dalsingh you didnt answer my question, please do! Show how iam in "danger of overemphasising what we have in common with conservatives at the expense of the big differences we have with them." Look in your community, how many good sikhs are conservatives, who keep to their own and do not draw attention to themselves by clamouring about the 'decline of sikhi', and instead are just happy to live their lives as good gursikhs. I know plenty of these people. They are successful in their careers, admirable in their conduct, respectable in their conservative opinions (as opposed to extremist ones); they are balanced individuals that make up the backbone of our community, our main financial contributors to our gurdware, the brains behind our business decisions (buy property here, or there, sell now or sell later, plan for the future expansion of sangat, etc). I know at least a dozen of such sikhs, and if you observe or talk to them, they are typically conservative.
Compare them to the extremists who so driven by their desire to better the sikh community that they start petty arguments, pick on respectable members of the sangat and chastise them over trivial 'flaws', wax nausiatingly about political matters without a sense of balanced perspective, demand unreasonably and excessively from others by measuring them against similarly unreasonable standards, are a nuisance in matters of leadership: causing needless arguments and conflict over elections and meetings, serve no useful purpose whatsover in our communities.
Conservative sikhs are sikhs who are conservative. They care just as much about Sikhi and sikh community as anyone else, but the difference between them and loud-mouthed reformists is that they simply arent interested in raising a ruckus and dividing the community. They are happy to teach their kids about Sikhi, serve as useful and reasonable members of the sangat, and not take that whole idealism thing too seriously. That doesnt mean they dont have high standards: they usually do, but mostly for themselves and their families. They are the uncles and aunties, the fathers and mothers, the experienced sikhs who've seen the world and have a great deal of common sense. They are grounded in reality and in reasonableness - the opposite of which is extremism and idealism.
I've read your other posts on this site dalsingh, and i've seen you lament that young sikhs do not care for tradition. Well dont you see that if you consistently adopt the neo-sikh perspective then the past doesnt matter so much, what we have now doesnt matter so much, there is nothing worth saving from the past, because if you look from the neo-sikh perspective all we have left worth saving is a few gurdware, a couple of granth birs, and some rustic weapons and relics of the great masters. Apart from that, you are inclined to view culture as something negative instead of something valuable. What we have, is what we have, but to the neo-sikh, that isnt good enough, and because it is not good enough, it is not valuable, and not worth saving. The neo-sikh might wax nausiatingly about 'saving sikhi', but he has in mind something that has never existed the way he thinks, and even if it did, it doesnt now, so the battle to save it has already been lost even before it began, and then he has nothing really worth fighting for. The conservative doesnt want to throw away what we have, the liberal is happy to throw it away, as long as he gets something perfect from it. This is why friends-of-humanity like Stalin, who rose to fame by wishing good for all those in their communities ,eventually ended up being such monsters. It is because they dont mind taking apart whatever we have now, in a hope for something much better in the future. They will spill much blood, but because it is for a 'good cause', they are happy to do so.
You asked me to recommend a book to read a few pages ago, and i've recently come across Khuswant Singh's two volume treatise on Sikh History. It is very well written and a pleasure to read. If you havent already seen it, i would urge you locate a copy.
Dalsingh, if you read nothing else of this post, read this paragraph. The reason you are so convinced the gurus were not conservatives is because you've heard only about the things they changed. There is no record, as far as i know, of the Sikh guru's day-to-day life, their ordinary and frequent actions and values because no one thought of recording them down, because they were simply taken for granted. For example, no one thought to record why the guru chose only male successors. These things and many more of them simply do not have any reason to be found, simply because they were actions that were in line with conventional morality and no one thought to ask why, because it didnt occur to them or even to the Gurus to do otherwise. Because there is no record of such things, unfortunately, sikh scholars make the mistake of characterising our gurus only as revolutionaries, when in fact they lived conservatively, but with some important exceptions. The backbone of sikh society then was conservative, they didnt worry about Aids and Gays, about feminism and about equality, about 'freedom of the individual', about revolutions and about communism. The sikh gurus didnt care about these things - and i cant prove that they didnt care about these things - but if you disagree with me, you must prove that they did care about these things. I am not misinterpreting history or anything like that, i am simply demanding proof before i accept these otherwise false claims. How can you say that this distorting history? I see in each of the examples you have given, the Sikh gurus acting in the wisdom and thought of saintly men who lived during and before the gurus, in seeing some practises as being evil and injust. The saints like Namdev and Kabir were openly critical of these evils, and so how can you say the gurus were driven simply by a desire to be revolutionaries, when the reasonable explanation is that the sikh gurus were the first proponents of those bhagats that actively opposed those evils? If such saints recognised evil as evil, then other good men must have thought so too, and if they did, then opposing the evil does not make one a revolutionary, because a conservative person would oppose evil too, if it were possible and rightful to do so.
You do accept that good men existed before the Gurus, dont you? The Sikh gurus werent the first righteous men to walk the earth. Even a cursory glance though a list of contributors to Guru Granth Sahib will demonstrate this to you. Sikhs arent in sole possession of the Truth - every sikh knows this. Reading through Sikh history I get the sense that the Sikhs have always cherished to cultivate good society, but if the only good society is sikh society then the Sikh message is clearly mistaken by wishing to unify mankind despite real and perceived differences. Preserving good society is not cared for by revolutionaries - they are more interested in changing it. The sikh gurus cared about society, but they also changed some things that were badly wrong.
You are making such an obvious mistake in logic. If you are against some particular injustice of inequality does not mean you are against inequality in general. If the Sikh gurus were revolutionaries does not mean they wanted their Sikhs to be too. The sikh gurus, it is obvious to me, were interested in good society.
Good society opposes certain evils. Those evils, some of them no longer exist, so we should no longer worry about them. Some still do, and they should be opposed, but its dangerous to generalise from these battles against injustice and evil and conclude that the Sikh must always be a revolutionary, that he must seek to create a perfect society, and that he is to finish what the Gurus started.
Have a read of Japji Sahib, if the gurus were not interested at all in existing society why would they so often talk about hindu gods? If theirs was a wholly unique and revolutionary message why isnt this borne out in sikh scripture? Why the insistance to reach all kinds of men, of different backgrounds if the Sikh message was so revolutionary that only brave new minds, free of existing prejudice, could grasp it? You will say no, ofcourse not, but that is just the point, the sikh guru's message would have been received and welcomed by good men everywhere because it was only repeating the voice of their conscience.
The fact is, after making those important changes to society which they did, and by teaching their sikhs about the Sikh way, they already achieved their goal of good society. This society was robust and tolerant enough to accept men of many walks. It was a wholly human affair - and it was so, because the sikh goals of good society correspond to the aims of good men in general. We still have such a society, more or less, and we ought to preserve it, as it is. But neo-sikhs slight it, ridicule it, and dismiss it away.
