2 wings and the UIS

Our Universal Intersection Set; Weathermakers, Two Wings and Venn Diagrams

By John Taylor; 2007 October 22, 07 Ilm, 164 BE

The past few weeks I have been slowly going through Tim Flannery's "The Weathermakers," a book that gives ample background about the mechanisms of climate change. I relearned my Grade Six lessons on the layers of the atmosphere, Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere and Exosphere. Now I have a more adequate understanding of how the whole system works, after so many years. Flannery also gives an introduction to the history of air pollution. I hate to think of the number of history books I have read, yet all this was spanking new to me. I had no idea that people were writing about the effects of air pollution in London four or five centuries ago, and that as late as the 1950's there was a "great smog" that killed over 10,000 Londoners. You can see this Aussie author introduce his book himself in a televised CBC interview at:

<http://stage6.divx.com/CBC/video/1211302/Weathermakers>

What got me interested in this was Mark, local French teacher at Dunnville Secondary School and regular contributor at the Wainfleet Philosopher's Cafe. He had just read Weathermakers and demonstrated an impressive grasp of the details of the world's climate, even in the face of our usual rapid fire, heated argumentation. He demonstrated that it is necessary for anybody concerned about saving humanity to go much deeper into what should be called "climate destabilization" (rather than the more usual global warming) than just watching Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."

When, after the meeting, I asked Mark how he gets this sharp command of what he has read, he kindly shared with me the secret of how he works. In every book he reads he marks the most important parts and when he is done he keeps the volume permanently on a bookshelf in his office. The "books read" library is in chronological order, according to when he read it. That way he can go over the most important parts of each book, and when something comes to mind, he has the information right at hand. I wish somebody had told me to work like that when I first started out. Instead, because migraine wove agony into my experience, I always felt a visceral revulsion for what I had just read, and got rid of the book as fast as I could. Bad mistake, it turns out; now I am three steps closer to Alzheimer's and have little to show for years of study. Since our conversation, I have torn apart my office and research system and am trying to reorganize it all in a more sensible, useable system, one not unlike Mark's.

One of the most impressive lessons I got out of Weathermakers is his capsule history of how the science of climate change is being studied. There are, it seems, two schools of thought, the holists and the reductionists. Mathematician James Lovelock's holistic Gaia hypothesis of the 1970's was excoriated as mysticism rather than science at first, but lately it has been coming back into favor. It seems, looking at the record over billions of years, that life as a whole has been cooperating to make this planet stable and livable. Life processes over millions of years sequestered masses of carbon, while releasing a balanced amount of oxygen into the air.

The Aboriginals of Australia believe that by digging into the ground with mines and drills we are entering the land of the dead and releasing evil spirits to roam the land. As Flannery points out, this is literally the case. Science is discovering the actual names of these evil spirits, greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane, plus several new ones that were unknown even in the hellish conditions that ruled in the first three billion years of this planet's childhood. Then there is the ozone layer, a belt in the middle of the stratosphere the thickness of two pennies laid together that surrounds our planet and keeps us from being fried. We have been fooling with that. Enough said.

Thus, to say that we up to our necks in deep doo doo is to state what is quite literally the case. Worse, we are up to our necks in rotting corpses. We are digging up the graves of dead plant matter and burning them, we are base grave robbers groveling in our precious fossil deposits, madly pumping carbon back into the air, making it as un-breathable as it was two billion years ago. Massive climate instability was the norm in prehistory, before life collectively (at the cost of many mass extinctions) gradually made the air breathable and the temperature tolerable. Just when it got livable, humans learn industrialization and the planet, Gaia, is now rapidly regressing back to an unlivable beginning. Even so we reap the whirlwind...

Depressing? You bet. But strangely I have found courage to go through the painful details. Time was, I would be weighed down and have to turn away but now I feel as a Baha'i and aspiring world citizen I must grit my teeth and do my best to understand what is going on. One thing that the Master said is always on my mind,

"Regarding the "two wings" of the soul: These signify wings of ascent. One is the wing of knowledge, the other of faith, as this is the means of the ascent of the human soul to the lofty station of divine perfections." (Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of Abdu'l-Baha vol. 1, p. 178)

We see the two wings failing to coordinate or make us soar in climate science. Only now is the wing of reductionistic science beginning to recognize the value of the holistic Gaia hypothesis. They are not flying yet, but at least they know about one another and recognize a complementary role. Similar pairs of wings resolve themselves in every aspect of human activity, not only in the two sexes but in the very quarks and atoms that compose the universe. Even daily life duality reflects itself in our two rituals, prayer and reading the Writings, that we Baha'is perform each morn and eve. Prayer stretches the faith wing, reading the knowledge wing. Even Shakespeare recognizes this polarity:

"Ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven." (King Henry VI, Act IV, Sc. VI)

A Baha'i hearing this is immediately reminded of Baha'u'llah's Tablet known as the Tajalliyat,

"The third Tajalli is concerning arts, crafts and sciences. Knowledge is as wings to man's life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone. The knowledge of such sciences, however, should be acquired as can profit the peoples of the earth, and not those which begin with words and end with words." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 51)

If we are to escape the curse of ignorance, we must seek knowledge, not just any knowledge but knowledge that is useful, that makes a difference. That is why I suffer through the Weathermakers, because I cannot imagine a more important thing to know about than how we are affecting the climate. Our future on the planet hangs on this hair.

If there is a single message that we Baha'is should be giving the world, especially the world of scientists, is that everybody should do what we do. I do not say believe what we believe but do what we do, that is, take that morn and eve ritual. This practice preens both of our two wings, knowledge and faith. The morn and eve study and meditation session should be universally applied, no matter what the content or outer form of one's beliefs. Anybody can and should do it, even an atheist. Everybody needs to think holistically and reductionistically together, to exercise those two wings regularly, keep them in shape and ready to use during the day. Who knows, if scientists had done it faithfully, they might not have rejected the Gaia hypothesis out of hand, and we might not be as deep in it as we are.

Lately my thinking along these lines has been resolving into a single image: a Venn diagram. Everything I know is a circle, everything you know is a circle, and at some point our circles intersect. That is common knowledge. Here lies common faith. That can be portrayed on a Venn diagram. I was researching Venn diagrams for this reason and came across a humorous version of what I just said. On the left circle a wag had written, "Music I like." The left circle was labeled, "Music you like." In the intersecting space was "Music I used to like."

In any case, there is surely an intersection set of knowledge and faith that everybody, no matter who they may be, no matter how varied their two wings may be, still accepts and knows. And even if we do not, with love we can build it; if so, we might label it "music I now like." That space we can call the universal intersection.

Here, I truly believe, the believer and the atheist, and even the agnostic, have surprisingly firm common ground. Consider this prayer or meditation of Baha'u'llah. Here He seems to be talking to that universal intersection set, saying that here we can build a common, stable climate of harmony and agreement.

"The mind of no one hath comprehended Thee, and the aspiration of no soul hath reached Thee. I swear by Thy might! Were any one to soar, on whatever wings, as long as Thine own Being endureth, throughout the immensity of Thy knowledge, he would still be powerless to transgress the bounds which the contingent world hath set for him. How can, then, such a man aspire to wing his flight into the atmosphere of Thy most exalted presence?" (Baha'u'llah, Prayers and Meditations, 133)

How indeed? Only on the wing of faith, supplemented by the wing of the best that we know. If we do not build up that common intersection space we will be weak, deluded and in imminent danger of collapse. Long before Jared Diamond wrote his all-important warnings, Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel, the Master pointed to the same danger, only instead of pointing to the failed civilizations of the Americas and the Pacific, He only needed to point to the ruins that litter central Asia. These ubiquitous ruins litter the plains, and are repeatedly mentioned in most if not all of the world's holy writings. Here is His warning. I will close with it.

"If one were to travel through the deserts of Central Asia he would observe how many cities, once great and prosperous like Paris and London, are now demolished and razed to the ground. From the Caspian Sea to the River Oxus there stretch wild and desolate plains, deserts, wildernesses and valleys. For two days and two nights the Russian railway traverseth the ruined cities and uninhabited villages of that wasteland. Formerly that plain bore the fruit of the finest civilizations of the past. Tokens of development and refinement were apparent all around, arts and sciences were well protected and promoted, professions and industries flourished, commerce and agriculture had reached a high stage of efficiency, and the foundations of government and statesmanship were laid on a strong and solid basis. Today that vast stretch of land hath become mostly the shelter and asylum of Turkoman tribes, and an arena for the ferocious display of wild beasts. The ancient cities of that plain, such as Gurgan, Nissa, Abivard and Shahristan, famous throughout the world for their arts, sciences, culture, industry, and well known for their wealth, greatness, prosperity and distinction, have given way to a wilderness wherein no voice is heard save the roaring of wild beasts and where bloodthirsty wolves roam at will. This destruction and desolation was brought about by war and strife, dissension and discord between the Persians and the Turks, who differed in their religion and customs. So rigid was the spirit of religious prejudice that the faithless leaders sanctioned the shedding of innocent blood, the ruin of property and the desecration of family honour. This is to cite only one illustration.
"Consequently, when thou traversest the regions of the world, thou shalt conclude that all progress is the result of association and co-operation, while ruin is the outcome of animosity and hatred. Notwithstanding this, the world of humanity doth not take warning, nor doth it awake from the slumber of heedlessness. Man is still causing differences, quarrels and strife in order to marshal the cohorts of war and, with his legions, rush into the field of bloodshed and slaughter." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 288-289)