Proprietorship

Down With Sole Proprietorship!

By John Taylor; 2006 December 11

Last night I helped with the technical setup for our Human Rights Day celebration, a projected showing on a big screen of "An Inconvenient Truth." It was the third time I had seen this documentary film about Global Warming since the DVD was released a couple of weeks ago. This time around my thoughts while watching it were of a historical bent. At the heart of this crisis, it seemed now, is not just the folly, corruption and avarice of a privileged elite. True, their ambition provoked the climate crisis in the first place, and their further refusal to wake up and listen to criers in the wilderness like Al Gore is letting the climate crisis spiral out of control. But the real, underlying problem, it seems to me, runs much deeper than we imagine.

To explain our suicidal turpitude the denial of a few or even the despondency of many cannot cut it. At the heart is a pandemic refusal to listen to and act on informed advice. The doctor hands us the diagnosis, but we do not recognize his qualifications, or we cannot be bothered to fill the prescription, or we fill it and then lose the medication, anything but actually do what must be done for our own good. I came to believe while watching yet again these conclusive proofs of global warming that listening to the advice of climate scientists alone is not going to be enough to save us. We must form a new habit of listening and obeying not just these experts but everybody in the know. In other words, we need to learn to become fully scientific about everything that matters, and not just what concerns the welfare of our planet, essential as that is.

And when I say scientific, I am not using the narrow modern sense of the word. I am talking about a broader search for truth that used to be called natural philosophy, and which boils down to one word, wisdom. Wisdom is the application of justice in everything we call "yours," "mine" and "ours." Consider how the most glorious of Jewish kings started out. He began his reign, we are told, with a humble wish in a dream on the night before his accession to the crown. Here it is, as recorded in the Bible:

"Your servant is in the midst of your people which you have chosen, a great people, that can't be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give your servant therefore an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to judge this your great people?" (1 Kings 3:8-12, WEB)

I was prompted to look up this passage again by a headline in a news magazine asking this question about a candidate for leadership of the Liberal Party in Canada: "Are you good enough for Michael Ignatieff?" I took the accusation to mean that this man is eminently qualified for Prime Minister but that in the opinion of some he may not have the sort of humility before God's people that Solomon showed. I do not know Ignatieff well enough to comment on that (though I did enjoy the documentary films he made in the early 1970's), even if it were right for me or anybody to make such comments, which after all border on backbiting. Such thoughts are good only when unspoken, meditatively considered just before voting; openly planting them in peoples' brains should be Verboten, as is hate literature.

But the point about arrogance, taken generally, is a crucial consideration for voters and those voted into office. For truly, the people are holy, since God Himself created them. If one person is to be loved because God created her, two are twice as lovable, and many that much more. Groups are holy and mysterious and inscrutable just as God is. Only a leader who reveres and loves the people above all has any right to be in a position of prominence. This, the Master taught. Abdu'l-Baha reasoned that if it is bad to put down a single person, how much worse is it to denigrate an institution? After all, an institution is a group of persons. What is more, they are dedicated not to their own good but the interests of others. Yet many, even some Baha'is I have known, are happy to exclude institutions, especially government, from their definition of backbiting. Abomination on abominations!

There are many groups and institutions that we should respect and revere, and the greatest of all is the biggest and most inclusive, the human race. This is why Margaret Thatcher's denial that there is any society other than individuals or families was such a primal, heinous betrayal of her mission as leader. That is why we have her, and those who think like her, mostly to thank for the mounting climate crisis. Anyway, here is the "report card" that God gave to Solomon for his request in his dream, recorded above. This is one of the few explanations in Holy Writ of God's side of the prayer equation, and it is therefore something we should bear in mind constantly, whenever we judge or make a value judgment, whenever we are praying or preparing to cast a vote:

"The speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. God said to him, Because you have asked this thing, and have not asked for yourself long life, neither have asked riches for yourself, nor have asked the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern justice; behold, I have done according to your word: behold, I have given you a wise and an understanding heart; so that there has been none like you before you, neither after you shall any arise like you."

I am calling this essay "Down With Sole Proprietorship!" because that, it seems to me, is what Solomon was renouncing and God was confirming here. That is, God is saying what Solomon was to get to have as his own. Remember, Solomon did not ask for any property or outer fruit of providence, either for himself or others. He did not want it, and God does not give it to him. But, as a result of his purity, God gives him the "understanding to discern justice," and a "wise and understanding heart." Recall, Solomon had already promised to use such an ability to discern between good and evil to "judge the people." In other words, since selfless judgments are disinterested they would benefit the people and not Solomon.

What did Solomon get out of it? He got a pure heart that would make it "so that there has been none like you before you, neither after you shall any arise like you." In other words, uniqueness. As Abdu'l-Baha said, those who imitate the past are doomed to repeat the past endlessly. The soul who, like Eve, reaches out to take the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by the shortcut of imitation, initiates a fall from grace of epic, climatic proportions. Solomon would do the reverse, his wisdom would bring about a return to grace, he would be given the power to bring something new into the world. Nothing, no possession is more valuable than that.

Which is why Solomon's name and glorious reign are still known today, so many ages later, and even why its achievement is immortalized proverbially in the first Persian Hidden Word, addressed to all "people who have minds to know and ears to hear," saying, "O messenger of the Solomon of love! Seek no shelter except in the Sheba of the well-beloved..." The Queen of Sheba came out of Africa to pay with rich gifts her homage to Solomon. She, with the perceptiveness that only a female sovereign could have, saw in his wisdom something divine, a unique gift to the world.

The Queen of Sheba saw a return for us all to innocence and grace, a way out of the fall caused by false imitation of past understanding. And that was just what God had promised Solomon in that night before his crowning, uniqueness, innovation, what Bacon later called Instauration, what Baha'is now call Badi', and paid for it with his blood. Badi' or instauration mark true progress, revolutions mere tumbling, for it is based upon a humble search for truth and justice. Badi' was the name of the young roué given the job of delivering to the tyrant Baha'u'llah's Tablet to the Kings. O messenger of the Solomon of love, indeed.