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Remembering a Forgotten Essay

By John Taylor; 2008 Apr 06, 17 Baha, 165 BE

I wrote the following last week but what with one thing or another, I did not send it out until now. For one thing, I could not come up with a title. Here are some attempts.

Diversity

American Politics

Atonement for forgetting earth hour

You have got to have a good title, but this time all I can come up with is "forgotten essay." I guess part of the reason for the delay was that I was worried about the fact that the essay is about politics. On the one hand, Baha'is are not to "breathe a word about politics," and on the other hand, the Guardian encouraged us to study social disciplines like sociology and political science in school. It would be as difficult to investigate history or political science without breathing a word of politics as it would be to go to medical school without saying a word about the human body. So I suppose what is meant by not breathing a word is that we should never throw fuel on the fire of a charged "politicized" atmosphere, not that we should not do our best to discuss and understand the political thing.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the essay I forgot to send.

Forgotten Essay

2008 Apr 02, 13 Baha, 165 BE

The "extra features" section of Michael Moore's Sicko DVD has an interview with a leftist politico from England. He talks about how in early youth he learned to lust after justice. He got it from his mother's teaching the message of Jesus, the imperative of protecting the oppressed from the powerful and privileged. Socialism, for him, means nothing else but the revolutionary message of Christ put into practical application.

He also points out that the redistribution of wealth to the majority is a natural and inevitable consequence of democracy. It always and inevitably goes like this: as soon as the poor, who are in the majority, get a say in the direction of their affairs, they immediately vote out what is against their interest. They support social programs. They see to it that the lion's share of a nation's wealth passes into their hands, either directly through communism or indirectly, through social programs like libraries, public works, universal health care and welfare.

Who can blame them?

But this point raised some nagging questions, not all of which are answered in Moore's DVD. If the poor majority know what is good for them and vote for that, why do the workers of the United States not vote for social programs? Why was communism rejected, even in the face of some of the grossest and brutal exploitation of the indigent in the world? Why with every passing year is its wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands? This is no tin pot dictatorship, it was second democracy in modern history, after Switzerland (and some African and Aboriginal tribes). Democracy, crippled as it is, is hardly unheard of in America. If so, why do Americans not turn to socialism with a vengeance?

What is going on?

An Op Ed article in the New York Times, evidently written in response to a speech on race by Barack Obama (featured on this blog lately) has been haunting me for the past week. It is as if the author of this article had heard set out an answer to the above questions about American democracy. In fact it raises one more question as well, is the article itself racist? It starts off,

"In 1893, Friedrich Engels wrote from London to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, another German Communist then living in New York, lamenting how America's diversity hindered efforts to establish a workers party in the United States. Was it possible to unify Poles, Germans, Irish, the many small groups, each of which understands only itself? All the bourgeoisie had to do was wait, and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again." New York Times, March 31, 2008; (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/opinion/31mon4.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin)

In other words, racial and ethnic differences are why socialism was stillborn in America. The communist party was always weak, except during a brief time in the 1930's. After FDR died, the left fell so far out of favor that even the word "liberal" became a dirty word. The diversity of the workers permanently crippled them. As a result, the otherwise inevitable transfer of wealth that democracy sets in motion never gained traction. No matter how hated, disadvantaged and indigent the masses were, they never posed a threat to the elites, except during the Depression. But this writer goes further, he seems to believe that diversity always and inevitably trumps democracy.

"Ten years ago, William Julius Wilson wrote that American whites rebelled against welfare because they saw it as using their hard-earned taxes to give blacks medical and legal services that many of them could not afford for their own families. ... in a nation of as many hues, tongues and creeds as the United States, it struggles against self-defeating human behavior: racial and ethnic diversity undermine support for public investment in social welfare. For all the appeal of America's melting pot, the country's diverse ethnic mix is one main reason for entrenched opposition to public spending on the public good."

Is this racist? It is certainly provincial. Diversity does not, in-and-of itself, lead to diffraction or disjunction. Under the right conditions, it can even strengthen a society. Nobody with any familiarity at all with history and geography imagines that diversity is always at the root of disunity, division, pettiness, and weakness. You expect that on extremist websites but in the exalted New York Times?

The parallel American experiment, Canada, proves that diversity need not blind the poor majority to its own best interest. Has this writer never heard of Toronto? Our Golden Horseshoe, extending from Hamilton to Oshawa in Ontario, is considered the most diverse region in the world by the UN. Do you see us dismantling our social programs and robbing from the poor to enrich the rich? Are the white folk here beset by petty fears that our tax dollars might somehow benefit people of darker skin? I am not saying that we are void of the racism and tribalism that stains any non-stateside society. But we are not stupid; we do not cut off our nose to spite our face.

Abdu'l-Baha warned against the pernicious effect of the race problem, a problem that has had a ripple effect around the world in the century since He said this,

"This question of the union of the white and the black is very important," He (Abdu'l-Baha) warns, "for if it is not realized, erelong great difficulties will arise, and harmful results will follow." "If this matter remaineth without change," is yet another warning, "enmity will be increased day by day, and the final result will be hardship and may end in bloodshed." (quoted in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, 38)