Justice to Unity of Man

Doing Justice to the Unity of Man

By John Taylor; 2006 November 14

Last time we looked at the citation that gives the book we are reviewing its name, "The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch." (2.37) Today we are going to look at the paragraph that comes next, which is concerned with justice, especially distributive justice. We noted yesterday that Baha'u'llah leads up to His discussion of justice by establishing three preconditions of justice, free agency, wisdom and vision. All of these spring from the one source, the oneness of humanity, the fact that we are all leaves of one branch. As for oneness, consider the following utterance of the Master, as indirectly reported in a talk by Louis Gregory.

"A distinguished Southern educator who heard the Servant of God, His Holiness 'Abdu'l-Baha, address the Lake Mohonk Peace Conference in 1912, quotes Him as opening His luminous address by saying: "From time immemorial we have been taught the Unity of God, the Unity of God, the Unity of God! But in this day the divine lesson is the unity of man, the unity of man, the unity of man!" (Star of the West, Vol. 20, p. 9)

Close readers of this list will recall my surprising discovery that this talk given by the Master at the Lake Mohonk Peace conference is missing; it is not to be found in any published Baha'i sources, although Shoghi Effendi listed it first among the Master's accomplishments in America. So for the moment, this tantalizing second hand quote is our only known record of a no-doubt great event in the history of peace. And what a comment this is on the principle, Oneness of God, that we studied throughout this year! Truly, you cannot talk about the Oneness of God today without starting at the Oneness of humanity and finishing there. The same is true of justice, it begins and ends in unity, the unity of God, the unity of humanity. Injustice uses some variant of the opposite stratagem, divide and conquer. Once atomized, it is easy for the power monger to mop up.

Here is a recent example of divide and rule strategy, perhaps the most egregious and influential example in recent times. A relatively obscure academic movement in the 1970's called "public choice theorists" upheld a truly diabolical proposition, that all of us are inherently greedy and untrustworthy. Although many teachers and philosophers have recognized that everything we can shake a stick at has a tinge of self interest, teachers as spiritual as Jesus and Bishop Berkley, public choice theorists carried the hypothesis to where it had never been.

"By defining greed as the only natural impulse -- the one that lies at the root of all human behaviour -- they have dismissed everything else as unnatural and artificial, ultimately an illusion or simply wishful thinking. Greed, the public-choice theorists declare, is all there really is." (Linda McQuaig, All You Can Eat, Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism, Penguin, Toronto, 2001, p. 38)

If greed is the blood in our veins, even our highest hopes and ideals must be selfish, mere will to power. Whenever people enter a group they inevitably seek that group's interests over all others. Government officials, no matter how public spirited they think they are, always seek to fatten their own coffers at the expense of every other part of society. Corruption is the norm and we just have to deal with it by making government as tiny and helpless as possible.

Although their writings were dubious and jargon ridden, the ideas were avidly taken up by wealthy elites and their political minions. The UHJ's peace message was written, in part, to refute their insidious take on human nature. They adopted clever, chameleon-like deceptions. In appealing to democracies, the public-choice vision masqueraded as the healthy skepticism that every independent minded citizen has for governments. It is true that leaders often slip into tyranny, but now it was believed that they must do so because that is human nature. They spread total suspicion and even hatred of anything to do with government; thus a clever few bamboozled the best educated, most sophisticated and empowered public in history. A godless, divisive, cynical theory provided intellectual justification for the huge swing to the right that only now is starting to slow. In the late 90's they even figured out how to enlist extreme Christians to their cause. The result has been that what few, inadequate regulations we already had to protect the environment and the general public interest were severely truncated and perhaps fatally compromised. We shall return to public choice theory and its reductionistic insults to human nature presently.

Here is the paragraph that will preoccupy us for this and no doubt many future essays to come. It offers a definition of justice that I do not think I have seen before in one place in the Baha'i Writings. Anyway, without further ado:

"Justice, which consisteth in rendering each his due, dependeth upon and is conditioned by two words: reward and punishment. From the standpoint of justice, every soul should receive the reward of his actions, inasmuch as the peace and prosperity of the world depend thereon, even as He saith, exalted be His glory: The structure of world stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment. In brief, every circumstance requireth a different utterance and every occasion calleth for a different course of action. Blessed are they that have arisen to serve God, who speak forth wholly for His sake, and who return unto Him." (Tabernacle 2.37)

Literally at the center of this citation is a quote from the Great Being statement on justice in the Lawh-i-Maqsud that we examined here recently, "The Great Being saith: The structure of world stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment." (Tablets, 163) Taken in context, both here and in the Maqsud, the Great Being is saying that our world will be inherently unstable, insecure and retarded as long as the poor majority of the human race are excluded. Living in indigence, they have neither hope nor fear, and reward and punishment have nothing to say to them. This is an injustice of monumental proportions. Therefore, anything less than complete resource sharing would insult our humanity and compromise all of our rights.

This is even more explicit when we look at how the Master expounded upon Baha'u'llah's teachings for world stability and order:

"This readjustment of the social economy is of the greatest importance inasmuch as it ensures the stability of the world of humanity; and until it is effected, happiness and prosperity are impossible." (Promulgation, 181-2)

"At that time He wrote Epistles to the kings and rulers of the world, calling upon them to arise and cooperate with Him in spreading these principles, saying that the stability and advancement of humanity could only be realized through the unity of the nations." (Promulgation, 388)

`Abdu'l-Baha's masterpiece on development, The Secret of Divine Civilization, is especially firm on this point. He asserts here that our one an only hope for advancement is that a number of enlightened individuals will arise on behalf of all the highest interests of all humanity. In other words, everything depends not upon a formula or institution, a trick or a technique, but upon right minded, active individuals, moved by faith, who will look at the situation and do the right thing. Once they arise on our behalf, they erect the ways and means by which our interests are assured. They practice justice by using their minds for what they were made, then enlightening the public in what is good for them. That good is constantly changing and only your man on the spot is going to know what to do. This may be why Baha'u'llah follows the Great Being statement on justice in Tabernacle by saying that,

"every circumstance requireth a different utterance and every occasion calleth for a different course of action."

So behind this understanding of justice is a firm conviction that humans are capable of selfless, disinterested investigation, and that the public is capable of understanding and responding to their initiative. I am reminded of an anecdote of when Tommy Douglas, voted our greatest Canadian, came to Hamilton to give an abstruse talk to steel workers about economics and foreign policy. So clear was his exposition of what most people regard as a boring and inaccessible topic that at one point a young girl in the audience stood up and shouted, "I understand! I understand!" That is what justice assumes and demands of both teachers and the taught. Justice is leadership of teachers and doctors who have faith in us, who know in their bones that it is worth the effort to try to change human nature, and that our nature can be changed and made into something new and admirable. Anything less lets viruses and demons into the public sphere, as Linda McQuaig eloquently points out:

"In debates in the social sciences, there is always a tension over the issue of what should be defined as natural and what should be defined as the mere product of human conditioning. If something can be defined as natural or innate, we are less inclined to try to change it or modify it, believing that we are dealing with part of the apparatus of nature. How astonishing, then, to think that the greed impulse in humans -- long the object of constraints in one form or another in the interests of social harmony -- has now been reclassified as natural, indeed as the only natural human impulse! Stretton and Orchard note that the public-choice theorists have attempted "to persuade people that material greed is, and will inescapably remain, the single, natural, dominant motive of their political, economic and social behaviour." Such thinking clearly gives a green light to every greedy impulse that is coursing through our veins." (Id.)

Tomorrow we will continue attempting the impossible, to do justice to justice.