Pangaea

Three Steps to Pangaea

By John Taylor; 2007 September 22, 15 Izzat, 164 BE

The Badi Blog is going to be in a state of upheaval for the next three weeks. First of all, I have to rip my office apart. My hand was forced by a creeping mold problem, and the fact that one of my desks is bowed down with the burden of supporting reference books, and is about to collapse. With the help of Peter Gardner, I purchased a replacement desk at a garage sale this weekend. It is a foldout "writer's desk," with a built in place for a typewriter. I plan to put a laptop there and do my writing on a less power hungry appliance. I hope to have a newly designed study in working condition in about a week. But then right afterwards we will be traveling to upper New York State and Quebec for a week. Time was you could boast about traveling. It was a good thing that broadened the mind. But now that I have been reading Monbiot, I hang my head in shame to admit that our vacation will irresponsibly expand our carbon footprint. In any case, within about a month I should be back to the old essay-every-day habit.

I have been going through every recorded speech at the TED conference website, and this was among the most interesting:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/55

Here filmmaker Jehane Noujaim suggests her plan for world peace. She has initiated what she calls Pangea Day. This will take place next year, "an event in which people all over the world can watch the same films at the same time." A sort of planet wide film festival. The name Pangaea, or as they spell it, "Pangea," was the super-continent that existed before plate tectonics kicked in and drifted the continents into their present positions. This event is intended, metaphorically speaking, to reunite the continents of humanity back together into one super-continent by means of sitting together in the dark and sharing a uniting experience. The films will be of the local, do-it-yourself variety and will be judged by experts of Noujaim's choosing. Contributions can be submitted to a special location on Youtube.

Myself, I would like to make a film on Socrates for this event. Or maybe my latest hero, Mo Tzu. But not being Chinese it would probably take too much make-up to for me to impersonate him.

In any case, one of the most important lessons of Mo Tzu was how to examine a doctrine, how to set about applying the first principle, search for truth. He suggested a methodical process of development similar to that laid out, much later, by the Master in Secret of Divine Civilization. To run things this way would be both religious and scientific. Leaders would use faith to motivate the people, and science to direct them in a methodical manner, according to this definition of science: "... science is a process, a series of occurrences which lead from some initial point to some identifiable conclusion." (Richard W. Miller) Except that governance as xxx was understood and taught by Mo Tzu millennia ago,

Now, how is a doctrine to be examined?

Mo Tzu said: Some standard of judgment must be established. To expound a doctrine without regard to the standard is similar to determining the directions of sunrise and sunset on a revolving potter's wheel. By such a means, the distinction of right and wrong, benefit and harm, cannot be known. Therefore there must be three tests.

What are the three tests?

Mo Tzu said: Its basis, its verifiability, and its applicability. How is it to be based? It should be based on the deeds of the wise rulers of the past. How is it to be verified? It is to be verified by the senses of hearing and sight of the common people. How is it to be applied? It is to be applied by adopting it in government and observing its benefits to the country and the people. This is what is meant by the three tests of every doctrine." (The Ethical and Political Works of Mo Tzu, tr: Yi-Pao Mei, Arthur Probsthain, London, 1929, at: http://www.humanistictexts.org/motzu.htm)

In other words, do not take intellectual shortcuts. Do not pollute the mind with ideology; face reality. Take an exemplar, model your thought and action on what worked for that exemplar, then consult as broadly as possible with popular opinion. Finally, act and pay attention to the effects of your actions. Feed back the results for on-going reevaluation.

You may object that this question that Mo Tzu addresses, how to run a country, is of interest to a tiny proportion of the population, that is, politicians, managers and policy makers. Our present system of representative democracy encourages that dangerous illusion. But the fact is, we all come from a family, and we all can participate in a family. In fact, in order to be moral, we must do that, just as a responsible Baha'i must participate regularly in the Feast. Family, the Feast, these are universals; these are basic building blocks of man as political animal.

This points to what I see as the main advantage of Earth Charter Architecture. It forces (okay, it offers very strong inducements for) everybody to participate in family and feast occasions. For those who do not have a family, or who for whatever reason are separated from blood relatives, it offers substitutes which amount to the same thing. Earth Charterhouses would give to each citizen a fair chance on the neighborhood level actively to apply the methods of investigation and governance that Mo Tzu suggests above.

It may well be possible, as Monbiot points out in "Heat," to re-jig ordinary houses to live up to high standards of energy efficiency. But never will the present system of disparate, freehold dwellings live up to the invisible but real social standards required by being a human being. In fact, wrong-headed design of housing has separated family and isolated individuals from community; this constitutes the most immediate cause of our present environmental crisis in the first place.

Another one of the presentations at the TED website has an architect and neighborhood designer showing snapshots of typical streets and intersections -- if you live in North America you could probably step out your door and see similar monstrosities of overhead wires, roads crowded with cars everywhere, buildings distanced from pedestrians, signage dominating every exposed surface, and token clumps of what he calls "redemptive nature." As he displays these grotesque cityscapes, he asks:

"If you were an American soldier in Iraq would you be willing to fight and die for this? Is this what we are paying such a high price to defend?” (William McDonough, <http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/100> and, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104)

I do not know about defense or how to design anything much, but what I am trying to do on this Blog is to imagine a neighborhood designed for carrying out Mo Tzu's way of investigation. A neighborhood built to initiate a social renaissance.

As this architect giving the talk pointed out, a hundred years ago it was well known how to design a neighborhood for people, and his profession is trying to relearn the basics that were forgotten. He shows an amazing pair of before and after pictures of a new city he helped design in China; the before picture is of a gentle, grassy hillside; the after picture looks exactly the same. What they did was build the town and raise the turf onto the roofs of the buildings. Almost no environmental impact. He put walkways over the streets; you can walk across the grassy field almost as well as before there was a city built underneath.

Spectacular and showy as this plan for a new city is, it still suffers from the big flaw of modern architecture; it is the product of one mind. It is a fact of the universe, two heads are better than one, and, under the right consultative conditions, many heads are best of all.

As most Baha'is know, the Guardian considered history to be too important for one person to write. He foresaw what we now call group writing for this profession. I think the same thing is true of architecture. That is why I have not gone into the specifics of Earth Charter architecture -- okay, laziness and ignorance are factors too, but not the only reasons. Earth Charter building would be the first design intended consciously to follow the three steps of Mo Tzu,

Step one: a firm basis or foundation, i.e., the deeds of wise rulers of the past. You want to use the best model for past success, Ancient Athens, Alexandria, Florence, Baghdad. You study the most vital neighborhoods in the world (there is a disproportionate number, I hear, in Latin America) and put the best of that into new neighborhoods. You take away disincentives to progress and let competition and obsolescence gradually erase poorly designed places.

Step two: verifiability by the senses of hearing and sight of the common people. You feed back the hands-on experience, the praise and complaints of those who live in the neighborhood, and use that to improve and renovate it. Take these lessons and make each new neighborhood more flexible in what matters for such adaptability.

Step three: applicability. Apply it "by adopting it in government and observing its benefits to the country and the people." In other words, the feedback process of step two _is_ the structure of local government. Consultation rules! This transcends representative democracy and capitalism, but it does not leave aside their advantages.

So if Earth Charter techniques were applied in making that new city in China, it would not look at all like the natural fields that were there originally. But because humans thrive socially in properly built high density housing, the city would not take up as much space. What is more, the new city might well increase the total biomass of that land surface from what was supported before by integrating agriculture into every roof and wall exposed to the sun. Like the gardens and terraces on Mount Carmel, formal garden and park land would gradually melt into natural forests and fields.