Unity in Diversity, Our Grand Climacteric
By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 13, 10 Qudrat, 164 BE
Unity in diversity is not window dressing; it is key to our survival, stability and security. Here is why.
We are all painfully aware of the fact that climate disruption is destroying unique species of plant and animal life. Scientists for decades have been discovering exotic animals that go extinct the moment they are discovered, including a phosphorescent toad in a rain forest and in Australia a frog that somehow used its stomach to gestate its young. At the same time, for reasons not unrelated, we are losing forever much of our former human diversity, both cultural and linguistic. In a recent interview Noam Chomsky reverted briefly to his area of expertise, linguistics, though in this case his concern for democracy and political diversity meshes in as well. He said,
"Every time a language disappears that means the disappearance of the historical tradition, of cultural wealth, of an aural literary tradition, of a way of life; a piece of humanity is gone. It's not just the words. Languages are part of a living society. So a large part of humanity is being destroyed. It's tradition and it's cultural wealth. It's happening all over, people are not too aware of it." <http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/blog/eva/2649>
The unplanned, unofficial spread of English, the language of cultural imperialism, along with the
It would be suicidal to sit back and watch as the number of languages and biodiversity in the natural world dwindles. The environmentalist George Monbiot lately pointed to a dystopic novel called "The Road," which he says is a nightmare vision of where we are headed. The Road is what might be called a road tragedy, a world where pollution has killed almost all plants and animals, and then famine, disease and warfare killed most of the human race; only a few surviving humans remain. They are divided into scavengers (the good guys) and cannibals (the bad guys). The scavengers head down a long road, hiding from hungry human predators, in hopes of reaching the ocean, which is now a poisoned, dead sea.
This frightening scenario shows where we are headed if we do not address the root causes of language loss, global warming and other manifestations of disunity in uniformity. A reversal of fortune is what we need, one that would put unity in diversity in all our hearts and minds.
This is not a new discovery. Profound thinkers have long recognized that seeking unity in diversity is the basis of world citizenship. Confucius put it at the center of his search for truth and the educational programs he set up.
"The Master said, "`Ts`ze, you think I suppose that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in memory."
Tsze Kung replied, "Yes, but perhaps it is not so?"
"No," was the answer, "I seek a unity all-pervading." (Confucius Analects 15:2)
This goal marks the difference between world citizenship and the fractured, impotent, mindless consumer culture we have today. A world citizen seeks unity all-pervading, not cookie cutter uniformity.
The fact is that the only way unity could ever become all-pervading would be if each individual everywhere did not have to be forced to see oneness in our core values, if he or she identified voluntarily with the One, and loved the diversity of His creation. Just as plants nurtured by one sun show creative diversity, people who turn to God demonstrate this by flourishing in diverse states and conditions.
This is the effect of knowledge, this is the result of light. For, as a character in Shakespeare declares, "There is no darkness but ignorance." That character was Malvolio, the heavy in Twelfth Night. When he is fooled and humiliated by frivolous pranksters who carry a joke too far, Shakespeare imperils the comic lightness of the play by putting the following protest into Malvolio's mouth.
"I am not mad, Sir Topas: I say to you, this house is dark. Clown Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness but ignorance; in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog. ... I say, this house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance were as dark as hell..."
Malvolio had been proud and presumptuous, but his anger is not entirely unjustified; his opponents are superficial beings whose attack was born in alehouse gossip and raised in backbiting. But mostly his belief that ignorance is darkness, and conversely, knowledge is light, is as astute an observation as any ever made about the human condition. Malvolio fails to bring about a Peripeteia in his own fortunes, but almost. More generally, I think the spreading realization that darkness is ignorance and knowledge light marks something even more significant for us all than a sea change; it marks a grand climacteric.
Climacteric is my favorite new word since I ran across it in a book about slums a few weeks ago. I have been stumbling over the term with eerie frequency ever since. It comes from the Greek word for rung or step in a ladder, and signifies, according to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica,
"a critical period in human life; in a medical sense, the period known as the `change of life,' marked in women by the menopause. Certain ages, especially those which are multiples of seven or nine, have been superstitiously regarded as particularly critical; thus the sixty-third and the eighty-first year of life have been called the "grand climacteric."
The Wiki definition says in part,
"The first climacteric occurs in the seventh year of a person's life; the rest are multiples of the first, such as 21, 49, 56, and 63, the last of which was called the grand climacteric, with the dangers here being supposedly more imminent."
I have been haunted by a sort of climacteric film series by the English director Michael Apted, the latest of which is called "49 Up." Every seven years he comes out with a new version. The project started when a Canadian filmmaker was assigned to perform a social experiment to test the rigid class structures of
Baha'is are familiar with the term "climacteric" since it was used a while back by the Universal House of Justice in the concluding paragraph of a letter dated
"At this climacteric of human history, we are called upon to rise up in sacrificial endeavour, our eyes on the awe-inspiring responsibilities which such developments will place upon Baha'i institutions and individual believers in every land..."
As far as I can determine, it was George Townshend who was responsible for introducing the idea that Baha'u'llah's fulfillment of the millennial expectations of older religions marks a grand climacteric in our collective fortune.
Specifically, the first chapter of the Hand of the Cause's "Promise of All Ages," written in response to Shoghi Effendi's World Order letters, puts the thesis forward that our collective coming of age, what Confucius might call the "all-pervading unity" of history, is a kind of climacteric. Interestingly, he does not cite Biblical sources exclusively but gives due attention to other traditions, including Confucianism. In the following, for instance, Townshend describes the theme of the Spring and Autumn Annals (now thought to be only edited, if at all, not written, by Confucius), which divides history into three stages.
"In the first, which he called the Stage of Disorder, the social mind was very crude; there was a sharp distinction between one's own country and other countries, and hence attention was paid more to conditions at home than abroad. In the second stage, the Advancement of Peace, there was a distinction between civilised countries on the one side and those uncivilised on the other; the range of civilisation extended and friendship between nations became closer. The smaller people could make their voices heard. In the third and final stage, the Supreme Peace, there was no distinction at all between the nations of the world. All became civilised and met upon the level. Righteousness prevailed and the world was unified." (George Townshend, Promise of All Ages, George Ronald, Oxford, rev. ed., 1948, p. 23)
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