On the connection between individual and social transformation
14 Oct
A study circle in the fields of Kamashi, Rwanda, in June 2004 (Copyright 2006, Baha’i International Community)
Therese over at the BIC Interns Blog posted on last month’s opening session of the UN Summit on Climate Change. She writes honestly about the speed with which political institutions have responded to climate change, and about the challenge of “developing an adequate institutional framework for intergovernmental cooperation.”
Her comments reminded me of this passage from the Ruhi Institute:
The Ruhi Institute tries to understand the process of the transformation of human society in terms of a far more complex set of interactions between two parallel developments: the transformation of the individual, and the deliberate creation of the structures of a new society. Moreover, just as it does not view the human being as a mere product of interactions with nature and society, it does not identify structural change only with political and economic processes. Rather, it sees the necessity of change in all structures—mental, cultural, scientific and technological, educational, economic and social—including a complete change in the very concepts of political leadership and power.
What do these two things have to do with each other? Therese points to the need for a new institutional framework to approach climate change as a global community. This seems consistent with the quotation from the Ruhi Institute, but it is unclear to me how we get from one to the other. The Ruhi Institute approaches social action as neither limited to individual transformation nor solely focused on transforming social structures. Rather, the intellectual and spiritual development of the individual is expressed not through personal salvation but through a set of activities that contribute to the establishment of new social institutions:
This continuous interaction, between the parallel processes of the spiritualization of the individual and the establishment of new social structures, describes the only dependable path of social change, one that avoids both complacency and violence and does not perpetuate the cycles of oppression and illusory freedom that humanity has experienced in the past.
Dear reader, what do you think? What is the role of social institutions in addressing climate change? How can the individual contribute to such seemingly out-of-reach efforts?
Thank you for this post. It can be easy to oscillate between extremes of individual growth and collective transformation, or to assume that one is sufficient without the other. Another dichotomous thinking trap! Thanks for the reminder of their necessary collaboration and interdependence.
Hey, Jeremy. Dichotomous thinking, indeed.
We’re only just beginning to see what the role of the individual as a protagonist in development might mean. We’ve got a ways to go before the role of the institutions begins to emerge. But it’s useful to remember that social institutions exist at all levels of society. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year for her work on social institutions, and the role they play in protecting common-pool resources. Maybe local and regional social institutions have a role to play in regulating greenhouse gas reduction, above and beyond any market-vs-government dichotomies.