By John Taylor; 2008 May 28, 12 `Azamat, 165 BE
Yesterday we started to review Udo Schaefer's magisterial discussion of law and ethics. He ends his paper with this concise, insightful comparison of the crucial distinction between the Baha'i stance and that of the West, epitomized in the famous saying of the agnostic philosopher Protagoras.
"The conflict between the two different sets of values, that of Western secular civilization and that of the book of God is inevitable, and it will be a long time before humankind will accept that not `man is the measure of all things,' as the Greek philosopher Protagoras (d. 410 B.C.) stated, but rather it is God's unfathomable will that is the `infallible standard.' (Gl. 88:1) of all morality." (Udo Schaefer, Some Aspects of Baha'i Ethics, Journal of Baha'i Studies, 16. 1/4. 2006, p. 21)
Yesterday we touched on two touchstones of this parting of the ways suggested by Schaefer in this paper. One was capital punishment, which we looked at in some detail, and the other was sexual morality, which we will dive into today.
Essentially, what the Aqdas says (along with most other scriptures) is that indulgence in extra-spousal or non-heterosexual sexual intercourse is a perversion of human nature. Now from Protagoras's point of view, this brings up a paradox: how could a part of human nature contradict human nature? Man is the measure of all things, and since man often indulges in extramarital, homosexual, even extra-species sex therefore extramarital sex must be a standard of human behavior. As long as behavior is the standard of behavior, the very idea of perversion is logically inadmissible. The conclusion is inevitable: God's law forgive me for saying this, is nothing better than a form of prejudice. God is not only jealous, He is a bigot.
We have discussed Protagoras before on this blog; he was an agnostic, but Socrates paid him great respect, and later Protagoras, like his theist colleague Socrates, suffered for his convictions by being exiled. Now the West has come around to Protagoras's point of view; as Plato's dialog named for this sophist demonstrates, Socrates was not able to refute Protagoras, and their discussion trailed off into abstruse interplay over the question of "one" and "many." In other words, the theist and atheist viewpoints cannot logically nullify one another. Both are worldviews and can only be judged as such. There is only one way to judge a worldview, and that is not internally but by its fruits, by its widespread social effects when large numbers of people adhere to it. This is the only way. This criterion was explicitly prescribed by Jesus to His followers when He promised to return and they asked how they would know it was really He: "By their fruits..."
Lately at a meeting it was driven home to me how important this issue of sexual orientation is to the Universal House of Justice. Here is what happened. A member of Canada's NSA gave a talk to 78 people in Grimsby on how to deal with the environment, but I noticed that he had not mentioned the Earth Charter. When he asked for questions I jumped at the chance and briefly said that this charter, if it is accepted, would be the first pillar of the United Nations that has been consulted on and drafted by a broad cross-section of society. He gave it a polite nod, then turned to other things. I could not understand why the reticence. Why are Baha'is not latching onto this wonderful document? This is the first international political constitution designed from the ground up to change our relationship with nature and the environment. You would think that the leadership of the Faith would be all over it.
Since this speaker happens to be one of my spiritual parents, I later had a chance to discuss the Charter with him for a few minutes. He explained that a Baha'i, a member of the United States NSA in fact, had done a great amount of work on the early consultations leading up to the final draft of the Earth Charter. (and of course long before that the early environmentalist and Baha'i St. Barbe Baker had enlisted the Guardian as a "man of the trees" in his "forestry charter" initiatives.) However the House wrote a letter to this US NSA member (I could not find it on the Web, maybe a reader can point me to the letter) saying that it could not give its official sanction to the document, largely because of what it says about homosexuality. I looked the passage up in the Earth Charter and, looking it over again, it is worse than expected. I think the offending words are "sexual orientation" in the following, from paragraph 12,
"Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities. a. Eliminate discrimination in all its forms, such as that based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic or social origin." (http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/2000/10/the_earth_charter.html)
So in effect the Earth Charter accuses the Charter of Baha'u'llah's divine Order, that is, the Aqdas, of discrimination based on sexual orientation. This is what happens when there is a clash of two charters. According to what the speaker said, Baha'is are not discouraged from using the Charter as individuals but there just cannot be official sanction from the House or the Administration, in spite of their practically proposing the thing single handed from the beginning. This is a pity, and I must say I have been mulling this over during the past weeks. Yesterday I think I came to the threshold of a satisfying answer.
I was listening to a taped set of lectures put out by the CBC radio show "Ideas," that were given several years ago at my Alma Mater called "Malthus and the Third Millennium." Here is the blurb,
"In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his chilling essay `The Principles of Population,' claiming that human populations grow faster than resources. In the University of Guelph's Kenneth Hammond Lectures, four speakers ask how Malthus' dire prediction might apply today."
The first three speakers were conventional environmentalists who gave the usual fifty minutes of bad news followed by five minutes of hopeful solutions. The fourth speaker, Ronald Brooks, in effect gave them all a sucker punch. He pointed out that none of them had mentioned Malthus. The simple idea of Malthus that population always outruns food supply. Behind this is the story of the Chinese Emperor who offered to reward a sage, and he suggested a grain of rice on one square of a chessboard, two on the next, and so forth. Of course by the sixty fourth square all the rice in the world could not fill the last square. Arithmetic progression always falls behind geometric progression, and the more progress the quicker it falls behind. Population outstrips resources and the result is inevitable famine. This utterly demolishes any silly, vain hopes that the unthinking environmental guru can possibly offer.
Briefly, there are two kinds of approach to the environment, both of which have been around for centuries. One is the bucolic view that if we just respect the environment, hold high environmental ideals and curtail our wasteful lifestyle, everything will come out all right. Brooks points out that in practice people tend to do the opposite of the ideals they hold dear. For example, the three places with the lowest birthrates in the world are Italy, Ireland and Quebec, all three with Catholic majorities forbidden birth control by the church. The same is true with our planet, the more we value it the more we rape and exploit it.
The other approach says: forget about valuing the environment, protect it or do not protect it according to your own best interests. Put blind faith in progress, technology, capitalism, the working class, or whatever. We will find a way. Just accept that if we just keep on learning we will figure out a way to do the impossible. One thinker even suggested that as the population grows there will be more brains and therefore with all that much more brainpower we are bound to figure out a solution. That is the logic of democracy, and Plato saw through it at its very beginning. No matter how many people vote for one plus one equaling three, it will never make it true.
Malthus's answer to both sides is always the same mathematical inevitability: Seven billion humans sitting on a fence, trying to make arithmetic beat geometric progression. It cannot be. You can stack all the computers and all the best human brains in the world on top of one another, and the answer is always the same: the more you progress the worse it gets. Population always grows beyond the earth's ability to sustain it.
Brooks uses a solution suggested by water expert Sandra Postel in the third lecture as an example. Drip irrigation will increase crop yields and decrease agricultural water use by eighty percent. What will we do if that happens? Naturally, food prices will go down, we will eat and waste more food, the population will increase, farmers will try to cultivate more land, and the noose around our necks will only get tighter.
The second lecturer seemed to realize the hopelessness of our situation; a New Zealander, he sounded smashed out of his head, strangely like Dudley Moore's drunken character "Arthur." As he stacked up the offenses against the earth that he had discovered in his illustrious career, it made even a teetotaler like myself want to take a drink. But Brooks and Malthus took the prize; nothing can be more depressing than mathematical proof that nothing we do will ever make it better.
Eureka, sad but true, that is why environmentalism is doomed to failure and fundamental poverty. Malthus exposed it and utterly refuted their basic presuppositions. Progress, now that the bounds of earth have melt into a single small globe, has to be mental, emotional, spiritual, just not physical. It is a mathematical fact that the only way ahead is to progress inwardly while keeping outer progress carefully to the limits of arithmetic progression.
Then I thought back to Udo Schaefer's conclusion: at the root of it all is the contradiction and clash between two standards, that of man as measure and that of the Will of God as measure of all things. Using the criterion of success, "by their fruits ye shall know them," the way of Protagoras is failing miserably.
First of all, Protagoras, like the environmentalists, was working a fallacy; he was fundamentally mistaken. How can a measure be used to measure itself? You cannot use a ruler to measure itself or a weight scale to weigh itself any more than you can use your eye to see itself or your hand to hold itself. The very definition of "standard" means to measure something according to something else. That is why if you want to measure all things, yes, use man as the measure, but to measure yourself you first need something outside of man in order to say what man is. The viewpoint of God has to be the measure of who and what we are before we decide what rules and laws to adopt for our own regulation. If God says that certain sexual expressions are illicit and unnatural, that is the way it is. Our true nature is what is above, God, not what is below, the animal. Our future rests with Him too.
When we use man as the standard of all things, no matter what our ideals or intentions we end up using our worst behavior as our standard. The short term, narrow view beats out the aspect of eternity. Killers, not saints, grab the headlines. We look at an airplane or train crash that kills hundreds, or a typhoon or earthquake that wipes out thousands, and we ignore the millions killed by poverty and international disorganization. The same thing is true of sexuality. In the same way that this water specialist was calling for water sustainability in the same way we speak of other forms of sustainability, that is exactly what God advocates too, in our sex lives. The virtue of chastity promotes family sustainability. Our nature is perverted if it does not act as if it part of a family that will last many generations. The expression of sex has to fit into the long run evolution of the human race; it is not a playground for personal desire. Unchastity and promiscuity betray one's family, and a person who wastes his or her life in sexual relationships outside marriage is living an unsustainable lifestyle, using same dissipated, fallacious thinking that lures industry to wanton destruction of nature. If it feels good do it, if it is useful, to hell with the long-term consequences.
None of this is new. Here is what the Guardian recalled about how the Master reacted when His proposals to the Hague Peace conference were rejected and a ship of nationalist fools made up the first charter ending war and starting the League of Nations.
"Peace, Peace, how often we heard Him remark, the lips of potentates and peoples unceasingly proclaim, whereas the fire of unquenched hatreds still smoulders in their hearts. How often we heard Him raise His voice, whilst the tumult of triumphant enthusiasm was still at its height and long before the faintest misgivings could have been felt or expressed, confidently declaring that the Document, extolled as the Charter of a liberated humanity, contained within itself seeds of such bitter deception as would further enslave the world. How abundant are now the evidences that attest the perspicacity of His unerring judgment!" (Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha'u'llah, pp. 29-30)
It was just as the Bible prophesied: "they declare peace, but there is no peace." Hatred, not love, becomes the dominating force when "realities" rather than God are our standard. The fundamental poverty of the leadership of environmentalism is just like the poverty of our peacemakers, solutions that are lies. Any improvement based on increasing resources only staves off the inevitable. A healthy beautiful environment cannot be based upon a faulty standard. In the same work, the Guardian continues by asking if,
"the fundamental cause of this world unrest is attributable, not so much to the consequences of what must sooner or later come to be regarded as a transitory dislocation in the affairs of a continually changing world, but rather to the failure of those into whose hands the immediate destinies of peoples and nations have been committed, to adjust their system of economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly evolving age? Are not these intermittent crises that convulse present-day society due primarily to the lamentable inability of the world's recognized leaders to read aright the signs of the times, to rid themselves once for all of their preconceived ideas and fettering creeds, and to reshape the machinery of their respective governments according to those standards that are implicit in Baha'u'llah's supreme declaration of the Oneness of Mankind -- the chief and distinguishing feature of the Faith He proclaimed?" (35)
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