The Lehvantian Scholar - Printable Version

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The Lehvantian Scholar - Lehvant - 08-26-2022

Salvation in the Secular Age: Lehvant's Experiment with Community-Building and Spirituality

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of the book of the same title.


The modernization project of the French settlers in Lehvant was defined by a sense of disjointedness. Today, Lehvantians still use the idiom “to be like a Frenchman” to describe situations where someone is operating without any context of a particular environment. 

Even prior to the 1830 invasion of Jezairé, French pressure was the primary driver of modernizing reforms such as the establishment of equal citizenship instead of the former religious hierarchy, more rights and opportunities for women, and banning practices such as the death penalty. 

This state-driven process of reform, however, created an over-empowered state that came to define the beginning of the period of French rule. The highly centralized bureaucracy inherited by the French was especially destabilizing, which eventually led to the establishment of French Lycée systems to facilitate the education and indoctrination of technocrats. 

In the meantime, the erasure of the traditional “scholarly class” from the public sphere and the lack of coherence of the new bureaucratic structure to much of the public, led to the well-connected and well-spoken elderly community leaders of the time filling this vacuum in public life. The fact that these leaders’ spheres of influence were limited to neighborhoods rather than large districts shaped the community-building processes we see in Lehvantian society today.

Unlike the French rulers who implemented their modernization project wearing cultural blindfolds, the first elected President of Lehvant, Mehdi Kamran, was highly cognizant of these nuances while introducing his secularizing reforms. This is why, as the precursor to these reforms, he recruited many of these community leaders to begin introducing community practices and superstitions of good and bad luck that would have previously been shunned for being pagan in origin or idolatrous. One of the examples of these initial experimentations that remains today is burying pomegranate seeds in the foundation of houses to represent fertility and abundance. Especially in rural communities where agricultural production was of particular importance, superstitious burials such as this became increasingly popular.

This is why in Kamran’s visits to rural Lehvant following some of his more hard-hitting reforms, such as the abolition of religious-political authority and establishments from public life, he urged people to turn to the communitarian practices of village life. During one of such visits, a villager pressed Kamran about how he is expected to repent, or if his government is forcing him to live in sin. In response, Kamran took the seeds of the olives he’d been served by an elderly woman, and planted one. Kamran famously then told the villager, “To plant a seed, to feed the earth and make something grow - what, if not this, could cleanse us from sin?”.   

The “sin gardens” popularized by this story have become a staple of spiritual life in Lehvant, where the structure of organized religion has over time been replaced by norms and practices that symbolize and emphasize collective responsibility. 
Such practices have evolved through meditations and interpretations written by scholars and theorized as a communitarian, hyper-socialized form of mysticism. Communitarian mysticism involves the belief that people collectively create their common material-spiritual reality, as an intertwining of dualities or opposites. 
 
In his magnum opus “The Dialectic of Spirituality”, Lehvantian divinity scholar Hugo Azimi writes, “Lehvantian mysticism signifies the prospect of a community which emphasizes labor-sharing as a driver of the common good, balancing each person’s knowledge with the intuitive wisdom of others.”. 
 
Azimi’s socialist reading of spiritual life in Lehvant was a novel approach for its time. Since then, however, an increasing amount of scholars argue that while decentralized, communitarian practices of spirituality were manufactured during the nation’s transition to secularism, it is one of several factors contextualizing the unexpected success of democratic socialism in Lehvant. In a conflict-ridden geography where promises of empowerment for the working class have died quick, violent deaths at the hand of power-hungry authoritarian leaders, Lehvant stands alone as a nation that has lived up to these promises and sustained decentralized, redistributive policies such as workplace democracies and a robust social safety net for several decades. 
 
Spiritual life in Lehvant has become the backbone and fabric of a society where people are governed as partners, not beneficiaries. 

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