Sunday, July 01, 2007

Responsibility Without Borders

Responsibility Without Borders

By John Taylor; 2007 June 29


Today I want to talk more about a preoccupation here of late, decision making and authority.

Past decades have seen the rise of various professional service organizations calling themselves, "Doctors without Borders," "Engineers without Borders," "Journalists without Borders," and so on. I like that idea, because it describes just what we Baha'is are aiming for. A Baha'i is a citizen without borders. A Baha'i is someone who advocates leaders without borders. A leader without borders is anybody who seeks universal benefit over narrow, temporal good for a few. A polity is a planet without borders with leaders who do not see imaginary borders dividing us and making the whole weak. A leader without borders does not accept that power or statesmanship are the concern and responsibility of a few. We must decentralize power, take responsibility on our own shoulders and learn about power, learn how to rule ourselves first, so that each of us will know how to become our own leader without borders.

In matters of power, as with everything, moderation rules. Most people think of the saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" as coming from Lord Acton in the 19th Century, but he no doubt learned it straight from Plato. Plato learned his crowning lesson about politics in the bitterness of old age. The communitarian idealism of the greatest of philosophers hit the fan of Realpolitik when, after writing the Republic, he attempted to put theory into action by teaching a young tyrant how to rule. Plato became entangled in the beehive of court intrigue and ended up being sold into slavery. Only the intervention of friends saved Plato in the nick of time. Chastened, Plato wrote his Laws, which I for one regard as his greatest work.

From a Baha'i point of view, the Laws gives us an intimate vision of what the Guardian called the Age of Responsibility," the virtue-ruled, moderate, decentralized, consultative Order that we are all working to enact. Here is what Plato's Athenian Stranger has to say about moderate, communitarian power.

"... if any one gives too great a power to anything, too large a sail to a vessel, too much food to the body, too much authority to the mind, and does not observe the mean, everything is overthrown, and, in the wantonness of excess runs in the one case to disorders, and in the other to injustice, which is the child of excess. I mean to say, my dear friends, that there is no soul of man, young and irresponsible, who will be able to sustain the temptation of arbitrary power -- no one who will not, under such circumstances, become filled with folly, that worst of diseases, and be hated by his nearest and dearest friends: when this happens, his kingdom is undermined, and all his power vanishes from him. And great legislators who know the mean should take heed of the danger." (Plato, Laws)

Moderate authority allows its wielder to stay flexible, to retain perspective, a sense of humor and the ability to be self-critical. That surely is what Baha'u'llah was talking about when He wrote in a prayer,

"...they who are in authority have borne witness to their own evanescence and to the evanescence of others, and discovered the eternity of Thy majesty, and of Thy sovereignty, and of Thy sublimity, and of Thy power." (Prayers and Meditations, 281)

Many have taken the vision of society that Plato advocates in the Laws as a dark and dismal one, but that is to confuse the external control of totalitarianism with the internal self-discipline of the Kingdom of Spirit. The latter, inner power, would rule in an equal, just and free community guided by Divine Law. This same vision, in this same order, equal, just, free, was the dream of Moses, the First Liberator. Under Pharaoh he envisioned equality under the law, as opposed to the inherent tyranny of rule by men, be they one man, a few men, or many. The only worthy law for this is one that comes from above. So, coming down from the Mount, He brought the Ten Commandments down, establishing justice and right.

I just learned something new about these ten Laws of Moses. It seems that the commandment not to covet is repeated in the original, "Thou shalt not covet, shalt not covet..." Some took this as a mistake, but others took it mystically, like the disconnected letters of the Qu'ran. They understand this repetition to imply that the need not to envy what others have is twice as important as any of the other Commandments. If so, that would jibe with what Plato says above, that immoderation is bad for two reasons, because it confuses and because it leads to injustice. If I covet the advantages of others, I confuse my emotions and misdirect them from the just solutions given me to solve.

After the death of Moses, a new generation of liberated Hebrew slaves, armed by equality and justice, entered the promised land of freedom, a land of milk and honey. But in the wilderness, it did indeed seem dark and dismal. But that was only a condition of slavery. The free must be free inside to see the beauty of responsibility. The land of plenty was not dark and dismal, it was bright and glorious when they were pure enough to take it.

One aspect of modernism has obscured our collective freedom, blocked our personal vision of collective vision, and made it impossible to appreciate the merits of Plato's communitarian ideal. I am speaking of psychologism. This offers a vision of human nature denuded of responsibility. An atheistic belief system, it asks, "Responsible? To what are human beings responsible?" Ultimately the only answer to that question is, "We are responsible to the One, to God." Since they deny God, the only alternative is an organic model of cure.

Harmful, deviant thoughts are caused by an illness that only a trained professional priesthood is qualified to cure. Psychiatry prescribes an indefinite period of therapy to remove the thorn of angst and subconscious urges. In Woody Allen's "Sleeper" his character sleeps two hundred years and when he awakes quips, "You know, I was going to an analyst and I think if I can get another couple of centuries of treatment I might actually be cured." Thus our sins and wrongs are not the result of wrong thoughts and actions; they are a sickness that afflicts us through no fault of our own. We need a cure to wrong thinking, even when caused by moral wrong.

I was startled to hear in the recorded talk of Curtis Kelsey (mentioned here a few days ago) that the Guardian told Zebby Whitehead that psychiatry is "foolishness." That is a strong blanket statement! But I had arrived at that conclusion myself, after a fair bit of reading, so I was not surprised. I had already set aside the following elaboration of this opinion of the Guardian, or something along the same lines, by Ruhiyyih Rabbani.

"Individuals, nations, Baha'i communities, the human race, are all held accountable for their acts. Though there are many factors involved in all our decisions, the essence of Baha'i belief is that God gives us the chance, the help, and the strength, to make the right one and that for it we will be rewarded and failing it we will be punished. This concept is almost the opposite of the teachings of modern psychology. This principle was brought home very vividly to me in my personal life. When the beloved Guardian did me the great and unexpected honour of choosing me to be his wife, I had the idea that for me, at least, all my troubles of wondering what my spiritual end would be were over. I was going to be near him. It was like dying and going to heaven where nothing more could get at me. One day, in the course of conversation, Shoghi Effendi said to me words to this effect: "Your destiny lies in the palm of your own hand!" I was horrified! It had come back to me, the life-long struggle to do the right thing for the sake of my own soul." (Ruhiyyih Khanum, The Priceless Pearl, 357-358)

Even a king has not "died and gone to heaven." He is not absolved of the same responsibility we all have. Indeed, when Baha'u'llah wrote to the Sultan, He counseled him to check in on his ministers more often. He had given them too free a hand. Plus, he should let his responsibility begin in his own taking of himself into account, "every day, every moment" of his life.

Presumably a moderate frequency of taking oneself into account, then, lies somewhere between daily and momently, at a sweet spot between turning to God every day and every second. The latter, every single thought in God, would clearly be too much. It would be an immoderate extreme and would lead to the narrow mind of a fanatic; it would make the organization under such a leader into a cult.

Most of all, it would snuff out responsibility rather than enhance it. It would make robots of us all.

We need ever to bear in mind that God wants for us real responsibility, not a sham that pretends to piety while absolving us our end of the bargain. That is the kind of thinking that created a power vacuum filled by the foolishness of psychiatry. It has made psychologism more attractive than its religious opposite, responsibility to God. We followers of religion must ever bear in mind what the Qu'ran advises, that God is the best of deciders and we need to follow His example of taking charge, not to cede everything to Him:

"In Allah do we put our trust. Our Lord! Decide with truth between us and our folk, for Thou art the best of those who make decision." (Qur'an 7, Pickthall tr)

This is not asking God to smite the rival beliefs to the Cause of God. It asks God to "decide with truth," that is, not to force the issue but to bring believers into the truth and thereby make theirs the best and most attractive alternative to all beholders. This is a scientific criterion. Power is the ability to find a mean that maximizes both our responsiveness and our responsibility. The Master wrote:

"In the same way, in all the action or inaction of man, he receives power from the help of God; but the choice of good or evil belongs to the man himself. So if a king should appoint someone to be the governor of a city, and should grant him the power of authority, and should show him the paths of justice and injustice according to the laws -- if then this governor should commit injustice, although he should act by the authority and power of the king, the latter would be absolved from injustice. But if he should act with justice, he would do it also through the authority of the king, who would be pleased and satisfied." (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, p. 250)

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