Incipient Manifesto

Incipient Manifesto

By John Taylor; 2006 October 27

At this fall's ARE meeting of Esperantists I met the author of the textbook for a Peace Studies course that I took back around 1990, one Ronald K. Glossop. His book, which I went over with a fine toothed comb at the time underlining passages long and short, is called "Confronting War." He told me that the fourth edition of Confronting War is out. After we had been home a week there arrived in the mail from him an Esperanto version his more recent work, "Monda Federacio? Ampleksa Analizo de Federacia Mondregistaro" or, in the original, "World Confederation?, A Critical Analysis of Federal World Government." Mondfederacio expresses many world-political ideas that Baha'is hold dear but which I have never seen treated in such detail, so critically and forcefully. I will deal with the contents of Mondfederacio in good time, when I have read more of it.

This forces upon me a broader vocabulary. I haven't read any major books in Esperanto since a few years after I first learned it. So far, wading through this is challenging because Esperanto has become a household language, spoken only to wife and children. I found early on that going over entirely to reading and writing in Esperanto sucked the life out of my English inspiration. It is not so much the difficulty of the language that is the problem, it is its seductiveness. I lost desire to write in my native tongue, lost myself in research and hardly wrote anything new for several years in the early 1990's.

At one point in the conference Dr. Glossop and I, and his friend, a tall, bearded, professorly-looking fellow whose name escaped me (he was evidently a linguist, since he spoke of learning a new language with the casualness that you and I do of walking from one room to another) all sat down together and spontaneously discussed world federalism. I laid out my over-baked idea of mound architecture (latest working title: "The Instauration Manifesto"), spontaneously dressing it up as an alternative, non-political way to approach world confederation. Rather than dream and agitate, why not design and build? That will persuade better than just saying over and over, "We should have a world government." My idea, further dumbed down by rudimentary Esperanto vocabulary, went over like the proverbial lead balloon. "What does local housing design have to do with unification of all nations under one government?" they asked, uncomprehending. I tried and utterly failed to get the idea over. I suppose it is expecting a lot; if I cannot finish the book in English, how can I sum it up in another language?

So that is what I will set out to do today, to answer their question in English as concisely and convincingly as I can.

The Instauration Manifesto; First Draft

"Think globally, act locally." This is far more than an inspiring aphorism. Do we have any idea what it means? Do we ever ask ourselves what it would be like if we ever really did think globally?

The particular political arrangements, all the elaborate political and economic theories, the structures and forms of government on every level have little if any visible impact on daily life. Few spend much of their day in town hall, far less the United Nations buildings in New York and Geneva. What affects us every hour of the day, what keeps us alive and happy, is the design of our homes and neighborhoods, and the way we travel from point A to point B.

An ounce of global thinking would mean that dwellings, work places and modes of transit would be radically different, designed from the ground up according to a world standard. As it is, lack of global thinking has already caused massive environmental degradation and global warming, as we all know. The planet is slowly strangling. Governments, thinking only nationalistically, completely neglect the built environment. Local building codes assure that housing built in a sloppy, haphazard manner according to obsolete technology. Roads have taken over from buses, trains and other mass transit technologies.

More profound global thinking would give rise to an urgent demand for a single answer to basic physical and other needs. The human body, be it in New York or Timbuktu, has the same basic, invariant physical requirements, such as clean air, food, clothing and shelter. Our world can and must be built to reflect that. Fulfilling this need is the Sine Qua Non of human rights, not to mention culture and civilization. Far from reducing diversity, a global standard would allow for far more natural and cultural flavor to be designed into the local built environment than we have now.

All that is needed is to agree upon a set of rules and standards to scientifically regulate what affects us most, all day and every day: our health, diet, social contact and other basic needs. The technical means that serve these fundamental physical requirements must be redesigned holistically, according to a consensus of scientists and researchers. After all, the Internet started off as nothing more than a set of specifications for connecting computers together to aid in communication, and look where it has taken us after the Web went global only a decade ago. Imagine what it would be like if roads and buildings were similarly globalized!

A universal, integrated power grid, transport and transit system could rapidly, efficiently and cheaply connect every point on the planet to every other. Each locale could be regulated by a single, open building code to assure that each building and neighborhood takes advantage of every available solar, wind and other renewable energy resource, that effluent be recycled as conveniently and efficiently as possible, that food is mostly grown and prepared locally, and so forth.