Globe

Towards an Anti-Aesthetic Globe

 By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 21, 18 Qudrat, 164 BE

 Note: I revised yesterday's essay and re-posted the improved version to the Badi Blog at: badiblog.blogspot.com. When I mess up this way I feel like the manager of a malfunctioning sewage processing plant. He is forced to announce that people probably should not drink their tap water for a while, or they will die. You may not die, but still, do not read your emailed copy of yesterday's blog entry. It may not be contaminated but in its own way it is crap. Just go out and read the version on the Badi Blog.

 Yesterday we exposed the root of the world's corruption. It is not so much threats of terror as it is mollycoddling from within, particularly in youth. We are victims of what the Master called "love inversions." One way of reversing the deadly heat wave of unhealthy love is to start with self-discipline, and then to enter into consultation about how to solve the real problem. True, mature love plus knowledge lead to action.

 One of the most important grassroots discussion processes for effective action is the Earth Charter. In response to the Charter I have been slowly going through a book called "The Earth Charter In Action, Toward a Sustainable World." An early essay, featured here before, explains that the Earth Charter is effectively a new pillar of the United Nations. The Charter of the United Nations was a first step, dealing with relationships with and between governments, then came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aimed at improving human-to-human relations. A third object was economic, but economics grows from the roots we extend into the natural world, and that was long ignored. One essay in this book, by Mirian Vilela and Peter Blaze Corcoran, explains how this gradually changed.

 "...three major goals were identified for the UN - to ensure peace and world security, to secure human rights, and to foster cooperation for social and economic development. It was only in 1972, as the result of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, that environment protection was considered as the fourth main preoccupation of the United Nations. Furthermore, it was not until the 1980s that the concept of sustainable development emerged, raising the need to address these various preoccupations with an integrated approach and justifying the need for a new charter." ("Building Consensus on Shared Values," Earth Charter in Action, p. 332)

 The Earth Charter, as yet still unofficial, will soon become the shiniest pillar of the United Nations. Last week the UN tentatively recognized its responsibility for the environment by daring to admonish the world's two greatest polluters, the US and China. This is a good sign, but far from enough.

 Anybody who opens his or her eyes has to be worried about how far our relationship with nature has degraded. What to do? Rather than sitting back and stewing over pollution and the thousand other natural shocks that nature is heir to, we should actively promote this Earth Charter. My book on it was commissioned by the body responsible for the Charter, and it has been a great help. It offers essays by writers of diverse backgrounds. Their varied points of view about how to implement better environmental policies at the grassroots level are stimulating to a dreamer like myself. Discussion leading to this document started back in the 1980's.

 "... the Earth Charter derived from the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development report Our Common Future. This report called for ... `a new charter to guide state behaviour in the transition to sustainable development,' and also stated that the charter `should prescribe new norms for state and inter-state behaviour needed to maintain livelihoods and life on our shared planet.'" (Ib., 332)

 As with all progressive ideas, this process was opposed by reactionary, vested interests from day one. Truth is, as somebody said, inconvenient. In spite of that, masses of thinking people demanded some kind of a show of action and, around the centenary of Baha'u'llah's Ascension, the gathering known as the Earth Summit took place. It was subverted of course, flouted in its face by the biggest nationalist, capitalist power brokers, who resented the pressured to be there at all. Nonetheless, there were good outcomes.

 "The idea of developing an Earth Charter was then included as part of the preparatory process for United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) - the Rio Earth Summit. In 1990 and 1991, several preparatory meetings for the conference took place at the international and national levels, which identified elements for such a charter. This effort sought to develop, through intergovernmental negotiation, a charter which was to provide the ethical foundation upon which Agenda 21 and the other UNCED agreements were to be based."

 From a philosophical point of view, the gradual implementation of the Earth Charter will require a move from the first to the second levels of Kierkegaard's three spheres of human existence. These, you will recall, are first the aesthetical, second the ethical and third the religious. The aesthete is concerned only with liking and disliking, pleasure and boredom. Right now both our elites and masses are embroiled in some kind of hedonistic rat race.

 The aesthete cannot cut it when it comes to saving the world. To survive and implement the Earth Charter we each and all must put moral considerations first. This same history of the fate of the Charter at the Earth Summit continues:

 "The possibility of such an ethical foundation generated significant enthusiasm, which led a number of governments and non-governmental organizations to submit recommendations and proposals on this subject."

 Rather than go over what they suggested, here are some ideas of my own.

 How about a goal for every teacher to carry into every classroom a globe, and relate every lesson, every lecture in some way to that physical reminder of our global responsibility? You can pick up an ordinary globe for what? Twenty or forty dollars? It is not that expensive, and is hardly a radical move, since globes in classrooms are traditional items. But most globes are defaced by national coloration. I am talking about a globe showing the world as it is, without borders. The effect of that would be limitless.

 But it should not stop there.

 I notice that many stores are advertising improved world globes. A Toy World brochure kicking around our house advertises a computerized globe display, including games and lessons for all ages, called the "smart globe." It costs a hundred dollars and has the advantage of being re-programmable according to the needs of a particular lesson. Another product is "Magic Planet;" here is their site:

 <http://www.globalimagination.com/faq.html>

 Here is how they describe their doodad:

 "The Magic Planet is a digital video globe that allows you to view and explore dynamic digital media of the earth and other planets, as well as to watch and interact with marketing, promotional or entertainment media.  The Magic Planet is a projection display device - it is a computer display with a sphere-shaped screen. It's controlled by a PC or another video source such as a streaming media server, so it can display any global image - it's tremendously versatile. It allows you to present global information and global context in the most compelling way possible."

 Such initiatives are significant steps to what we really need, a round computer monitor. Using that, connected to Google Earth, you could plunge into our globe in ways that nobody can imagine until it is done. To get an idea of what such a round I/O device might reveal, go to:

 <http://worldprocessor.com/catalog/world/mainframe.html>

 The artists who made these data displays up gave their traveling art show a great name, the "World Processor." The World Processor gives a glimpse of what interactive, dynamic displays of our globe might do for education. If teachers had a world processor of some kind they could put the Earth Charter and its objectives into a persuasive display right before them. I think such display technology could take us from an aesthetic sphere to a moral one, for an aesthete is only concerned with found pleasures, as found on an analogue globe, but the moral sphere is inherently digital, it seeks out the good and displays that. Although He was speaking of the next level up in the Kierkegaardian scheme, the religious sphere, the Master's words to teachers of Baha'i classes could also apply to moral teachers of the Earth Charter:

 "Then when they grow up most astonishing results will be produced because the map of their whole lives will be drawn with the hand of the spiritual educator." (SW, Vol. 7, No. 15, p. 142)