Peace Appraisal, Part II

The Promise of Peace, An Appraisal Twenty Years After; Part II

By John Taylor; 2006 June 13

The Peace Message is by my computer's count some 6,687 words in length. Nor is it written in a way that can easily be summarized. We are talking a succinct treatise here, highly concentrated, written in an unrelenting literary style that can only be called "high committee." The House of Justice is clearly more heavily influenced stylistically by the often Jane Austin-like eloquence of Shoghi Effendi than by the pellucid classicism of the Master. As far as content, they cite Baha'u'llah twelve times, `Abdu'l-Baha once and the Guardian seven times, all from the World Order letters. This is deceptive, though, since the citations from Baha'u'llah tend to be a sentence or two while those of Shoghi Effendi are often a paragraph or more in length.

Anyway, every time I try to summarize the contents of the Peace Message it ends up as an explication, that is, the capsulation is more drawn out in length than the original. Nor am I the only one affected, since I notice that in the ABS's booklet length re-publication of this letter, "To the Peoples of the World, A Baha'i Statement on Peace," their subheadings are largely crowded up into the first third of the letter. The last two thirds of the Message defeated their attempts at summary and got short shrift. Yesterday I spent an entire essay assessing and rephrasing the opening one-eighth of the peace letter. At that rate it will take eight more essays just to outline it, not to mention assess its influence over the past twenty years.

And I have a deadline; by this evening I have committed myself to making it into a brief PowerPoint presentation. So what to do? How to put a long and elaborate message into a palatable, easily digestible visual presentation? By the end of this essay, I hope to have an idea, or failing that a good excuse for coming to the fireside empty handed -- I was too busy writing an essay on the Peace Message.

It was to be expected, short of plunking an entire book into the hand of every person in the world, that they would have to make it terse and highly concentrated. To shorten it even further would distort it, for the whole point of the Baha'i peace program is that peace is universal. You cannot take a synoptic view or squeeze it into a sound bite. Look at it from any perspective, however all-embracing, for example as purely political or economic or even a religious concern, and you distort it, you squeeze out its meaning. Peace is the sum of all specialties, and much more. The House of Justice has to do justice to the principle the Master called "universal peace." So it has to set out to embrace every major concern of our several billion-strong human race, not to mention God's concerns.

The latter divine concern entails explaining the nature of principle, the ultimate implication and full flower of monotheism. This they do brilliantly and originally, even considering the Great Ones on whose shoulders they stand. Thus, if I had to choose the most important passage out the entire message, its distinctive contribution both to Baha'i Studies and the history of ideas, it would be this, from the end of its second section:

"...the primary challenge in dealing with issues of peace is to raise the context to the level of principle, as distinct from pure pragmatism. For, in essence, peace stems from an inner state supported by a spiritual or moral attitude, and it is chiefly in evoking this attitude that the possibility of enduring solutions can be found. There are spiritual principles, or what some call human values, by which solutions can be found for every social problem. ... The essential merit of spiritual principle is that it not only presents a perspective which harmonizes with that which is immanent in human nature, it also induces an attitude, a dynamic, a will, an aspiration, which facilitate the discovery and implementation of practical measures. Leaders of governments and all in authority would be well served in their efforts to solve problems if they would first seek to identify the principles involved and then be guided by them."

This pregnant passage had a life-changing influence on me as a writer. It inspired me to write a book on the Baha'i principles, to devote my life to them. My book rapidly grew into two books, then three, and eventually the number of planned books that would be required to do the job exceeded ten to the exponent three hundred, a critical number equaling the number of atoms in the universe. At this point most writers, excepting only the very dumbest, give up and go on to easier lawns to mow. But in this respect I live up to the family motto, "A Taylor never quits." But even I realized when the number of books ran higher than the number atoms that I had hit a rut and would never in my lifetime finish even the one book that I had aimed at. But it has been a great ride, these past twenty-one years, I have learned a lot and although I am infinitely far from where I hoped to be I remain convinced that principle is, as the Peace Message implies, the successor and heir apparent to the ideologies and "isms" that afflicted the 19th and 20th Centuries. I believe that even if it defeats a thousand better minds than mine, with every passing year principle will increase in importance.

Remember what I said about the gods of public speaking being angry with me a few days ago? Well, they have intervened again. Ron Speer just called from Emerg, saying that he cannot attend due to a kidney stone attack. The evening was planned as a musical fireside featuring Ron's baritone singing Baha'i songs of peace, supplemented by a few readings by my daughter Silvie from the Peace Message, which I would illustrate with PowerPoint. Now Ron is out of it and Silvie has to play in her first soccer game of the season, so she cannot attend either. So it is all up to me. I must learn to sing, prepare the slides, do the talking and do everything else, from setting out the cookies to locking up afterwards. May these fickle gods turn a merciful eye and have it turn out that nobody turns up, or I am screwed.

Let us turn back to what the House says above about applying principle. "Leaders ... and all in authority would be well served ... if they would first seek to identify the principles involved and then be guided by them." An editorial in the New York Times a few days ago points out a perfect example of why we are utterly doomed unless and until we learn to do exactly this.

Here is the situation: The prodigious growth of China demands that they open a power plant averaging more than one new coal-fired plant every week. Their vast plume of poisonous smog is already blotting out the sun as far away as the otherwise pristine wilds of the Rocky Mountains. And China is slated in two decades to be overtaken in both production and population by India. Our planet is in deep trouble; nobody yet has come up with a refutation for headlong progress, least of all in the most advanced nations. At the same time, power plant technology exists in the hands of Western corporations that could greatly reduce the environmental footprint of these power plants. Local Chinese companies expert in obsolete, filthy coal techniques have the ear of local leaders, and modern, foreign power plants seem expensive in comparison. There is no answer to this as things stand. Nobody is going to talk these private corporations into giving away their technology, or even offering it at a reduced price. Nobody has a right to tell the Chinese to shell out more money when a cheap, local alternative is at hand, least of all the center of rampant corruption that is New York.

How would principle solve this dilemma? First of all, the existence of a constitutional world government responding to principle would give an example to everybody, from the local level on up. Principle would become De Rigueur. Also, a world governing body would be in a position for the first time to control multi-national corporations and turn them into a force for good rather than evil. Right now corporations are owned and run by a tiny minority who answer only to a faceless, amorphous body known as "the shareholders." Well, give an elected world economic body a controlling share of every company that aspires to do business internationally. Write everything into the very charter of every corporation. Give the world government power, when need be, to form or even disband international corporations. That way, if it is in the overall interest of humanity to give away or share a patent or technology, then, as Captain Picard said, "Let it be so." I am not saying that there would be no compensation, for at the heart of principle is the rule of law. In fact, the existence of principle at every level would make local companies eager to cooperate and arbitrary measures would rarely, if ever, be called for.

The closer the world unites, the ranker and more odious corruption becomes. Corruption used to be a banal evil, now it is fatal. There are now only two sides to the coin, corruption or principle. The coin falls on one side or the other, never on its edge. That poisonous plume growing ever denser above our heads is just an outer sign of a deeper, spiritual illness, the rejection of God's principles. The solution is at hand, peace and the principles of peace. It has been obvious for centuries. Kant envisioned it in the 1790's when he imagined what the constitution of a permanent world institution for peace might look like in his own peace message, which he called "Perpetual Peace." Here is part of his treatise, part of what the ABS chose to excerpt in its notes and annotations to the UHJ Peace Message:

"And thus this guarantee of nature makes it a duty that we should labour for this end, an end which is no mere chimera ... and since peace cannot be effected or guaranteed without a compact among nations, they must form an alliance of a peculiar kind, which may be called a pacific alliance (foedus pacificum), different from a treaty of peace (pactum pacis), inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars, whereas the latter only ends one."

A great deal of the UHJ Peace Message is supportive of what Kant says here. Peace is and always will be a chimera as long as we believe it is, as long as we think cooperative consultation and sharing are unnatural, foreign to our humanity. If we think that we will be doomed only to form truces allowing more war preparations in the future. The big white boys will take most of the pie and leave only crumbs for the vast majority of humanity. But, as the UHJ Peace Message points out, the prime blame lies not in the tiny number of privileged individuals, however greedy they may be. The real chain that is around our necks, the burden forcing everybody to bend over and submit to the ravishments of corruption, that ultimate fetter is a mental one. It is not in our stars but in our selves. It is that mover of masses, that false religion of our time, ideology. The House of Justice sums it up, as ever, succinctly,

"Most particularly, it is in the glorification of material pursuits, at once the progenitor and common feature of all such ideologies, that we find the roots which nourish the falsehood that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive. It is here that the ground must be cleared for the building of a new world fit for our descendants."

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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com