Baha’i Perspectives

leila February 18th, 2009

I swirled the last of the borscht with my spoon, the pink liquid altogether too cheery for a soup originating in the former Soviet Union, and my mind drifted in and out of snippets of conversation that began: “That one time I had Dengue fever in Nicaragua…”

The five of us sat around a candlelit table, and I wrapped my scarf tightly around my neck, warming my hands over the tealights (“The heater never works downstairs!” Justin apologized), grabbing a glimpse of the world of three former Peace Corps volunteers in Ukraine and Nicaragua.

My friend Justin had invited me over that evening, via a message on Facebook: “I’m back in town! I live in a green row house on Capitol Hill! Come have borscht with us on Friday!” (I looked it up on Wikipedia. It was pink, and a soup. I almost backed out.)

So there I was, with an old friend from my carefree days as an intern, who used to wear thick black-rimmed glasses, dressed up as Borat for Halloween before Borat became a household name, and taught me how to play Coldplay on his electric piano. He and his roommate Kelly had just returned from two years of the Peace Corps in Ukraine, while Carly, Justin’s childhood friend, had spent her term in Nicaragua, warding off Dengue fever and attracting the indefatigable attention of locals who called her “La Chinita” (she’s of Korean descent).

As our ideas, experiences, and observations on the world– afar and in our backyard– mingled through the atmosphere that hovered above the tealights and the borscht, that one gray topic arose that has tinted many otherwise cheery Friday evening conversations: the financial crisis.

“I used to teach my students that our economy ran on debt,” Justin declared exasperatedly, of his post as a high school business class teacher in a small eastern Ukrainian town. “That a culture of debt was normal in the U.S. For two years!”

But as he and Kelly revealed more about their years in Ukraine, one thing became certain: The economic culture in that country, too, has its downfalls. Capitalist in name, to be sure, but the scornful looks they received when asking for correct change made them feel like Capitalist Pigs.

In a land where bronze Lenin statues still sprouted in town squares like stale dandelions from bygone seasons, the communism of its past still lingered in the air, it seemed.

With one foot in the realm of capitalism and another still dancing in the communist ways of decades past, its people still bore remnants of habits and norms of a discarded system. And, Ukranian and Russian media propagated exaggerated notions of excessive materialism in the United States, causing some to cling more tightly to their ways. While the capitalist system relied too heavily on “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” and American ways admittedly excessively individualistic, the Ukrainian culture’s emphasis on the collective and de-emphasis on personal responsibility wasn’t altogether healthy, they observed.

All of this made me wonder: In a certainly post-communist world, and with many capitalist assumptions crumbling that once held to be true– what might the economics of the future look like?

Now, I don’t profess to know much about economics, nor can I say much about post-Soviet economies. In fact, I know just as much about those two as I did borscht prior to that evening (which, by the way, is quite tasty if taken with a bit of sour cream, and in fact isn’t as pink as Wikipedia made it out to be).

But luckily, I’ve been reading the writings of Baha’u'llah, which has made my brain bubble the way Justin’s borscht did as I suspiciously stared at it stewing in the tin pot. So much so that much of what I want to say cannot fit into a meager blog post. And it’s gotten me thinking about: balance, dichotomous ways of looking at economics, how economic growth is defined, and where justice fits into all of this.

I’ll continue these nascent thoughts in Part II, but in the meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a quotation that asks us to shift our paradigm on economics and development. It’s from a statement prepared by the Baha’i International Community, the NGO representing the worldwide Baha’i community with its offices at the United Nations in New York and Geneva. Called The Prosperity of Humankind, it was first distributed at the U.N. World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995. While written over a decade ago, the words are chillingly relevant to the present state of the world. Hopefully, it’ll get your brain bubbling, too:

This unprecedented economic crisis, together with the social breakdown it has helped to engender, reflects a profound error of conception about human nature itself. For the levels of response elicited from human beings by the incentives of the prevailing order are not only inadequate, but seem almost irrelevant in the face of world events. We are being shown that, unless the development of society finds a purpose beyond the mere amelioration of material conditions, it will fail of attaining even these goals. That purpose must be sought in spiritual dimensions of life and motivation that transcend a constantly changing economic landscape and an artificially imposed division of human societies into ‘developed’ and ‘developing’.

– The Prosperity of Humankind

Tags: development, economics, financial crisis

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