Bahá'í Strategies for Social Change

One of the things that have kept many sincere, enthusiastic people from achieving greater, more lasting changes faster is a tendency to jump right from the perceived problems to the imagined answers, without first stopping to try and really understand the problem first. This can result in treating mere symptoms as if they were root causes, and applying simple palliative remedies as if they could cure the origins of the diseases. If you develop an itchy rash all over your body, which would be the better doctor, the one who prescribed a soothing ointment to put on each red spot, or the one who looked deeper and diagnosed that a liver disorder was causing it (which the medicated ointment would have aggravated) and cured you of that?

Of course, there is always the danger of analyzing or studying issues ad nauseum, without doing anything concrete about them. However, but as the liver example illustrates, there is an even greater danger in not stopping to think before acting. Let’s suppose that Martin Luther King and his supporters had limited themselves to identifying and responding to individual acts of injustice. They would have expended enormous amounts of time, energy and resources, and would have ended up merely fanning the flames of racial animosity, thereby worsening the problem instead of improving it. By looking deeper to the common source of those individual problems, they were able to achieve fundamental changes in the legal and political structures of American society that were causing them. Perhaps the very root of that disease lies even deeper, as it has still not been solved entirely, but the case of the Civil Rights Movement is still a good example of the value of stopping to think more deeply first.

1. Getting to the Roots
It is important to respond to the immediate needs of those around us. However, once again, we should not let such palliative actions distract us from the socio-structural causes of those needs, or lead us to believe that by performing them we have done all that we can or should do. Otherwise, to the extent that we limit our actions to individuals’ immediate problems, we might be unwittingly helping to legitimize the very status quo that causes those problems in the first place. Authors like Noam Chomsky (see “Manufacturing Consent”) suggest that the great economic and political powers that benefit the most from the status quo are actively encouraging people to concentrate on individuals’ immediate problems in order to distract them from studying and attacking those structural root causes.

Let us take another analogy to illustrate this. Imagine that the world’s current political and economic order is an huge machine that provides enormous privileges, wealth and power to its handful of owners, and affords an empty “living” to those serving the machine, but dashes the hopes and destroys the lives of the great masses of humanity. Most people are taught from childhood that the machine is a permanent, unchangeable aspect of the world, and that the most they can ever hope to achieve is to pick up the broken pieces of the lives it destroys. So they busy themselves with that overwhelming “work at hand”, and ignore the why and how those lives are being destroyed in the first place. If anyone pauses to study the machine and think about how to stop it or change its functioning into something more benevolent, they are accused of idle philosophizing, utopian thought, and not worrying about the real needs of those around them. As said before, some authors actually maintain that these ideas are being fed to the public on purpose in order to perpetuate the hegemony of the status quo.

The result of all this is with what Alfie Kohn calls “the entrenched reluctance of Americans to consider structural explanations for problems”. He says, “We prefer to hold individuals responsible for whatever happens or, at the most, to find a convenient proximate cause. Rarely are events understood in their historical or economic or social context” (see his book “No Contest – The Case against Competition”). There seems to be a deep-rooted belief that if we could just solve each individual’s problems, we would have the kind of world we hope for. However, it doesn’t work that way, because there are “systemic” problems that transcend the individual ones. Most of the individuals serving the status quo machine are kind, loving, generous human beings who have little or no idea what the machine they serve is doing to others, and bitterly deplore the suffering they see around them. To use another analogy, if a tree is starting to lean towards your roof and is threatening to fall on top of it, it would make no sense to try and cure each individual cell in that tree, thinking that this will solve the problem. You need to think of the overall structure of the tree and how to stop it from leaning.

2. Example: Social and Economic Development
A case in point. Originally, most “international development agencies” started out working under an “aid” or “welfare” mentality, which consists of simply giving impoverished individuals (usually children) material things (food, clothing, books, etc.) under the simplistic assumption that the cause of poverty is merely the lack of those things. Gradually they have learned that you can best help an individual child by giving things to its family (employment, housing, lighting, improved stoves, etc.), then that families were best helped by giving things to their communities (roads, water and sanitation, schools and hospitals, etc.), and now that community problems are best solved by correcting structural inequalities at a national and even international level (social, economic and political arrangements, etc.).

These agencies are also learning that by providing individuals, families and communities with “assistentialism” or direct “welfare” type assistance, the hidden message being received is that this aid is given by their “rich neighbors” because they are unable to help themselves. This type of “paternalism” (doing for others what they can do for themselves) confirms and deepens their feelings of impotence, which only worsens the problem. For more on this, please see two other posts in this same blog, on “Wealth and Poverty” (the history of “development”) and “Overcoming Paternalism” (reflections on our learning process).

One excellent program that offers one alternative to this type of “development” is the so-called “Rural University” run by a Bahá'í-inspired Colombian foundation called FUNDAEC. It provides rural youth with higher education using a method called the Tutorial Learning System (SAT from the Spanish “Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial”). Instead of having to attend expensive city colleges that train them for city jobs, it provides them with knowledge and skills that will be useful in their home communities. The curriculum is built around their own research of their communities’ needs and aspirations. Through cooperative learning and periodic visits from their tutors, they study subjects that they then apply directly to solving the needs and achieving the visions of their communities. It is tremendously empowering and has achieved magnificent results throughout Colombia and other countries where it has been implemented.

3. Bahá'í Strategies for Social Change

The over-riding purpose of the Bahá’í community is to contribute to the building of a new world civilization, which some religions would call “building the kingdom of God on earth”. Towards that end, three of its main ‘lines of action’, so to speak, are community building, social action, and participating in the discourses of society. Each of these line of action builds upon the previous one, and culminate in what some Christian groups call “witnessing” or “being a living witness” to the fact that a different way of life is indeed possible.

• Community Building
The first line of action is called “community building”, which entails finding people who accept and commit to the Bahá’í Faith, empowering them (spiritually and otherwise) for service through the Ruhi Institute and other means, and developing the administrative arrangements needed to organize and orient that service. In this way, over its 166-year history, the worldwide Bahá’í community has grown to some 6 million members from about 2,100 indigenous tribes, races and ethnic groups, organized in approximately 100,000 local communities in virtually every country and territory of the world, with its literature translated into more than 800 languages. The Bahá'í concept of “community” is not as geographically-centered as for other groups. In fact, the Bahá'í Faith has been listed by the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the second most widespread religion in the world (in terms of geographic reach) after Christianity as a whole.

• Social Action
A second line of action is called “social action”, which is basically putting those communities and their “human resources” at the service of the needs of the world. This can include anything from very simple, short-term activities like tree-planting by children, to more complex, on-going socioeconomic development projects such as radios, schools, hospitals, etc., using trained professionals. The Bahá’í community currently has several thousand fixed-term activities and some 600 ongoing projects. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile offer examples of how this can work. The Bahá’í communities in those countries go out and identify the needs of their neighbors, taking advantage on their local knowledge of the area. They then notify the Bahá’í World Center of the resources needed to meet those needs (which actually come from the entire Bahá’í world), and then administer those resources in such a way as to ensure that they have the greatest possible impact. This locally-based approach avoids the problems that many international agencies have had in making sure their resources reach those who really need them the most. However, where there is no Bahá'í community or it is not strong enough to undertake such a project, funds may be channeled through such agencies.

• Participating in Discourse
A third line of action is called “participating in the prevalent discourses of society”, which is basically sharing with the greater public the lessons learned from the “community building” and “social action” efforts, in an attempt to influence the way rest of the world thinks, talks and acts about the world’s pressing problems. This sharing includes what Bahá'ís perceive as being the root causes of those problems, what their general approach to them is, what they have tried to do about them in daily practice, what results they have obtained using different approaches (both successes and failures), and what lessons they have learned from all of this that might be of value to others. This of course requires that Bahá'ís view their own efforts both humbly and objectively, and with a learning attitude. They also invite others to study their efforts from the outside, somewhat like a real-life laboratory.

There are several elements in this third line of action. Some are carried out through the United Nations offices in New York, Geneva and Brussels under the name of “Bahá'í International Community” (BIC), with consultative status before the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNESCO), and regular participation in conferences, congresses and seminars concerned with the socio-economic life of our planet. You can find many BIC statements and reports in the Internet here. There are also several Bahá’í Studies Associations around the world that seek to apply the Bahá'í teachings to the concerns of the world, and the “Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity” (ISGP), which trains college students to orient their careers towards service to humanity. Another element is the quarterly newsletter “One Country”, sent out regularly to leaders of thought and action all over the world.

Of course, these are not the only lines of action that the Bahá'í community uses in its work around the world, but they suffice to convey an idea of the overall approach that is used towards the building of a new world civilization.