Telling Truth to Power Really Means Planning
By John Taylor; 2009 July 01, Rahmat 07, 166 BE
Precis: If we are ever to start addressing the challenge of global
warming, specialists will have to renounce their monastic seclusion
and enter into social action. This can be done by formalizing and
opening up the mechanisms of planning.
One thing that Mike Holmes, star of the television series "Holmes on
Homes," often says on his show sums up what I have been aiming at in
the Badi' essays written over the past week. He says that most
homeowners know what they want but that it is the sacred duty of
contractors and other expert tradespersons before they touch a
contract or pick up a hammer to educate homeowners about what they
need. Otherwise, disaster threatens; roofs collapse, floods occur and
houses burn down. As the song says, you do not always get what you
want but sometimes you get what you need. That sounds like a plan.
Literally. A plan is feedback between what we want and what we need, a
process that continues before and during every action. On a broader
level, Holmes is responding in a practical way to the ancient, sacred
duty of the intellectual to tell truth to power.
The learned of all types must involve themselves in social planning,
since we all have to be certain of what we need before we can possibly
plan what we want. This is especially so now, when so little truth is
spoken to power, and less is heard. It is axiomatic that a community
of world citizens would be both what we need and what we want. It
would look far more beautiful than ours, torn as it is by conflicting
loyalties.
A big reason that the environment has deteriorated this badly is that
ever since the rise of Marxism and Fascism, experts in the West have
roundly rejected comprehensive thinking, and planning most of all.
Now, the looming threat of global climate destabilization is acting as
a giant alarm bell, booming at Ivory Towers everywhere to empty out.
Experts must stop learning more and more about less and less and start
working out what we all need to know in order to plan together. Only
by uniting the people with the experts and together planning our
collective rescue can we hope to reverse climate change.
As theorists from Aristotle to `Abdu'l-Baha tell us, every conscious
plan requires three things, knowledge, volition and action. To build a
house or addition to a house you need an architect or other qualified
designer to devise a plan that takes into account current standards
and building codes (knowledge). Then, you need the power to act,
meaning the money to pay workers and buy materials (volition).
Finally, you need coordinated, punctual application of the plan by
skilled workers (action).
The first requirement of every building plan, as Mike Holmes often
points out, is that it adhere to code. Building codes protect
occupants by assuring that the new construction will not burn down or
collapse on their heads. We are threatened by global warming simply
because our building codes and other standards fall far short of what
the need is for safety on a planetary scale. We are unwilling to
respond to this increasingly glaring need because we are not world
citizens as yet. This broadening out to cosmopolitianism we need more
than anything to plan.
According to the Wikipedia article on Cosmopolitanism, the basis of a
cosmopolitan order is "nested structures of governance" that balance
two principles, irreducibility and subsidiarity. Irreducibility is the
principle that certain problems can only be addressed at the global
level. Examples are, as mentioned, global warming, as well as war and
strife among nations. The other principle of cosmopolitanism is
subsidiarity. This is the principle that decisions should be made at
as local a level as possible, since here is where the experts live.
Where there is face-to-face contact an impulse and feedback are
established between knowledge and experience.
Abdu'l-Baha spoke of such "nested structures" when He talked about
"circles of unity" or "circles of love." Each level or aspect of
society, from individual, family, skin colour, nation, color,
language, to the broadest, the human race under God, is a circle of
unity rippling out like waves from where a tossed stone enters a calm
pond. Each ripple is a wave enclosing all others, but it in turn is
enclosed by a wider wave.
According to `Abdu'l-Baha's brainchild, the Baha'i principles, the
closest wave to the center is the source of the original impulse, the
individual. As we investigate we are ever renewing our search for
truth, making the smallest but most energetic wave. The widest wave is
the goal and product of the efforts of us all, world peace. Search for
truth gives the world the cosmopolitan principle of subsidiarity,
since the self is the ultimate locality. Each of us on our own is best
qualified to work out our place in the universe and thereby advance
our own career, worship, education and service to humanity.
The principle of universal peace is the expression of irreducibility.
No matter how well we do as individuals and groups, it can all be
wiped out in a moment at the touch of the nuclear button, or more
slowly by the deterioration of the natural environment and the
destabilization of climate through global warming.
We need a truly open and democratic planning system. We need full
involvement by the learned in making standards, codes and plans that
apply subsidiarity and irreducability. That, combined with common
consent, wealth and practical action, would be our only hope to
respond quickly to the inexorable advance of global warming.
John Taylor
email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
::
No comments:
Post a Comment