I’ve been catching up on the Baha’i blogosphere this weekend and I just read Alison’s thought provoking observations on Ruhi.
The thinking behind this all-encompassing Ruhi project appears to me like a cargo-cult mentality. Boiled down, it says: “If we build it, they will come”. In the late 19th century, peoples in the Pacific Islands believed that if they built structures associated with cargo, this would lead to cargo magically turning up. Wiki says: “The most famous examples of Cargo Cult behavior have been the airstrips, airports, and radios made out of coconuts and straw. The cult members built them in the belief that the structures would attract transport aircraft full of cargo. Believers stage ‘drills’ and ‘marches’ with twigs for rifles and military-style insignia and ‘USA’ painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers.” You see, the cult members had no idea how cargo was actually made and transported to their islands. Instead, they associated its appearance with the appearance of spiritual beings with magical equipment.
I chuckled a bit reading that because Alison is an excellent writer and it made me see in my mind’s eye little jungle men marching in faux-uniforms pretending to be air traffic controllers or soldiers and what-not.
The fallacy that induced the cargo-cults is mistaking correlation for causation. That is, because A happened and then B happened… A must have caused B. So if we repeat A, we should get result B.
Or in simpler terms, because ice cream sales go up when it is hot and sunny, lets sell more ice cream, because then we should have a warm, sunny day.
When you stop to think about it, that is pretty much what happened. Ruhi was a small tiny project being developed and run in a few small villages in Columbia. The target audience was mostly illiterate to moderately literate rural folk. The results were good (I still haven’t seen any proof of this but let’s let it slide for now). So the creators of Ruhi thought they’d hit the secret method to win over the world to the Baha’i Faith.
Yet after giving Ruhi the benefit of the doubt for more than 10 years, it can not withstand even the most superficial scientific inquiry. Was Ruhi really successful in Columbia? How do we know it and only it was the reason that (allegedly) rural Columbians became Baha’i? How do we know there wasn’t another factor(s)? Has it been successful since? Has it been successful as an export? how and why?
The data offered from the Baha’i World Center is nil. Sure, there are anecdotal evidence: gloriously moving stories of 2 yak herders in downtown Gypjak taking Ruhi classes. But no hard data.
In fact, the only data we have comes from the national level. Like the recent one from the United States. And not only does it not provide any evidence of Ruhi’s efficacy… it in fact suggests that since Ruhi was introduced about 10 years ago, the Baha’i community has seen an accelerated rate of decline in enrollments and an acceleration in the rise of people leaving the Faith. Furthermore, according to the NSA, the “A” clusters, those cities and areas which are the apogee of the Ruhi system are showing no difference in growth or enrollments than other clusters.
Think I’m making all this stuff up?
Read the annual report from the National Spritual Assembly of the United States for yourself! Investigate the truth independently my good wo/man.
So all the hard data we do have is showing that a cargo cult mentality is an apt analogy for Ruhi. Why not? They are both unscientific and about as effective at bringing about the desired result.
But while cargo-cults in Oceana are a sociological oddity we can giggle at, Ruhi is really damaging the Baha’i Faith. It will take us years to realize just how much damage was inflicted. But by that time it will be too late.
This is why I asked previously:
“How will we know, specifically, if this whole Ruhi/core curriculum/institutes process is succeeding? what metrics will we have to watch? what time frame will have to elapse? is there any point or event or situation in which we may potentially acknowledge that it didn’t work? what would that be?”
But why waste time asking such silly questions? There’s a march at 1500 hours and I still haven’t finished polishing my bamboo rifle. So if you’ll excuse me… hep-two, hep-two, hep-two….
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