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Fall 2000

World Order

FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY: A SECOND
INSTALLMENT OF REVIEW ESSAYS

OEDIPUS REVISITED
MICHAEL L. PENN

TURNING POINT: WOMEN OF AFRICAN
DESCENT AND WRITING IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
GWENDOLYN ETTER-LEWIS

RECKONINGS: ROBERT HUGHES’
THE FATAL SHORE AND EDWARD BALL’S
SLAVES IN THE FAMILY
GAYLE MORRISON

HEALTHY ORGANIZATIONS AS BUILDING
BLOCKS FOR A NEW PARADIGM
DOROTHY MARCIC

UPHOLDING THE RIGHTS OF THE
IRANIAN BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY
A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

[Page 0]

World Order

VOLUME 32, NUMBER 1

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:
BETTY J. FISHER
ARASH ABIZADEH
DIANNE LOTFI
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
KEVIN A MORRISON
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JIM STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Manuscripts and editorial correspondence: Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end and not attached electronically to the text. The contributor should retain a copy. Return postage should be included. Send editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC 28211. E-mail: <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

Subscription rates: U.S.A. and surface to all other countries, 1 year, $19; 2 years, $36; single copies, $5. Airmail to all other countries, 1 year, $24; 2 years, $46. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from Bahá’í Distribution and Subscriber Service, 4703 Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30336-2017. Telephone: 1-800-999-9019, all other countries; E-mail: <subscription@usbnc.org>.

WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 2001, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2   Racism: Are We Ready to Answer the Question?

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7   The Poet’s Book, poem by S. K. Dapoz

8   Points of Light: Review Essays on Significant

Twentieth-Century Books, Second Installment

11   Oedipus Revisited

review essay by Michael L. Penn

19   First Child, poem by Cynthia Sheperd Jaskwhich

21   Turning Point: Women of African Descent and

Writing in the Twentieth Century

review essay by Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis

23   Sharing, poem by Victorino D’Araujo

25   Reckonings: Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and

Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family

review essay by Gayle Morrison

35   Healthy Organizations as Building Blocks

for a New Paradigm

review essay by Dorothy Marcic

39   The New Millennium, poem by Monica A. Reller

40   The Search for Gold, poem by Hillary Chapman

43   A Concurrent Resolution: Upholding the Rights of

the Iranian Bahá’í Community

47   Children Lost, poem by Janice Mazidi

48   Authors & Artists in This Issue

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[Page 2]

Racism—Are We Ready
to Answer the Question?

IN 1938 Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, called the problem of racism “the most vital and challenging issue” facing the American Bahá’í community, declaring that the well-being of American society as a whole—as well as the advent of world peace— depended on our ability to solve this problem.

The Bahá’í Faith has a long history of working toward racial harmony; it could hardly fail to, given that world unity is its basic premise. However, plans and programs, even ones based on spiritual principles, are not solutions. \We might “know” that humanity will one day overcome the barriers that divide us, the tendencies that often pit us against each other. But the overriding question remains: How do we get to the desired outcome? What, indeed, does the outcome look like? We may congratulate ourselves for celebrating a few social and ceremonial occasions together, but there are serious issues that we continue to ignore.

Racism, it turns out, is a subtle and renewable “resource,” requiring that we be ever vigilant in the struggle against it. Many people seem to find it difficult to welcome those who are different, whether that difference is racial, cultural, gender- or age-based, or, as is frequently the case, economic—or some combination of these. Even when we take it upon ourselves to include the other, our act of inclusion is often tinged with what Shoghi Effendi termed a “usually inherent and at times subconscious sense of superiority.” Matters are aggravated when the attempted inclusion is combined with “impatience of any lack of responsiveness” from the supposed beneficiaries of our act of inclusion, beneficiaries who may have already moved on and left us out and who see in our new-found but belated enlightenment an attempt to soothe our guilty conscience rather than a genuine attempt to transcend differences and form a lasting partnership in which humanity can truly be said to be “one soul in many bodies.”

A century’s worth of experience in the United States has taught the Bahá’ís that there are no easy answers to the intractable problem of racism, only difficult beginnings. It is sometimes comfortable to talk about “large” issues because they are out of our control, and we can have all the virtue of deploring their pernicious effects without actually having to do anything about them. However, any large societal issue [Page 3] has personal ramifications. Where do we live? With whom do we associate? What are our private thoughts?

Shoghi Effendi, in commenting on the hopeful plans of one group, gently pointed out that their success would rest on “an actual attempt to translate into action their meritorious intentions.” In the early 1990s the government of a major Venezuelan city commissioned a survey of the citizenry. People were hired to go door to door and ask, “What have you done for society lately?” When they knock on our door, what will we answer?

[Page 4]

Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THE DISCERNING reader may note two things about the current issue of World Order: contrary to what the cover date says, it is not Fall 2000, and, despite the magazine’s claims to being a quarterly, this is the third issue you have received in as many months. “What,” you may be asking, “is happening to my subscription?”

The World Order Editorial Board, which was recently expanded from four to seven members, has taken a number of steps to catch up on the magazine’s publishing schedule and to ensure that the magazine will soon appear on a consistent, quarterly basis. Besides the obvious benefit of receiving an issue the cover date of which is current, World Order will also be in a position to respond to topical issues of social and cultural concern.

A number of factors led to our decision to publish several issues in rapid succession. One is that libraries, both public and private, subscribe to World Order and keep track of volume and issue numbers to maintain accurate databases. Changing our cover date from Fall 2000 to Spring 2001 would throw such records into disarray. Moreover, libraries are reluctant to give shelf space to publications without a current date. Our readers, also, are often reluctant—however timeless the copy inside—to share a recently published issue with friends when the date on the cover makes the issue seem old.

“Catching up is a wonderful goal,” you may be thinking, “but what are you doing to make sure that you will continue to publish on schedule?” To ensure that the magazine remains on schedule, World Order has launched an aggressive three-year editorial and marketing plan, two components of which are a manuscript-acquisitions campaign and planning theme and general issues three years in advance. Our marketing efforts are proving equally successful with new readers being exposed to the magazine and former readers returning to the fold. This has not only strengthened World Order’s subscriber base but also expanded our pool of potential authors, photographers, artists, and poets.

As a result of our catch-up plan, your subscription will expire far sooner than you had anticipated, although you will receive the same number of issues. We hope that you will feel compensated for this inconvenience by the issues you have received and by those we are planning for you. We also hope that you will remain a part of the important conversations of our time by resubscribing once your subscription is complete.

* * *

This issue of World Order includes the second installment of a project begun in our Spring 2000 issue: a number of review essays reflecting on significant books of the twentieth century. A brief introduction to them (see p. 8) provides an overview of the philosophical context in which the project was undertaken.

In his review entitled “Oedipus Revisited,” psychologist Michael L. Penn argues that Dudley Fitts’ and Robert Fitzgerald’s twentieth-century translation of Sophocles’ three timeless plays that make up The [Page 5] Oedipus Cycle is among the most significant works to have been retranslated in the past one hundred years. Penn argues that Fitts’ and Fitzgerald’s translation reintroduced to the twentieth century “a dimension of life and of the human spirit” that emerges when one reads Sophocles’ plays without the filter of Sigmund Freud’s perhaps more familiar conception of Oedipus, which served as a “root metaphor for the theory of mind” that animated “the birth of modern psychiatry.” Freud’s Oedipus is one in which the human spirit is completely vanquished, but in this 1939 translation, Sophocles’ trilogy serves as a powerful reminder of the transcendent nature of the human condition.

That transcendent dimension of human nature manifests itself most prominently in times of great struggle and oppression. In her review of Beloved by Toni Morrison, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, a linguist and professor of English literature, traces the triumphant spirit of African American women. The two works of fiction Etter-Lewis selected explore the “true meaning of motherhood, black female identity, black female and male relationships, black and white relationships, and the lasting influence of the past.” The nonfiction reference work, Etter-Lewis argues, not only recognizes the “lasting influence of the past” but also the need to begin “correcting the historical record” so that the “accomplishments of black women and awarding them the acclaim they so rightfully deserve” may finally be brought to the foreground.

It is that lingering, lasting influence of the past, and our frequent attempts to disavow it, that historian Gayle Morrison, the author of To Move the World: Louis C. Gregory and the Advancement of Racial Unity in America, explores in her review of two works: Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding and Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family. These histories serve as “antipodal counterparts” in their attempts to reckon with the past and to give voice to silent histories that continue to exert powerful, though often unspoken, influences over two continents —a convict system in Australia and slavery in the United States. Both books tackle “legacies of shame and pain that have long been ignored or mythologized,” and in them, Morrison argues, we find “personal and societal dimensions” that attempt to “come to terms with old traumas that shaped who we have become” and that “contribute to a shift of consciousness that inevitably affects who we will be.”

The exploitation of people is not confined to the extremes of convictry or slavery. In striking contrast to prevailing management practices that encourage human exploitation for profit and gain, thus often leading to comparisons, however valid, with slavery or penal institutions, Dorothy Marcic, a specialist in human-resource development and author of Managing with the Wisdom of Love: Uncovering Virtue in People and Organizations, discusses several significant books [Page 6] that help us to conceive of organizations in new ways. While the role of managers was once seen as simply to ensure increased worker productivity, Marcic presents another narrative of management that sees the role of organizations as empowering workers and unlocking their inchoate qualities and capacities, thus leading to both financial and human profit. Marcic argues that these books “recognize that organizations are nothing more than groups of people and that people have human needs that encompass and transcend efficiency.” Such works, then, have implications for every other sphere of management —from the family, to volunteer groups, to the self.

* * *

In 1979 the World Order Editorial Board was meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, where the majority of the Board members resided, when a call came through that the Iranian government had launched a new wave of persecutions against the Bahá’ís of Iran. Over the two decades that have passed since that fateful telephone call, and the subsequent execution of more than two hundred Bahá’ís in Iran, World Order has committed itself to assisting, in however small a way, the emancipation of the Bahá’ís of Iran and, more broadly, to speaking out for religious freedom for all people. This issue concludes with the text of a Concurrent Resolution, passed in the fall of 2000 by the United States Senate and House of Representatives, calling for the “Government of Iran to extend to the Baha’i community the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international covenants of human rights, including the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and equal protection of the law.”

Letters to the Editor

PRESERVING THE BEST LEGACY
OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

I am favorably impressed by your editorial, “The Century of Light?” (Spring 2000), with its loving call to Western intellectuals to “discard an inadequate view of the world.” The same call is also indirectly raised in another editorial that I found interesting and encouraging—“Taking Dogmatism Seriously” (Fall 1999). Its sentence “dogmatic secularism is modernity without a sense of humor” is really well chosen.

I perceive In those editorials two very important qualities: on the one hand, a lucid use of the powers of sense perception and intellectual investigation, in the best tradition of Western civilization since the time of Socrates; on the other, a wise use of insight and scriptures, as manifested in the qualities of refinement, detachment, purity of heart, “moderation . . . combined with tact and wisdom,” quite evident in those editorials. And thus I recognize, in those two papers, the best part of Western tradition —the rational method—purified of the materialistic dogmatic traits which have gradually encrusted it and empowered by the vitalizing contribution of the spiritual conception of the nature of reality, taught by all religions, but explained in its best form in the Bahá’í scriptures. In my opinion, these traits are very important for Western Bahá’í scholars in these early years of the Bahá’í Formative Age, if they want to contribute to preserving the best legacy of Western civilization for future generations.

JULIO SAVI

Bologna, Italy

[Page 7]

The Poet’s Book
for Roger White

The book tumbles from the envelope,

a marvel of handmade engineering and tape.

My fingers glide smoothly over the cold, glossy cover

as I read your words, rumbling them around in my mouth

like a child with a marble or a forbidden sweet.

The cover grows warmer beneath my hands

as I discover that it’s become skin, wet skin,

the soft insides spring from that secret darkness—

giving me your laughter, your slow sadness,

the bright, blazing gift of your rage,

the magnet of your love.

With the last page I breathe again,

knowing dizzily that the opening of the book

was the opening of a heart.

The cover is slick, not with paper,

but with frozen tears.

An unwitting burglar, I seize your throbbing heart,

the blood-fire in your veins explodes in my mouth

and the quicksilver in your bones

becomes a sudden exposure,

flash-printed on my spinning, Nagasaki heart.

I cannot speak the language that is spoken there,

only breathe and hope and sigh.

—S. K. Dapoz

Copyright © 2001 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States

[Page 8]

Points of Light: Review Essays on
Significant Twentieth-Century Books,
Second Installment

AT THE end of one century and the beginning of another, World Order’s Editorial Board invited a number of scholars and writers to identify and reflect on important twentieth-century books. They responded, as authors are wont to do, by offering an interesting, and exciting, interpretation: they wrote on a range of books that they considered to be significant but not necessarily obvious in their importance—books that may not have shaped a particular discourse or worldview but rather have within them the potentiality to do so. In our Spring 2000 issue we published the first installment of these reviews about sixteen significant books that help readers to discern the spiritual solutions to pressing issues of social, cultural, and political concern. The books reviewed in both installments come from various disciplines, including race studies, feminism, psychology, history, literature, art, management, and science.

Why did we choose to review books rather than another medium of communication and expression? In a period that might best be described as the age of media and entertainment, why not television shows, movies, or, as is so often the case these days, celebrities or public figures? In our Spring 2000 issue, an introduction to the project explored the tendency among some to view the twentieth century as one in which reason became a tool of domination and enslavement and, therefore, as one in which the manifestation of reason in reading and writing was often seen as similarly oppressive. But for Bahá’ís there is an inherent complementarity between reason and faith, science and religion. Thus reading and writing present a forum in which humanity can conceive of, and discuss, the socially, culturally, and politically new. The books reviewed in two installments demonstrate humanity’s capacity to endure through [Page 9] struggle and loss, to transcend parochialism or divisiveness, and, ultimately, to come together in times of catastrophe to envision the world anew.

One reading of the review essays as a whole suggests the need for new definitions of significance, new categories that determine which books speak, in a purposeful way, to the human condition. In so doing, one’s understanding of the human condition might be similarly broadened—from the belief that understanding humanity’s failings and dark underside gives one the “truth” of human existence to an understanding that accounts for these deadening aspects in a broader context of spiritual renewal and ever-increasing, indeed ever-advancing, potentialities and capacities.

What has emerged in all of the review essays, when read together, is a narrative of the twentieth century that recognizes a number of the spiritual principles necessary to effect social change. The reviews are also the beginning of a conversation—a conversation about identifying points of light that emerged in what might otherwise be considered the darkest age in human history, a period that Bahá’ís believe represents “the darkest hours before the break of day.”

KAM

[Page 10]

[Page 11]

Oedipus Revisited

A REVIEW ESSAY BY MICHAEL L. PENN

Copyright © 2001 by Michael L. Penn.

AMONG the most significant works published in the twentieth century is Dudley Fitts’ and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation (first published in 1939) of The Oedipus Cycle, a trilogy by the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Although the plays that constitute The Oedipus Cycle—Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—long predate the twentieth century, such a review is warranted because the story of Oedipus, reintroduced to twentieth-century readers by the stately translation of Pitts and Fitzgerald, captures a dimension of life and of the human spirit that was obscured at the end of the nineteenth century when Sigmund Freud chose Oedipus to serve as the root metaphor for the theory of mind that would animate the birth of modern psychiatry. Inasmuch as no theory of the mind has had a greater impact on shaping modern views of the human condition, a post-twentieth century analysis of The Oedipus Cycle and of the uses to which the story was put is illuminating.

In formulating his influential theory of psychoanalysis, Freud was captivated by two aspects of the story of Oedipus. The aspect best known to most readers emerged after the death of Freud’s father in October 1896. Although Freud’s father was by then an old man, and although his death was not unexpected, during the year following his father’s death Freud found himself in a state of inner conflict and unanticipated turmoil. During that year he also had what he came to regard as a significant dream. He dreamed that he was late for his father’s funeral. In his attempt at self-analysis, Freud arrived at the disturbing conclusion that at some level of his personality, he was not unhappy about his father’s death. Indeed, he was to confess to himself that his father’s death represented the fulfillment of a long-standing wish that had begun in childhood—a wish that his father would be out of the way so that he would be the sole possessor of his mother. As Raymond Fancher, one of Freud’s biographers, has noted, it became apparent to Freud that this pattern of wishes paralleled the plot of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus discovers that he has unwittingly slain his father, Laois, and married his mother, Iocaste, Queen of Thebes. At the same time, as the enthroned King of Thebes, Oedipus brings down the wrath of the gods on his kingdom. “The play,” writes Fancher, “portrays the agonizing process by which Oedipus realizes the nature of his deeds,” a terrifying self-appraisal not unlike Freud’s own self-analysis. When Oedipus learns the true nature of his deeds, he is so horrified that he puts out his own eyes. In Freud’s view, Oedipus’ horror was symbolic of “the dread that always accompanies the revelation of repressed ideas and wishes.”

The second aspect of the Oedipus story that captures Freud’s imagination concerns the way in which it depicts the power of a [Page 12] person’s past to determine his or her future. It is this dimension of the story of Oedipus, the dimension that would come to embody Freud’s notion of “psychic determinism,” that is of concern here. For it was, in many respects, the notion of psychic determinism that rendered Freud’s theory of the mind pseudoscientific and that enabled the mind to become a legitimate object of empirical study and clinical concern.

Oedipus as Root Metaphor in the Birth
of Psychoanalytic Psychiatry

IN the nineteenth century, medicine—as a professional discipline—was just beginning to be consolidated. There were only three firmly established branches of medicine: internal medicine, surgery, and neurology. One of the notions that was to appear early in medicine and that was to pave the way for a complete reconceptualization of the mind and the subsequent birth of psychoanalytic psychiatry was the concept of Functional Delta.

Functional Delta can be explained by noting the difference between a symptom in medicine, which is some kind of verbal or behavioral report of physical dysfunction or distress, and a medical or pathophysiological sign, which is some pathophysiological evidence that stands in causal relation to the reported symptom and accounts for it. If, for example, Mrs. Yamaguchi enters the hospital and reports that she has blurry vision and a bad headache, she has reported two symptoms. If upon physical examination it is found that Mrs. Yamaguchi has a tumor growing in the occipital lobe, the tumor is the pathophysiological sign that accounts for Mrs. Yamaguchi’s reported symptoms. Under normal circumstances, there is a causal and logical relationship between the severity of symptoms that are reported or evidenced by patients and the pathophysiological signs that are discovered upon physical examination. If patients manifest a variety of symptoms but evidence no pathophysiological signs, the discrepancy between their reported symptoms (or illness-related behavior) and the observable signs is referred to as a Functional Delta.

At the turn of the nineteenth century it was believed that patients could manifest a high Functional Delta in two ways and for two reasons: when pathophysiological signs were minimal or absent but the intensity and range of symptoms and illness behavior were high, patients were often accused of being malingerers who were playing the part of a sick person for some gain; conversely, when pathophysiological signs of disease were high but symptoms and illness behavior were absent or relatively low, patients were said to be, for whatever reason, unaware of the severity of their actual disease.

In the 1800s, however, medical science began to identify a particular configuration of symptoms—without corresponding pathophysiological signs—that could not be understood by invoking either malingering or a patient’s unawareness as sufficient, logical explanations. This constellation of symptoms was known as hysteria; and while these symptoms had been observed in women for many centuries, they had not been understood as constituting a legitimate medical disorder. It was the meticulous observational and diagnostic work of one of the great physician-teachers of the time—Jean-Martin Charcot— that led to the acceptance of hysteria as an authentic medical illness and that precipitated an intense clinical search for its natural cause.

Charcot carried out his work at a massive hospital complex in Paris known as Salpêtrière, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become a well-established asylum for the poorest of the Parisian proletariat. Among the ill seeking refuge in Salpêtrière, no patients were of greater interest to the leading physician-intellectuals of the time than the many women who suffered from this newly recognized functional somatic syndrome, or hysteria.

[Page 13] For more than two thousand years hysteria had been considered an incomprehensible disease the cause of which was explained at various times by invoking a variety of mystical entities and processes—such as evil spirits and wandering uteri. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, when medical science was becoming increasingly suspicious of mystical forces as adequate explanations for disease, neurologists began to search for the causes of hysteria, and all other diseases, in natural, observable processes.

The understanding of hysteria advanced greatly at Salpêtrière, due in large part to the meticulous clinical work of Charcot. Judith Herman, one of the foremost authorities on the history of trauma-related disorders, has affirmed that Charcot’s approach to hysteria “was that of a taxonomist. He emphasized careful observation, description, and classification. He documented the characteristic symptoms of hysteria exhaustively, not only in writing, but also with drawings and photographs.” Because Charcot was one of the most entertaining lecturers of his time, every Tuesday afternoon, when he held his public lecture-demonstrations on hysteria, many distinguished physicians would make the pilgrimage to Salpêtrière to behold the great master at work. Among those visitors were two young neurologists, Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud.

As Janet, Freud, and a variety of fascinated male physicians looked on, Charcot and his interns performed the public, grand-rounds examination that was intended to reveal the symptoms of a convulsive hysterical attack. After witnessing many of these examinations, Freud returned to Vienna and resumed his practice with a new mission. He set for himself the goal of going beyond a mere description of hysteria to demonstrating, unequivocally, its cause.

For nearly a decade Pierre Janet in France and Sigmund Freud and his collaborator, Joseph Breuer, in Vienna were to search for the causes of hysteria. Their search, however, would be conducted in a manner wholly different from the usual way of proceeding in nineteenth-century medicine. Rather than examining their patients’ bodies for pathophysiological signs, the three neurologists, operating on little more than a hunch, undertook their search by examining the stories that their patients told about their lives.

In listening to such stories, Janet, Freud, and Breuer came to affirm the dualism Descartes had proposed more than two centuries before—but they argued it in a completely new way. As had Descartes’, Freud’s description of the human reality suggested that it consists of two dimensions—a somatic dimension and a psychological one. Each dimension, though related to the other, was said to have its own anatomy, its own dynamics, and its own set of illnesses. Freud was the first to describe the anatomy of the psyche—which he conceptualized as being the by-product of biological processes, inextricably linked to the body in functional ways and thus wholly contingent upon the body for its functioning and existence. By rendering the psyche dependent upon biological processes, Freud’s model provided a partial solution to the problem of Cartesian dualism. Furthermore, Freud’s conceptualization would prove acceptable to the leading European intellectuals of the time as it embodied a materialistic notion of the psyche that held that the body produces psychological phenomena in much the same way that it produces heat. Thus no special entity, process, or force was necessary to explain the psyche’s existence, nature, or function.

[Page 14] In 1896 Freud announced to the world the results of his study on hysteria. In his report, entitled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” he wrote:

I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology.

Notwithstanding Freud’s subsequent retreat from this thesis, the discovery of the etiology of hysteria was revolutionary in that it contained the idea that human pathology may originate not only from diseased tissue, organs, and pathophysiological processes but also from unhealthy ideas, experiences, and human relationships.

Thus Freud’s redefinition of the psyche, as well as his adumbration of its role in human disease, revolutionized the practice of medicine and launched a century of study on the nature of the psyche and the impact of biological and social processes on its health and development.

The Eclipse of Metaphysics
in Psychology

DESPITE Freud’s revolutionary contributions, two significant problems with his somatopsychic conceptualization can be identified. Inasmuch as he, and most of those who followed him, conceptualized the psyche as nothing more than the byproduct of biological and social processes, Freud’s bipartite theory rendered the human reality wholly and completely natural. Thus, while proving successful in rescuing the study and treatment of mental illness from the superstitious ideas that had plagued the field for centuries, Freud’s theory also made human beings ontologically equivalent to all other mammals. In addition, in conceptualizing the psyche as an epiphenomenon of somatic processes, human consciousness was reduced to a mere effect and was given little or no causal role in the calculus of human action. In brief, it could be said that modern psychiatry emerged in Europe through sacrifice of the soul.

A soulless psychology must lead to the withering of that special type of hope that can be experienced only by human beings; for in the absence of a theory of mind that allows the possibility of transcending the influences of natural and social processes, an individual’s present and future must be seen as an inevitable result of the past. In terms of psychoanalytic theory, this hopelessness is captured succinctly in the story of Oedipus Rex, the first play in The Oedipus Cycle, which serves as Freud’s root metaphor in the development of psychoanalysis.

Indeed, an enduring idea in psychology since the days of Freud is the notion of psychic determinism. Adherents to the principles of psychic determinism—whether they be soft (nurture-centered) determinists or hard (nature-centered) —suppose that human action can be explained using roughly the same causal principles that underlie the actions of other advanced mammals. According to determinists, [Page 15] just as the biology and history (the nature and nurture) of baboons and chimpanzees are sufficient to explain and predict their actions, in like manner can we understand and predict the psychological and social lives of human beings. Karl Popper, an authority on the history and philosophy of science, discussed this notion as the problem of historicism. Historicism is the doctrine according to which sociohistorical events are as fully determined by their antecedents as are physical events by theirs.

From an historicist perspective, metaphysical processes are irrelevant to human life because they can have no meaning within a purely deterministic framework. Metaphysical processes become relevant only when one admits to the existence and operation of powers that can influence the trajectory set in motion by the forces of nature and nurture, but which are not, in themselves, the mere by-product of these forces. Before the human psyche was reduced to a material function, these metaphysical forces were assumed to find expression in the operation of the human soul.

Oedipus Rex serves Freud as a root metaphor because it demonstrates the power of biology and history to fix the destiny of even the most sincere and high-minded among human beings. Oedipus is a good and noble lad, who, upon hearing the terrible prophecy of the Oracle at Delphi, flees his home to avoid it.

The prophecy was given in two parts— the first was that Oedipus would murder his father, marry his mother, and sire a child who would be his sister; the second was that he would be buried in Colonus. Despite Oedipus’ efforts to escape his destiny, he unconsciously and unwittingly fulfills the prophecy precisely as the Oracle had given it. Thus Oedipus’ intention to do good ultimately has no influence whatsoever on his fate.

Oedipus Rex opens with a crowd of suppliants who have brought the king branches and chaplets of olive leaves and who “lie in various attitudes of despair”:

Great Oedipus, O powerful King of Thebes!

. . . Your own eyes

Must tell you: Thebes is tossed on a murdering sea

And can not [sic] lift her head from the death surge.

A rust consumes the buds and fruits of the earth;

The herds are sick; children die unborn,

And labor is vain. The god of plague and pyre

Raids like detestable lightning through the city, [Page 16]

And all the house of Kadmos is laid waste.

All emptied and all darkened; Death alone

Battens upon the misery of Thebes.

Therefore, O mighty King, we turn to you. . . .

Thebes suffers, one later learns, from “an old defilement” that is sheltered there—a defilement that must be expelled from the land if it is to be healed. This defilement is the result of the deeds of Oedipus, who, in a fit of rage many years earlier, had murdered King Laois and was enthroned in his stead. At its heart The Oedipus Cycle symbolizes the movement from childhood to maturity. As such, Sophocles’ trilogy begins by affirming the power of biology (nature and the passions) and of family history (nurture) in shaping an individual’s early life.

The story of Oedipus is the story of every human being, for every person begins this life as an unwitting slave to nature, in “the abode of dust.” Oedipus’ being a slave to nature’s passions is symbolized by the reckless abandonment with which he slays his father, King Laois. Oedipus describes this moment to his wife (and, as it transpires, mother), Queen Iocaste:

I will tell you all that happened there, my lady.

There were three highways

Coming together at a place I passed;

And there a herald came towards me, and a chariot

Drawn by horses, with a man such as you describe

Seated in it. The groom leading the horses

Forced me off the road at his lord’s command;

But as this charioteer lurched over towards me

I struck him in my rage. The old man saw me

And brought his double goad down upon my head

As I came abreast.

He was paid back, and more!

Swinging my club in this right hand I knocked

Him out of his car and he rolled on the ground.

I killed him.

Inasmuch as Freud’s theory of the psyche is fundamentally a theory of the psyche in childhood, it was fitting for him to invoke the story of Oedipus Rex as a root metaphor. But the other two plays in The Oedipus Cycle— Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone—do not fit into Freud’s concept of psychic determinism.

Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus as sacred theater in the late evening of his life. At eighty-nine years of age, he was certain that this mystic drama would represent his final work. It is no wonder, then, that, for his wise and surrogate voice, Sophocles has old Oedipus, his body blind and bent with age, address the people of Colonus about the life that is so quickly fleeting and the life that is to come.

Sophocles shows through Oedipus at Colonus that the former king, having been in exile for many years, and having, in willing fulfillment of the Oracle’s second prophecy, arrived finally at the city of Colonus, has matured and has submitted his will to the will of the gods. In this ironic moment of contentment, Oedipus, like the Apostle Paul who was to follow this same mystic path, begins his final address with a prayer directed both to Apollo—who had guided him mysteriously to that hallowed ground—and to the people of Colonus, that he might fulfill his destiny, which called for him to be buried in their venerated and sacred city. Oedipus has thus arrived at Colonus after a long and painful journey, not merely as an exile, a refugee, and a fallen king, but as a noble, chastened, and illumined spirit in service to the gods:

Ladies whose eyes

Are terrible: Spirits: Upon your sacred ground [Page 17]

I have first bent my knees in this new land;

Therefore be mindful of me and of Apollo,

For when he gave me oracles of evil,

He also spoke of this:

A resting place,

After long years, in the last country, where

I should find home among the sacred Furies:

That I might round out there my bitter life.

Conferring benefit on those who received me,

A curse on those who have driven me away.

Portents, he said, would make me sure of this:

Earthquake, thunder, or God’s smiling lightning;

But I am sure of it now, sure that you guided me

With feathery certainty upon this road,

And led me here into your hallowed wood.

How otherwise could I, in my wandering,

Have sat down first with you in all this land,

I who drink not, with you who love not wine?

How otherwise had I found this chair of stone?

Grant me then, goddesses, passage from life at last,

And consummation, as the unearthly voice Foretold;

Unless indeed I seem unworthy of your grace:

Slave as I am to such unending pain

As no man had before.

Hearing the words of this strange traveler, the people of Colonus recognize that he is none other than Oedipus of Thebes, fallen king, disgraced in all the world. To the plea of Oedipus and Antigone, his faithful daughter and sister, they reply that, because Colonus is sacred ground, one such as Oedipus cannot be buried there.

In that hour of searing and final disappointment, Oedipus reaches deep into the reservoir of the human spirit and delivers to the people of Colonus words inspired by the gods. As he persuades the people of Colonus to grant him, in their compassion, a final resting place, he breathes into them the spirit of life; and as he takes his last breath, they take within themselves that vitalizing force necessary for resurrection and renewal. The people of Colonus are revitalized because in caring for Oedipus and in helping him to realize his destiny, they rediscover the noble qualities in themselves that had made the people of Colonus so great.

Through the second drama in The Oedipus Cycle one learns that Oedipus’ entire life, though stitched together by apparently senseless pain, was also preparation for a final hour of service in which he would be honored by the gods and used as their redeeming instrument. In other words, one learns that the apparent injustice that Oedipus suffered in childhood and youth was actually a more refined form of justice that made possible the maturation of his faculties.

Despite Sophocles’ conviction that Oedipus at Colonus would be his final work, he followed it with Antigone, the final play in The Oedipus Cycle. Antigone covers the period after Oedipus’ burial at Colonus and represents, in part, the biological, social, and spiritual heritage passed from Oedipus to his faithful sister/daughter, Antigone. But it also represents the spiritual qualities that Antigone wins for herself as she struggles, in her own way, to fulfill her responsibilities to that which she believes is right and good. In the ultimate act of freedom, Antigone chooses to sacrifice her own life so that Polyneicês, a brother whom she loves and honors, might be properly buried.

The play opens in front of the palace of Creon, the new King of Thebes. Creon, whose [Page 18] kingdom had been rendered secure after the successful defeat of the Argive army—an army led by Antigone’s brother, Polyneicês—orders that no one should bury Polyneicês and that no one should mourn him. Rather, must his body “lie in the fields, a sweet treasure for carrion birds. . . .”

Though well aware that she will have to die for it, Antigone decides, nevertheless, to bury her brother’s body. In witnessing this noble act, the reader notes that, although in his youth her father slew a man in blind rage, in her youth Antigone sacrifices herself, in full consciousness, that something of transcendent value—namely, human honor and dignity—might live. In this manner does Sophocles, in his final play, describe the journey of the human spirit from “the abode of dust” (or the world of nature) to “the heavenly homeland.” It is this transcendent dimension that was lost in Freud’s deterministic theory and that is now being rediscovered in the discipline that he founded a little over a century ago.

Sophocles’ name for his central character of the trilogy signals the journey, for Oedipus, in Greek, means “swollen feet.” Inasmuch as the feet are the means whereby one advances physically in the world, Sophocles is telling us from the outset that Oedipus’ advancement will be painful and hard won. That is the way that it is with all real advancement —it is painful and hard won. If the advancement of humankind can be likened to the advancement of a single individual, that advancement must take place in stages and must be accompanied by pain and struggle. But just as Oedipus’s daughter, Antigone, inherits the fruits of her father’s spiritual striving, so also will the generations that are to follow us be made the nobler for the spiritual battles we fight and win today. Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, captures the spiritual principle in the following verse: “O SON OF MAN! My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is my command unto thee, do thou observe it.”

[Page 19]

First Child

Ezra {Ancient Hebrew) “the helper.”

Albert (Old English) “noble, bright.”

From the darkness of the womb

you are born into the sea of light;

breathless, yet nevertheless,

you proclaim life to be illimitable.

Your mother cradles you in her arms,

though you would fit snug in her hands.

Her tears wash over you,

wash over you,

though you are stainless, pure.

Your father comforts you, gentles you,

though you are hushed and still.

His tears wash over you,

wash over you.

Your grandmothers memorize you,

though you are already known by heart;

we lay claim to mouth, nose,

hairline, toes, though you belong

among an exaltation of larks.

Our tears wash over you,

wash over you.

Your grandfathers touch your hands,

miniature as maple leaves

unfolding from buds,

as though from your hands

they could grasp a glimmer

of your everlasting gift.

Your minister anoints your head,

though it is you who have blessed us.

And as we sing to you, sing of you,

your strong, widespread wings

waft over us, waft over us,

uplifting us all.

—Cynthia Sheperd Jaskwhich

Copyright © 2001 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States

[Page 20]

[Page 21]

Turning Point: Women of African
Descent and Writing in the
Twentieth Century

A REVIEW ESSAY BY GWENDOLYN ETTER-LEWIS

Copyright © 2001 by Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis.

THE twentieth century represents a milestone for both African and African American women writers. No other century has witnessed such a proliferation of published fiction and nonfiction by black women. To attempt to name, among such richness, the most significant is neither possible nor desirable. There are many more important books of the century than can be named. However, some texts have transcended the boundaries of age, race, class, gender, and nationality. Three of these include Beloved by Toni Morrison, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga—both works of fiction——and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, a nonfiction reference book edited by Darlene Clark Hine. These publications vividly illustrate, through imagined as well as real-life experiences, the power of women to transform the world. Collectively, the texts highlight important connections between daily life and the Bahá’í principles of the equality of women and men and the eradication of racial prejudice.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), the first of the three books to be published, is a text that either immediately repels or attracts readers. The thread of mysticism throughout the novel is difficult for some to understand and impossible for others to accept. Based in part on the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who used extreme measures to try to prevent her children from being enslaved, the novel is anchored by characters from Sweet Home, a Southern plantation that was their “home” until they escaped, died, or were sold. Sethe, the novel’s protagonist, is a woman struggling to understand the devastation of the past in the context of her present life. She has lost three of her children to the economic exigencies of slavery and its aftermath. This past, which threatens to destroy Sethe and her surviving daughter, Denver, is symbolized and summarized in the form of her dead child, Beloved, who returns to the family as a demanding ghostly presence. In a series of unpredictable incidents that intertwine black culture and history, Morrison weaves a tale of horror and ultimate triumph. The true meaning of motherhood, black female identity, black female and male relationships, black and white relationships, and the lasting influence of the past are some of the themes embedded in this multilayered narrative set in post-Civil War Ohio. Morrison, a masterful storyteller, won a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 and in 1993 a Nobel Prize for literature. [Page 22] Beloved stands out as a book that can be read and taught for the valuable lessons it offers about love, survival, and community.

Later and thousands of miles away, Tsitsi Dangarembga entered the literary world with her novel Nervous Conditions (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1989). The title of the book, taken from a quotation by Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (“The condition of native is a nervous condition”), refers to the mentally and psychologically challenging coming-of-age experiences of Tambudzai (Tambu), a young girl living in preindependence Zimbabwe.

Raised in a traditional family that expended all of its meager resources on the education of Nhamo, her older brother, Tambu struggles to overcome the stigma of being a girl who wants desperately to be educated. Her unsympathetic father asks her a “traditional” question: “‘Can you cook books and feed them to your husband?’” Her mother voices the “traditional” cultural position: “‘This business of womanhood is a heavy burden.’” Even her educated brother does not support Tambu in her desire to go to school: “‘Why do you bother? . . . Don’t you know I am the one who has to go to school?’” In spite of the odds against her, Tambu is determined to find a way to go to school and become an educated woman like her aunt Maiguru. The novel follows Tambu in her quest for education and also explores the lives of other women in the family in their escape from and rebellion against a tradition that confines women to domestic life without the hope of education or advancement. Dangarembga’s characters capture Zimbabwean women’s lives in startling detail and create in her readers an acute awareness of the challenges facing some African women. Tambu’s struggle represents the plight of women worldwide in their quest for education, independence, and basic human rights.

The third book that has transcended boundaries and created international dialogue is a two-volume set entitled Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1993), edited by Darlene Clark Hine, the nation’s most prominent black woman historian, the John A. Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University in East Lansing, and the author of numerous books and articles on African American history. An encyclopedic collection of scholarly essays about black women and black women’s organizations and institutions from slavery to the present, the project was “initiated,” according to the encyclopedia’s preface, “to reclaim and to create heightened awareness about individuals, contributions, and struggles that have made African-American survival and progress possible.” Some of the information may be familiar to the readers, but some of it is previously unpublished. From religious reformer Nancy Prince (1799-1856) to comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley (1897-1975) to actress and Bahá’í Dorothy Champ (1893-1979) to former Spelman College president Jonnetta Cole (1932-) and other women too numerous to name, the encyclopedia highlights the lives and contributions of black women. This work is important not only in rectifying the historical record by augmenting and correcting previously published materials but in bringing to the foreground the accomplishments of black women and awarding them the acclaim they so rightfully deserve. Black Women in America educates readers by providing, in addition to pages of facts and data, a new understanding of the significance of black women’s leadership in the advancement and development of the United States as a nation.

A brief review cannot do justice to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Black Women in America. However, reading any of the books is enlightening and useful in helping us to understand and evaluate our collective past so that we may be prepared to transform the future. Part of our past, and our struggle, is [Page 23] enshrined in books that open up worlds from the past and lead us to imagine a better world in the future. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son and appointed successor of Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, describes the process this way: “Today the seed is sown, the grain falls upon the earth, but behold the day will come when it shall rise a glorious tree and the branches thereof shall be laden with fruit.”

Sharing

Leaves

Are swinging in the air,

Captive

in disguised dreams,

Wind

flutter,

in the Autumn sun,

What would sinners do

if sins did not exist

in the darkness of the night

Losing sense of freedom,

upon the mountain

Sleepwalker,

who chants my name

is gone

Poems are made

for everyone, under

the Autumn Sun. . . .

—Victorino D’Araujo

Copyright © 2001 by Victorino D’Araujo

[Page 24]

[Page 25]

Reckonings: Robert Hughes’
The Fatal Shore and Edward Ball’s
Slaves in the Family

A REVIEW ESSAY BY GAYLE MORRISON

Copyright © 2001 by Gayle Morrison.

IN THE final months of the twentieth century I read two powerful works of nonfiction produced during the past decade and a half. Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Share: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, first published in 1987, had been in my library for years. Daunted by the prospect of fitting nearly seven hundred pages of small print into my schedule, I took a long time to begin and many months to finish it. Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, released in 1998, accompanied me, by chance, to the former Fatal Shore, absorbing the long hours of a flight from Auckland to Honolulu by way of Sydney. I found the two books to be antipodal counterparts in their explorations of the transmigration of multitudes of human beings, forced to work in servitude in new lands on opposite sides of the globe, and of the personal and societal effects of that bondage.

Faced with the impossible task of writing about a few of the “most important” books of the century, I realized that I need look no further than Slaves in the Family and The Fatal Shore—not because I care to argue their relative importance but because their themes and approaches strike me as being as important as any in our time. Their authors tackle legacies of shame and pain that have long been ignored or mythologized. By scrutinizing the past with self-awareness, by interweaving personal and societal dimensions and giving names and voices to the forgotten, by seeking to come to terms with old traumas that shaped who we have become, these works contribute to a shift of consciousness that inevitably affects who we will be.

Hughes has given us a finely textured, multilayered social history of Australia’s settlement as a penal colony—meticulously researched, beautifully and accessibly written, “objective” in tone yet passionately engaged. Ball’s book, in contrast, does not attempt a general history of plantation slavery in the South or even of rice plantation slavery in South Carolina, although it provides a wealth of historical information within the context of the particular Carolinian rice plantations he surveys. Rather, Slaves in the Family is as [Page 26] much personal narrative as it is social history. Direct and unflinchingly honest, it is a work of scholarship, intuitive detection, and emotional catharsis. Both books deal with a nation’s soul, linking seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precepts with the present and highlighting the special sufferings those precepts imposed on individual souls, particularly women, people of color, and the rebellious of spirit. Both place seemingly meaningless, large-scale inhumanity into a larger context: the creation of a new society.

Robert Hughes grew up in Sydney at a time when study of Australia’s history as a penal colony was avoided. An “unstated bias rooted deep in Australian life” had created “amnesia—a national pact of silence.” The country’s beginnings as a jail, settled primarily by convicts, were an embarrassment, a skeleton in the closet of a nation that aspired to respectability. The “System”—the general term for the apparatus of British convictism in Australia, or convictry, as Hughes terms it—held interest for journalists, novelists, and the public and was thus acknowledged in popular culture with a mixture of morbid sensationalism and hero-worship, but it was neither studied nor taught as history. Hughes devoted his manifold talents to other topics, becoming an art critic and art historian in New York. By 1974 his work in the field of Australian art caused him to realize how little he knew about his homeland’s history. He found that historians were beginning to study the System, but their published work generally lacked “the voices of the convicts themselves” —voices that would give dimension to the way the System worked, both in its prosaism and its excesses. “This book," Hughes explains, “is largely about what they tell us of their suffering and survival, their aspiration and resistance, their fear of exile and their reconciliation to the once-unimagined land they and their children would claim as their own.”

In The Fatal Shore Hughes traces British exploration in the Pacific and British social history, including the development of the theories of law, crime, justice, and human nature on which the whole notion of transporting criminals was based. Britain in the 1780s had nowhere to put the large numbers of men, women, and children who had run afoul of its harsh laws, which mandated severe penalties for even minor crimes, and had come to be considered an incorrigible criminal class. Since the American Revolution in 1776, Britain no longer had the American colonies as an outlet for convicts as indentured servants. With the country’s limited number of prisons overflowing, the burgeoning convict population was warehoused on hulks—old, rotting ships anchored in the Thames and various naval ports. A solution had to be found. Remarkably, the solution was Australia, which had been visited only once, briefly, by James Cook in 1770 and about which almost nothing was known. In 1787 the government sent 736 convicts to Botany Bay, an unexplored spot on an unmapped continent. Although the majority of this first group of convicts were young adults, they ranged from an eighty-two-year-old woman to a nine-year-old boy and had not been chosen with any thought to the skills needed to establish a colony.

Over the next eighty-one years, the System would ingest some 160,000 convicts from Britain. Australia would become a remote prison walled off from the world by the seas that surround it. Later, as the continent was settled by free colonists and emancipists, secondary prisons were established in Tasmania and Norfolk Island, places so terrible that the fear of being sent to them would, theoretically, ensure good behavior among the convicts, wherever they were assigned to work—places so terrible that even a chain gang would seem tolerable in comparison.

As promised, Hughes provides the human detail that takes the Australian penal experiment out of the abstract. Frequently quoting [Page 27] from letters and diaries written not only by convicts but by officials, visitors, doctors, and others, he describes who the convicts were and what they experienced. The prisoners on the First Fleet in 1787, for example, included a West Indian named Thomas Chaddick, convicted of picking twelve cucumbers; a seventy-year-old woman named Elizabeth Beckford, who had stolen twelve pounds of cheese; a laborer, Thomas Hawell, who had stolen two hens, one alive and one dead; and thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Hayward, who had taken a linen dress and a bonnet. From the beginning most convicts were thieves, although not all of their crimes were petty; horse thieves were regarded as serious criminals, and on the First Fleet all of the convicted horse thieves had commuted death sentences. None of the convicts, whatever their crimes, had any idea of their destination or any hope of ever seeing loved ones again. Later the System ensnared a wider range of offenders, many of whom had repeated convictions. A relatively small but important percentage consisted of political prisoners—English, Scots, but mainly Irish.

Women were especially vulnerable as prisoners within the System. Although the numbers of men and women in the First Fleet were roughly equal, over the System’s full span only one convict in seven was female. Most of the women had been convicted of minor crimes like petty theft and seem to have been transported to fill an unspoken quota, assuring that the largely male population had access to sexual relations with women. Some (perhaps as many as one-fifth) might have been prostitutes in Britain—although even those who admitted to being prostitutes were not transported as such, since prostitution was not a transportable offense— but to survive in the System almost all had to prostitute themselves to some degree.

Officers and sailors had their pick of the women during the long voyage. The “fortunate” women became attached to someone reasonably kind, onboard ship or after arrival in Australia. If they arrived in Sydney unprotected by a man with influence, they were subjected to what Hughes describes as a “slave market,” in which the highest ranking colonists had first pick but no legal obligation to care for the women indefinitely. Cohabitation was commonplace; even long-term unions seldom led to marriage, which “neither the penal system nor pioneer life favored.” In any case only Anglican marriages were recognized by the authorities, resulting in Catholic and Jewish women being considered “concubines” even if they had married according to their own religious rites. Common-law marriages had no legal status. Thus even women in stable relationships tended to be regarded as being morally deficient. Women who were not immediately “taken” on arrival in Sydney (such as those who had become pregnant or had given birth on the voyage) were either sent to a barbaric facility called a Female Factory or forced to find lodgings with settlers. With the exception of the elderly, women left to fend for themselves were seldom able to avoid giving sexual favors in exchange for food, shelter, or better treatment. Not surprisingly, large numbers of them eased their pain with the colonial drug of choice: rum.

The misery of the convicts conditioned the treatment of the Aboriginal population. The inevitable clash of cultures, microbes, and interests—which favored the colonists in Australia as in other places—was exacerbated by the impact of the System. Early on, the government pronounced that the original inhabitants’ rights were to be respected, thus giving them a position superior to that of the convicts, who found themselves lower in status than beings they regarded as savages. Moreover, the convicts saw the Aborigines as enemies and accomplices to the authorities; escapees were often killed in the bush by Aborigines, or, later, captured by Aborigines who had been persuaded to track fugitives. In time, as white settlement encroached further [Page 28] and further on tribal lands, Aborigines defended themselves, leading to prolonged conflict, and the official position toward them hardened. Ultimately the Aborigines were consigned to the bottom of Australian society, for, no matter how degrading the convicts’ experience, those who had been shaped by it could always look down on the “Abos.” “Australian racism,” Hughes observes, “began with the convicts, although it did not stay confined to them for long; it was the first Australian trait to percolate upward from the lower class.” The eventual result for modern Australia—as Hughes worded it in a segment called “After Trousers” in his recent documentary series Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore——was not “a blemish on our history,” as it has sometimes been described, but “a deep, infected, and suppurating wound” that has yet to be healed.

Like Hughes, Edward Ball found a career as a writer in New York before he became engrossed in probing the deep wounds of slavery. The descendant of several slave-holding families in South Carolina and Louisiana, he grew up in the South with the stories and relics of his Ball ancestors but scant knowledge about the people they had enslaved. The plantations, although long gone, set the Balls apart—a source of uneasy pride and also the subject of a particular type of amnesia among the older generation. Ball himself, recognizing that his forebears had participated in and benefited from the crime of slavery, felt both intellectual curiosity and a deep sense of moral accountability. A family reunion spurred him to begin the accounting: “I decided I would make an effort, however inadequate and personal, to face the plantations, to reckon with them rather than ignore their realities or make excuses for them.” He wanted to know more about what his family had really done and been, but he also wanted to know who the slaves had been and what had become of them: “The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave holders are forever linked. We have been in each other’s lives. We have been in each other’s dreams. We have been in each other’s beds.”

Having moved back to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin his research, Ball found his family’s surviving records in four libraries and used these sources—the earliest dating from 1631. the last from the 1930s—as his “map,” supplemented by oral histories. The documents guided him in identifying the Balls, descendants of his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Elias Ball I, who arrived in Charleston from England in 1698, the heir to a plantation established by a childless uncle. The first workers on the plantation had been white indentured servants (presumably, convicts whose labor had been sold), but before Elias’ time the owners had acquired chattel slaves—some indigenous (or Native, to use the term Ball prefers), some African. Elias prospered and propagated in South Carolina. At his death in 1751, he owned more than a hundred slaves. Two surviving sons had become established as planters, and two of his daughters had married slave traders.

Over the next century Elias’ descendants, many of whom Ball profiles, would continue to acquire property in the form of plantations and slaves. By the end of the twentieth century, they had lost their positions as estate-holders. No longer tied to the land, they were spread across the United States, engaged in a wide variety of (mostly middle-class) professions. Although they had not maintained their privileged status, their numbers had multiplied. One Ball alone, Edward’s great-grandfather, had at least 150 descendants living in fifteen states. Edward Ball fleshed out his research by talking with or [Page 29] interviewing some of these relatives. A few of the older ones helped him, although they tended to guard their illusions about the family’s slave-holding past; others disavowed his project.

The question “who were the slaves?” proved harder to answer. In the early years most of the men were Africans who had been brought to South Carolina from plantations in the Caribbean, and most of the women were Natives. In time this mixture gave way to large numbers of slaves, both male and female, imported directly from West Africa. Individuals and groups of slaves were regularly bought and sold, and the children they produced were added to the slave rolls, some of which have been lost along with other plantation records. As a result, totals of those who were the property of the Balls at any point between 1698 and Emancipation in 1865 defy calculation. Ball estimated, however, that at least 842 slaves were freed on Ball plantations at the end of the Civil War— out of nearly 4 million throughout the South—and that by the year 2000 their descendants must conservatively number some 75,000 people. At least a few of these, Ball reasoned as he began his search, might be the offspring of Ball masters and slaves with whom they had sexual relations.

Tracing the slaves by identifying them in the extensive but incomplete family papers proved challenging. Because slaves were not allowed to use family names, individuals had to be traced by their given names in birth, death, and sale records; slave inventories; and other documents. Working backward from the twentieth century was equally difficult. Slaves had often remained in the vicinity of the plantations after the Civil War, but later they and their descendants tended to scatter, many moving to Charleston or to the North. A turning point in the search came on a visit to New York, when, at a meeting of a black genealogy group, Ball met a woman who identified herself as the great-granddaughter of a slave on a Ball plantation. Back in Charleston, Ball found her family in the records. The story of the Ball slaves began to come alive. Eventually Ball pieced together a number of slave family histories. Where family traditions had retained only a few names or facts, he discovered names, dates, and places, including records of the purchase in 1756 of a ten-year-old girl from Sierra Leone who became a Ball slave named Priscilla and bore children whose descendants Ball met; notes of illnesses, injuries, and afflictions; accounts of ancestors who had held relatively privileged positions in the slave hierarchy yet had been flogged for stealing meat. Unable to right the wrongs his forebears had committed, he succeeded in returning to several families a little of the richness of a lost past.

As he expected, Ball also discovered interracial unions that had been consigned to silence. Many resulted from slave owners exercising their power to do as they wished with their property, undeterred by laws against interracial unions; a few had the characteristics of common-law marriages, without their legal status, and were presumably consensual (to the extent that women slaves and women in general can be said to have been free to choose their partners). The expanded family tree dated back as far as Elias I himself, who seems to have taken a young slave girl of mixed race named Dolly as his mistress after the death of his second wife. Dolly bore two “mulatto” children, Edward and Catherine, who were almost certainly Elias’, “the only people owned by Elias who would ever be freed from slavery.” In his will Elias provided for Dolly to choose within three months of his death which of his white children she preferred as master or mistress—a small concession of kindness by Elias, perhaps even a sign of a sort of love, although it is impossible to determine what Dolly might have felt toward him at any stage of the relationship.

Read together, Ball’s and Hughes’ accounts illuminate similarities and differences between [Page 30] plantation slavery in America and the System in Australia, which assigned convicts to work for government or settlers under conditions that were sometimes analogous to slavery. Hughes tackles comparisons directly at one stage in his narrative. Discussing the challenges facing free settlers in Australia, he observes:

Cheap land and free grants meant that anyone with hard hands and a strong back could become his own boss. They also meant that the only stable source of labor, whatever its defects, came from the assignment system. Thus assignment was as important to colonial Australia as black slavery was to the antebellum South, and both had practical disadvantages in common.

In his view (although he gives a nod in a note to the existence of contrary opinions about the efficiency of slave labor in the South), both black slave labor and convict labor were less efficient than free labor. Assignment was “more open and flexible than slavery,” however, and thus “more innovative in its deployment of skills”; with no incentive to work more efficiently, says Hughes, “No slave ever came up with a new farm tool or a better way of using an old one.”

As it happens, Hughes’ argument about the relative deficits of the two forms of servitude suffers from his acceptance of notions about slavery that Ball’s work calls into question. Ball describes the development of a system of rice cultivation that Elias Ball I and his British contemporaries knew little about when it was introduced in South Carolina around 1695 but in which West Africans had been proficient for centuries. Thus the experience of the slaves was translated into practices in the new world: “In the parts of Africa where rice predominated, women took the job of seeding the ground, and the same arrangement survived in America.” The method used to clean the rice and the type of baskets employed in the process came from West Africa as well. Ball asserts that West African slaves may also have introduced the labor-saving methods of tidal rice farming that plantation owners adopted after the Revolutionary War. Such methods were found in Sierra Leone in 1794, and “[t]idal agriculture would not have been taught to Africans by whites, because the traffic of culture between Africa and America moved in a single direction.” If slaves did not invent new tools or better ways to use old ones, as Hughes claims, Ball makes the case that they provided old tools and practices that were as good as new to the Carolinian plantation owners.

Moreover, Ball shows that slaves were not always without incentives to work harder. Elias Ball and others used “a thin system of wages as a means of buying cooperation,” allowing families a plot of land on which slaves might grow crops for sale as well as raise vegetables and chickens for their own use. The rice plantations also developed an innovative “task system” in which workers were assigned to do certain tasks and allowed to attend to their own work after the tasks were completed.

Comparisons between convictry and slavery that Hughes does not make directly may be stronger. The appalling conditions on a number of the ships that transported their human cargo to a distant world constitute one of the surprising similarities between slaving and the System. Some of the early voyages to Australia resulted in huge losses of life, much like the “Middle Passage” that claimed the lives of so many African captives. Half of those transported to Australia on the Second Fleet, which landed in 1790, died during the voyage or shortly after landing. The convicts, chained together in the holds of ships that had been fitted for the slave trade, were fed so little that they delayed reporting deaths, opting to remain chained to decomposing corpses as long as possible so that they might eat the provisions [Page 31] no longer needed by the dead. The companies contracted to transport the convicts profited by cruelty. They were not required to deliver living cargo, and by starving the prisoners and allowing them to die in large numbers, the contractors saved provisions that they were then able to sell on arrival in Sydney, where food was short because the struggling colony was unable to produce enough to meet its needs. By 1815 the extreme cruelty of the early voyages had abated, with the authorities making efforts to ensure that most of those transported survived. But the harshness of the voyage, even under improved conditions, would remain an experience that ground down generations of prisoners for the next half century of the System’s existence.

Another similarity between convictry and slavery is treatment that Ball describes as “torture” but that the British considered routine as a punishment and a warning. Disobedience was often punished by solitary confinement, whether of slaves or convicts. Flogging was commonplace for both. In Charleston, plantation owners used the services of the Work House, where, for a fee, slaves would be whipped into submission. In Australia and on board ships bound there, convicts could be flogged for anything or nothing, and their lacerated flesh—sometimes cut to the bone—might well be treated only with a bucket of salt water and left to putrefaction and infestation with maggots. If the convict were too weak to work, he or she might be flogged again. “The whistle and dull crack” of the cat-o’-nine-tails, Hughes writes, “were as much a part of the aural background to Australian life as the kookaburra’s laugh.” He goes on to quote an observation made in the 1820s that children in Australia played at flogging trees the way children in England played at riding imaginary horses. Although cruel masters in America were matched by sadistic authority figures in Australia, even the relatively enlightened in both places tended not to question the agonizing and degrading punishments that were considered normal in the times.

In the end, American slavery and the System may have differed little in the experiences of the people they held captive (or of those they benefited). Both slaves and convicts harbored longings to escape; many tried repeatedly, and a relatively small number succeeded. Sometimes the escape itself was suicidal. In other cases suicide was the escape. Ball notes that the Igbo people were so inclined to commit suicide that Elias’ son-in-law Henry Laurens, a slave trader, cautioned a contact that, if he were to buy any Igbo, they must be under twenty, since the adults were liable to kill themselves. Convicts in Australia were known to commit hanging offenses as a way out of the horrors of their imprisonment. Sometimes groups of convicts in the hellish secondary prisons played a sort of “suicide by lottery” in which, by drawing straws, one would be chosen to be killed and another to kill him, while the rest witnessed the act. The “killer” and the witnesses would then be sent to Sydney for the trial—for the witnesses, a temporary respite from their everyday horrors, and for the “killer,” permanent relief in the form of summary execution.

Beyond the many outward experiential similarities, however, convictry and slavery affected the attitudes of the subjugated in different ways, as Ball and Hughes show. In general the convicts could hold onto the prospect of emancipation, no matter how bleak the circumstances of the present, whereas the slaves had virtually no hope beyond revolt or escape (neither likely to succeed) and suffered the added burdens of racism. The convicts bolstered their self-esteem by despising the Aborigines, while the slaves could gain status only by becoming more valuable as property, house slaves rather than field slaves. Either exercise created its own wounds.

The convicts, once freed, were still marked by chains that differed from the scars of [Page 32] slavery—attitudes that shaped the way their descendants felt about themselves and the way Australia perceived its past. Even though the end of slavery in America did not bring reparations, equal rights, social justice, or true freedom, the former slaves had no cause for embarrassment over the fact of their enslavement. Slavery had been judged wrong. Society tended to regard African Americans as inferior, but at least they held a certain moral high ground. Most Australian convicts and their descendants, in contrast, might seem to have been able to disguise their origins by blending into the settler population, but theirs was a society that considered them forever tainted by “the Stain” of their criminality, by bad blood that would persist for generations: “After abolition, you could (silently) reproach your forebears for being convicts. You could not take pride in them, or reproach England for treating them as it did.” Until recent times the notion that Australians “had cause to be proud of surviving it [the System] and creating their own values despite it, was rarely heard.” By legitimating the convict experience in a book that became an international bestseller, Hughes shattered the national silence. A new generation of Australians descended from convicts and settlers is taking deeper pride in their country and in their own identity as Australians —and, in so doing, finding the will to acknowledge the wrongs done to the Aboriginal people and to seek national reconciliation.

Without glamorizing the convicts (and while puncturing popular myths about bushrangers as folk heroes), Hughes leaves the reader with admiration for the strength of character of many of the convicts—and for the ability of principled individuals to make a difference in history. Many of the authorities who administered the System were hardened by it and by the prevailing notions of the time. A few, like James Thomas Morisset and Patrick Logan, made the prisons they commanded hellholes. Alexander Maconochie (1787-1860) emerges from this moral morass as a rare point of light in Hughes’ narrative, “the one and only inspired penal reformer to work in Australia throughout the whole history of transportation.” Today, when prisons worldwide have all too often become warehouses for disadvantaged minorities and others that society has failed, Maconochie deserves to be better known.

Both books end with a poignant twentieth-century visit to a site associated with the terrors of the past. In The Fatal Shore it is a penitentiary in Tasmania, now visited by tourists who “can hardly grasp the isolation it once stood for.” In the “Epilogue” to Slaves in the Family, Ball completes the circle of his search by going to Sierra Leone to find people with a common past, “the heirs of the slave-sellers,” black African slave dealers who profited from the slave trade, as the slave-owning Balls had done.

At a site where, over time, thousands of people, including many who became Ball slaves, had probably been loaded onto the boats that took them to a slave factory from which they were shipped to America, Ball and some of those slave-selling heirs performed a ceremony that “permits the living to speak with the ancestors and ask for a blessing, or for forgiveness.” The ceremony came out auspiciously, according to the local tradition, with every indication that their prayers had been accepted—a small reckoning among many in a book that is itself a settling of accounts, a way of releasing the future from the unresolved issues of the past.

Ball’s and Hughes’ works raise many questions that stem from what may prove to have been the central question of the twentieth century: what does it mean to be human in a time of immense changes in the world? The two books offer no easy answers. Instead, they provide reckonings that illuminate the delicate and difficult process of coming to terms with diversity among peoples and [Page 33] nations. As Hughes put it in his television documentary:

The differences between races, nations, and cultures are at least as deep and durable as their similarities. Some sections of Australia will continue to reject the new and different and demand its assimilation. But others are learning to navigate that difference, and in the world that’s coming, if you can’t do that, you’ve had it.

Indeed, if we can’t do that, we’ve had it.

[Page 34]

[Page 35]

Healthy Organizations
as Building Blocks
for a New Paradigm

A REVIEW ESSAY BY DOROTHY MARCIC

Copyright © 2001 by Dorothy Marcic.

Introduction

I HAVE spent most of my professional career trying to understand why people so often create unhealthy and debilitating organizations that drain rather than energize their members and why it has been so difficult to create systems that encourage people to do what can come naturally: to enjoy themselves and work productively. No one really wants to go to work and be bored, mistreated, and marginalized, yet all too frequently that is exactly what happens. As a management consultant, teacher, and author, I have walked into many organizations where pain was so prevalent that one could almost taste it in the air.

Next to the family, business organizations are a basic building block of society; thus a study of how they work (or do not work) is important. Just as a dysfunctional family can damage or impair the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual growth of its unfortunate members, an unhealthy work environment acts as a physical and emotional drain, thwarting the potential productivity and satisfaction of its populace. In a collective sense, such organizations also drain the lifeblood of a society, keeping it from attaining its true place in the world.

Among the significant books published in the twentieth century are a number that have helped me in my professional quest to promote effective organizations and that, for me, have shifted the paradigm. Their authors are thinkers whose philosophies explore new territory in examining the conditions necessary for effective organizations and who call for a new awareness of the meaning of leadership, groups, and power. They pinpoint the blind spots that keep society from creating systems that are hospitable to the human spirit.

Traditional organizations are modeled, whether the indebtedness is recognized or not, after the society of the ancient Egyptians, who skillfully designed an elitist hierarchy, a concept and structure further developed by the Romans. Hierarchy in itself is not a problem. But an elitist hierarchy allows the top group to accumulate autocratic and self-serving power for its own greater glory. By-products of the system are injustice to and emotional abuse of others. In fact, years ago one of my colleagues, as an important part of his management courses, taught his students how to protect themselves from organizational abuse after they entered the work force. Who, then, are the authors whose works are concerned with organizations as promoters of a healthy society, as welcoming systems in which the human spirit can flourish?

[Page 36] Paradigm-Setting Books

MARY Parker Follett (1868-1933) was a brilliant thinker and writer of the early twentieth century who is only now finding the recognition among management practitioners that she so richly deserves. Follett wrote about group motivation and treating workers (and their input) with respect at a time when other management theorists were concerned with improving productivity by managerial fiat, a manager-knows-best style still prevalent in many of today’s organizations. Although Follett was among the first to identify the need for teams, empowerment, and networked organizations, her ideas, while not always credited to her, are today ironically called “new-paradigm” thinking. It is important to remember that Follett was writing when Frederick Taylor was the god of management. Taylor, with his easily understood division-of-labor and efficient-structure theories, tried, in the quest for greater productivity, to squeeze the humanity out of work, making people more like machines. Follett’s theories were so revolutionary that they suffered the fate of many ideas ahead of their time: they were pushed aside, in this case, in favor of efficiency experts and time-motion studies. In recent years, when we have used the efficiency model until both it, and we, have exhausted each other, we are finally beginning to realize what Follett pointed out years ago: that organizations are nothing more than groups of people and that people have human needs that encompass and transcend efficiency.

Starting in the 1920s Follett wrote about constructive conflict, which, to Bahá’ís, looks a great deal like what they term “consultation.” She spoke of businesses as social organizations, as opposed to mere “business organizations,” something it took the rest of the field many decades to understand. She continued to be ahead of her time in her understanding that management was a function, rather than a kit of tricks or tools.

If Mary Parker Follett could anticipate the horizontal flow of power and authority in an organization, the importance of empowering workers, and the utility of cross-functional teams, why was it so easy for the Taylors and the advocates of an elitist hierarchy to dominate until recently? Alice Miller (For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence [New York: Farrah 1983]) and Lloyd de Mause (The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse [New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1974]) say that it goes back to our practices of child rearing. Miller’s book outlines the unconscious abuses practiced in child rearing, the unhealthy things parents do to their children in the belief that they are acting for the child’s own good. Similarly, de Mause traces the history of child-rearing practices from antiquity to the present, showing how parents demonstrate a shocking lack of empathy toward their children: violence, abuse, infanticide, abandonment, and severe physical punishment are common practices recorded throughout the ages.

It is only recently that the common practice of beating children has begun to change. [Page 37] Miller and de Mause say that the abuse of power by parents against their children, both physically and emotionally, creates deep psychological wounds and subconscious needs to strike back, needs that are often played out in wars, clan and tribal feuds, and domestic violence. It is not, therefore, surprising that abuse of power also plays out in organizations, with employers treating people as objects to fulfill their own needs or to satisfy their own understanding of the way things “ought to be,” just as their parents may have done with them. Both Miller and de Mause show how parents who treat their children with respect, the kind of respect these same parents received from and showed their parents, will raise children with a stronger sense of empathy toward other human beings and with a stronger set of moral values.

De Mause examines thoroughly the concept of civilization as an ever-developing process. He considers the entire history of child rearing, from antiquity when infanticide was common (the story of King Solomon and his threat to cut in half the baby claimed by two mothers presupposes that infanticide was not unheard of; otherwise, such a suggestion would not have occurred); to the Middle Ages, where thrashings and “spare the rod and spoil the child” were the norm; to today’s socialization phase, in which we hope to mold children so that they conform to certain traits; and, finally, to a new era that sees the parent as an agent who, through nurturing and respecting, helps the innate goodness of the child to develop. Children learn much of their behavior from their primary role models, their parents; thus when respect, decency, values, and healthy boundaries are modeled, the child learns to behave as a responsible and loving human being.

Because, as in any other learning situation, each generation tends to do a better job in child rearing on its second time through the process (first as children themselves, second as parents), child rearing is evolving toward a healthier model. De Mause’s model looks at the big picture, at changes that took centuries. His point is that, in general, we have a more enlightened view of child rearing than those of past centuries. Most societies do not accept norms of ages past: infanticide and severe neglect or abuse. Social change, however, does not move in a strictly linear fashion. There are still too many examples of horrific treatment of children, of parents selling their own flesh and blood into slavery. De Mause and Miller would say this is because the parents themselves did not experience healthy role models from their own parents and are not even conscious of the cruelties they inflict. What we can say, in a broader sense, is that abusive child-rearing practices, though still present in too many places, are at least outlawed or are called into question by an increasingly enlightened populace of the world. The fact that the news media reports stories of child abuse and slavery shows how horrified society, as a whole, has become at such practices. Miller and de Mause state clearly that a new form of child rearing is needed, not only to create healthier business organizations but also to end wars and other types of violence.

As children, through receiving adequate nurturing and respect, grow into more emotionally secure adults, we will see (and are seeing to some extent) healthier and more respectful organizations, based less on overly tight controls and more on participation, shared values, and empowerment.

The first wave of management theory to apply the idea of respect to organizations came in 1982 with the publication of Thomas J. Peters’ and Robert H. Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper, 1982), which identifies eight traits that, according to the authors, distinguish the best companies. Four of the eight are directly related to people: valuing and treating them well. To be sure, this was not the first book that addressed the [Page 38] importance of seeing workers as assets. Fritz Roethlisberger found in 1928 (Man-in-Organizazian: Essays of E. J. Roethlisberger [1928; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, Belknap P, 1968]) that excessive pressures on employees and unenlightened management practices could severely handicap companies. In 1965, Abraham Maslow wrote Eupsychian Management: A Journal (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1965), which describes in detail the need to treat workers in a way that would create empowerment and enthusiasm. In the late seventies Chris Argyris wrote that employees are the foundation for creating learning in organizations. And, of course, there was Mary Parker Follett’s earlier work. Although none of these writers captured much attention when their works were published, they laid the foundation and helped make the environment ready for Peters and Waterman in 1982, at a time when it might be said that collective maturity, as opposed to the occasional stellar individual, was increasing.

Peters’ and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence was the first “best seller” business book to provide cogent arguments about the importance of “productivity through people,” while describing the need for managers to be coaches rather than cops. Because the book sold more than a million copies, Peters’ and Waterman’s ideas were diffused rapidly throughout the general management population. Before the publication of this work, whenever I taught leadership training programs and mentioned the need to treat employees with respect, a common response was, “Treat them with respect? Are you kidding? We PAY them. It is their job to treat us with respect.” However, after the publication of In Search of Excellence, I rarely heard those types of comments. Peters’ and Waterman’s book helped to dislodge the old ways of thinking and to point us in a new direction, one aligned with concepts of justice, service, and unity.

Conclusion

ALL OF the writers discussed in this essay— Mary Parker Follett, Alice Miller, Lloyd de Mause, Fritz Roethlisberger, Abraham Maslow, Chris Argyris, Thomas J. Peters, and Robert H. Waterman—would agree that one cannot eliminate hatred by forbidding it nor increase motivation by telling people to work harder. Deeper and more subtle issues, many of which correlate with Bahá’í principles of justice, unity, love, and service, must be addressed. The problems of modern organizations are not always due to the lack of material resources or the lack of competent people, although both can be issues of importance. But when resources are adequate and competence is high, too often emotional wellbeing is lacking: organizations sap the energy of their employees and thus fail to contribute to the well-being of society. Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote that the problems of the world stem from a spiritual disease and need a spiritual solution: “The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy.” He spoke of the importance of justice in the world, of love, of service. It is not surprising, therefore, that such traits are proving to be essentials for organizational well-being. By addressing respect [Page 39] (a kind of love) for workers (and childten, albeit indirectly) and moving toward greater fairness and justice in the workplace, the best companies and their leaders have demonstrated—through scientific experiment, studies, and empirical arguments—the power of Bahá’u’lláh’s message.

We live in a time of great social change and upheaval. Some may see it as catastrophic. Others see it as the opportunity to create a new civilization—a civilization the organizations of which, both at the family level and collectively at the societal level, excel in being hospitable to the human spirit.

The New Millennium

My garden-plot of Eden

Is winter-worn again

The dregs of a thousand seasons

Bear the stench

Of rotting flesh

The sour odor of frozen aloe veras.

I pull the stubborn roots

That cling

Like knitted tentacles

To the past

Of creeds outmoded

Crystallized.

Soothing the troubled soil

With nurturing hands

I find the fresh green sprouts

Stirring up from beneath

The hopeless mass

Strong and brave

Harbingers of the new millennium.

—Monica A. Reller

Copyright © 2001 by Monica A. Reller

[Page 40]

The Search for Gold

When the thirsting man with cracked lips

Kneels down to water his dryness by hand

Shoveling dirt into his mouth then chokes

From swallowing,

And the warmish wind covers the death

Marched corpses with silted silence

And consigns them to oblivion like

Unto a banishing;

When the emptied heart tips over,

Shattering, and little rivulets lengthen

On the floor like yellow fingers

With rigor mortis spreading,

And the last drop of water drops down

Single, alone, as one who leaves thankless

And without promise of return,

Even for the dying;

When the heaving and fatted sun vomits

Opaque light that dulls to formless forms

The once lived-in lives that appeared

As the shape of being,

And the last ambition wanders crazy,

Collapsing into the red-colored dust

Of the worn out earth,

Without even a reckoning;

[Page 41]

When carcasses whose spirits long ago

Departed are blackened by the heat

Baking sky pulled downward by sounds

Of a vulture flying,

And the life oasis has been drunk dry

And every cry for the water soul

Has been called out to the realm

Beyond this mere existing,

And not for salvation nor even a breath can be wished,

Then, will the search for gold be finished.

—Hillary Chapman

Copyright © 2001 by Hillary Chapman

[Page 42]

[Page 43]

A Concurrent Resolution:
Upholding the Rights of the
Iranian Bahá’í Community

A concurrent resolution concerning the Iranian Bahá’í community, having been passed by the U.S. Senate on July 19, 2000, went before the U.S. House of Representatives in September, where it passed on September 19, 2000.

Between World Order’s Winter 1978-79 issue and the present, twenty-five issues have included discussions of the ever-changing but ever-present persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í community, a religious minority singled out, according to the Iranian government’s own record, for extermination. The discussions have taken many forms: editorials, articles, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, book reviews, photographs, Congressional testimony and resolutions, and other public documents, including a damaging Iranian government document. This 2000 Concurrent Resolution passed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives represents the efforts of one government, among many, to continue to pressure the Iranian government and to call it to the high moral standard set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While the seven Concurrent Resolutions have all held the government of Iran responsible “for upholding the rights of all its nationals, including the members of the Baha’i community,” the resolutions have become more and more specific. When persecutions on the Iranian Bahá’ís have eased, they have recognized such changes. The 1994, 1996, and 2000 resolutions call for legal recognition of the Bahá’í community. The 2000 resolution urges, more directly than previous ones, that educational opportunities be opened to Bahá’ís, including the right of Bahá’í students to attend Iranian universities and Bahá’í faculty to teach at such institutions and the right of the Bahá’í community to resume operation of its Open University. The 2000 resolution also urges the full implementation of the recommendations on the emancipation of the Iranian Bahá’í Community made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance in his 1996 report to the United Nations Council on Human Rights.

At the turning of the century, the persecution of the Bahá’í community, the roots of which trace back to the middle of nineteenth-century Iran, [Page 44] continue. The call for its emancipation continues to be heard at the threshold of the twenty-first century.

—THE EDITORS

---

Concerning the emancipation of the Iranian Baha’i community. (Engrossed in House)

106th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. CON. RES. 257
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Whereas in 1982, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996, Congress, by concurrent resolution, declared that it holds the Government of Iran responsible for upholding the rights of all its nationals, including members of the Baha’i Faith, Iran’s largest religious minority;

Whereas Congress has deplored the Government of Iran’s religious persecution of the Baha’i community in such resolutions and in numerous other appeals, and has condemned Iran’s execution of more than 200 Baha’is and the imprisonment of thousands of others solely on account of their religious beliefs;

Whereas in July 1998 a Baha’i, Mr. Ruhollah Rowhani, was executed by hanging in Mashhad after being held in solitary confinement for 9 months on the charge of converting a Muslim woman to the Baha’i Faith, a charge the woman herself refuted;

Whereas 2 Baha’is remain on death row in Iran, 2 on charges on apostasy, and 10 others are serving prison terms on charges arising solely from their religious beliefs or activities;

Whereas the Government of Iran continues to deny individual Baha’is access to higher education and government employment and denies recognition and religious rights to the Baha’i community, according to the policy set forth in a confidential Iranian Government document which was revealed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1993;

Whereas Baha’is have been banned from teaching and studying at Iranian universities since the Islamic Revolution and therefore created the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education, or Baha’i Open University, to provide educational [Page 45] opportunities to Baha’i youth using volunteer faculty and a network of classrooms, libraries, and laboratories in private homes and buildings throughout Iran;

Whereas in September and October 1998, Iranian authorities arrested 36 faculty members of the Open University, 4 of whom have been given prison sentences ranging between 3 to 10 years, even though the law makes no mention of religious instruction within one’s own religious community as being an illegal activity;

Whereas Iranian intelligence officers looted classroom equipment, textbooks, computers, and other personal property from 532 Bahá’í homes in an attempt to close down the Open University;

Whereas all Baha’i community properties in Iran have been confiscated by the government, and Iranian Baha’is are not permitted to elect their leaders, organize as a community, operate religious schools, or conduct other religious community activities guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

Whereas on February 22, 1993, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights published a formerly confidential Iranian government document that constitutes a blueprint for the destruction of the Baha’i community and reveals that these repressive actions are the result of a deliberate policy designed and approved by the highest officials of the Government of Iran; and

Whereas in 1998 the United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights, Maurice Copithorne, was denied entry into Iran: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress—

(1) continues to hold the Government of Iran responsible for upholding the rights of all its nationals, including members of the Baha’i community, in a manner consistent with Iran’s obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements guaranteeing the civil and political rights of its citizens;

(2) condemns the repressive anti-Baha’i policies and actions of the Government of Iran, including the denial of legal recognition to the Baha’i community and the basic rights to organize, elect its leaders, educate its youth, and conduct the normal activities of a law-abiding religious community;

(3) expresses concern that individual Baha’is continue to suffer from severely repressive and discriminatory government actions, including executions and death sentences, solely on account of their religion;

(4) urges the Government of Iran to permit Baha’i students to attend Iranian universities and Baha’i faculty to teach at Iranian universities, to return the property confiscated from the Baha’i Open University, to free the imprisoned faculty members of the Open University, and to permit the Open University to continue to function;

(5) urges the Government of Iran to implement fully the conclusions and [Page 46] recommendations on the emancipation of the Iranian Baha’i community made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance, Professor Abdelfattah Amor, in his report of March 1996 to the United Nations Commission of Human Rights;

(6) urges the Government of Iran to extend to the Baha’i community the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international covenants of human rights, including the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and equal protection of the law; and

(7) calls upon the President to continue—

(A) to assert the United States Government’s concern regarding Iran’s violations of the rights of its citizens, including members of the Baha’i community, along with expressions of its concern regarding the Iranian Government’s support for international terrorism and its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction;

(B) to emphasize that the United States regards the human rights practices of the Government of Iran, particularly its treatment of the Baha’i community and other religious minorities, as a significant factor in the development of the United States Government’s relations with the Government of Iran;

(C) to emphasize the need for the United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights to be granted permission to enter Iran;

(D) to urge the Government of Iran to emancipate the Baha’i community by granting those rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international covenants on human rights; and

(E) to encourage other governments to continue to appeal to the Government of Iran, and to cooperate with other governments and international organizations, including the United Nations and its agencies, in efforts to protect the religious rights of the Baha’i and other minorities through joint appeals to the Government of Iran and through other appropriate actions.

Passed the House of Representatives September 19, 2000.

[Page 47]

Children Lost

Bosnia. Somalia.

Beautiful children

expendable as stalks

of wheat dancing before

a scythe.

Roumania. Appalachia.

Every day a new name

for an ancient anguish.

The faces change but

the wraith eyes remain.

Rwanda. Chiapas.

Wounded Knee.

The meek inherit

the earth only when

buried under it.

Apartheid, genocide,

plain old-fashioned war.

Tribe against tribe,

brother against brother,

while the mothers weep.

—Janice Mazidi

Copyright © 2001 by Janice Mazidi

[Page 48]

Authors & Artists

HILLARY CHAPMAN is a history and English teacher, an aspiring poet, and a songwriter and musician with Big Open Road.

S. K. DAPOZ supports her writing habit by working as the Distributed Education Project Manager at the Indiana University Kelly School of Business in Indianapolis.

VICTORINO D’ARAUJO, a retired hotel manager, makes a first appearance in World Order.

GWENDOLYN ETTER-LEWIS is Professor of English and Graduate Director of the English Department at Western Michigan University. Her publications include Unrelated Kin: Race and Gender in Women’s Personal Narratives, coedited with Michele Foster, and My Soul Is My Own: Oral Narratives of African American Women, both published by Routledge.

CYNTHIA SHEPERD JASKWHICH free-lances full time as a poet-in-residence through the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Artists in Education program, traveling from school to school. Wordplay, a collection of her poetry, was recently published.

DOROTHY MARCIC is the Director of Graduate Programs in Human Resource Development and senior lecturer in human resource development in the Peabody School at Vanderbilt University. Her book Managing with the Wisdom of Love: Uncovering Virtue in People and Organizations was named one of the top ten management books of 1997.

JANICE MAZIDI, who holds two degrees in computer science, has coauthored several college textbooks on computers.

GAYLE MORRISON, a former member of the World Order Editorial Board (1969-72), has published articles on education and gender issues and is the author of To Move the World: Louis G. Gregory and the Advancement of Racial Unity in America (1982). Her review essay reflects her personal and professional interests in Australia and New Zealand, where she lived and traveled extensively, and in South Carolina, Louis Gregory’s birthplace.

MICHAEL PENN is an Associate Professor of Psychology, specializing in the study of psychopathology, at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. His research and publications include works on the epidemiology of gender-based violence, the relationship between culture and psychopathology, the pathogenesis of adolescent psychopathology, and the study of psychology and spirituality.

MONICA RELLER, an award-winning collage artist, writes poetry and newspaper articles and teaches piano, voice, and reflexology.

ART CREDITS: Cover design, John Solarz, cover photograph by Susan Reed; pp. 1, 10, 20, 24, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p. 33, photograph by Feng Bin; pp. 34, 42, photographs by Steve Garrigues.

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FORTHCOMING

• Peter Murphy pauses for poetry
• June Manning Thomas looks at the relationship between urban planning and racism
• Gary L. Morrison encounters the Xinjiang Mummies
• Richard Thomas looks at the rich history of intercultural and interracial collaboration in the U.S.
• Leila Milani considers the role of women in peace
• Julio Savi explores the dynamics of interfaith dialogue
• Special issues on the family, gender and sexuality, and race

BACK ISSUES

• Did you know that World Order has published more than 28 articles and editorials on the equality of women and men, including ones in the following issues: Fall 1995 (Vol. 27, No. 1); Fall 1996 (Vol. 28, No. 1); Spring 1997 (Vol. 28, No. 3)
• Back issues ($5.00 each plus shipping) on this and on many other topics, as well as subscriptions, may be obtained from:

1-800-999-9019

subscription@usbnc.org

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