I was imagining a single division behind Baha'i Internet feuding, between followers of the House of Justice and people who have grievances against the Baha'i community and its institutions. I wanted to practice and promote fellowship across that divide. Now I see the situation as much more complex than that, and I just want to continue what I had already started, practicing and promoting freedom from sectarian attitudes and practices in general. Using disagreements over Baha'i administration as an excuse for estrangement would just be one example among others. I might post some ideas about that on my Deeds Not Words pages.
This morning I was thinking of Seventy-and-Two's example. I don't see him drawing lines between himself and people with ideologies contrary to his. I'd like to write something about that for my Deeds Not Words pages.
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3 comments:
Hi Jim,
You wrote:
"I was imagining a single division behind Baha'i Internet feuding, between followers of the House of Justice and people who have grievances against the Baha'i community and its institutions. I wanted to practice and promote fellowship across that divide. Now I see the situation as much more complex than that..."
Could you elaborate a bit more on the complexity of the situation, as you see it? For example, do you think there are multiple divisions, and what are they? Are you starting to doubt that the two categories you have created - followers of the House of Justice and people who have grievances against the Baha'i community and its institutions - are entirely valid?
ka kite
Steve
I think now that there are at least as many categories as there are people drawing lines. I've drawn and continually redrawn and renamed lines between myself and some other people. People who excuse their cruelty as defending the Faith, for example. I see other people drawing lines between themselves and people they call BIGS, or fundamentalists, or the mainstream, or all Baha'is, or the Internet Anti-Baha'i Society, or Covenant breakers, or non-Baha'is.
"Are you starting to doubt that the two categories you have created - followers of the House of Justice and people who have grievances against the Baha'i community and its institutions - are entirely valid?"
I never did think they were entirely valid. Just useful for some purposes.
It might have been useful for some of my purposes, when I first learned about Baha'i Internet feuding associated with the dialogue/Talisman chronicles, to imagine two camps, but I'm thinking now that it has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had.
Opposition to the House of Justice has never been a big issue in the Bahai culture wars. None of the familiar Bahai liberals or progressives have questioned the legitimacy and importance of the House of Justice, or refused obedience to it. The culture wars (and not just the Bahai ones) come about from more fundamental differences, between worldviews and cognitive styles.
To describe the issue in the Bahai community as feuding between followers of the House of Justice and others is to accept the conservatives' account of the divisions. But it should be tested, not simply accepted. Is there in fact any evidence that any of the progressive Bahais have made "persistent challenges to the Universal House of Justice" (as Momen alleges in his apostasy article? Is there any evidence of even one such challenge?
The divisions are unresolvable in the short term because there is a basic asymmetry. One of the things that makes people adopt a postmodern worldview and a progressive reading of the Bahai message is the consciousness of the plurality of worldviews. This consciousness is as characteristic of the postmodern as the historical consciousness was characteristic of modernity. Naturally, those who are embedded within their world-views, rather than also standing outside them and seeing their plurality, cannot really grasp the possibility of an entirely different, post-modern, world-view, let alone imagine how the Bahai Faith would look if one stood within the postmodern worldview. So in their bafflement, they invent motives which "must" be driving the progressives -- they are eager for power, or they reject authority or oppose the House of Justice, or they are personal egoists, or or ...
These are not evidence-based understandings, they are the kind of stories people make up to tie up the loose ends, to make their world tidier.
In the very very long term, people who live in a postmodern world will, almost all, adopt a pluralist, relativist, worldview, and will show greater tolerance for a diversity of different cognitive styles.
-- Sen McGlinn
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