Consultative Cooking

Consultative Cooking and the Principle of One God

Universal Language and the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 2006 May 20

Oneness of God is perhaps a deceptive name for this principle. Really what seems to be meant is "Unity in Diversity of God." This I am realizing as I wade through the abstruse article "God" in Mortimer Adler's "Syntopicon." The proofs of God, for instance are either before or after the fact, that is, a priori or a posteriori. Proof does not stand on an either-or basis but on both, on the reconciliation of two ways of looking to Him. I call your attention to two thinkers who understood this particularly well. The first was Isaac Newton.

"`The most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes' seem to (Newton) the best way of knowing God. `Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety in things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.'" (Adler, Mortimer, Ed., The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon, "God," Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago, 1980, p. 553)

A God Who created nothing but unity would be less masterful than One Who created variety. Since the very idea of God involves perfection, God would have to make unity, and make many kinds, and then bring them together to do more than both separately. In the image of the Master, a garden that displays variegated varieties of flowers is most beautiful. Such unity in diversity is the only possible result of the total perfection worthy of God. Berkley, as well as Newton, understood this.

"Berkeley maintains that `if we attentively consider the constant regularity, order, and concatenation of natural things, the surprising magnificence, beauty, and perfection of the larger, and the exquisite contrivance of the smaller parts of the creation, together with the exact harmony and correspondence of the whole, but, above all, the never enough admired laws of pain and pleasure, and the instincts or natural inclinations, appetites, and passions of animals; I say if we consider all these things, and at the same time attend to the meaning and import of the attributes, one, eternal, infinitely wise, good, and perfect, we shall clearly perceive that they belong to the ... Spirit, who "works all in all," and "by whom all things consist."' This seems to him so certain that he adds, "`We may even assert that the existence of God is far more evidently perceived than the existence of men.'" (Id.)

For those of us who are convinced that God exists, our task is not to try to prove what is obvious, His unity in diversity, but to live it out to the fullest, together and apart. That is the principle of the Oneness of God. QED.

Yesterday we reviewed the contribution of a great architect, who understood and applied the principle of diversity in the buildings and regions that he designed around the world. Instead of building on flat ground, he designed a town in Israel along a fertile river valley. In Singapore he designed a large city where the view from taller buildings shared a seaward panorama on one side and a green area running down the middle.

I find this man's leaning toward vision and diversity stimulating at this point in my investigation of the principle of the oneness of God. The idea of an almighty God involves a seemingly impossible reconciliation of the opposites of oneness and diversity. If I have known God first-hand all my life, and you have too, we have to be one in essentials and different in incidentals. Yes, but only if we are absolutely sincere and truthful. And the word "absolutely" is the rub. Nobody can come near absolute sincerity without great agony and suffering. The Master compared human suffering to food being "cooked." Only if our soul is well cooked in truth will it be ready to bring diversity and unity together.

Oneness is the easy part. Diversity is difficult. Our differences, diversities and incidentals are not at all what the word "incidental" seems to imply, that is, trivial and unimportant. Our variations and differences are in a profound sense the essentials to our true unique self, and God created that as much as He created our oneness. I must be true to my unique path and you true to your experience and together true to ours. Truth together takes as much trial and effort as being true to ourselves in the first place. The common effort to this ensures that the oneness we attain will be genuine, not a lazy short cut to conformity, not a product of illusion or imitation.

The principle of unity in diversity is not theory, it is practical too. Farmers apply it in planning what they grow. If a crop or livestock are too uniform they will be subject to destruction by viral attack, as chicken farmers are finding out right now with bird flu. Unity in diversity applies to every word that comes out of our mouth. Mere talk cannot arrive at truth, for prevarication, lies and falsity will act like disease to an undiversified crop. The result is failed consultation, complete fiasco. Consider the following web essay, which you can read at:

(http://www.arl.org/diversity/leading/issue8/abilene.html)

It is called "The Management of Agreement," and was evidently produced by a group of librarians who observed the dangers of lack of diversity in group problem solving among researchers. The beauty of the "Abilene Paradox" mentioned here is that it is a trivial example of failed consultation. Trivial, but we have all seen much bigger failures caused by the same phenomenon. Here is how the Abilene paradox goes:

Everyone in a certain rural family went along with the half-hearted suggestion of the father to go for dinner in a greasy spoon in Abilene. A terrible time was had by all, and later it turned out that nobody really wanted to go there in the first place, they were just trying not to stir the pot. The whole family wanted just to be agreeable. Even the father did not really want to go. He just wanted to get the ball rolling by offering that suggestion. This lovely little essay suggests several ways an animator or person posing a suggestion to a group can avoid provoking such missteps.

The Writings tell us that only true consultation, the product of sincere reflection and prayer, is capable of bringing unity and diversity together. Consultation, however casual, must touch upon the truth of each and all, or mistakes will propagate. This is being found out by non-Baha'i managers the hard way. Products are introduced at the price of millions of dollars and they fail. After the disaster it often turns out that all employees involved in the project or theatre production knew that they were dealing with inevitable failure. But for one reason or another nobody wanted to stand up and try to stop it. After all, they get paid no matter what.

Myself, I have observed this in committees and Assemblies. For one thing, it makes a tremendous difference how the chair poses a proposal. The mere wording of the proposition is often more decisive than the arguments for or against it. If the chair says, for example, "Shall we not do this?" the proposal can be sunk just by that negative phrasing. Nobody likes a negative proposal. Turn it around and say, "Shall we do this?" and everybody is all for it. Everybody loves to be agreeable. I fervently would suggest that anybody who is elected chairperson go over the suggestions in this essay for the steps to gaining consensus very carefully. It should be in the Chairperson's handbook, should such a book ever be published.

A chairperson is asked by his or her Creator to be a cook, to cook up the oneness of a group from its diversity of opinion and viewpoint. A cook does not create food, farmers do that. But a cook prepares it, makes it palatable, pleasant, easily and efficiently consumed. Perhaps we should change the job title from chairperson to "consultative cook." Lately in the Globe and Mail I came across a thinker who proposes that our ability to cook food became, long ago, the defining factor of humanity. I cite the passage in full:

"Cooking makes us human? Cooking is what makes humans different from the apes, contends Alfred Crosby, author of `Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy.' The skill, which arrived some time in the Upper Paleolithic Period, allowed humans to do some of the work of digestion outside the body, clearing the way for a smaller gut and larger brain, and enabling that gut to harvest stored solar energy from previously unappetizing or inedible sources, such as hard grains. "Cooking, like hunting, obliged human hunters, gatherers, fire tenders, and cooks to plan and co-operate ... Chimps spend six hours a day chewing; cookivores only one."

This supplements Jared Diamond's thesis that the most effective food producers (that is, farming, fishing and other ways to mass produce food) always win out over inefficient producers, such as hunter-gatherers. The big leap in agriculture was the discovery of grain in the Fertile Crescent, a grass that can support millions of people, not just thousands. We could not have eaten grain without cooking. In the same way, consultative cooking can take our individual search for truth and "cook" it together to arrive at a truth greater than the sum of its parts. This truth can support the whole world, rich and poor, weak and powerful. Such effective work in groups and committees is our only realistic hope for a viable world. Only that could erase war and stop global warming.

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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com