Transcript:Gregory Dahl/Speaking on evolving towards a Bahá’í economic system
| Transcript of: Speaking on evolving towards a Bahá’í economic system (1982) by |
 Proofread onceDownload: mp3, Source: © Gregory C. Dahl
|
[0:00] Thank you, Madame Chairman. I think we are deeply indebted to my friend and colleague John Huddleston for his concise review of the Bahá’í vision of a future world commonwealth from the point of view of its economic aspects. It's not an easy matter to take so many teachings and convince them into 40 minutes. In fact, the Bahá’í writings give us a window through which we can glimpse, sort of a magical window, through which we can glimpse what the future is going to be like. A future in which we have a society of justice, and this means justice and economics as well as in other aspects of social organisation. A society in which a person's effort will be rewarded in proper measure. And this is not, of course, the principles underlying the society that we live in today.
[1:11] What I wanted to address with you in the second presentation this morning is how we at the present time can relate to this vision of the future. In other words, what should we be doing now as a Bahá’í community and as individual Bahá’ís to set in process, or set in motion those processes which will eventually cause us to arrive at that promised Bahá’í commonwealth of the future. And I'm convinced and I hope to leave you with some conviction that there are many things that we can and should be doing now, very exciting endeavors, that should be occupying our attention at this stage in our our growth and development.
[2:02] I wanted to spend a few minutes at the beginning discussing the question of methodology, and a small overview. And then I'm going to turn to a few specific topics which seemed to me to be a particular interest now, but are in no way an effort to provide an exhaustive survey of such a vast field. I'm afraid at the beginning I need to try to relate what I'm going to say to the economics profession as it is now practiced, and this presents me with a certain embarrassment because other scholarly papers are full of footnotes and references to the work of others in their field, and unfortunately, this is very difficult for a Bahá’í scholar in economics at this time. The economics profession sees itself as being, or at least the economists pretend to be divorced from questions of values, questions of ultimate objectives, they believe that this is the realm of politicians to determine and the political process, and that economists are somehow technicians who apply those values to a specific economic system. Of course economists, as in many other fields, cannot avoid having values, and those values are necessarily embedded in their work. But they generally do not admit to those values, and it's very hard to engage them in the discussion of ultimate principles. And in fact much of the work of modern microeconomics, the technical work has shown that the foundation of Western economics is based on a model of the individual human being which Bahá’ís cannot accept. It is proven that there are certain principles which are required to make the whole system follow logically, and those principles are completely contrary actually to the Bahá’í view.
[4:08] For example, economists have found that they must assume that my preferences when I go shopping in the grocery store are somehow independent of the welfare of my neighbor. Whereas for a Bahá’í, the welfare of your neighbors should be a prime consideration, for all of us. That's a technical point, but if anyone wants to discuss it later I would be happy to. So economists see them themselves as considering the questions of the the flow of money, goods and service, and not really it addressing the question of human aspirations. And this is where I think even on technical grounds the modern economics profession is coming under great fire, because they're not succeeding very well in their technical projections, their technical solutions. Because the economic system involves human beings and ultimately must involve a consideration of of human values and human objectives.
[5:11] We do have in the economics field, more broadly speaking, the group that are known as radicals, those that espouse socialist solutions to economic problems. And they do begin with a vision of the future, a classless society for example, a society of greater Justice but they very rapidly become embedded in the same problems that the the capitalist or Western economists are subject to. And we all know that the economies that have been based on their principles rapidly become bogged down with the same bureaucratic inertia in the same limitations of the human beings that they're working with the capitalist system is subject to. So in short one needs a broader view of spiritual men and motivation, which is provided by questions of morality and religion, in order for any economic system to make any sense. What economists are trying to do now is similar to fine tuning the engine of an automobile which doesn't have a steering wheel. Now Bahá’ís on the contrary, as John has reviewed for you see the Earth has endowed with resources for the benefit of all mankind. National boundaries, languages, economic and legal systems are man made, not God given and can and should be changed to suit our objectives. While most people take these vast social systems is virtually unchangeable, Bahá’ís must make a conscious effort to carefully define objectives suitable to our vision of a new society and then to create appropriate institutions, laws and systems for the realization of those objectives.
[7:02] Economics is basically a system of social contracts, just like the law as we are accustomed to thinking of it. Money has no existence by itself, and in fact most modern money exists only in computers or as markings of ink in ledgers somewhere, it is virtually non existent. It is in fact the contract between people that money represents which has some substance. If the system of social contract does not serve our ultimate purposes we have to set about to redesign that system. I am indebted to Dr. Farzam Arbab, counselor in South America, for a very stimulating discussion of the difference between a process, what he calls a process and a system, and I hope that he will address himself to this concept when he speaks later in these sessions. I think that the idea is very applicability to the problems facing us in Bahá’í economics. We do not in fact have a clear idea yet of what about Bahá’í system of economics will look like. And in fact the principles of the Bahá’í faith are general enough that very likely we can have many different kinds of systems, all of which would be functioning within the framework of those principles. For the foreseeable future then we cannot imagine being involved in the implementation of a Bahá’í system of economics, rather we have to be concerned with setting in motion a process which will eventually lead us in an evolutionary fashion towards some future objective which we cannot even clearly visualize. And we have to focus on that process as much as or more than the ultimate objective.
[8:54] There is always though interplay between the two and both are necessary. You cannot go to the hardware store and junk yard and collect all kinds of hardware and put it together and then discover what it is that you have, let us say a car or a spaceship. You have to first have your objective and then you said about putting together the tools and the means for achieving it. But it's also of no use to have glorious objectives and to never make any effort to implement them, they always stay in the books on the shelf. So we have to have a constant process of redefining, reexamining our objectives in the light of the Bahá’í teachings and then redesigning our method of implementation. Judge Nelson mentioned yesterday an analogy which I was also going to refer to of the space shots to the moon. If you try to aim the spaceship at the moon from the ground and fire it, your chance of hitting the moon is virtually nil. But we have never missed the moon and the reason for that is that we put into our spaceships a process of constant reexamination of the flight path and adjustments in flight and with that kind of a process you will always hit the moon. It may be an indirect method if the moon is moving, you may have a trajectory that moves, but you always get there. So we need that kind of process of continual reexamination.
[10:40] This process of which I am speaking is clearly envisaged in letters written on behalf of the Guardians of the Bahá’í faith, Shoghi Effendi between the years 1933 in 1936, and all published in the American Bahá’í News. This was a period as you know of intense economic difficulty in the western world and therefore a great deal of attention to economic problems. And I wanted to share with you several excerpts from those letters. [Second speaker] Excuse me, Mr. Park Scott has an urgent long distance call outside the ballroom. Mr. Park Scott, an urgent long distance call. [Dahl] This is quoting from the letters on behalf of the Guardian of Bahá’í faith, "as regards the activities of the Economic Committee of the National Assembly Shoghi Effendi fully sympathizes with the desire of some of the members to see the committee find ways and means to put into practice the economic teachings of the cause as explained in some of the recorded writings and sayings of Bahá’u’lláh and the Master, but he believes the time is not yet ripe for such activities. First, we have to study the economic teachings in the light of modern problem more thoroughly so that we may advocate what the founders of the faith say and not what we conjecture from their Writings. There is a great difference between sounding a great general principle and finding its application to actual prevailing conditions. Secondly, the cause is not financially in a position to launch itself in such undertakings at present. Such plans need great financial backing to be worked out in a permanent form. In time, Shoghi Effendi hopes all these things will come to pass. The primary consideration is the spirit that has to permeate our economic life, and this will gradually crystallize itself into definite institutions and principles that will help to bring about the ideal conditions foretold by Bahá’u’lláh. With regard to your wish for reorganizing your business along Bahá’í lines, Shoghi Effendi deeply appreciates the spirit that has permitted you to make such a suggestion, but he feels nevertheless that the time has not yet come for any believer to bring about such a fundamental change in the economic structure of our society, however restricted maybe the field for such an experiment. The economic teachings of the cause, though well known in their main outline, have not yet been sufficiently elaborated and systematized to allow anyone to make an exact and thorough application of them even on a restricted scale. There are practically no technical teachings on economics in the cause such as banking, the price system and others. The cause is not an economic system nor its founders be considered as having been technical economists. The contribution of the Faith to this subject is essentially indirect as it consists of the application of spirituals principles to our present day economic system. Bahá’u’lláh has given us a few basic principles which should guide future Bahá’í economists in establishing such institutions which will adjust the economic relationships of the world."
[14:17] So I think you see clearly envisaged in these passages a process of evolution towards a Bahá’í system in which Bahá’í economists and other thinking people will play an important role in evolving the implementation of the principles that John has outlined for us in practical applications. And this obviously must be seen in the context of the development of a spiritual society and the development of individuals with different spiritual motivations from what we have today. I think that also this intentional gap in the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh is an example of the setting in motion of this kind of evolutionary process. It is no mistake or oversight, obviously on Bahá’u’lláh's part that He chose to leave the technical questions of implementation to the future and undoubtedly envisaged this kind of process. It also means that each Bahá’í who chooses to work in this field cannot be considered any kind of authority, and that we can have ample room for a wide diversity of expressions and opinions in these complicated in many faceted problems, and therefore we can hope to avoid the kind of narrow orthodoxy which has had such a stifling influence in many intellectual disciplines.
[15:47] Finally, to conclude this brief overview I wanted to say that in my opinion we are missing as Bahá’ís a very important opportunity to use the Bahá’í teachings on social justice in general and economics in particular in reaching with our more general message many of the thinking and concerned young people of the world. When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá traveled in the West, he chose certain subjects which were extremely challenging and controversial in his time, such as the equality of the races and the equality of sexes, and his public talks on these subjects grabbed the headlines. They were touching the nerve of the time. These issues, although not resolved, are widely debated and no longer have such prominence. But we do have issues in the world that are increasingly attracting the attention of the public, including the problems of equitable economic distribution, the threat of war and the prevention of war, and in general the improvement of the aspects of justice of the society and in fact, around the world the young people are rapidly becoming radical in a response to these particular problems in modern day society. I think that it's very important that we as Bahá’ís become informed about our own teachings in these areas, which are in fact very revolutionary and quite different from what anyone else is suggesting, and that we can then present these teachings in a way that will attract an audience that we have not been able to reach.
[17:30] We also need to be working, I believe now almost 50 years after the Guardian had written the letters which I quoted, we need to begin to address in practical terms some of these issues and to lay a more detailed intellectual framework or groundwork for our investigations and then to engage increasingly in some modest experiments and actual applications. So along those lines, I wanted to discuss very briefly a few topics, within the time permitting, and there's not enough time to go into any topic in any great depth, but I'll try to indicate very briefly some of my own thoughts and then if there's anything in particular that you'd like to develop further we do have, I hope, an ample period for discussion at the end of the morning's sessions.
[18:23] The first question is a very general one of values and the process for making decisions. We have in today's management and economic sciences very elaborate tools for the making of economic decisions. I won't go into any detail but you know that modern day businesses operate along very scientific lines and that these tools are being ever increasingly elaborated with the aid of computers and so forth, so that very refined decisions can be made. Unfortunately though the values on which these tools are based are fundamentally values of profit and size and growth. In fact a business may not be profitable at all but if it's growing rapidly one has the feeling that it will be profitable in the future, and either one of those criteria are considered to be the sign of a healthy, or enterprise with a future, an enterprise that one would want to be associated with, where as obviously an enterprise which is getting smaller or is stagnant, our friend Schumacher pointed out that the word stability has been lost in the language in favor of the word stagnant. Um, those are considered to be an desirable attributes, and one wouldn't want to become associated with the firm of that kind. There's been a limited effort in the field of development project analysis to take the tools developed for the private sector and to modify them by using what are known as shadow prices. We're taking existing market prices and adjusting them for certain distortions that one can measure and to try to to implement into that adjusted system of prices certain values which otherwise wouldn't be taken into account, such as externalities, the effect on the environment, the effect on employment or other objectives. However, all of these methods start with the framework of prices as they now exist, and this framework of prices is the result of a market system with its a set of values that we do not subscribe to. Therefore, we are left with essentially a very difficult problem in trying to make specific decisions in our own enterprises or in our professional positions.
[21:05] Some of the Bahá’í objectives which I might suggest should be factored into this process of decision making would include self-fulfillment through service to mankind, the maintenance of moderation and balance for example, as between material and spiritual aspects of life. The satisfaction of doings one's best and producing the highest quality of work, and the reward of making a positive and lasting contribution to society, none of which are included directly in the profit motive. In fact the system that we are functioning in if we have a business or an occupation puts tremendous pressure on us to adopt the values of this system as opposed to our own values. And I consigned in his example, I understand from a Bahá’í who worked in the business of buying books for a very large chain store of bookstores, a chain of bookstores that their criteria for purchasing books were first the cover, second the title, and third the contents in that order. And obviously if you're in the business of publishing books you therefore are forced by the buyers to put the greatest effort into designing the cover and the second greatest effort into wording the title and only third consider the contents.
[22:42] I have my own personal experience which I might share with you very briefly. I'm the owner of a small publishing company which caters to Bahá’ís, and its been very interesting to me as a professional economist to try to implement in my own decision making with this firm this set of problems. In fact I think that I would find and my employees find that there are ample rewards in trying to publish materials that will help to stimulate a contribution of people to the building of a new world civilization. And obviously 100, 200 years from now no one will care whether our little company made profits, what will be remembered in the future is if we were able to make available things that otherwise would not have been available. So the profit motive, although it's necessary to healthy enterprise, is clearly not our first objective and if the work is meaningful for us, if we have rewards at the personal level in doing the work also, that is more important to us than what is known as the bottom line. It becomes very difficult though in practice to make specific decisions, business decisions, with these general principles in mind. And I'm afraid that I don't have any very concrete proposal to make. But I am hoping this is the theme I think underlying all of my comments, I'm hoping that some of you out there will take an interest in these subjects and will begin to elaborate how the tools that exist for analyzing and making decisions and businesses can be applied taking into account these Bahá’í values that we have.
[24:42] Obviously the same questions apply even more to very large organizations where you have not only these simple questions but also questions of management of personnel and organizational structure. And you have the same set of questions, and maybe even more difficult to address on the individual level, to help individual people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources and their own time to best achieve their own objectives. And I think that we probably do a very poor job if we had some perspective in utilizing our resources truly for reaching the objectives that we have in mind.
[25:20] Next, I'd like to move on to another area which is the area of worker management relations. Again, Bahá’ís have a very different view from what you ordinarily find in the world. We see the fundamental question as being one of common interest rather than conflict. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá pointed out in his talk in Montreal that John referred to September 3rd, 1912 men cannot live singly and alone. He is in need of continuous cooperation and mutual help. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá likened society to a family and said that the inequalities and injustices observable in the world were quote "because this family lacks the necessary reciprocity and symmetry." Personally, I find this analogy fascinating with the perspective of these many years, because these same problems that are besetting industrial countries today are also tearing apart the family. Instead of focusing on the benefits of cooperation and self sacrifice, almost universally the Western world is now focusing on questions of injustice and the struggle for justice and the demands for fair and equitable treatment. And unfortunately this kind of confrontational approach is not conducive to human relationships on any scale. It instead leads to taking of rigid positions and to the development of alienation, which is becoming universal.
[26:54] However, one can only solve these problems if one has a system that the individuals in the society perceived as being just. Once you perceive the system as being just, you're willing to be more flexible and to be more self-sacrificing. So we need to develop the legal and financial structures that will allow people to perceive some measure of justice. There is very recently a considerable movement in the western world, and I mean just in the last two or three years in this regard, partly stimulated by interest in the American Congress and new tax laws which have been passed to encourage this movement, and there's a considerable literature which I will just refer you to, these are associations being formed for while I give you the names, the Association for Workplace Democracy, which is located in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the National Center for Employee Ownership in Arlington, Virginia. Both of which have now periodicals and a bibliography. And there's an extensive literature of case studies of all kinds of cooperatives and worker ownership arrangements that would be a fertile ground for Bahá’ís to study and to benefit from.
[28:08] Third I want to touch briefly on a very different topic which is the prosperity of the village. The majority of mankind still lives in villages, and this is a very pressing and immediate problem for the world as a whole. It is interesting that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in his speech to Socialists and labor leaders in Montreal devoted a large part of his talk to the concept of a village storehouse. The proposal which he makes is essentially a self help scheme in which the revenues at the local level, some of them would be devoted to this storehouse, and then the needs of the village would be met from the storehouse, particularly emergencies and unforeseen needs. And ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasizes that this system would contribute to human dignity and the freedom from exploitation. In his words, "each individual will live most comfortably and happily under obligation to no one." Now you contrast this vision of a village organization with the present system, almost universally around the world in which there are local money lenders or local landlords who control the market system at the village level. In fact there have been many efforts at agrarian reforms around the world in which the land is legally given to the villagers and within a very short period of time, in general, the villagers have sold the land back to the original landlords. The reason is that farming is inherently a risky occupation, and unless one has some capital or some access to capital one is forced at one time or another to engage in credit operations, and the same people who control those operations control the market of the village level. In Haiti for example where I'm living, the coffee growers receive about one quarter of the value of coffee as it is exported from the country. The other three quarters go to what are called the spekulators? the local financial strong men and to the exporters. Obviously there's a large margin there that could be captured for the benefit of the villagers under the kind of scheme that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá proposes. Some kind of a cooperative system therefore seems to be called for, in which the villagers themselves can pool some of their resources and meet their own needs for emergencies, give themselves assistance in marketing their product and in obtaining the supplies and inputs that they need and thereby short circuiting the system of exploitation that now exists.
[31:00] This obviously is a subject that needs careful study, and there are many attempts that cooperative organizations around the world at the village level that we could examine, and then we need to begin to implement some of these concepts in villages and we have the great advantage of having many thousands of local assemblies in villages around the world, composed of Bahá’ís who are already beginning the process of development of institutions at the local level.
[31:32] Very quickly because the time is running short, but if you give me a few minutes? There's another subject which interests me very much is the question of work environment and lifestyle, which has become increase increasingly interesting in the advanced countries. You find as people are overburdened and frustrated in their urban lives you find many of them the more dynamic or mobile new businesses locating in places like Boulder, Colorado, or rural areas in southern New Hampshire, where the employees find a lifestyle which they find more attractive. There has also been a very limited experimentation with flexible working hours, increased use of part time employment, use of electronic media so that one can work in one's home and so forth. With the Bahá’í teachings on the emphasizing the rewards of work and service it seems very likely to me that we can develop whole new working environments and work structures that would respond more to the human needs of the employee. I don't see any reason why employees in the modern world necessarily have to sit in an office eight hours a day like school children. Surely we can develop methods, with complicated computer programs if necessary, to allocate people's time more flexibly to the needs of the economy. And even with pagers and so forth we can get people on the on the line when we need them, give us much more flexibility in locating our work and in structuring are hours. I also think that, which John touched on briefly, that the large scale organizations which are increasingly dominating the Western economies are not the product of economic factors necessarily like economies of scale, but rather the product of a legal system which has been designed by the well-to-do sectors of society for their own interests. And an example is the patent laws on which many of the great financial empires have been based, which don't necessarily have to be structured the way they are. And it would be quite easy in a Bahá’í system to redesign the laws, which would have profound effects for the economic structure.
[33:55] Even more fundamentally perhaps, I've been amazed in my own experience in the last year and a half in moving to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and conducting business there the same kind of occupation that I had in Washington in one of the most modern office environments. And quite frankly, I find the Haitian environment far more interesting and far more satisfying and far more enjoyable. And the inescapable conclusion is that the rich country should all become underdeveloped. [Audience laughter] Uh, but I'm not suggesting that but I think that increasingly we are trapped by our own technological advancement. What I'm speaking about us in Haiti the telephones don't work, even within the central bank where my offices are located it's hard for me to call the next office, and the secretaries are inefficient and it's hard to get things typed. So the result is that you have to go and talk with people, and one spends one's day moving about and talking with people. And that is a far more satisfying way of spending the day than to sit at a desk and shuffle the papers and answer the telephone. That is a very fundamental principle there at work, and I think that we need to to examine what we want in the way of lifestyle and work style, and then structure the technical and legal structure around us so that it responds to those needs and we have failed to do that so far in the Western world.
[35:22] Finally, very briefly because the time is short I wanted to look at what is to me the most exciting area, but it's less practical at this moment it's more theoretical, but I think that in our lifetimes it is going to become the major issue of concern to mankind, and that is how we can organize the laws and institutions of the world to promote global prosperity and security. We have many guiding principles, as you know, in the Bahá’í teachings which have implications for how the world should be organized, but we have to work out proposals for concrete institutions that would embody and implement those principles. There are for example in the Bahá’í teachings reference to the need for a single currency, a single system of weights and measures, an auxiliary language, freedom from trade barriers, as John has mentioned, and I would even add a single commercial code so that contracts can be enforced everywhere in the world. These principles imply a world central bank and a high degree of coordination of economic policy making among nations and actually even a full blown world government with powers of taxation and redistribution. But the form that those institutions must take has not been elaborated and I think this is a very important area where Bahá’ís can be making proposals.
[36:59] There are also many issues facing national governments which one day or another, not too long from now, Bahá’ís may very likely be directly involved in as the number of Bahá’ís increases in many countries, and at some point we may have some of the responsibilities that now face national governments. These include for example the questions of how to deal with poverty and orphans and the infirm and the aged. How to educate the young, how to administer criminal and civil justice, the proper scope of government and of course all the economic issues of taxation and monetary policy, job creation, spending priorities and all that kind of thing. As I mentioned earlier, these issues are all attracting a great deal of attention in the debate between capitalism and socialism in the world, and this is an area where we should be having a voice. It's not at all clear exactly how we implement, for instance, the teachings that John has mentioned about the equalization of wealth and poverty. There are very extensive implications in my view of the teaching in the Bahá’í faith that gambling is prohibited. As John has aptly defined it, the gain without having done anything. And one can also call that speculation. And we have to design economic systems that will channel wealth, reinvest wealth, somehow divorcing them as much as possible from the highly speculative elements that exist today that cause wealthy people to rapidly increase the size of their wealth and do not give access to a fair share of the economic products of the society to the people who do not have wealth.
[38:55] I'm told the time is running short, so I have to abbreviate. I think finally, the question of economic development is extremely important, and I'm pleased that the last day there will be two workshops on this subject. In fact we need entirely new models for economic and social development which embody the Bahá’í values. Even in the poorer countries of the world themselves today are led by elites who aspired to the lifestyle of the rich countries, and they set the priorities and the tone for the poor countries on the whole. On the other hand the Bahá’í view I think is far more balanced rather than having the example of the rich countries held up as the ultimate objective, which I think is clearly not the the goal that we should be working towards, that there are many values which still exist in the poor countries which are increasingly being lost in the rich countries, and that we have to develop a concept of balance and interchange between the rich and the poor. If I can illustrate in an extreme form of the problem, if the problem of defense in the world was resolved tomorrow so that if we had a world government, for instance with the peacekeeping force so that we no longer needed to devote 6% of our resources to defense, we would suddenly have a tremendous release of resources that would have to be spent on some other objective in order to maintain employment. And we would literally have hundreds of billions of dollars instead of tens of billions of dollars to be invested in questions such as the abolition of poverty and disease and hunger in the world. Now with that kind of financial resource, obviously the restraint would not be the finances but would be elsewhere. You cannot take a million Chinese and bring them to the Western world to study in universities. They wouldn't understand the language. You can't take a million Westerners and drop them all over the world with their hamburgers in their Coca Cola and their big cars and expect any kind of positive result. So the question is one of setting priorities and understanding cultures and cultural needs. And in my view, this has to begin at the village level with the kind of process that Bahá’ís are already beginning in the development of local assemblies around the world. We need to think of a view of economic development in which the people themselves have the major voice in determining what their immediate needs are, and then assistance is made available in a measured way to support their own initiatives and endeavors. And I think that there's a talk actually devoted to this subject later by Linda Gershuny and I look forward to that that talk.
[41:54] Well I hope that I've simulated a little bit you're thinking in a wide variety of areas. It's not meant to be comprehensive, there are many subjects which can be attracting our attention at this time, but those are a few that I thought were particularly timely and I hope that some further research will be forthcoming from all of you scholars out there in these fields. Thank you.
