F Day and orbits of EJF

Father's Day thoughts on the Revolutions of Equality, Justice and Freedom

By John Taylor; 2007 June 17

"God presides in the great assembly. He judges among the gods. `How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality to the wicked?' Selah. Defend the weak, the poor, and the fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked... They do not know, neither do they understand. They walk back and forth in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, `You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless you shall die like men, and fall like one of the rulers.' Arise, God, judge the earth, for you inherit all of the nations." (Ps 82:1-8, WEB)

Here are some clips, forwarded by Ron Speer, our local singer, from the Choral Music Festival that he participated in at the holiest Mashriq in the world, after it had been voted one of the seven wonders of Illinois.

http://www.youtube.com/usBahaiFaith
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1mjbbW_wZU

My quote for the day yesterday was: “In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.” (Geoffrey Cotterell) If that is so, then I would add in Canada everybody is a writer; our problems arise when you have to explain what a reader is. Really, in my experience almost every writer you meet is a poet, and nobody reads anybody else’s poetry. For us, we Canadian writers are victims of the tragedy of the commons. What is common to everybody soon becomes the possession of nobody.  A Canadian, then, reduces to  an Australian.

Today is father's day, so as a father I will take it as my privilege for once to write about whatever I feel like writing. Okay, I do that every day, but today especially. I want to write about equality, justice and freedom, respectively, in that order, or rather, about that ordering of the three. There is, you see, a definite hierarchy among these three basics as I learned lately from philosopher Mortimer Adler. In all my years of studying these three principles, I never realized this, so my thanks go out to Morty. Here is how it goes:

Equality comes first because if you try to set up justice without equality it always breaks down to the question, "Justice for whom?" For all practical purposes justice ends up defined as what is right for the strong, the influential, the powerful, over the weak, the unconnected and the nobody. To a certain degree, then, justice presupposes equality among all human beings.

On the other hand, equality itself cannot be an absolute or universal, or it will nullify itself according to the tragedy of the commons. If everything is equal to all else, in every way, all the time, then nothing is equal. Equality collapses in upon itself and becomes a meaningless Black Hole.

We theists get around this dilemma by positing an Entity, God, Who holds in His Bosom the only Absolute, which we deem holy, an end in itself. We do not claim to know, or even to be capable of knowing, what that Absolute is, but we do have faith that if we remain pure It becomes a He, that is, He reaches out to us and abides "closer than our life vein." As the Master put it, nearness is likeness. Everything save Him is relative to Him, and responds to His Will for us. This Will is the basis of equality and right, which in turn allow for freedom.

When you put equality and justice together then you get equal rights, what used to be called the rights of man. This right is a relative quantity derived from all serving One God; an image for this service is planets revolving around one sun, and moons revolving around those planets. Hence the Biblical sayings,

"God presides in the great assembly. He judges among the gods." (Psalms 82:1, WEB) "You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High." (Ps 82:6, WEB)

One God, like the sun, leads to every being capable of knowing Him being empowered with a God-like ability to become a mini-solar system, a planet with moons revolving around it, a virtual end in itself. From this orbiting around the One, the unknowable Absolute, comes our service. We rule a part of His material creation temporarily, entrusted to us on this ephemeral plane of existence, while He is Father to us. The more like Him we become, the wiser and better our rule. The outer is a reflection of the inner.

In the same way, freedom cannot be without justice. Freedom is defined by what is given, by the strictures of right. Otherwise it too becomes a Black Hole, a tragedy of the commons. If everybody is free then nobody is free, and if nobody is free, all are slaves to whoever happens to be first or stronger or faster, or whatever. In our collective childhood slavery was endemic because this subtle truth was not universally understood, and lines of communication were broken. The gravity of the solar system was weakened and everything flew apart like meteors in space. The strong always ended up enslaving the weak, and then rationalizing a Fait Accompli. There was no integration among equality, right and freedom.

This protocol, equality, justice and freedom, is expressed and reflected outward in the Polity of Baha'u'llah. First comes spiritual principle.

The solar system of spiritual principle is simple but profound. The principle of the Oneness of God comes first, and around that revolves the Power of the Holy Spirit. Last comes covenant, which depends upon and revolves around the equality and justice of God. Firmness in the covenant is how the moons of our life dynamically adjust to the interplay of gravity radiating out from the two central spiritual principles, Oneness and Spirit. There is a fourth spiritual principle, love. According to this metaphor of the revolution of the spheres, love would be gravity itself, for it is the attractive force among all bodies that holds together and defines their motions.

After spiritual comes social principle. The social principles are the outward expression of the inner reality established by the spiritual principles. The only difference is that here there are giant gas planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, around which orbit many moons. Each satellite and each satellite's satellite, follows the same ordering, though, from equality to justice and, last of all, freedom.

Two social principles, however, stand out from all the others because they each embodies one of the two universal prerequisites, equality and justice.

Equality is instantiated in the principle of the oneness of mankind. The Guardian calls this principle "pivotal" because everything else moves around the fact that all men are brothers and sisters under One God. A pivot is a fulcrum, a fixed point by which, as Archimedes pointed out, if you had a long enough lever you could move the world.

Justice is instantiated in the principle of the individual investigation of reality. By personal search for truth each of us sets up our own ultimate court of appeal by which we judge our world. Our minds and thoughts are the lever, and our equality and commonality with the rest of the human race is the fulcrum for the motions of the moons that orbit our world. As Baha'u'llah said, "Center your thoughts in the Well-Beloved, rather than in your own selves." (Gl 168) If we do not place our mental lever on this fulcrum of oneness, self becomes a prison within. Baha'u'llah says,

"Yea, inasmuch as these people have failed to acquire true knowledge from its source and wellspring, and from the ocean of fresh and soft-flowing waters that stream, by the leave of God, through hearts that are pure and stainless, they have been veiled … and have remained confined within the prison of their own selves." (Gems, para 79, p. 57)

At the same time, without equal rights bolstered by search based upon oneness, outwardly our world will continue to be characterized by anarchy, weakness and the tragedy of the commons. For the inner devil and the outer tyrant have one tactic in common, one main weapon in their arsenal: divide and rule. As long as they hide in wait to waylay us on the road to freedom, we will never know freedom.

"Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own self. The Evil One is he that hindereth the rise and obstructeth the spiritual progress of the children of men." (Lawh-i-Dunya, Tablets, 86)