Cosmo

Cosmopolitan Project

By John Taylor; 2007 May 08

News

Next time the Haldimand Baha'is will feature for our last monthly public meeting before the summer break the following talk by Betty Frost:

A Key to Loving

How can we have creative, loving relationships with our life partner, relatives and colleagues? We all want love, but resentment, anger and hurt feelings often lock us out. What is the "Key"? The author of "A Key to Loving," Betty Frost, will present some answers from the Baha’i Writings. A book signing will follow.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007, 8 PM,

Garfield Disher Room, Dunnville Public Library

Months ago, on my first attempt to include pictures on the Badi' Blog, I had Silvie write an article introducing some of her art inspired by the Silverwing series. On the blog itself the pictures did not turn up, only gaping white spaces. But nonetheless a reader responded to her description of the hero, a bat by the name of Shade,

"Hi Silvie, I like the way Shade is brave, but a bit slow in assessing character, and he needs Marina around to guide him. You must tell us how Shade saved Marina from the Orca sometime. I'll bet that's a story in itself. ka kite (see you later), Steve."

I showed this to Silvie when I dug up the rest of my reader feedback from the past few years on Blogspot. I also showed her with the more successful recent graphical entries on the Badi' Blog, and she asked to start up her own Blog, along with her little brother, where they can display their own words and pictures, and maybe get some feedback, too -- you can write them if you click on the "comments" link at the end of each entry. So on Sunday morning while Mom was at choir practice we started their new blog going and added two pictures to start off. Here is the URL to the incipient Silvie and Tommy Blog:

<http://silvieandtommy.blogspot.com/>

Cosmo Project

Yesterday, and a few times before that, I cited the following dire words from a prayer in the Bible,

"Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." (Psalms 74:20)

This pretty much epitomizes the direction of my reading lately. It is frightening how cruel humans can be when we are insulated from reality. I have been reading with shock Zinn's "People's History of the United States," laying out in horrible detail the systematic genocide that characterized the early colonization of this continent. This expression "insulated from reality" comes from Jared Diamond, perhaps the most important academic in the world right now, along with Noam Chomsky. If you have not read him, I came across a video of him giving a lovely summary of his latest book, "Collapse," at Columbia University's "Earth Institute" just after it had been published. If you were not tempted to read him by my constant mention of him on this blog, at least watch this 40 minute video, at:

<http://www.dkv.columbia.edu/video/ei/jared_diamond.html>

I read about half of this book last year and found this video lecture a good review of the book, most of which I had forgotten. It was also interesting to see in the flesh Jeffrey Sacks, who introduces Diamond. This guy, an economist, is as far as I can see one of the most important thinkers in the world today. If the United States were ever to nominate somebody to be its representative on a world government, Sacks would have to be on everybody's short list. Which is why I find it strange that Chomsky is so fervently against Sacks, and condemns him as a corporate lackey. I feel like writing Sacks and asking him, "Like, are you a corporate lackey? Say it ain't so."

Another book I am devouring these days is a light humor book with a surprisingly profound undercurrent, Scott Adams' "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel." Reading it along with Zinn and Chomsky (I listened to Chomsky's lectures and read some material by him on the Web, lately), Adams' Dilbert acts as both an antidote and an intensifier.

Dilbert is an antidote in that you realize that the atrocities you read about so often throughout history were just the result of the same sort of "get what is in your interest by whatever means you can get away with" imperative that you come across in everyday life, and which infests the business world. It is just a matter of degree, and of the speed of communications, that determine how much one can get away with. But Dilbert also makes it worse, because you realize that you have done the same thing, you have bent the truth in your own interest, played tricks and made up scams to prop up your own egotistical point of view. You may not have committed genocide but every time you paint the world in your own colors you have done what the exploiters of the past have done, and often with less justification than they had.

For example, Columbus comes to America and kills, terrorizes and enslaves the generous "Indians" that he finds, and why? Because he is months away from the reach of the law, and because the few members of the elite that he is in contact with in Spain are not worried about humanity, they want gold and, what was almost as valuable as gold at the time, slaves. As Diamond puts it, there was very effective insulation from the effects of their actions. The very existence of poverty proves that there is insulation -- as Abdu'l-Baha once said, if the rich knew what the poor are going through, they would never allow it to happen. Then the Puritans colonize further north and murder and terrorize the native tribes who get in their way, in one case burning a defenseless, innocent village full of women and children, "sending to hell" over 800 souls in a few hours.

However, unlike Chomsky, Zinn is not unrelenting in a one-sided description of the evils of the privileged classes. He explains why it was so attractive to enslave human beings. Knowing why does not justify but does give perspective and depth. For one thing, there was a huge demand for labor in the new world, and patriarchal social structures were too unfair and rigid to adapt to the challenge. The economic system amounted to De Facto slavery anyway, in both Europe and the American colonies. The difference between a peasant or indentured servant, with a handful of flimsy rights, and a slave for life was often academic. Brutality and exploitation were ubiquitous in an age that we still call the "Enlightenment."

Though Zinn is a better all-round student of history than Chomsky, having read Jared Diamond I feel another inadequacy of Zinn, which is that of historians generally. Traditional historians get only a slice of the whole picture when they ignore the dynamic physical demands of the geography where people live. History should be told in the fuller perspective of Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," which explains why the natives were so weak at the time -- ravaging disease and a narrow continent that runs north and south, rather than east and west, as does Asia.

What we really need is what Kant called for, a cosmopolitan history. I see the Cosmpolitan History Project as something much bigger and better than a dusty old text book. I envisage a tremendous, mobile library slash cinema that would display the past, as collected by specialists of all disciplines, in a dynamic, interactive display. It would be a simulation game that you could enter into and experiment with whatever "what if" scenarios strike your fancy. The Big Cosmo game would be the Internet Instantiated, a hypertext "knowledge book" as originally envisaged by Vanovar Bush.

I know, something like that will never happen before there is a world government. The past is just not important enough for a world drunk with war. The cause of war is always traced to a failure to learn from the past, but for these leaders, drunken with pride, that is all the more reason not to look at a cosmopolitan history.