Covenant and Search in an Age of Responsibility.
Part II
By John Taylor; 1 June, 2004
Yesterday we worked the idea that freedom and truth are not states or conditions but muscles strengthened by regular exercise. No matter what our religion, everyone increases strength by struggling to squeeze spiritual meaning out of daily life. This is not done passively but through independent planning and regular assessments guided and illumined by regular reflection, prayer and reading of scripture. In Baha'i terminology this responsive exercise of search for truth is termed "firmness in the covenant," since it is a primary expression of an ancient contract with God.
All the great world religions are intended to fulfill this covenant by synchronizing our hearts to truth in the rhythm of nature, the seasons and the motions of sun and stars. Their specially designed calendars regulate personal introspection and build from that a common structure for peace. Having a schedule allows many to come together in God and share personal discoveries. In time this forges a community of believers. In researching this I came across two useful new words, proseity and propitiable. Here are their definitions.
Proseity: (from metaphysics; Latin, "Pro Se," for oneself) "The quality or condition of existing for oneself, having itself for its own end."
Propitiable: "Capable of being made favorably inclined."
Given these definitions, we may sum up the principle so far by saying that the search for truth makes the proseity of mankind. It makes us propitiable to unity in diversity by expanding what is "for myself" to its broadest, most universal sense. By participating in God, ultimate concern, my idea of what is pro se, for myself, identifies with what is for the human race as a whole. I am then pure, or propitiable to subordinating special interests and narrower, parochial needs to the whole. I can reach out and share in the same truth with others, both within and without our faith community.
I therefore do not pray, recite, meditate, plan and assess my progress merely for self-help or personal improvement. My spiritual expression makes my proseity into "pro-humanity" and merges consultation into the collective search for truth. What makes consultation a multiple of many individuals searching for truth is their loyalty to the spirit of this covenant. Although ostensibly spirit seems like wind and fire, moveable and ineffable, Jesus Christ drew with it a very deep, emphatic line.
"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come. Either make the tree good, and its fruit good, or make the tree corrupt, and its fruit corrupt; for the tree is known by its fruit." (Matt 12:30-33, KJV)
Human beings are either all answerable to this spirit, or they not. All are His servants, or not. Whether we know it or not, each and all are completely involved in an unspoken covenant of mutual love with our Creator. The Center of the Covenant, `Abdu'l-Baha explained that humble, loving service is the mark of firmness in the covenant of spirit.
"Adhere to the hem of the robe of the Lofty One and do your best to spread the Covenant of God and to be kindled with the fire of the love of God, so that your hearts may move with joy through the fragrances of humbleness which are being diffused from the heart of 'Abdu'l-Baha." (Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i World Faith, 404)
An attitude of humility demonstrates understanding that the covenant is universal, that all are his servants, even the reprobate and rejecter. Nobody knows who will make it through the eye of the needle. Nobody can say what rule or restriction may benefit us or others in some hidden way. Another aspect of humility is respect, fear of God, a sense of reverence for the One behind the diversity of outer expressions.
"And so amongst men and crawling creatures and cattle, are they of various colours. Those truly fear God, among His Servants, who have knowledge: for God is Exalted in Might, Oft-Forgiving." (Q35:28, Yusuf Ali)
A person grounded in the spirit of knowledge of God can appreciate the many and diverse "colors," outer expressions of one truth. Endowed with this knowledge, one can express it in harmonizing speech.
"...by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned." (Matt 12:35-7, WEB)
There is a thought provoking new book out this year that explains how this spirit of search for truth can work its way into the opinions of a collectivity; by one James Surowiecki it is called "The Wisdom of Crowds." As he himself points out, he only traces recent research that confirms the wisdom of a very old saying.
"Where there is no counsel, plans fail; But in a multitude of counselors they are established. Joy comes to a man with the reply of his mouth. How good is a word at the right time!" (Proverbs 15:22-3, WEB)
Surowiecki points out that the popular television show, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" demonstrated how very accurate a crowd can be. Overall it was found that when a contestant asked for help from an expert, the expert was right about 60 percent of the time. When a poll was taken of the audience, they were correct well over 90 percent of the time. Other examples he cites are the uncanny ability of a random crowd at an agricultural show to guess within a pound the dressed weight of a cow. Then there is the spot-on guess within a few hours by the stock market as to which contractor was responsible for the Challenger shuttle disaster. The stock price of that company dropped and stayed down while other contractors' prices fell but recovered shortly afterwards. Months later expert investigators (including our hero, Richard Feynman) confirmed what the market guessed right away, that this company's O rings were brittle in the cold.
This collective ability to divine the truth tends of course to confirm the value of both democracy and free markets, both happy combinations of individual and group judgment. But as Surowiecki points out, this wisdom only works when four factors characterize the crowd, diversity, independence, decentralization and aggregation. Diversity of opinion means that each person should have some private information, even if it is an eccentric interpretation of known facts. Independence requires that the opinions not be determined by those around you, in Baha'i and Platonic terminology, "imitation."
This independence factor points to what I have long thought, that there is a great future for the voting devices that were built into the seats at the set of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," or as many teachers are now doing, building them into personal remote controls that each student keeps at hand during lectures. These devices input your opinion without influencing it by knowledge of what those around you think. It is also testimony to the brilliance of the Master, who so often spoke of the necessity of "unfettered" and "independent" search for truth.
Decentralization, the third requirement, means that people can specialize and draw on local knowledge. I'll have to read the book rather than a review of it to know exactly what this means, but it certainly seems to indicate what Baha'is call consultation, where the expertise of a small group enhances the specialized training of individual experts by "rounding off" their inevitable blinkers and biases. Medicine itself is no longer relying on a single diagnosis but in recent years is taking a team approach of several experts to handle the most serious health care problems.
The last factor, aggregation, refers to the need for an agreed upon mechanism for turning private judgments into a collective decision. I need not go into how this is done in Baha'i administration and will only note that in the case of personal problems, "aggregation" is left up to the individual. That is, if I ask an ad hoc group to consult about whether I should jump in the lake, the final decision as to whether to take the leap is still left up to me, whether a majority of consultants lean one way or not -- though an exception seems to be in medical consultation where I am obliged to obey a wise doctor's counsel; of course I still decide whether she is wise or not. Giving the individual final say in personal consultation, I suppose, pays obeisance to the supremacy of search for truth.
Search and Monadology
By John Taylor; 2 June, 2004
Here is a citation from the Guardian that I read today that seems new to me; it is compatible with my train of thought lately.
"We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions." (Shoghi Effendi, through his Secretary, from a letter dated 17 February 1933 to an individual believer, quoted in BIC, 1998 Feb 18, Valuing Spirituality in Development)
I need not point out that this contradicts something you hear virtually every time a Western believer opens his mouth. You hear it endlessly, that we need to change the world one heart at a time, change starts from within, and all that. Poppycock. The soul is a mirror, it reflects what is outside it; nature, the world, they are mirrors too, they reflect our inner condition whether we like it or not. So you have to change both outward and inward conditions in order make any lasting reforms.
If I have made any original contribution in my life, it was last summer when an idea for what I called "open systems" blew me down like a fresh breeze. It tries to go beyond "one heart at a time" and take on both outward and inward change at the same time. Actually, I think I'll now start calling it "open principles," since I realize lately that it really is an understanding of the Baha'i principles. It all started in an essay called, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation," written on 11 August, 2003, where I wrote,
"What else did we do? Well, there were readings from `An Intellectual History of Europe,' by Roland N. Stromberg. That was really exiting, and as the week went by the cerebral heroes described therein led me into a sort of epiphany. On Saturday I sketched out a plan to revolutionize the world. Eureka! But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. The real hero of this story is, of course, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, (1646-1716) a colossus bestriding the world of thought. As soon I got home I rushed to find something by him but found only some tidbits. Even so, they were nourishing."
In the ten months since I wrote that I still have not found nearly enough to give more than a taste of the writings of Leibniz. Still, reading about his monadology was the flint that sparked my ideas for expanding the open systems movement beyond its current bounds into a sort of "dashboard" for monitoring personal progress in relation to the whole of humanity. The word "monad" comes from the Latin equivalent for Vahid, the Badi' Calendar's 19 year period. Both Monad and Vahid are Latin and Arabic words meaning "unit" or "unity," and of course both mean far more than that. Both hint at the emergent qualities of atoms in nature, where out of many One emerges, and a similar phenomenon in the world of human minds.
Yesterday while exploring search for truth we discussed James Surowiecki's book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," which gives four factors that characterize a wise crowd, diversity, independence, decentralization and aggregation. A democratic poll of a random crowd, as long as it lives up to these four conditions, is almost always right in answering just about anything you can ask them, even when they seem to have no way of knowing what they seem to know. This agglomeration of many independent minds is the mental superpower behind democracy and the free enterprise economy, not to mention the principle of search for truth.
Thinking about this since yesterday, I recalled that something like a wise crowd has actually been for centuries the ultimate authority in informal logic; for philosophers, if a proposition would be deemed inadequate by the average intelligent person, it is rejected as a fallacy. It will be interesting to see if some enterprising school of philosophers stops just speculating as to whether this or that proposition is what the average intelligent person thinks is reasonable, and actually begins to poll real crowds.
In any case, before I go any further with this connection of monads with wise crowds, I will excerpt the rest of what I wrote just after my Eureka experience last August.
"Most important is the monadology. Not long ago, in discussion, I encountered a friend's idea that God is a sort of pebble tossed into the still pond of reality. Creation participates in His Being by moving to that impulse, like circular waves radiating in perfect circles around and out from the impact point of the stone. Leibniz's monads are the reverse of this picture. Being is pluralistic, atomistic, throbbing little monads whose motto is, "All for one and one for all." Wiggle your finger on the tummy of one monad and all the monads in the universe will giggle.
"Like most of Leibniz's ideas, this is very close our modern understanding. Especially for Baha'is, this is how unity is supposed to work, a vast diversity with a unity built into each monad. We, each in our own way, seek truth and tickle the tummy of reality. The result, faith; every thinking being will spontaneously and in their identical nature within, laugh in harmony. The overall, macroscopic result? Unity in diversity. As Leibniz starting off his letter to Simon Foucher puts it, it is important,
"`once and for all to examine all our presuppositions in order to establish something sound. For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we can understand perfectly the thing being considered.'
"That's it. That is the principle of search for truth right there. That is the basis of my master plan to change the world. But we will get to that in due time.
"What else went on in our vacation? It seems to me that there were some outward events, but the memory is already fading, dancing illusions that may or may not have been real. It involved a car as I recall, and family, money, boats, food, traveling about, a cinema, sleep, an island, things like that. I am not sure that kind of thing deserves to be mentioned as what I actually _did_ on my summer vacation but I didn't want to leave them out completely.
Monads, Karl Wilhelm Gottfried Von Leibniz said, "have no windows by which anything could come in or go out." In other words, they have the four criteria that according to Surowiecki make a crowd wise; they are independent, diverse, decentralized and aggregative. At the same time, each monad can "express" any other or, more likely, all of the other monads at the same time.
This fits with the Master's ideas that the soul is a mirror and that there are "kingdoms of God" going right up to the spirit of faith. On each level many atoms or monads have a transcendent power; on the mineral level this power expresses motion, plants take that in and add on growth, from animals emerges locomotion, and so forth. The human is the epitome of all below, with reason on the human level and the "spirit of faith" added over that, like a cherry on a bowl of ice cream. Each level is a set of many monads, each an independent mirror to a power or attribute of God.
A monad then is an expression of both what is within and without it, close to what Ali is reported as saying, that "In the beginning knowledge was One but the ignorant multiplied it." The Timaeus of Plato explains how a monadic soul must interact with the Manifestation of god, a divine interaction of one with its surroundings,
"For God only has the knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many things into one and again resolve the one into many. But no man either is or ever will be able to accomplish either the one or the other operation."
Let us continue with this endless theme tomorrow.
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