THE YOUNGER GENERATION
BY MARDÍYYIH NABÍL CARPENTER
LEMON BLOSSOMS and swaying shadows, amber lakes and glimmering fogs, all the elusive beauty of the world is supposedly the heritage of youth. To youth is permitted a tampering with or postponement of age-old principles, a margin of play, a lingering in some quiet garden while the work of life goes on. It has become habitual for the older generation to project in a sense its own desires of frivolity upon the youth; parents wish, however unconsciously, that their children should be flamboyantly young—and crowd them with toys and adolescent equipment, in an effort at renewal of years that have faded. Poetry that the world has cherished celebrates youth; enjoins the rapid gathering of roses, the gulping of life’s wine before one shall be “old, and gray, and full of sleep.” Explorers of the past dreamed of discovering the fountain of youth, and wore their days away in search for it; moderns send to Europe for creams and lotions, and are afraid to weep because wrinkles may follow. The world is clutching at youth, sacrificing to it, keeping life bright with the memory or the hope of April moments.
Certainly to the materialist this life can give nothing better than a few brief years of youth. But the lovers of reality are not interested in the physical aspects of time. To them an old person of any age is one who is bound to his self, not even to his present self but to his self of long ago; the experiences of life, essential for development, cannot affect him; any new occurrence merely sends him back to his memories, to old situations and faded settings; his ideas are merely remembered prejudices. And a young person is one whose heart is filled with the love of God; one who is continually renewed and re-created, because he is close to the springs of life.
For Bahá’ís, all ages are precious, just as are all the notes in a scale. When experiences are confined to one age-group, monotony results. Existence on a college campus, for example, is existence in an incubator; the undergraduate pines for someone who is neither eighteen nor twenty-three, longs for the sight of non-academic gray hairs. Rhythms are broken off, conversations are repetitive, ideas are endlessly the same, when a generation is left isolated. Life becomes normalized when somebody tells us that he laughed at our newly-invented witticism sixty years ago, or that white lilacs were just as lovely last century. One gathers finally that streams flowed and trees blew for Ḥáfiẓ or Shakespeare just as they do for us, and this knowledge serves to integrate our attitude toward life, and to emphasize the passing of our days. In some old graveyards even the dead continue a service for us; one finds under a mouldering angel the legend, “I am what you will be”; or on a broken alabaster column, vague letters tell us “Yesterday for me, today for thee.”
Since the coming, in the middle of the last century, of a new order, all things have been made new again. For this reason the youth-age situation has been revolutionized. There is no longer, among Bahá’ís, a “younger generation” problem, where other youth rebel, our youth have set their shoulder to the wheel, because they know where they are bound; their questions have been answered, their doubts removed, their rights defined. This life, this gift of consciousness, is used among Bahá’ís for other ends than those envisaged by the world, young and old we know our life on earth as an equipment for the real existence into which death ushers us; we know that here the maximum of consciousness must be developed, a spiritual, independent self built up, a ship rigged for launching in other waters.
Posterity will measure the greatness of the
new day in which we live, but even now, in
discussing the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh
with[Page 484]
members
of the younger generation, we see
from their reaction how different
our language is. Language, however, is
of little importance to practical moderns; whatever
words create, words can destroy. Bahá’ís are
told that deeds, and not vocabulary, will
serve the world, and that our lives must
prove the Word of God has been revealed
again. The example, then, precedes the rule;
and both the Bahá’í example and the Bahá’í
teaching throw new light on contemporary
youth,
In general, educated young people of today fall into one of three groups—they are agnostics, pseudo-atheists, or dabblers in the metaphysical. (It is safe to say that very few retain their orthodoxy after exposure to academic life.) They are sincere, unhappy, spiritually amorphous; they are looking for ideals in laboratories and text books, in conversations which last through the night, in work or in beauty. They are suffering from popular prejudices, such as the idea that nothing is true, or that liberty denotes the right to live by personal standards irrespective of society’s, or that technical knowledge replaces faith.
A characteristic of all three groups is the lack of interest in world affairs; so long as the moment is pleasant. The other side of the planet does not matter. This attitude tends at first to make the stupendous new proclamation—that of human oneness—unintelligible. The average youth has never thought in terms of humanity at large; his circle of friends is usually composed of people who are repetitions of himself; members of other races and nations are often shadows to be laughed at for their vagaries or stigmatized with passing earnestness as undesirable aliens. The average youth is living out of date in a united world. The Bahá’í principle of universal brotherhood can be explained to such young people only through bringing them into Bahá’í communities, where the significance of human oneness is clearly demonstrated.
The Bahá’í teaching regarding the individual’s necessity of seeking truth himself, of freeing himself from what he has learned at second hand, meets with quick approval. The youth have deposed their elders, and shifted, like the scientific method, from deduction to experiment. They have, however, in rejecting the ages, given over the good of their rightful inheritance as well as the bad, and are left with no standards to methodize the chaos of information and hypothesis which the printing presses release. It has been said that a major trouble with modern life is the fact that so many people can read.
The Bahá’í conception of liberty, which asserts the ready yielding of the individual to the community, the harmonious freedom which is possible only when the individual develops his own particular function in his group, is a principle only gradually understood by average youth. The youth have always conscientiously battered down the institutions which they found about them; they have rebelled against real and imagined wrongs, flaunted their independence in the face of bewildered elders. And yet the “bloody but unbowed” platform has been without charm; the independence assumed by the oncoming generation has been a Simeon Stylites affair—the young have been quarantined in their own point of view; nevertheless, existence in the rather stale atmosphere left by former generations has been intolerable. Youth has gone into monasteries, built guillotines, overthrown governments, turned its agonies into immortal sentences, but never won the quiet and confidence essential for adequate maturity. In Bahá’í communities, however, the individual finds nothing to rebel against; rights are clearly defined, and there is a place for everyone—“The youth must serve and honor the old, and the old, guard and protect the youth”; assistance is reciprocal, individuality treasured; the only laws insisted upon are those which the spirit of man has always longed to obey—the laws of courtesy and compassion, of trust and effort. The youth are steadied by their gift of responsibility; the old are kept young by the removal of their hitherto self-assumed duty of being omniscient.
Of many bounties, the regulation of
wants is one which especially encourages
the youth in this new day. Wants have
always formed barriers; no unity could
function where wants had grown up
[Page 485]
uncontrolled,
and yet it seemed impossible to
modify them. Reformers have tried down
the ages to regulate wants: Geneva was a
quiet place under Calvin, and life in Plato’s
Republic was stark in more ways than one.
Some authorities are advocating government
repression of wants, and yet the only
trustworthy regulation is undoubtedly
that imposed by the individual on himself;
and it
is only through divine persuasion that men
can be brought to practice “moderation in
all things”—to learn the giving up of self
to a higher good, the living from a universal
rather than a merely personal viewpoint.
God has shifted our desires from the
quiet of a day to universal peace, from
mental complacency to scientific endeavor,
from a facile isolation to sympathy. He has
brought new wants that unite human beings.
Because the Bahá’í principles include such practical teachings as, obligatory education, sex equality, the abolition of prejudice, the unity of religion and science, and the like, there is one type of young person whose approach to the Bahá’í Cause is sometimes impeded. “Metaphysically” inclined youth are not rare just now. These like to discuss spirals and cycles, arcs of ascent, cosmic urges and the rest, to the exclusion of any tangible benefit. They are escaping from a world of street cars, alarm clocks and similar unpleasant realities; they are surprised that we prefer developing a new economic system, for example, to debating the relative merits of Truth and Beauty. The schoolmen who spent their lives discussing whether a certain holy being could have accomplished his mission equally well had he come into the world as a pea, are not dead. Another aspect of this question is undeniably that many souls have a rich capacity for penetrating spiritual significances, and to these the worlds of God give endless worlds to conquer. Moreover they learn that with prayer and meditation, understanding of holy, extra-natural truth comes to each according to his capacity, that two Bahá’ís may grasp the same spiritual fact in different ways and each be right in his degree. They realize why Bahá’í communities refuse to take issue on spiritual points, and why those age-long feuds, based on varying views of “metaphysical” questions, cannot arise amongst us. The Bahá’í principles of daily living, the beliefs on such fundamental principles as the love of God through His Manifestations, immortality, reward and punishment, man’s duty to mankind, are clearly explained; on the other hand personal adventures into thought, personally attained gifts from spiritual kingdoms, relate to individual experience and are not a basis for argument.
Members of the older generation often ask what the Bahá’í Cause means to youth. The answer is that Bahá’u’lláh’s advent has unrolled a new heaven and a new earth— that the youth of today are living in another world, and are dazzled by the light of it. The agonies which youth has always had to meet are quieted, the problems are solved, the pain is healed. The Bahá’í youth does not grow up defenseless; he is safe alike from tyranny and warping adoration; his life has meaning, because it grows toward immortality; he has a guide and a Beloved. The Bahá’í is protected from fanaticism, and from the exaggerated ascetic practice of former times; he is asked to rejoice in the gladness of his heart; he is given a world of morning hopes and wide horizons.
