation around us, socio-political situation around us and the nature of the kind of people who acquire power. So, in Vedic parlance, we would call this as Adhyatmik, Adhibhautik and Adhidaivik. So, environmental, social and psychophysical powers, they act and people respond to those.
And the interaction of various forces with human agency and how there is a response to these, and what emerges from that response is what is called as history. So, this mirrors the vision of evolutionary history of the earth, wherein basically existence is moving from, it is pointless and directionless. It is moving from nothing in particular to nothing in particular.
And during the process of evolution, sometimes some good comes up. And this view of history is radically different from a spiritual view of history, wherein there is understanding of some first things, some universal truths, some natural rights and some natural responsibilities. And humanity, time and time, misaligns with those and realigns with those.
So, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna states that he descends periodically to establish dharma, whenever society deviates from dharma, what he essentially is underlying over there is not so much evolutionary views of history as a realigning, refocusing view of history. So, while it is true that individual agents interact with various social natural forces and that response leads to certain events happening, but there is more to human existence than the random interaction of people and nature. This says evolution holds that that nature doesn’t move in any direction or toward any purpose.
Therein is the presumption that we have no purpose other than to survive. That is true for animals, but we humans want to do something more than survive. Certainly, we want to survive and faced with threat, people will definitely choose what will enable them to survive.
But everything that humans do is not simply driven by the urge for survival. We long to find a higher meaning in our lives and that higher meaning, that search for higher meaning in some ways is reflected in the flow of history. So, rather than seeing the flow of history as a just a meandering flow of water going from nowhere to nowhere, it might be a meandering flow, but it is also a flow toward the ocean.
It may have many twists and turns. So, the essential difference between material and spiritual history is what is the driving agent for people and what they do. Throughout history, there are people who make terrible choices which hurt them.
For example, certain kings who are defending themselves against barbaric invaders, they make some strategic mistakes and then their whole kingdoms are destroyed and thousands, maybe even millions are slaughtered and there are people who are barbaric invaders who can cause the deaths of millions. But beyond these, there are people who act out of virtue, out of goodness and try to establish order in society for the flourishing of the human person and human society. Here flourishing doesn’t mean just the increase in the GDP.
Flourishing broadly means the understanding that there is a movement toward a fulfilling life or there is at least a flow of human society with a significant number of individuals living according to values that lead to fulfillment. While this might never happen to a majority of people. But the point is, history itself is not necessarily to be seen as just a materialistic interaction of people who are also products of nature and are seen as stimulus response biological machines geared for survival, interacting against a changing and often threatening nature.
So there are two distinct, two more factors to be considered that we living beings, especially human beings, have a spiritual essence that strives for meaning and purpose. And there is a higher intelligence, there is a divine force that ultimately shapes the movement of human history. Although for a fish that is moving in the water, it just is swept with the flow of the water and it doesn’t understand how the swirling of the water to the left and the right and to the sharp left and the sharp right, how through it all, it is moving toward the ocean.
So now history itself is purposeful. Now purposeful doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody will at the same pace or the same rate will be achieving the same purpose or the ultimate purpose. Just like some fish in the river might get swept off onto the land or into a shallow creek nearby and they may not go all the way to the ocean.
So there is, we could say, at a material level, evolution that is happening and that evolution could be said to be directionless and pointless. But through it, there is the revelation of the human character and there is a transformation of the human character. The transformation can be upward or it can be downward.
That means how people respond to the changes in history reveals their character and it also reshapes their character and by this either they evolve or they devolve. So at one level, we may say that the main thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything from history because throughout history human beings have the same weaknesses. We tend to fall prey to lust, to anger, to greed, to envy, to arrogance, to short-sightedness introduced by materialism and thus we commit the same mistakes although in different ways.
Simultaneously however, through these routine bad choices that humans make throughout history, there are others who make better choices and through those better choices they themselves evolve and wherever there is a movement of history toward a better life, again not just in terms of a better GDP but a better standard of living, then that is indicative of the moving of forces beyond what are perceived by a purely materialistic vision of history. So we live in a world where events happen in such complicated and often undesirable, decipherable ways that it will be difficult for us to be satisfied with a statement like history is his story, that actually God or a cosmic divine intelligence is shaping the movement of events for some higher purpose but that understanding is what governs the spiritual vision of history. This is not to reject the forces that are analysed, the factors that are analysed in the materialistic vision of history but that we don’t restrict the analysis to only those events.
Beyond the analysis of those events, we perceive a higher agency acting. So whereas we could say that material evolution may apply to the bodies, the bodies are machines geared for survival but beyond those bodies we have a spiritual essence that is geared not for survival but for flourishing, for longing toward meaning and purpose, for what could be called a spiritual evolution. So understanding that through the material apparent randomness and pointlessness of the movements of history, there is a spiritual evolution that is meant to happen and that can happen to the extent we make wiser choices.
That is what gives us individuals a sense of cosmic agency and significance and inspires us to face life’s upheavals and history’s twists and turns before which we might individually feel powerless but despite being swept hither and thither by those historical movements, we can still rise to a higher level of awareness and thus even if events seem pointless, our experiences through those events can evolve in a purposeful way to take us toward higher consciousness.