LAYLI MAPARYAN
Since the surprising election results of November 2016, I have been deep in reflection about how best to move in the world as a person who desires profound transformation of the human condition. Since childhood, participation in this process of transformation has been central to my sense of self and purpose, manifesting in different ways during different eras of my life. Yet, over the years, there have been a few major moments, like this one, that have stopped me in my tracks and forced reassessment of myself and the situation around me. I have had to stop and ask myself: What is truly going on? Am I being effective? What should I do to make sure that we continue to move in a direction that is vitalizing for the human race and the planet? These questions have continued in months succeeding the election, as the conditions precipitating them have only seemingly worsened day by day.
I know that I am not alone; many others who care about the same things I do have retreated into places where they can focus on self-care, re-centering, re-strategizing, and restoration of their energies. For some, these places are solitary; for others, these places are social. For all of us, these are places where we can reconnect with truth and retool ourselves for fulfilling the purpose of our lives: to shepherd the collective toward peace and freedom, justice and well-being. We are a particular tribe—one among many—and we know who we are.
The night before I wrote this essay, I was jolted to wakefulness by the thought that I should write about social justice education and Luxocracy. Luxocracy means “rule by Light,” and it refers to the inherent capacity of human beings to continually move toward that which is highest and best, based on the universal Divine1 nature of humans. As I wrote in The Womanist Idea, “Light in this instance refers to the Inner Light, the Higher Self, the Soul, the God Within—what I will hereafter refer to as Innate Divinity—as described by mystics and others across cultures, across faiths, and across the centuries, if not millennia.”2 In this manifesto on Luxocracy, I argued that humanity is in the process of evolving toward global society and planetary identity, that this evolution is both individual and collective, and that critical mass in this phase shift toward a new form of social organization is rapidly building.
At present, such assertions seem laughably counterintuitive. What happened in 2016 in terms of the elections feels like a setback. And maybe it is. But when I asked myself whether I still believed in—and am guided by—the core premises of Luxocracy, the answer came back as yes. In this essay, I will write about why, and I will develop Luxocracy as a social justice framework, exploring in particular its relevance to education as a tool of social justice. I will also highlight an influence on my own thinking that I have not previously written on at length, namely, the Baha’i Faith,3 the religion in which I was reared, from which I took a 20-year hiatus, only to return with new eyes in middle age. My mother, a Black woman, and my father, a White man, both became Baha’is in college—my mother at Spelman College, an historically Black college where she learned about the Faith from international students from Africa, and my father at the University of Wisconsin, where he learned about the Faith from a Japanese classmate whose family had been Baha’i for three generations. My parents, who met at a Baha’i conference and married in 1962, were featured in the April 1965 issue of Ebony magazine in an article about the Baha’i Faith and its global message. It is in this Baha’i environment that I grew up and became a Black woman deeply committed to social justice, service to humanity, and spirituality.
I recognize and respect in this writing that not all of my readers and not all of the members of “the tribe” are as religious or spiritually or mystically oriented as I am, and at the same time, that many, often quite quietly, are as powered by religion or spirit as I am. I write this in the interest of our being in conversation together and doing our best work together on behalf of the planet and humanity that we all love.
Let me get something out of the way. I do not think that politics can save us. As I wrote in The Womanist Idea,
[i]n today’s world, many people look towards politics for liberation. Politics or political activism is assumed to be the answer to human misery, strife, and injustice. Yet, the limitations of this strategy are rendered invisible by belief systems that, at best, separate the material world from the spiritual realm or, at worst, negate the spiritual realm altogether. The political is earthbound. If politics is not undergirded by a sense of the spiritual, the sacred, it is a dead end. This is equally true of politics on the right and politics on the left. Politics as it is understood and enacted today is incapable of delivering humanity to its own potentiality. Yet, outside politics, this potentiality is gaining expression and momentum in the larger global society among people from all walks of life who are awakening to the power and reality of their own spirituality as well as the spirituality of others and the spirituality of the world around them. As people come to apprehend their own Innate Divinity directly, as well as the Innate Divinity of others, Earth, and all aspects of Creation, they think, speak, and act differently; they expect different things from their world, and they begin to live in a different reality altogether, regardless of what is going on around them.4
It is important to clarify that I am not talking about religious government here, that is, theocracy of any kind. We have seen the dangers of theocracies throughout recent and past history. What we have not seen clearly is the influence of government informed by a universal understanding that human beings are sacred, that all creation is sacred, and, by association, government should serve the highest and best interests of humans and creation. We have not seen this; we have not tried this. Most people probably do not even think that this is possible, but I do. Yet, we are a ways from it, generations probably. Therefore, we have to begin where we are, which is a place where people can self-organize “outside” government and enact ways of being in the world wherever they find themselves—in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, their schools, and all the places they move throughout the day. Change is as important in these spaces as it is in the government. Are we working hard enough to be transformative in the spaces where we find ourselves every day?
One space where many of us reading this volume find ourselves is the area of education. We are educators, educational administrators, educational policymakers, and education enthusiasts of different kinds. We are here because we believe in the transformative power of education for individuals and society. We are here because we love children, youth, and adults enough to help them develop optimally. We are here because we are questers after knowledge—researchers, scientists, scholars of all kinds—who document our findings for humanity. We are people who put blood, sweat, and tears into making educational institutions run effectively, despite not enough resources and many competing social, political, economic, cultural, and moral interests. We are people with a particular angle of vision on how social injustice plays out in education and academia. For many of us, this view is informed by our cultural rootedness—in Blackness, Africanity, or another ethnic or cultural lineage that has been socially and politically marginalized, yet is the source of profound knowledge and liberatory educational praxis.5 Thus, we have access to a particular space of healing, of rectification, of transformation. Based on our cultural positionalities and their associated worldviews—communalistic, holistic, vitalistic—many of us, without ever saying so, already see and revolve our lifework around the sacredness of human beings. But could we do this more explicitly?
Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess. Through a word proceeding out of the mouth of God he was called into being; by one word more he was guided to recognize the Source of his education; by yet another word his station and destiny were safeguarded. The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom. If any man were to meditate on that which the Scriptures, send down from the heaven of God’s holy Will, have revealed, he would readily recognize that their purpose is that all men shall be regarded as one soul, so that the seal bearing the words “The Kingdom shall be God’s” may be stamped on every heart, and the light of Divine bounty, of grace, and mercy may envelop all mankind. The one true God, exalted be His glory, hath wished nothing for Himself. The allegiance of mankind profiteth Him not, neither doth its perversity harm Him. The Bird of the Realm of Utterance voiceth continually this call: “All things have I willed for thee, and thee, too, for thine own sake.” If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure. Were the earth to attain this station and be illumined with its light it could then be truly said of it “Thou shall see in it no hollows or rising hills.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh [1990, pp. 259–260])6
This quote is one of my all-time favorite passages from the entire corpus of sacred writings by Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet Founder of the Baha’i Faith. I think it speaks to me because I am an educator, but also because I believe to the very core of my being that the key to transforming society—away from injustice, violence, oppression, discrimination, prejudice, hatred, and all related ills and toward peace, justice, freedom, and well-being—is education built on recognition of the sacred and Divine nature of humans. I would like to share my close reading of this quote, which has guided my life since early adulthood.
The first thing that stands out is the use of the curious word “Talisman.” Generally, talisman means something akin to a good luck charm. However, etymological research reveals that the word arose from telesma, the Greek word for completion or religious rite, which in turn emerged from the word telein (complete, perform a rite), and ultimately from the word telos (result or end). “Telos” is a word used in Greek philosophy to refer to a future end state that acts as a cause in the present. In other words, it refers to something not unlike “becoming” or “destiny.” Thus, one could read closely in the opening statement, “Man is the supreme Talisman,” that human beings are the ultimate “becoming thing” or “thing in formation.” In other words, there is something special about what human beings are capable of becoming.
We see some reference to this in the three-stage process outlined in the next sentence, which indicates that human beings were Divinely created, then invested with the faculty to recognize their Creator, and finally set on a course toward realization of their “station and destiny.” It is as though a profound gestational process was set in motion.
What has deprived us from becoming all that we are ultimately capable of becoming? The second line lets us know, in no uncertain terms: “Lack of a proper education” has deprived us. And what is a “proper education”? Again, I turn to etymology, where education, broken down, means to “lead something out from” (e = out from; duc[are] = to lead, in Latin). What is it we are “leading out”? Reading a few lines further, we find that the Great Being says, “Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” Thus, it is the gems that are hidden within us, the gems that need to be brought out. What are these gems? The passage doesn’t specify, but we can speculate: These gems are all forms of human excellence, including the unique talents invested in each person—those very elements that we as teachers seek to nurture and cultivate in our students when we are at our very best. Anyone who knows gemstones knows that they are typically hidden within very ordinary looking stones, which often must be cracked open to reveal their treasures. We also know that gemstones often have a wonderful quality of refracting the light in beautiful ways. Returning to the concept of Luxocracy, which refers to Divine Light as reflected in all people by virtue of the human connection, we can imagine these hidden gemstones refracting the Divine Light in very beautiful—indeed, splendid—ways, if revealed.
After this commentary on education, the passage shifts topically to a distillation of the message of Sacred Writings, insofar as the purpose of all of them is “that all men should be regarded as one soul.” This is, in my view, the missing piece of our current “political” discourse, insofar as it is not structured in a way to facilitate our seeing ourselves as “one soul.” This “one soul” idea is not unlike Thich Nhat Hanh’s notion of “interbeing”—We “inter-are.”7 It is a radical concept of interconnectedness, not just of humans, but also of humans with all created things, a kind of existential interpenetration, interdependence, and co-construction that is always in motion and always in effect. When we set up—indeed, reify—lines of division, lines in the sand, enemy lines, we undermine our ability to see, benefit from, and leverage a notion of human oneness. Oneness does not, in this context, refer to uniformity, sameness, or lack of appreciation of and respect for difference, diversity, and distinction; rather, it is an understanding in which all people and created things are mutually constitutive, for better or worse. It is an understanding that, when one part of “the Folk” is ailing, “the Folk” as a whole is ailing, and there’s no getting around that.8 It is a recognition of Ubuntu: “I am because we are, and because we are, I am.”9 It is a recognition of ntulogy: “All sets are interrelated through human and spiritual networks.”10
From a Baha’i perspective, this oneness already exists—it is the foundational condition of human beingness, the ontological reality, not something to be created or achieved—yet we veil ourselves from it through a variety of means, including ego, materialism, undue focus on appetitiveness, and, importantly, lack of a “proper education.” Education helps us to unveil our own faculties, to develop moderation over our appetites, to see beyond ourselves and our own interests, and to delve into the mysteries—that is, to explore what is beyond materialism and a purely material reality. This process prepares us for Justice—as spelled out in another verse penned by Bahá’u’lláh, which states: “O SON OF SPIRIT! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid, thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Very justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.”11
I digress here to show the links between education, sight, and justice. Education aids the development of clear sight, which, in turn, prepares people to be able to enact justice. Additionally, for justice to be fully realized, people must develop the ability to control their behavior (“how it behooveth thee to be”), a discipline also aided by “proper education.”
Returning to the earlier Baha’i passage on education, we see a logical syllogism (which could, of course, be empirically tested) that suggests that our recognition that human beings are one soul will be followed by social transformation (“Divine bounty, … grace, and mercy may envelop all mankind”). These are the goods of relief to human suffering.
The balance of the passage reiterates the idea that God has given these gifts—talismanic power, education, Scripture and Divine guidance, gems, treasures—to humankind strictly for the benefit of humankind. God is independent; God is beyond the conditions, good or ill, of humankind. God has conferred upon humanity all that it needs to prosper, to realize its own highest and best good. As the passage states, “All things have I willed for thee, and thee, too, for thine own sake.” This places tremendous responsibility on us to reach for and achieve our own great destiny, our own ultimate nobility, and all the social goods—justice, peace, freedom, well-being—that go with it. This connects the passage to the notion of Luxocracy—“rule by Light”—because it speaks to the realization of our Divine natures in ways that enable the best of society also to emerge—not because we have been forced into good through law or government, but because we have autonomously chosen to form society in ways that reinforce our goodness.
In my estimation, the penultimate sentence summarizes the relationship between sacredness, education, and social justice, with an admonition to the very kinds of people who challenge our faith in humanity in times such as these: “If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure.” This assertion speaks to the fact that those in power, those whom we uphold (perhaps falsely) as the leaders and guardians of society, are holding us back from the very simple things that would ensure our liberation and healing, namely, fellowship and love. There are active inimical forces keeping us separated from the keys that would release us from this cage, this prison of suboptimal human development, expression, and experience.
One of the challenges of this point of view that I am advocating is to see all people—even those whom we dislike strongly, those whom we view as “anti-,” those we deem as “bad”—through the lens of sacredness. How can we keep everyone in the fold while still acknowledging and addressing the evils, harms, and injustices that undermine human peace, freedom, and well-being? One way to do this is by tracing causal pathways and by understanding that a chain of factors and influences that, over time, caused an innocent baby to become an agent of harm in the larger collective. Do we truly understand that chain of factors? We must remember that, anytime we demonize anyone, we are recreating the pattern of drawing lines that separate people. Yet, how can we hold people accountable without demonizing them?
Anything that is caused can be uncaused or prevented, particularly in a future scenario. “Lack of a proper education” is often one factor that allows evil to arise unchecked, whether in individuals or in swaths of people. We must take more care—particularly those of us of this tribe responsible for shepherding humanity toward well-being—to explicitly trace, document, and attend to factors that entrench people in patterns of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are unjust, evil, or harmful so that we can develop interventions—individual and collective—that interrupt and re-route these patterns. Social scientists play an important role here, as do clinicians, therapists, and healers. All of us must collaborate.
The institutions of society are responsible for establishing safeguards for the development of people’s goodness across the lifespan, but collectively we have lost site of this responsibility of institutions. The recursive loop of influence linking individuals and institutions has broken down in favor of institutions serving the bad at least as often as the good, to our peril. Stated differently, these institutions are serving interests other than human well-being—often, interests that aren’t even human at all—and thus short-shrifting humans. Although it will be a gradual process to reclaim and retrain our social institutions, we must keep this goal in mind. In the meantime, we begin with something relatively simple—education, where we can have direct influence on many people right away. How can we right things in the educational sphere?
For starters, as social justice educators, we can begin each day with the remembrance that everyone is sacred. By sacred, I mean noble, of Divine origin, blessed and a blessing, inspiring awe and gratitude, worthy of reverence and respect at our core. We are sacred, our students are sacred, our colleagues are sacred, parents are sacred, even the people we are teaching about are sacred. Additionally, our earth is sacred, our cosmos is sacred—from our desks and chalkboard to our books and computers to the critters crawling around and beyond. See with the sacred eye, and teach students to see with the sacred eye. Then watch what happens. Does justice come more easily when we are creating a community of sacred beings? How do we interrupt problems in the classroom from a sacred starting point? How do we initiate discussions about historical or contemporary injustice from a sacred starting point? How do we encourage one another to keep up these practices despite a steady stream of stressors as well as invitations to do otherwise? While it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide in-depth answers to these questions, it is my hope to spur wider dialogue along such lines among educators, educational administrators, educational policymakers, and the general public, as well as to support educational programs that are already based on notions of human sacredness.12
Education is the most powerful, accessible means of social change at our disposal. It is global, it is established, it is peopled, and it is malleable. The greatest intervention on education itself at this time in line with Luxocracy would be to universalize the notion of the sacredness of human beings and creation. It is an emotional transformation that doesn’t require anyone to be religious or even to characterize themselves as spiritual. We all can access those feelings of awe and reverence that accompany the recognition of sacredness in a person or thing and bootstrap from this shared affective experience. In fact, it would be counterproductive to situate this practice inside religions or spiritual traditions because that would risk initiating a process of drawing lines in the sand. However, that does not mean we can’t access the energy from deep without our souls or the universe if that is our inclination. Wherever we find inspiration—which is, in itself, a form of power—that is where we begin.
Sometimes I find my ASÉ in Audre Lorde or Barbara Smith.13 Sometimes I find my ASÉ in Shirley Chisholm. Sometimes I find my ASÉ in Oshun, Oya, Yemaya, Mammywata, or Obatala. Sometimes I find my ASÉ in my sister scholars who are doing the same work (you know who you are), or different work (you, too, know who you are). Or in my beloved brother scholars (ASÉ-O, Brothers—you know who you are). Sometimes I find my ASÉ in the Báb or Bahá’u’lláh, Jesus Christ or Muhammad (peace be upon Him), Moses or Buddha, the Rishis or Thich Nhat Hanh. Sometimes I find it in teachers I have had along the way, such as Mary Wilson in 7th grade or Beverly Guy-Sheftall in college or Pregs Govender at the international feminist pedagogy workshop in South Africa. Sometimes I find my ASÉ in unknown beautiful-spirited people who serendipitously cross my path, blessings all. Sometimes I find it in Hip Hop or classical music or the marvelous sound of the kora. Sometimes I find my ASÉ in my father, my mother, my sisters or sisters-in-law, my children, or the love of my life, my husband Seboe. Or in my Ancestors, my grandmother, my daughter. Sometimes I find my ASÉ in my books or in a library or online. Sometimes I find it in my own head when I meditate or watch a sunrise or sunset or the stars or walk through a forest, sit by the ocean, or stand in the wind. It is always there, always available, always a source of power, of connection to Source. I give these many examples just to show how ubiquitous inspiration is for our work and how important it is to connect—also to remind ourselves to help our students and colleagues discover this Source.
Social justice education from a Luxocratic perspective begins when, fortified in this power, we step into our institutions, our classrooms, and our offices, knowing when to close the door and really teach and when to open the door to widen the circle. It requires us to check in with our own power to transform institutions from within by our own participation in highly intentional ways, as well as our power to counteract the ways in which institutions are failing by engaging in social justice–oriented and Divine Light–connecting practices outside institutions. It requires us to think beyond rote definitions of justice or social justice work and really expand the vocabulary of social justice activity, remaining humble and open in this process of discovery. It requires us to remember that there are no shortcuts and that we must strive to be impeccable internally and externally. We must challenge ourselves to love harder and, at the same time, exact accountability with more consistency and resolve. Most important, we must support one another as trailblazers in the doing of this work.
1.The word “Divine” is capitalized here and elsewhere out of reverence for the Creator.
2.Maparyan, L. (2012). The Womanist Idea. New York: Routledge, p. 3.
3.“Founded in Iran in 1844, the Baha’i Faith is the youngest of the world’s independent, monotheistic religions, with more than 5 million adherents in 236 countries and territories. Baha’is come from nearly every national, ethnic, and religious background, making the Baha’i Faith the second most widespread religion in the world, after Christianity, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Baha’is view the world’s major religions as part of a single, progressive process through which God reveals His will to humanity. Baha’u’llah (1817–1892), the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, is recognized by Baha’is as the most recent in a line of Divine Messengers that includes Abraham, Krishna, Moses, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad. The central theme of Baha’u’llah’s message is that humanity is one single race and that it is imperative, for the security and prosperity of all, that it resolve to move toward a united, global civilization. Baha’is believe in the harmony of science and religion, the equality of women and men, the elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty, the common origin and unity of all world religions, and the elimination of all forms of prejudice.” (Baha’i Office of Public Affairs, (n.d.), retrieved from publicaffairs.bahai.us/who-we-are/ourvision)
4.Ibid., p. 4.
5.See, for example, Vanessa Sheared’s “Giving Voice: An Inclusive Model of Instruction—A Womanist Perspective” and Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant’s “A Womanist Experience of Caring: Understanding the Pedagogy of Exemplary Black Women Teachers,” both anthologized in Phillips, L. (2006). The Womanist Reader. New York: Routledge (pp. 269–279 and 280–295, respectively).
6.In this passage, the words “he,” “him,” “man,” “men,” and “mankind” are to be regarded as referring to people of all genders.
7.Thich Nhat Hanh (1987). Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
8.The reference here is to “the Folk” mentioned by Alice Walker in her 1983 definition of “womanist,” where she wrote that a womanist “Loves the Folk.” See Alice Walker (1983), Preface. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
9.Ifeanye Menkiti. (1984). “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” In African Philosophy: An Introduction, edited by Richard Wright. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
10.Linda James Myers. (1988). Understanding an Afrocentric World View: Introduction to an Optimal Psychology, Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
11.Bahá’u’lláh. (1985). Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Wilmette, IL: Baha’i Publishing Trust, pp. 3–4.
12.Two Baha’i-inspired examples would be The Virtues Project by Linda Kavelin Popov, Dan Popov, and John Kavelin and Raising Peacemakers curriculum by Somava Saha Stout, MD. A Buddhist example can be observed in the book It’s Always Possible by Kiran Bedi or the film Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. A Christian and ecowomanist example can be seen in Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, as well as the film Taking Root.
13.ASÉ is a Yoruba word that refers to both the power to make things happen or change and power, authority, and command in relation to this energy. SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ase_(Yoruba)