Baha’i Perspectives

nadim April 11th, 2010

Of Americans under the age of 30:

• 33% prefer socialism over capitalism
• 37% prefer capitalism
• 30% are undecided

These statistics, from a 2009 Rasmussen telephone survey, were cited in Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story“.

At a glance these figures are surprising, coming as they do from the country that has historically prided itself in being the champion of free market capitalism. They reflect just how badly the financial crises of the last 2 years has shaken young people’s confidence in the once impregnable fortresses symbolised by New York’s Wall Street and the Square Mile in London. With jobs in short supply and a startlingly high ratio of unemployed university graduates, the sense of disillusionment is palpable.  And it hasn’t just been the youth. World leaders have been forced to sit up and scrutinise elements of a system that has lead to senseless exploitation of the masses, gross disparities between the rich and poor and blatantly unjust practices by individuals and corporations alike.

Just last week, President Sarkozy of France reiterated the plea in front of students at Columbia University:

The world economic regulations cannot go on as they are. We can’t accept a capitalist system without rules any more… Lack of rules will be the death of capitalism.

“Capitalism: A Love Story” begins with a sequence of flashing images, juxtaposing elements that precipitated the fall of the Ancient Roman Empire with correlating scenes from modern-day society. This impactful intro calls to mind the words of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, who once asked rhetorically:

Are we, the privileged custodians of a priceless Faith, called upon to witness a cataclysmical change, politically as fundamental and spiritually as beneficent as that which precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in the West?

Dr. Peter Khan, in his reflections on the 2009 Ridvan Message, examines the phrase in the message that calls on the Baha’i community to be conscious participants in “rebuilding a broken world”. Again, the metaphor of Ancient Rome is used. Civilizations don’t just come and go he reminds us — they exhibit cracks over time, often hundreds of years in the making, until eventually they crumble and collapse. Much has been written by various authors in an attempt to identify the fissures in the Roman Empire, some of which have been represented by Moore’s sequence of images…

• The disparity between rich and poor
• Too few jobs
• Games and spectacles “to keep idle citizens entertained”
• Rule by decree
• Irresponsible behaviour of public officials

Sounds like our world, right?

Not everyone agrees. Critics of Moore’s documentary-making style state that it is too black-and-white — everything is categorised as either right or wrong, focus is placed on extreme cases and subjects are often treated superficially. Some have taken issue with the subject matter directly, challenging his premise that the capitalist system is the main cause of the problems. One critic concludes with the following statement:

What he doesn’t tackle are the individual Americans who have made their own avaricious or unwise economic decisions… Perhaps what Moore should have condemned are greed and corruption. They are the human vices at the root of the issue and unfortunately, they can surface in any economic system.

Fair point. But one might then contend with this critic that, actually, many people were duped into the unwise decisions by unscrupulous bankers or mortgage lenders — that these individuals were merely naive — and the finger-pointing debate would cycle round again.

The Baha’i position accepts elements of both viewpoints. Neither should the capitalist system and the associated practices of corporations and big business be accepted as the hallmark of planetary organization — far from it — nor should the root causes of greedy and short-sighted behaviour be left unexamined. Pure capitalism, like socialism and other man-made systems preceding it, is a flawed system based on certain false assumptions about human nature and well-being (nevermind total disregard of the environment based on an antiquated assumption of inexhaustible natural resources), and is slowly unravelling before our eyes. Individuals too, while affected by the system in place, are certainly culpable for the unwise and harmful actions carried out under the pretext of personal rights and “getting ahead of the pack”.  Ultimately, the relationship between society and the individual is so intertwined and mutually affective that ignoring one at the expense of the other has to be viewed as simplistic.

With all of this as the backdrop, how are Baha’is, as re-builders of a broken world, as individuals ”anxiously concerned with the needs of the age”, going about their task? How is unity of focus and effort achieved in an environment where opinions on where to begin are so varied that one could quite easily spend a life fighting cause after endless cause… and still end up worse off? Do we tackle societal problems first and then look at individual behaviours next, or vice versa? Or do we take the visionary step of replacing the damaged shell of our present civilization with the foundations of an entirely new one?

Peter Khan neatly breaks down the immediate requirements…

How do you make a civilization?

A civilization involves a foundation of behavioral change through spiritual transformation. We can agree on that. A civilization depends upon certain moral and ethical, spiritual characteristics, but what else? What is the framework of the new civilization we are conceptualizing in this hypothetical example of given a blank sheet of paper and asked “please, set out a framework for a civilization”?

We would want to have certain things:

- We’d want an institutionalized practice of individual and community worship, for a variety of reasons

- We would want individuals comprising that civilization to engage in an exploration and application of divine teachings to daily life, so that we can build up a civilization in a reasonable and productive manner

- We would want civilized society to be imbued with a sense of altruism to the service of humanity. We don’t want selfish greedy people, but people who are altruistic, who think of the larger good.

- And essentially we would want them to transmit civilized values to the new generation of children and youth.

If you were to agree that those are the elements of the framework of a civilization then I must tell you, you have fallen into my trap, because what I have described are the elements of the core activities of the Five Year Plan. What I have referred to are things such as the devotional meetings, the institute process, study of the Ruhi Books, the focus on service to humanity, children’s classes, youth classes, the junior youth activities.

The point I make is that we are engaged, obviously in the spread of the Faith, in pursuit of the endeavors of the Five Year Plan and beyond, but far more than that we are establishing the roots of new civilization in our day-to-day activities of the present plan. This doesn’t mean that civilization will magically spring into being like the goddess Athena, rather it will come gradually, slowly, generation upon generation, decade upon decade, and century upon century, to realize its fruit in the Golden Age, but its roots are to be found in the activities of the present day at this time in history.

Tags: Baha'i core activities, capitalism, civilization, economics

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