Lights Out :: Baha'i Perspectives

Lights Out

nooshin February 4th, 2008

I’m no stranger to living in the 3rd World, and having experienced life in Zimbabwe, am able to take most things in stride. That’s probably why I have a more relaxed attitude towards the recent electricity outages than other South Africans. It’s the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that worries me: everyone accuses everyone else and no one will take any personal responsibility. The same business-owners who are crying over lost productivity and profits are still leaving all the lights on at night in their premises. People complain about being left in the dark, but aren’t looking at how they can cut their own consumption. Such selfishness is what has brought the whole planet to an environmental crisis and to such a frightening state of affairs.

The Bahá’í International Community, in its 1995 statement entitled “Conservation and Sustainable Development in the Bahá’í Faith” stated:

The rapid progress in science and technology that has united the world physically has also greatly accelerated destruction of the biological diversity and rich natural heritage with which the planet has been endowed. Material civilization, driven by the dogmas of consumerism and aggressive individualism and disoriented by the weakening of moral standards and spiritual values, has been carried to excess.

Bahá’ís believe that the solutions to the world’s problems—to poverty, crime, war and, yes, global-warming—are spiritual ones. When we accept as true the principle of the oneness of mankind, we will no longer be able to justify any selfish act. We will see the whole human race as members of our own family, and be just as concerned for their interests as we are for those of our own parents, sisters and brothers.

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind – the pivot round which all the teachings of Baha’u’llah revolve – is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations. Its implications are deeper, its claims greater than any which the Prophets of old were allowed to advance. Its message is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. … It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced. … It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarisation of the whole civilized world — a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.

(Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u’llah).