By John Taylor; 2006 May 08
Our topic is the Oneness of God manifested in economics. God is one, theory and practice. To believe in God is to act in God. There are no two ways about it, only one Way.
There is no single Baha'i principle of economics, but for convenience I lump them under the blanket term "economic readjustment." Here is the "Great Being" statement from Baha'u'llah's Tablet to Maqsud that I categorized under economics,
"The Great Being saith: The learned of the day must direct the people to acquire those branches of knowledge which are of use, that both the learned themselves and the generality of mankind may derive benefits therefrom. Such academic pursuits as begin and end in words alone have never been and will never be of any worth. The majority of Persia's learned doctors devote all their lives to the study of a philosophy the ultimate yield of which is nothing but words." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 169)
The first question you may ask is, why did Taylor put this under economics and not education? Is it because there is no Great Being statement dealing directly with economics? Well, yes, but my excuse is that in our modern "knowledge economy" the behavior and attitude of academics and intellectuals is an important if not the most important of all economic base lines. No advanced nation in our time has failed to achieve a level of cooperation between university researchers and industry that would have astonished a denizen of the 19th Century. Indeed things have gone so full circle that many worry that traditional academic goals and values are compromised by the vast profits from patents and royalties coming out of university sponsored research.
And although Baha'u'llah here specifically singles out the "learned doctors" of Iran at the time, Western education of that age, though less priest ridden, was not much better off. The mind enslaving prejudices of ancient slave-owning empires held full sway in Europe, which by and large was still imperialist and profited from colonies, if not the slave trade itself. To turn from theoretical cogitation to practical work was beneath the dignity of the lofty, upper class intellectuals that universities catered to. So well into the first half of the 19th Century serious students with an eye for a university education devoted their time to Greek and Latin at the expense of science and mathematics.
This led to a peculiar reversal where women, excluded from impractical training in dead languages, could ignore them and turn their attention directly to research. As a result they achieved a prominence as field researchers that has yet to be matched, even today. This of course was not the result of esteem for women's rights but rather contempt for getting one's hands dirty. This inattention to results is just what Baha'u'llah's "Great Being" warns against.
Nonetheless, although today there is much more cooperation among "learned doctors" and corporations and government, a case could be made that there is still not nearly enough, especially on a macroeconomic scale.
I will cite only the two most urgent examples. The mounting evidence laboriously gathered by climatologists that the planet is undergoing slow but catastrophic weather shifts is nothing but words, "the ultimate yield of which is nothing but words," as long as policy makers persist in ignoring the need to respond immediately to their implications. If the practical implications of research findings are blocked, or obscured by corrupting science and the scientific method, no scientist or thinker, no matter how brilliant or dedicated, can do more than impotently spout words that generate nothing but more words.
Similarly, when the nuclear threat of an ideologically opposed Soviet Union disappeared one would have expected "learned doctors" to have turned government away from the capitalist versus communist mind-set and led a massive shift in spending from war materiel to economic readjustment, to equalizing the gap between rich and poor. The misuse of physics for nuclear destruction would have been expiated by complete disarmament, nuclear and otherwise. Instead nuclear proliferation not only to nation states but now among rabid, secret, amorphous terror groups is a real and present danger. The more ineffectual the thinking the better an excuse it becomes to increase rather than decrease military spending. The less security we gain the more it costs.
The fundamental finding and object of all knowledge is what Kant called "perpetual peace." Peace is the effect of one divine ruler, God, taking rightful first place in the mind of all, which leads to peace and composure, inwardly, socially and politically. This cannot be devalued or reprioritized. As long as it is our massively productive world economy, the product of thousands of scientific advances, will see the lion's share of its wealth siphoned away in military spending and arms races, to means of destruction rather than the salvation of the human race.
--
John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment