I knew Steven Scroll and heard Juan Cole speak. I my opinion, they were forced out of the Faith by overly authoritarian leaders. This is from
Juan Cole's blog...
Here I wish to examine social control mechanisms in the American Baha’i community. These include mandatory prepublication censorship of everything Baha'is publish about their religion, administrative expulsion, blackballing, shunning and threats of shunning. What are the ideological bases of these control mechanisms? How is power attained and managed in a lay community without a clergy? I wish to stress here that this article is not concerned with the essence or scriptures or theology of the religion, but with the actualities of its day-to-day technologies of control.
From a philosophy course I took Juan Cole is picked apart, these are supposed to be examples of bad philosophy.
A good example of essential misapprehension is found in Juan Cole's "The Bahá'í Faith in America as Panopticon, 1963-1997". Cole fails to identify (abstract) two essential qualities of the Bahai Faith: it (1) a voluntary and (2) a purposive organization. This leads him to
conflate it with a panopticon, a type of prison in which convicts are visible from all angles at all times (Bentham) or, by extension, a society in which people keep themselves and each other under surveillance by their inward adherence to the rules (Foucault). In one way or another, a panopticon requires compulsion and thus denies individual freedom.
Consequently, Cole's attempt at
analogical reasoning fails as per analogy rule # 2: there is a significant essential difference that undermines all other similarities. By nature, panopticons are prisons; they require compulsion to work whether this compulsion be physical or social via fellow inmates. However, the Bahá'í Faith is a voluntary organization; one enters by choice and may leave - i.e. absent oneself from all further surveillance and compulsion - by choice. By definition, no genuinely voluntary organization can be described as a `panopticon' without seriously compromising the proper usage of the term. A panopticon which one may leave at will is simply not a panopticon.
The conflation here is either an inadvertent, but fatal error of reasoning or it is intentional, in which case it is nothing other than a propaganda ploy known as
"fear mongering". Conflation is one of the most commonly used propaganda devices.
Referring to the Bahá'í Faith as a theocracy is another example of essential misapprehension leading to outright
misrepresentation. Unlike any theocracy that ever existed, the Bahá'í Faith has no clergy; all authoritative and executive offices are held by election: LSA's, NSA's, delegates to the annual convention and the Universal House of Justice. Any decision made by appointees such as Auxiliary Board Members and Counselors may be appealed to the elected bodies, which, in the case of the Universal House, have the final word. This is so unlike any historical examples of theocracy that it is a gross misuse of the word to apply it to the Bahá'í Faith. Nor have there ever been examples of theocracies as voluntary organizations. The use of such philosophically and historically inaccurate descriptions is a blatant use of a rhetorical (and propaganda) device called "
guilt by association".
A second type of essential misapprehension is the failure to recognize the purpose of the object of study, its final cause. The Bahá'í Faith exists for a purpose, to unify humankind. It has a purpose that extends beyond its own collective self-interest. Consequently, it is a `purposive organization' and even in the most democratic societies, such organizations do not give absolute priority to individualism and civil rights; rather, they balance individual aspirations with common goals. Those who join such organizations, voluntarily set aside some of their preferences, civil privileges and even curtail some of their own civil rights for the good of the organization as a whole. They do so because they have a greater loyalty to the goals of the cause they have chosen than to their own views and `rights'. Such individuals understand - as Cole does not - that restrictions are a necessary and inevitable part of any purposive organization and that personal sacrifices are required for the organization to work. Membership has privileges - but also its duties.
It is obvious that essential misapprehension could lead someone to portray any purposive organization as undemocratic and repressive, and its members as manipulated tools. To do so, however, would constitute a serious error in reasoning.
A third type of essential misapprehension is the failure to see the object of study as a whole. For example, the Bahá'í Faith is not a fragmented smorgasbord of teachings but an integral entity, in which all parts must be seen in relationship to each other. The fact that women cannot be elected to the Universal House must be seen in light of women's stated priority in education, their absolute right for economic support and their exemption from military service. This error also underlies many attempts to `prove' the repressive nature of the Faith by means of single quotes taken in isolation.
Essential misapprehension may also lead to the straw man fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of false attribution by which we attribute qualities, intentions, motives and powers that do not really exist.
An example of such false attribution of motive is Cole's claim that "the Bahá'í authorities wish to project an image more liberal than the reality" (ibid.) However, this cannot stand up to rational analysis. The Bahá'í Faith has never hidden its commitment to supposedly less `liberal' teachings, among them the ban on non-marital sex and homosexual acts, the ban on alcohol and illicit drugs, the strong discouragement of abortion, the fact that only men may be elected to the Universal House of Justice, the principle of obedience to the elected institutions and the acceptability of capital punishment in some cases. These `un-liberal' Teachings have always been widely available to seekers.
Indeed, the artificial imposition of foreign categories such as 'liberal' and 'conservative' is a straw man device. This extrinsic attributions must be imposed from without because they have no natural place within the Faith. They are drawn from adversarial party politics and the ensuing political culture and as such are irrelevant to a culture that rejects adversarial politics in all forms. Moreover, as already noted, the Bahá'í teachings on various issues impinge on both "liberal" and "conservative" portions of the political spectrum. This false attribution is a good example of a propaganda ploy known as `divide and conquer'.
Essential misapprehension easily leads to self-contradiction because the object of study is not clearly conceived. In effect, the author no longer understands his/her own work. For example, having missed another essential attribute of a panopticon - universal participation - Cole says, "One solution to this difficulty [of growth with strict internal controls] is to attempt to control what are thought of as key pressure points - vocal intellectuals, media, prominent institutions - and to give greater leeway to ordinary believers.
In other words we have a panopticon with selective focus - but that is no longer a panopticon! One cannot, on one hand, claim that the Bahá'í Faith is a panopticon where everyone is informing on everyone else to ensure orthodoxy and, on the other hand, also claim that the vast majority of members are given "greater leeway", that is, less supervision, for their thoughts. A panopticon in which the vast majority are free or even relatively free of supervision is not a panopticon.
False attribution of cause is one of the most common, and serious, logical errors. It is sometimes called 'dog logic' or 'madhouse logic'. Each day the mailman comes; my dog barks and each day the mailman leaves - and once again my dog struts proudly convinced that yet again he has driven off the threat.
According to Cole, "[t]he problem with strict internal controls for missionary religions, however, is that they are most often incompatible in Western societies with significant growth" (Cole, 1998). He blames what he sees as the slow growth in America on 'repression' instituted by the Universal House of Justice. Yet, oddly enough, he recognizes that groups "with strict internal controls" ("Panopticon") such as the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses as well as a wide variety of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have experienced "significant growth"
It is logically obvious that if other religions with "strict internal controls" (ibid.) are experiencing "significant growth", such controls cannot be used to explain why the Bahá'í Faith is not growing as fast as he thinks it should be. Some other factor must be at work. He attributes causal agency without showing any causal connection. At best, one might say that he mistakes a correlation (slow growth and alleged repression) for a cause.
One of the oddest errors in reasoning is refusal of the conclusion, which is not so much a logical error as an existential error, i.e. an error rooted in personal willfulness or a conflict with other commitments.
For example, there are those who fully understand that the Bahá'í Faith is a religion, and that three things follow from this: first, the material world is only a part of reality; second, there exists a non-material realm which has a role in the unfolding of events in the material, natural realm; and third, no simple empirical-materialist methodology can provide adequate knowledge about reality, especially when relating to historical events involving God.
From these three premises it follows logically that strictly material explanations demanded by contemporary academic scholarship are, by definition, incomplete and, therefore, logically inadequate and inaccurate. Yet, oddly enough there are those who will accept the premises but, for various reasons, refuse the conclusion and thus embroil themselves in needless disputes.
(To be continued)
