The Face of One Family

One of the pivotal principles of the Bahá'í Faith is the oneness of humanity; that, in essense, we all come from one Source and are members of one family. In the incomparable words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá:

God has created the world as one -- the boundaries are marked out by man. God has not divided the lands, but each man has his house and meadow; horses and dogs do not divide the fields into parts. That is why Baha'u'llah says: "Let not a man glory in that he loves his country, but that he loves his kind." All are of one family, one race; all are human beings. Differences as to the partition of lands should not be the cause of separation among the people.

Recently I came across what seems to be a confirmation of this teaching from an interesting source--the renown Professor of Psychology, Paul Ekman. For forty years, Ekman has studied and written about the psychology of human facial expressions. One of his central and most striking findings has been the universality of the meaning that humans ascribe to various facial expressions. A recent Scientific American Mind article elaborates on the path that led to this discovery:

. . . Ekman headed for Brazil with a stack of photographs in his suitcase. The portraits showed sad, angry, happy or disgusted faces of white Americans, yet Brazilian college students had no trouble identifying the feelings depicted. Expeditions to Chile, Argentina and Japan generated the same results; regardless of where he went, local people seemed to understand, and use, the same facial expressions as the North Americans.

Concerned that perhaps inhabitants of "modern" societies had somehow cross-pollinated their facial movements, Ekman in 1967 visited extremely isolated tribes living in the jungles on the island of New Guinea. There again, though, he found that the basic emotions he had postulated, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust, were associated with universal facial expressions. The excursion sealed it for him: the language of the face has biological origins, and culture has no significant effect on it.

Thus, despite the variety of languages, cultures, customs, and religious practice we find in the world, when it comes to the experience of emotion, perhaps the most basic of all human experiences, there is a common language that is understood by all, from the members of an isolated tribe on an island in New Guinea to the denizens of highly populated western cities. These findings provide an interesting context within which to consider the following words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá:

. . . mankind has been created from one single origin, has branched off from one family. Thus in reality all mankind represents one family. God has not created any difference. He has created all as one that thus this family might live in perfect happiness and well-being.