The Cardinal
Failings of Sai Baba’s “Human Values”
WHERE THE TEACHINGS
AND THE TEACHER GO WRONG
Sathya Sai Baba began to talk about human values in
his thirties, then reckoning on four such (truth, love, peace and right
action). The phrase ‘human values’ was quite widely used in spiritual movements
in SSB’s youth (eg. by Rudolf Steiner and diverse humanistic writers on
ethics), though it fell rather much into disuse after WW2. SSB most likely
learned it from the erudite Prof. N. Kasturi, with whom he associated and
discussed daily in the 1950s and thereafter. The term is again much more
widespread in the West today, no doubt due to its being a central concept
in the human ethics movement. To what extent its use might also have been
influenced by SSB's use of it is most uncertain. Later he decided somewhat
arbitrarily one fine day that there were then ‘five eternal human values’,
having somehow forgotten formerly to include the Gandhian expression ‘non-violence’
(ahimsa). (A very popular, high-minded flag to fly both in India
and elsewhere, so it eventually had to be made use of by SSB too.)
Simplicity and vagueness in the service of moralism:
Though Sathya Sai Baba has repeated and repeated much
the same things for so long that they have become quite widely known, at least
among his followers. The five values, being one of his simpler menus, caught
on so well that he evidently chose them as his banner. That they were originally
grabbed as if out of thin air without any deeper thought becomes quite evident
only when one examines them carefully. They are five very ambiguous slogans,
each loaded with positive associations and attractive because of their simplicity,
something the masses can relate to. Even unlettered Indian villagers are often
acquainted with several of the values from their Hindu culture and so easily
find them appealing. The ideas they encompass are part of the modern Hindu
heritage, a mixture of traditional religious values and some borrowed elements
from Christianity (notably the concept of Divine love of God for his Creation
and for humankind).
The simplicity of the 'five values' is deceptive, because each term is so
general, imprecise and so conflates many different meanings… So, while there
is something to suit everyone, not all see at all the same set of meanings.
The vagueness of the terms hide various weaknesses and shortcomings of the
underlying viewpoint and makes it function much as an a la carte moralism,
a general menu to 'pick and mix' from where individual interpretations are
highly variable and often arbitrary.
The five values - explained by aphorisms, proverbs or sayings, parables and
simple stories - gain popular appeal in India and similar countries. They
meet a widespread and growing need among some segments of society - also in
the West - to see moral values (especially of a more traditional variety)
reestablished or regenerated in the modern world. The approach has a freshness
and much of what SSB says about values is right, just as is many another person's
teaching on the decline in values and how to reverse it. This, combined with
the efforts of a grass roots educational movement that seems to promise the
realization of fundamental reforms in education, is doubtless why many otherwise
intelligent persons hitch their wagons to the human values train. It also
promises to higher castes that the morally uneducated and otherwise ignorant
masses might be trained into better ways. The human values teaching programme
was built out with some modern teaching techniques like use of stories, role
play and so forth (imported from progressive teaching methods for children
esp. in USA and the UK). It seemed worthwhile as a kind of patent medicine
to help avert at least some of the world’s growing troubles.
The taint of intellectual and moral rigidity: These
five ‘human values’ have been set in concrete by SSB, as if there were only
five human values beside which all other values (now ‘officially’ designated
as ‘sub-values) depend in some relative fashion. His determination to fixate
ideas or abstractions into rock-solid categories which he claims are ‘eternal
absolutes’ that exist independently of human life altogether (i.e. he claims
they are actually ‘Divine qualities’) just shows SSB’s kind of philosophical
and linguistic self-contradictory naivety. Human life and culture changes,
and so do our ideas and language, so what can be distinguished as five values
in one culture, can well be most adequately covered in three or seven values
in another. But SSB has demonstrated in many ways that he wishes to lay down
the law on all manner of question, not least many modern moral issues on which
he is patently ill-informed and often wildly out of his depth. Issues concerning
sexual health, child slavery/labour and women's rights are very prominent
among his most blank areas.
On close acquaintance, the SSB values package is seen by clear-thinking observers
to promote too rigid and unrealistically traditional moral attitudes and all
to often take the form of very vague and sweeping platitudes. The value ‘love’,
for example, causes much confusion, so loosely and gushingly the word is used
in all manner of connection, by SSB himself about himself and especially by
all true followers when speaking about SSB. ‘Love in action’ is one of his
attractive slogans. Yet no one is more scathing about his devotees’ inadequacy
in acting thus than SSB in his frequent harangues. Meanwhile, he presents
himself as the perfect, infallible example of all 'human' values... while
virtually everyone else is judged by him (in one discourse or another) as
being more or less immoral, inhuman, evil and occasionally even 'demonic'.
Now that many of us have been enabled to penetrate the social fog of secrecy
in which he surrounds himself and his private behaviour, we see some of his
actions for what they really are, worse than any the great majority of us
could carry out! The world can now discover that much of his talk of his ‘setting
a perfect example’ is empty and very hollow ... when it is not directly mendacious.
The SSB devotee has to accept the five values as God-given entities towards
which they must (somehow or other) strive in every act. The values are so
sloppily defined, overlapping mightily, that it is hard for them to decide
what is a case of non/violence, of peace or of right action… for all boil
down to pretty much the same when analysed with any degree of concentration
and compared to the examples given in stories and anecdotes in the actual
complete texts of SSB’s discourses. Some devotees I have spoken to think they
have learned their meaning in visions or dreams, or may rightly wonder whether
the arbitrary and evidently superhuman ‘human values’ are some kind of unknowable
transcendental quintessence that may only be experienced after ‘leaving the
body’.
Naturally, the original four SSB values were already ingrained in Hindu tradition,
and – as such – do not at all comfortably translate to the English words used.
Dharma is a complex idea of ancient Indian origin that has come virtually
to form the crux of Buddhism, and it translates very poorly as ‘right action’,
which is itself a very fuzzy and controversial notion in English, besides
being a foreign kind of expression. The same applies to the Indian conception
of ‘sathya’ which is more like a higher Platonic or mystical religious notion
and very little like the mainstream connotations of the word ‘truth’ in English
and European tradition generally. SSB has struggled to accommodate this English
conception to the transcendental abstraction that is ‘sathya’, with very diffuse
and conflicting results. As a way of diverting attention from the conceptual
weakness (into which he evidently runs time and again) he usually interprets
truth as ‘truthfulness’.
Human justice as distinct from divine command: The
most glaring omission in SSB's package of ‘eternal five values’ is one of
the keystone values of Western civilization… and, interestingly enough, a
value which is not much in evidence in the traditional societies of India
or the East. Where it has been introduced in the Indian subcontinent, it has
very clearly not yet taken very deep root in actual practice. This is the
much-prized European value ‘justice’, to add an equally ambiguous but distinctly
different complex of ideas to the bag. Justice is, in practice, closely related
to 'human rights', both in national laws and European and international conventions.
However one look at it, the idea of human justice is glaringly absent from
SSB’s thinking and, moreover, from many of his attitudes and activities. The
importance of fairness, social and human rights suffer and are displaced in
his view by 'human duties', which are determined by 'divine law' and take
no account of individual freedoms or any kind of democratic values. SSB constantly
talks about the utopian nature of regimes of ancient India, where divinely-inspired
rulers (or even God Kings, like Rama) dealt out justice. Divine law thus supplants
human justice based on civilised consensus and individual and social rights.
He speaks of ‘Divine justice’, which is what he claims to deal out to every
one of us sooner or later etc. But not human justice, for he is outspokenly
down on human rights, which he does not see as being our right and which he
would apparently nihilate in favour of ‘human duties’… duties, note well,
as they are or may be prescribed predominantly by him.
Accordingly, Sai Baba favours a system of organization with strict top-down
rule… a system that is notoriously insensitive to feedback, unfair to members
and furthermore obviously leans towards pedagogical inefficiency and counter-productiveness.
Such systems are authoritarian and become totalitarian and cultish when their
power is threatened, as is being seen with the SSB movement today. This is
anti-democratic… because legal and social justice – along with human rights
– go hand in hand with democratic ideals of organization and government at
all levels of society. The so-called 'human values' programmes go under such
titles as EHV (Education in Human Values), ESSE and Educare. These exhibit
various strongly authoritarian and anti-democratic aspects in organisation,
doctrinal and sanctions against critics and non-believers in the largely Hindu
teachings of Sai Baba, which form the dogmatic back-up of those who teach
under them.
Surely the greatest failure behind SSB's much bandied "human values"
is the teacher's known behaviour. He has allowed and condoned terrible violence
under his very nose (the execution of 4 devotees), carried out sexual molestations
by oiling genitals openly admitted to take place by certain Sai Organisation
leaders - which are illegal even in India - and many much more serious alleged
homosexual offenses by numerous victims (i.e. against dharma and prema). He
has demonstrably been untruthful in many connections and has openly lied in
discourses etc. (i.e. against sathya or truthfulness). So much for the credibility
of his many harangues about the importance of unity of thought, word and deed!
Sai Educare’s fundamentalistic, doctrinaire
teachings? The
main lines on education in the Sathya Sai Baba movement's ideas and plans
concerning education have - as far as available documentation goes - concentrated
overwhelmingly on the inculcation of values according to what Sai Baba (SSB)
himself teaches, which has left the few courses that have been developed in
a cultural vacuum by systematically excluding most of the Western educational
heritage.
I participated in the forerunner of Sai Educare, the so-called 'Education
in Human Values' (EHV) programme, in which from 1985 in its early days and
to which I at the outset contributed some of my professional expertise from
University work by supplying some vital system planning in European EHV. I
soon realised that the basis for an effective value educational programme
was very weak and there were a number of insurmountable internal hindrances
in the Sai organisation and wider movement to its development into any kind
of widely-acceptable programmes.
It turned out
that the rather grandiose plans its official leaders (such as Victor Kanu
in the UK and Thorbjørn Meyer in Continental Europe) put forward failed
very signally to materialise in Europe. The free courses offered were not
taken up by more than a handful of parents, despite considerable efforts and
much voluntary preparation work and only one or two teachers managed to introduce
some measure of this 'value education' into their work at schools. The same
voluntary-based and elementary free schooling was, however, much more popular
in countries where education of any kind is at a premium, such as Africa,
Thailand and so on. These countries could not, of course, provide models for
any kind of education in countries with long-established universal educational
traditions.
Old wine in new bottles? Those whose efforts
had failed to attract clients to EHV except on a shoestring basis decided
on a new name 'Sai Educare', and they have introduced a more ambitious plan
to establish schools and colleges in a more traditional way, rather than relying
on free courses at the local community level (which is the mainstay of EHV
in underdeveloped countries). The Sai Educare Foundation is trying to establish
itself, and with very considerable financial backing from rich Sai devotees
particularly in the USA, in as many countries as possible, acquiring properties
as locales for schools and colleges. The instigators are not publicising their
plans or current work except within Sai devotee circles, for they have met
with some powerful opposition hitherto and have chosen to try to find a kind
of 'back-door' way into society. This is via the establishment through formal
routines for private schools and colleges in countries where, for example,
educational rules are liberal about religious or 'spiritual' educational institutions
So far there is nothing to indicate that Sai Educare has anything radically
different to offer than was already available in the 'Education in Human Values'
programme. In the first place, the only people who have been involved in the
preparations of the European variant are all Sai devotees. There was talk
of inviting international lecturers to the 'high school college' that was
planned (but which was forced to withdraw from Copenhagen by angry residents).
These 'international' teachers would doubtless nearly all have been either
convinced Sai devotees or those initially positive to SSB and his teaching.
It can safely be predicted that very few persons of any pedagogical or educational
standing would be induced to lecture in Sai Educare connections if they were
properly informed of the nature of the unrefuted and virtually irrefutable
charges against Sathya Sai Baba as a pederast and highly suspected accomplice
to murder.
The Sai teaching's shortage of universal educational
concepts and contents: Most of the hindrances in the Sai Org. to
developing a healthy teaching environment were and still are doctrinally based.
The main problem is that the largely traditional religious teaching of SSB
is a mixture of fundamentalist Hinduism drawing upon various Indian traditions
and only most superficially on more modern ideas. Many of the restrictions
that affected EHV stem from the highly conservative and traditional culture
expressed by SSB, which is without doubt carried over in no small measure
into Sai Educare.
The Sai doctrine quite purposely and explicitly ignores the rich scientific
and humanistic culture of the world as virtually irrelevant to the spiritual
life or value education (i.e. except for anything that can be used in support
of the same Sai doctrine)! By is very name and practitioners, Sai Educare
cannot be other than mainly based on Sai Baba's idealistic - but often highly
unrealistic and anti-worldly - teachings. Unfortunately, SSB's teachings fails
to recognise properly what Jack Kornfield has said: "Ideals are reflections
of our deeply religious nature. But, as we know, ideals can be poison if we
take them in large quantities or if we take them incorrectly; in other words,
if we take them not as ideals, but a concrete realities. …ideals are tools
for inspiration, not realities in themselves." (p. 121, After the
Ecstasy, the Laundry).
Further, should it be conducted without genuine discussion but with patronising
censorship and fobbing off honest questions - as in all Sai Organisation connections
- it cannot become more than a sectarian and traditional curiosity. It is
virtually unthinkable that the total banning of critical thinking and questioning
of the more doubtful tenets of SSB's 'teachings' in the Sai movement will
not seriously affect the conduct of teaching at Sai Educare schools or colleges.
This authoritarian agenda is well-know from the Sathya Sai Organisation, in
which Sai Educare remains based, though formally independent of it. It is
upheld by those same people who mismanaged EHV, causing it to make almost
no progress outside the SSB movement despite 20 years of great efforts. Only
those who broke out of the Organisation on grounds of censorship and unrealistic
restrictions that were imposed had any measure of success in conducting free
value classes. This they did without using the name of Sai Baba or making
his teachings too prominent. These persons were consequently ostracised by
the Sai Organisation and instead set up their own programmes under the wholly
independent title of AVES (Associazione di Voluntariato per l'Educazione Alla
Solidarieta' and is at Via Gambologna, 20136 Milano. Fax. 02/58115008. The
School Director is Eva-Lotte Mannerfelt). They include a former top leader
in the Sai Organisation in Sweden, Ulf Sviberg, and former Sai Org. EHV leader
in Italy, Francisco Polenghi. Another defector is the very active educator,
June Auton of UK. Unfortunately, even these initiatives suffer from many of
the flaws of the EHV system's inherent conceptual limitations.
Signs of this are already evident in the nascent Sai Educare activities in
Australia. Like the 'EHV' work, this educational system can safely be predicted
to thrive only in isolation, all conducted in sovereign disregard of recognised
pedagogical and psychological research. The mental climate generated by this
and shared by Sai followers who wish to imprint values, that is, by who will
define the core of any system using the name of 'Sai', is seriously lacking
any genuine empirical or comparative study, for the entire doctrine is axiomatically
inimical to such concerns. It is evident that any such educational system
would fall far short of excellence.
The inherent ideological failings of Sai educational
notions: The parameters
for the value education are initially set by Sai Baba's teaching, especially
on what he calls 'human values' - which specifically exclude at the outset
as worldly such values as justice, social equality, human rights and open-ended
fact-based researches. This is a serious flaw in any teaching claiming to
have anything to do with 'human' values. Moreover, the values are held by
SSB to be transcendental absolutes that therefore cannot be modified and do
not have their origin or justification in human praxis, but only in divine
will. It is easy to see from this why SSB avoids all discussion of sexuality,
of sex problems in society (including AIDS, contraception questions etc.)
and is against what any educated modern person would call women's personal,
social and political emancipation.
This makes for doctrinal teaching as opposed to realistic research, to the
deduction from supposedly indisputable axioms as to how people are and should
be, as opposed to the discovery of what they can and so should reasonably
aspire to from their given social, mental and emotional existence. The first
makes for patronising teaching and (often concealed) authoritarian attitudes,
the second for independent investigation, learning by trial and error, and
open communication and research between truth seekers. Without independent
thinkers and the wear and tear of opposing hypotheses, debates and critique,
all but elementary education becomes a mere ritual without lasting, constructive
effects.
My Russian colleague in education, Serguei Badaev, has remarked very appositely:
"Critical thinking, as one of a basic skills of character building, is
absolutely opposed to the EHV and Sai Educare approaches. I think it is a
threat to the SSB mini-empire. The situation is in a sense very similar to
what occurred during the Soviet regime. Communist leaders needed people with
good character to work hard and with enthusiasm. But the regime tried to restrict
firmly (or to control) the area of application of their intellect and research
skills to keep themselves safe from their analysis. The same with SSB. There
is a sort of invisible circle around him where you should abandon your critical
skills and submit completely to his uncertainty and mystery. Another interesting
aspect of Sai education is an idea of separate education of boys and girls
which is taken for granted without any serious justification.