The Essay Before the Essay that Would not Die

The Essay Before the Essay that Would not Die


In order to orient you to the previous post, here is the essay that preceded it on the Badi list. Posting a blog here is still not completely clear to me, so this is good practice.



Responsibility, Right, Left and Center


by John Taylor; 13 May, 2004



Just. Trustworthy. Merciful.

Three words you don't often see mentioned together talking about leaders. Especially now, judging by the scandals and atrocities sweeping the headlines over the last few days. Feuding and fighting, many seem in an unspoken competition as to who can show the direct opposites of just, trusty, merciful.

We are all responsible first to God, then to all humanity. These three perfections of justice, reliability and mercy sum up all our duties, and especially those of our leaders. They were how Baha'u'llah describes the members of His Houses of justice in the holiest book, the Kitab-i-Aqdas. Specifically, the Guardian writes,


"In it He formally ordains the institution of the House of Justice, defines its functions, fixes its revenues, and designates its members as the Men of Justice, the Deputies of God, the Trustees of the All-Merciful..." (Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, 214)


What a wonderful picture of the political spectrum, the right, center and left! On the right, justice, in the center the reliability of a trustee or deputy. On the left, the all-merciful.

The other day we discussed an article from "The Age" in Australia that described how managers are using real-time interactive displays to deal with the complex challenges facing modern organizations. This set me to imagining what the cockpit or dashboard computer display might look like for a future trustee of a House of Justice or Assembly. Let us start with the three virtues mentioned above.

On the right wing the dial or other graphic would somehow measure justice, the virtue of the right. How do you nail down conservative social values like that? Certainly the dial could display traditional measures, like levels of employment, industrial productivity, and other markers of independence. But also, since Baha'u'llah holds the purpose of justice to be unity, the "right" dial could measure factors of social cohesion, such as the stridency of political debate. Social scientists reliably determine such measures by searching for the frequency that certain words turn up in selected texts. Another essential to justice is education, which is measured by dropout rates and the richness of vocabulary used in consultation. Any measure of education levels would be essential for understanding a people's ability to uphold justice.

The center and largest dial would show levels of trust and lawfulness, again as measured by polls, statistics and other scientific meters. This dial must be at the center because moderation and dependability are needed by every citizen, not just the left and right.

Trust is by far the most important factor in the political arena in the same way that faith is in religion and integrity in science. Governments are slapdash about dependability at lower levels. For example, my father as a small businessman soon learned by observing his bankrupted competitors that a government contract is the kiss of death. Being big and impervious, government is notorious for either failing to pay or delaying payment until it is too late. This is a very bad sign, and such indicators should be prominent on the dial.

On the left hand of our leader's dashboard would be dials measuring mercy, liberality and imaginativeness, as shown by negative factors like suicide rates, as well as positive ones like artistry, levels of gift giving, the number of celebrations, holidays and recreational activity, the amount of charitable giving, indicators of kindness in speech and writing, the amount of intermixing among cultures, how much effort is made to communicate and avoid conflicts, and so forth.

An example of a possible "left" indicator might be this: we know that Baha'u'llah said that words are either fire or milk, that the learned must speak with the kindness and mercy of milk. Social science should take this seriously and make up measures of kind speech (such as the frequency that words indicating courtesy are used) and apply them to all who enter the public forum. Publicly, the measure would protect privacy, but on the dashboard of every public servant would be a dial showing his or her individual level of kind speech, alongside the average among his or her peers.

I firmly believe that interactive computer-mediated displays will turn out to be far more than a mere high tech gadget. They will prove to be the growing outer expression of a spiritual principle. They are how "open systems" will be implemented. At root, the basic idea for these graphics comes direct from the Word of the Lord of the Age.

The Writings of Baha'u'llah make taking oneself into account into a universal duty to be performed not sporadically but regularly. He set it up early, in the Hidden Words and, climactically, in His Tablet to the Sultan. Being rooted in the Hidden Words, the dashboard is not just for leaders, it is for all. Yet the fact that He gave that advice to take himself into account daily to the Sultan, the tyrant responsible for most of His exiles and banishment, indicates how important accountability, being "plugged into the source of all Being is for every statesperson.