Battalions of Nationalism

Cuisine and the Beleaguered Battalions of Nationalism

By John Taylor; 2006 December

I admit to a touch of exasperation when I heard the UHJ talk (I think it may have been in a Ridvan Message or the letter to the Counselors) about the "worldwide decline of religion." Oh Jayz, I thought, first it was the Guardian and now the House is going on about this? If faith systems are in such a tailspin, when are they going to hit the ground, crash and burn?

Here in Dunnville religion seems to have undiminished force in peoples' everyday life, more now than ever, as far as I can make out. Only one thing gives a shadow of doubt, a composite photo displayed near the entrance of all members of Grace United Church, where Silvie and Thomas go weekly for their scouts meetings. Of over a hundred portraits of grey heads and wrinkly faces, only a small handful is middle-aged or younger. The picture is shown with pride, no doubt, but a chill runs down my back when I look at it. They might as well have put up a death mask. Then on the radio I heard a United Church minister (I am interested in this church because my mother was a member before she became a Baha'i) proudly and openly admit that when she is on holiday and people ask what she does for a living she says, "I do public relations for a large east coast firm." Boy, and I thought Peter had made a roundabout denial!

But then the killer came when I ran across a worldwide Ipsos Reid survey in MacLean’s Magazine that reported an unmistakable decline in religiosity over the past fourteen years ("A Diminishing Role for Religion," November 20, 2006, p. 35) in virtually all nations of the world, with the exceptions of the Middle East and Russia. I found the drop so startling that I cannot resist reporting its bare outline here on this Badi' Blog. People were asked if it is the case that religion plays a "very important role in my daily life." In 1992, 83 percent of Americans said yes, now only 63 percent agree. Canadians were 61 percent, are now 39 percent. Britain went from 41 percent to 23, France from 37 percent to 17, Spain from 69 to 31 and India from 79 to 55. I find these figures as frightening in their way as the accumulating data on global warming. Basically, the hellish hotter our outer world, the hellish cooler our inner, spiritual life becomes. As most of my readers well know, Baha'u'llah predicts that "chaos and confusion" (WOB, 186-7) will result from the decline of religion, so from these hard statistics let a chill run down all our backs.

In view of the House's perspicacity about the fortunes of religion, I am reluctant lightly to toss out the window their ideas on nationalism. In their letter to religious leaders they all but wrote a eulogy for this primal urge in the ethnic peoples of the world. They wrote:

"The beleaguered battalions of nationalism face a similar fate. With each passing crisis in world affairs, it becomes easier for the citizen to distinguish between a love of country that enriches one's life, and submission to inflammatory rhetoric designed to provoke hatred and fear of others. Even where it is expedient to participate in the familiar nationalistic rites, public response is as often marked by feelings of awkwardness as it is by the strong convictions and ready enthusiasm of earlier times. The effect has been reinforced by the restructuring steadily taking place in the international order. Whatever the shortcomings of the United Nations system in its present form, and however handicapped its ability to take collective military action against aggression, no one can mistake the fact that the fetish of absolute national sovereignty is on its way to extinction." (UHJ, Letter to Religious Leaders, paragraph 4)

This is quite a fetish. I see little awkwardness or irony on the faces in the crowd in Central Park across the road from us on Canada Day. But maybe, as the House says, the faces of those wholly buried in patriotic fervor are graying and not being replaced, just like the hundred little portraits in the entranceway of Grace United Church. From the traditional perspective, there cannot limited sovereignty any more than a female can be a "little pregnant." Sovereignty means having no higher authority to appeal to. Here is how Rousseau pictured it:

"Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his own limbs, the social pact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same power which, directed by the general will, bears ... the name of sovereignty." (Social Contract, 74)

Rousseau goes on in this chapter named "The Limits to Sovereign Power" to stipulate that although you and I may be able to move our arms and legs anywhere we want, there are bounds to the ability of a sovereign to rule. (Come to think of it, I cannot place my arm and hands anywhere I please, as I regularly find out to my sorrow in the kitchen.) Even the most mighty potentate cannot, for instance, impose on his subjects any burden which is "not necessary to the community," reason being, it is a law of nature that there be "nothing without a cause." (Ibid, 75) This law of nature, by the way, Abdu'l-Baha affirmed forcefully in his early meetings with Western pilgrims; He even predicted that one day we would understand why there are those two little ridges above our lips (there is a name for them but I forget). A leader, then, who imposes an unnecessary burden on his people is ceasing to be a leader, and why? Because he is not being scientific. Everything must be done for an established purpose, just as every part of the body is designed to serve some end. Leadership is a science, a skill meant for the betterment of both the body and soul of humankind.

If a leader trashes the body politic without good reason, it is a mark of failure, injustice, folly. Hence Baha'u'llah's condemnation of the kings of Europe who were robbing their huddled masses blind in order to pay for more and better armaments. These were tyrants, not kings, for they were violating the grounds of their own legitimacy. Just as the betrayal of religious leaders caused the decline in religion, so these tyrants are to blame for the awkwardness on patriots' faces that the House sees (but which lesser observers like myself have more trouble discerning.) There is an increasing demand, or need, for a broader sovereignty that embraces all people, the whole planet.

Leadership as an art is the use of sovereignty to better our collective body and soul. Leadership of the body has fallen into the same disrepute as leadership of the soul; politicians and priests are equally reviled by most members of society. So little do we understand leadership that we do not have the words or images to describe it. Consider for example one strange thing that I have been realizing lately reading the Gorgias. The thing is that we have no name for the art of body management, but that the Greeks did. They were very clear on what is very obscure to us. Take this, from Plato's Laws,

Athenian Stranger: And in the case of the body are there not two arts, which have to do with the two bodily states?
Theaet: What are they?
Stranger: There is gymnastic, which has to do with deformity, and medicine, which has to do with disease. (Plato, SOPHIST)

Gymnastic? What the heck is that? Clearly, Plato meant the study and management of healthy bodies, as opposed to medicine, which takes care of sick and diseased bodies. Is there a word for this now? If somebody says she is a gymnast we think she is a tumbler. That is a highly skilled specialist, but not one with general relevance to all owners of bodies. We have worked out common terms for the study of sick and diseased minds, psychiatry, and of healthy minds, psychology. But there is no general study of healthy bodies as a part of everybody's education and daily life. Sure, universities have physical education and kinesiology faculties, but their interests seem restricted to a few elite athletes and their influence is negligible. The Greeks on the other hand treated gymnastics as a higher calling than medicine. Consider this, for example,

"My good friend, the sophist and the rhetorician, as I was saying to Polus, are the same, or nearly the same; but you ignorantly fancy that rhetoric is a perfect thing, sophistry a thing to be despised; whereas the truth is, that sophistry is as much superior to rhetoric as legislation is to the practice of law, or gymnastic to medicine." (Plato, Gorgias)

Gymnastic rules medicine. Imagine that. Imagine what it would be like if even one penny of every dollar we spend on drugs and the health care system went into what the Greeks called gymnastic, that is, in maintaining healthy bodies. If we did that, we might have a hint about what leadership is, of how to be a good steward of the planet. As we learn in the Republic, gymnastic, the study of the body, and music, the science of the soul, though outwardly they are distinct, both have a common end.

And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to practise the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless in some extreme case.

That I quite believe.

The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to develop his muscles.

Very right, he said.

Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other for the training of the body. What then is the real object of them? I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the improvement of the soul.

Let me end this with an astonishing passage from the Gorgias. Having read it I will never see the multi-billion dollar cosmetics and culinary industries with the same eyes again, for both are signs of our collective acceptance of flattery over consultation.

Gorgias: Never mind him, but explain to me what you mean by saying that rhetoric is the counterfeit of a part of politics.

Socrates: I will try, then, to explain my notion of rhetoric, and if I am mistaken, my friend Polus shall refute me. We may assume the existence of bodies and of souls?

Gor. Of course.

Soc. You would further admit that there is a good condition of either of them?

Gor. Yes.

Soc. Which condition may not be really good, but good only in appearance? I mean to say, that there are many persons who appear to be in good health, and whom only a physician or trainer will discern at first sight not to be in good health.

Gor. True.

Soc. And this applies not only to the body, but also to the soul: in either there may be that which gives the appearance of health and not the reality?

Gor. Yes, certainly.

Soc. And now I will endeavour to explain to you more clearly what I mean: The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to them: there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art attending on the body, of which I know no single name, but which may be described as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another, justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference.

Now, seeing that there are these four arts, two attending on the body and two on the soul for their highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men's highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death.

A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them.

Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic. I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time you will be able to follow)

gymnastic :: cookery : medicine;

gymnastic :: sophistry : legislation;

as cookery : medicine :: rhetoric : justice.

And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them. For if the body presided over itself, and were not under the guidance of the soul, and the soul did not discern and discriminate between cookery and medicine, but the body was made the judge of them, and the rule of judgment was the bodily delight which was given by them, then the word of Anaxagoras, that word with which you, friend Polus, are so well acquainted, would prevail far and wide: "Chaos" would come again, and cookery, health, and medicine would mingle in an indiscriminate mass. And now I have told you my notion of rhetoric, which is, in relation to the soul, what cookery is to the body.