I’ve been following with interest a debate (a long-standing one which has recently hotted up) about the effectiveness of giving aid to developing countries. On one side is the argument that developmental aid and humanitarian assistance has been proven to save millions of lives, and it is not just effective, it is necessary. On the other hand, some (like the author of Dead Aid Dambisa Moyo) say that aid is deterimental to those it is trying to help, bringing corruption, market distortion, further poverty and aid dependence.
My personal take is that it is not that there is good aid or bad aid, but that the circumstances in each situation will determine if it is effective aid or not. Throwing money at a problem will never completely solve it. If the underlying issues are not addressed, it’s just good money and effort after bad. And in particular so if aid agencies, humanitarian organizations and governments don’t recognize the power in grassroots communities and in each individual. We need to harnass the potentialities latent in each member of the human race, empowering them to become a source of social good and development.
And you really don’t need to go further than the story of William Kamkwamba to see what I mean. At 14, the Malawian boy is forced to drop out of school for lack of fees. Inspired by a book in the village library (donated by a development agency!), William decides to build a windmill in order to provide electricity for his family home. He is undettered by the fact that he is not very educated, that he has no access to materials and parts for the windmill, or that no-one has ever done it before. Relying mostly on the illustrations in the book, and scrounging for scrap metal and materials others have thrown away, and ignoring the ridicule aimed at him, William built a crude but effective windmill which powered four light bulbs, a radio and cellphone charger.
Since he built his first windmill, William has gone on to build five more, in and around his village. He has been given a scholarship to the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. He has given talks and speeches at international conferences and received worldwide acclaim. He is working on projects dealing with HIV, malaria, solar power and clean water. And last month, at the age of 22, his autobiography “The Boy Who Harnassed the Wind” was released worldwide.
When I read his story, and watched him speak, William humbled me, but most importanly, gave me hope. And reminded me of the emphasis the Baha’i Faith places on the potentialities in each one of us, and of our duty to make the most of them:
Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom…
Is any larger bounty conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find that by the confirming grace of God he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men? No, by the one true God, there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight.
Silence descends upon an arena of thousands. Only the quiet drumming of hearts beating faster and faster in anticipation pierces the thick hush of a crowd poised to triumph or mourn. In a space filled seconds before with screaming and cheering, all stay perfectly still awaiting the sound- the trumpet blast for some and the executioner’s call for others-of ball in net. Woosh. Gooooaaal!! Thousands jump to their feet. All screaming. Some in celebration. Others in despair. Some avid fans who are easily riled up. Others who actually staked significant sums on that momentous ball-in-net moment.
The drama of it all is not lost on me. The excitement, the rush of blood to the head, the endorphines. I get it. Sports are a big deal. For countless reasons. Some meritorious; others not so much.
Clearly our financial woes are not solely material. Our financial problems are deeply rooted in the decaying morality of a materialistic credo that gorges on frivolity, o.d.’s on self-centered pleasure pursuits and panics at the thought of having to prolong gratification for any considerable amount of time.
Does this mean we should send our money off right now to XY&Z agency so that it can buy mosquito nets for those who need them? Is that the solution? It might help, but it’s like plugging one leak in a dam so filled with holes it’s about 10 seconds away from bursting. I’m not discouraging charity. I’m just saying it’s not enough. A solely material solution to one ramification of a moral crisis is not going to rebuild the dam. Besides, with countless episodes of corrupt leaders whose sticky fingers dripping in greed just can’t seem to find their way out of the money jar, it’s not entirely implausible that your capital will help a self-indulgent hypocrite finance his or her latest vacation home.
The problems are complex. The symptoms are overwhelming. And as a first step we need to rightly diagnose the disease. If we keep insisting that impoverished nations, for instance, need nothing more than money thrown at them, or that populations dying of venerial diseases simply need more condoms, the overwhelming symptoms will not only never disappear, they will continue to amass until there really is no hope.
So then is the solution merely spiritual? Should we all organize 24-hour prayer campaigns and write pretty songs and lengthy blog posts to praise peace and talk about how we’re all one and the children are our future? Is that going to feed the starving children? Is that going to cure the diseased?
For an entire nation to be lifted out of poverty, you can’t just erase debt and then hope the nation doesn’t amass it again. I don’t think there are easy answers or simple solutions to any of this. You can’t wave a wand and expect fundamental problems to just vanish. But you can’t avoid problems simply because you don’t have the solutions. These age-old problems need new approaches. The people of the world need to be empowered. The most oppressed from among us need to have a voice. Not just a venue in which to speak. But they need to actually be given tools to learn how to use their voices.
Part II will focus on what actually constitutes oppression, as well as some of the fledgling movements aimed at empowering all human beings.
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?
I asked this in my last post, and since then, I couldn’t help but notice a proliferation of angsty articles that asked: If not capitalism, then what?
You may also note that I wrote my article an embarrassingly long time ago. I could say that it’s because I’ve been busy (which is true), but it also has to do with the fact that I simply couldn’t find an answer to the question I posed.
Well, I still don’t know the answer. But lucky for you all, I had a few “see the light” moments this week.
So I’ve talked about economics– most of us take as fact that economic activity is the central process of social existence. And that knowledge– often labeled as “information”– is useful inasmuch as it’s an input for the production of goods and services. This is reflective of a view of society that is rooted in materialism, one manifestation of which is the belief, held as truth, that economic development lies in economic growth, which is measured by GDP per capita. Indeed, the idea of “economic development” has largely materialistic assumptions underlying the process: that growth and development is characterized by material well-being.
Material well-being is crucial, of course. But is it really the end, or a means to an end? What is the end we’re looking for? Right now, it seems that economic activity and the creation of wealth is being placed at the center of everything. But is the creation and distribution of wealth the end to which we should strive?
The Prosperity of Humankind, the 1995 document that I also quoted from in my last post, makes an interesting assertion:
The tasks entailed in the development of a global society call for levels of capacity far beyond anything the human race has so far been able to muster. Reaching these levels will require an enormous expansion in access to knowledge, on the part of the individuals and social organizations alike. Universal education will be an indispensable contributor to this process of capacity building, but the effort will succeed only as human affairs are so reorganized as to enable both individuals and groups in every sector of society to acquire knowledge and apply it to the shaping of human affairs.
In other words, rather than the creation and distribution of wealth as the center of development (development as the distribution of material wealth), what’s being posited is development as the endowment of the wealth of knowledge: not only the generation and acquisition of knowledge, but its application. Given this, knowledge, rather than material wealth, then becomes the “currency” by which one needs to function, the wealth of a person, in a sense. In this regard, ‘Abdu’l-Baha writes in His treatise to the peoples and rulers of Persia, The Secret of Divine Civilization:
…the happiness and greatness, the rank and station, the pleasure and peace, of an individual have never consisted in his personal wealth, but rather in his excellent character, his high resolve, the breadth of his learning, and his ability to solve difficult problems.
The generation and application of knowledge, then, becomes the center of humanity’s collective existence. What is necessary for this is capacity-building: that all participation of all, that all become the protagonists of their own development. For example, the present state of the world is such that much of humanity are “users of products of science and technology created elsewhere.” But sometimes, these products of science and technology may, at best, not be applicable to the needs of a community or society, or at its worst, be detrimental to its environment, lead to the loss of livelihoods, of land, and so on. But if individuals in a community were raised up with the capacity to examine and address challenges in their communities and societies, and apply the knowledge with which they’ve been endowed, then we’d shift away from a top-down model that, in many respects, has become quite problematic.
So what has started as a conversation on capitalism, communism, and a future models of economic has (rather unintentionally) turned into one that flips the way we look at economic activity– asking us, what if it isn’t the be-all, end-all? If we’re seeking a world in which all have a part to play (as the present state of affairs is not reflective of that, where the materially wealthy holding a seemingly insurmountable advantage over the materially poor), then certainly the paradigm that exists today must undergo a change.
I’m not as confused as I was the night I was sipping borscht in the candlelight, but the fact that I’ve struggled to eke out this post means that we’ve still got a long way to go. Thoughts are most welcome.
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’.
This video is another gem from DoubleTake.tv, a site that contains a growing collection of short Baha’i-inspired documentaries. Watch how an innovative “white bloke” living on the island of Vanuatu rolls up his sleeves and gets down to finding a homegrown solution to the problem of rising fuel prices.
Finished watching?
Let’s reflect for a moment on the video and then turn our thoughts towards the bigger picture…
The Biofuel Conundrum
Biofuel production is without doubt one hot topic these days. It provokes an entire spectrum of opinions from advocates and critics alike. Having initially been devised as a mechanism to reduce the world’s dependence on crude oil, the mass production of biofuel using food crops has precipitated another crisis — in the form of rocketing food prices and increased global famine. What are the possible reasons for this wretched situation? Was this outcome inevitable, or was it somehow avoidable?
Being a regular user of public transport, I’ve had to endure yet another rise in the base taxi fare, as well as a significant price rise for bus tickets, all in the past month. Clearly, biofuels haven’t lowered fuel prices — not for me anyway — and the trip over to the local grocery store is becoming more and more of a nervous window-shopping experience. So what exactly has gone wrong?
As usual, I dive into the World Wide Web to try and figure things out. A Time magazine article, Solving the Biofuels vs. Food Problem, points out that in 2006 alone the U.S. produced 4.86 billion gallons of corn ethanol. That sounds like a lot, but what does it really mean? Well, United Nations expert Jean Ziegler, explains that it takes the same amount of corn to produce 13 gallons of ethanol as it does to feed a child for one year. Divide 4.86 billion by 13 and we have 374 million starving children who could have been fed, all by a single country!! And this was back in 2006 — I can only imagine the numbers would have shot up by now. Ziegler, clearly exasperated by this situation, goes on to comment:
…the effect of transforming hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of maize, of wheat, of beans, of palm oil, into agricultural fuel is absolutely catastrophic for the hungry people… So it’s a crime against humanity… What has to be stopped is… the growing catastrophe of the massacre (by) hunger in the world.
Based on this statistic alone, it would take a foolhardy person to reject Ziegler’s statement outright.
When Baha’u'llah, Prophet Founder of the Baha’i Faith, pronounced that the prevailing world order is “lamentably defective”, need we look any further for proof?
Couldn’t They Have Waited?
Both Ziegler and the author of the Time article state that non-food alternatives for biofuel, such as switchgrass (which is energy-efficient) and Jatropha shrubs (which grow well on poor land), are only a few years away from becoming viable for mass production. The Science Blog reports on an even more promising alternative, a grass called Miscanthus. Why then, do the economically advantaged countries not wait a little while longer? Surely it should be obvious that all this excess corn can quite easily feed the world’s hungry population. Why do these countries ruthlessly trade human lives in order for their citizens to drive a few extra miles on the highway?
Tragically, what Bahá’ís see in present-day society is unbridled exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as the operation of “impersonal market forces”… What they find themselves struggling against daily is the pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of “science”, that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness.
(Commissioned by The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, p. 137)
This captures, in essence, what Baha’is believe to be the root cause of humanity’s ills. What is completely disregarded by our present economic and political systems are those universal spiritual qualities spoken of in the Holy Books of the world’s religions — justice, honesty, trustworthiness, generosity, love of one’s neighbour and so on. Indeed, it is puzzling to observe how these guiding principles, which govern the behaviour of righteous individuals across just about every society, are conveniently swept under the rug in debates on international policy.
Having said this, individual transformation, although vital, is alone not enough. It is becoming increasingly urgent for nations to acknowledge that they belong to a single common homeland known as planet Earth, and that the good of the whole can never be achieved without sincerely seeking the best for each and every part. This implies moving from a culture of competition for natural resources towards one of collaboration. The implications of this change of thinking would be nothing short of revolutionary, and revolution, it seems, is precisely what is needed.
Sure, it is easy to pass this off as some fanciful notion and continue seeking the latest popular explanation as to why our world systems are just so volatile. Commonly-heard phrases like “economic downturn”, “instability in the Middle East”, “rising interest rates”, “loss of investor confidence”, “farm subsidies” are forever making the rounds in the media, and people blindly accept these for the very reason that they are impersonal. These phrases, in my opinion, are comfortable to accept because they do not challenge the status quo. They do not challenge ingrained patterns of human and societal behaviour. Instead, all they do is mask the reality that we are governed by a system that has long passed it’s sell-by date; one which is described as “morally and intellectually bankrupt” by The Universal House of Justice. The only solution that will ensure a long-term future of peace and prosperity is spiritual — it can only be spiritual.
But what to do about the biofuel problem?
Ahh, the million dollar question. Obviously there is no such thing as a quick fix. Nevertheless, Baha’is believe that even the most complex economic problems can be solved through the application of spiritual principles. Now, supposing for a moment that Tony Deamer’s coconut fuel initiative in Vanuatu became a candidate for large-scale production. What are some questions that we would hope the Government would ask? What are some suggested potential international guidelines on this matter? Here is a quick list that came to my mind:
What is the nutritional value of the crop in question? Is it a viable source of food for the world’s population?
What is the current economic state of the country in question? In what ways can the money saved on importing fuel be channeled towards improving education, health care etc?
Will the by-products of the fuel extraction process have any worth or be discarded as waste?
What is the potential environmental impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions etc?
How do we “give back” to the land what has been taken from it?
In terms of coconut fuel in Vanuatu, you may find it interesting to read this article, in which Tony Deamer addresses some of the above questions.
A sincere longing for being of use and helping one’s surroundings is a natural driving force that most people have. In the Baha’i Faith, love and service to mankind are regarded as “the worthiest and most laudable objects of human endeavor”, through which we can also develop virtues and spiritual qualities within ourselves. In the Baha’i community, the courses of the Ruhi Institute are being used to train individuals to develop skills and attitudes needed to succeed in this endeavour. The courses are offered at the grassroots level and are designed to instill in participants the capacity, as well as the confidence, to embark on service activities aimed at gradually uplifting the wider community.
The Ruhi Institute is an educational system that was originally developed under the guidance of the Baha’i community of Colombia in the 1970s, and is now being used all over the world. Based on the Writings of the Baha’i Faith, the material aims at giving its participants an understanding of the presented topics, not only on a level that generates reflection and analysis, but, more crucially, on a level that facilitates action and change:
O SON OF DUST!
Verily I say unto thee; Of all men the most negligent is he that disputeth idly and seeketh to advance himself over his brother. Say, O brethren! Let deeds, not words, be your adorning.
The main sequence of the institute consists of seven books, each with a specific theme and an act of service tied to it. The books are studied in study circles consisting of one tutor and 3-10 participants. Some of the themes of the main sequence are “Reflections on the Life of the Spirit” and “Teaching Children’s Classes”. The last book of the sequence is a tutor training, after which the participant herself/himself can serve as a tutor.
The Ruhi Institute has come to spread all over the world, being used by Baha’is and their friends from the Kiribati Islands in the South Pacific Ocean to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland in Northern Europe. Of course, culture, weather and tradition influences the shape and expression of the study circles in different corners of the world, but they all have in common the purpose of educating and training their participants to be of service to their fellow beings and to mankind.
The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.
(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 259)
I ended my last post on the documentary film “God Grew Tired of Us”, about the Lost Boys of Sudan emigrating to the United States, by noting the clash between two opposing ways of life, aspects of which were reflected in miniature throughout the film. An example was a scene where the boys were filmed going about their errands in a group, as was the norm back home. This aroused the suspicion of onlookers, eventually leading to one person phoning the police, who in turn ordered that the boys should refrain from walking around in groups. Watching this scene, you will come to your own conclusions regarding the underlying motives behind this incident as they weren’t explored in any further detail during the film.
Nevertheless, we observe a clash of two worlds. We see a demonstration of modern society’s “individual is king” ideology that tenaciously upholds individual rights and liberties, in this case the perceived right to safety. This right is a given, yet if it is established that the boys have not caused any harm and that they merely prefer walking in groups, should this factor not also be taken into consideration? One may also ask how much the group’s ethnic background had to do with the police decision, and so on and so forth, but this would be an entire discussion of it’s own! The key point here is that, even when dealing with notions of individual liberty, one should carefully weigh such rights against the principles of equity and moderation.
…Bahá’u'lláh “inculcates the principle of ‘moderation in all things’; declares that whatsoever, be it ‘liberty, civilization and the like’, ‘passeth beyond the limits of moderation’ must ‘exercise a pernicious influence upon men’…
Of course, moderation is also vital in ensuring that we resist the temptation to hop to the other end of the ideological spectrum, namely an excessive collectivist culture. Much has already been written about the “pernicious influence” of Communism in stifling the flame of individual creativity and dismissing the importance of religious faith. In an extract from “In The Quantum Self: A Revolutionary View of Human Nature and Consciousness Rooted in the New Physics”, Danah Zohar makes some compelling observations about such extremes, or “splits”, in our thinking:
The split between the individual and his relationships led on the one hand to an exaggerated individualism, to a selfish will to power and possession, and on the other to an enforced communitarianism like that of Marxism, which denied the meaning or importance of individuals at all while stressing the absolute primacy of relationship.
The split between culture and nature led both to relativism of all sorts — factual, moral, aesthetic and spiritual (value judgments) — and to dogma and extreme fundamentalism. There seemed no middle ground between the two extremes of saying that a given way of looking at things was only one of many contingent and relative ways of looking at them, or between saying there was only one, true and absolute way of looking at them. There seemed no way to say that we were not either wholly creatures of culture, and therefore unrooted in any established facts, or wholly creatures of nature (of the given), with no flexibility or room for creative development.
In the West, these dichotomies robbed our individuality of its context and landed us in the deepest isolation, leading to narcissism. We were cut off from an outer confirmation of our inner life, leading to nihilism, and denied the confirmation of our ideas, leaving us with relativism and subjectivism. Each nourished a form of alienation, and the sum total of this alienation is the curse of modernism.
Zohar’s conclusions on these fragmented approaches to understanding human reality are echoed in the Baha’i Writings. So, where do the Baha’is stand? It could be said that the Baha’i model lies at the confluence of several lines of thought; and while aspects of each are recognized and their worth acknowledged, none of them are accepted in isolation. For example, on the necessary relationship between the individual and the collective, Shoghi Effendi states:
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.
(Compilations, The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 84)
Similarly, in stressing the importance of both material as well as spiritual education, Abdu’l-Baha offers the perfect analogy of the lamp and the light during one of His talks in the United States:
Since my arrival in this country I find that material civilization has progressed greatly, that commerce has attained the utmost degree of expansion; arts, agriculture and all details of material civilization have reached the highest stage of perfection, but spiritual civilization has been left behind. Material civilization is like unto the lamp, while spiritual civilization is the light in that lamp. If the material and spiritual civilization become united, then we will have the light and the lamp together, and the outcome will be perfect. For material civilization is like unto a beautiful body, and spiritual civilization is like unto the spirit of life. If that wondrous spirit of life enters this beautiful body, the body will become a channel for the distribution and development of the perfections of humanity.
(Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 11)
These passages only scratch the surface. Indeed, there is an enormous depth of knowledge in the Baha’i Writings in terms of gaining an appreciation of our role as individuals within society, on society’s effect on the individual, on the necessary duality of spiritual and material civilization.
The unease one feels when watching certain scenes in the film will hopefully force the viewer to question certain assumptions, leading to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human; an understanding that would harmonize rather than fragment, one that would accept that material existence is empty unless it is illumined by the light of the spirit, one that would acknowledge the totality of our existence both as creative individuals as well as vital actors in society.
We offer individual ideas and insights based on the Baha'i Writings, but do not represent an official voice. So once you've enjoyed reading through the articles, be sure to check out the official sites above.
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