Fuller 1

Fuller Feedback and Revised Essay Series, Part One

 

An Internet reader of my recent postings about Buckminster Fuller wrote,

 

"John, I was a born-again atheist before Fuller's compelling definitions awakened me to the fact that the problem with most people's concept of God was their arrogance and narrow-mindedness and that the word 'God' shouldn't be thrown out just because most people in my acquaintance did not apprehend the more fundamental issues in the Universe. I look forward to reading anything you write about Fuller and God: it is an issue of some interest to me."

 

I replied, in part,

 

"We are spiritual brothers then, in a way, since I too was a fervent anti-theist before I started reading Fuller. I recently wrote a series of essays on my Badi' blog on the proofs of deity, in dialog with an atheist friend, starting around new years day, 2008. Looking over my earlier writing, I just found that I wrote a six part series on Bucky back in 2002 or so, and it is not on the blog. So I will go over these and make them available soon. I do not yet know how much of this essay series is to do with God, though. At the moment it is Fuller's environmental ideas that I find most seminal. I think they will soon become central to solving the global warming problem..."

 

The following is the first of this series, written a couple of years before the Badi' Blog started, so for most of the readers here this will be new.

 

From Search to World Aroundedness; Some Afterthoughts about Buckminster Fuller, Part I

 

Afterthoughts

 

Originally written 19 December, 2001

 

I was a fan of Buckminster Fuller before I was a Baha'i, and my entry into the Baha'i Faith was conditioned by many of his ideas. For example, Fuller's view was that people in future will be much more mobile and will live in transportable dwellings. So I was impressed when I encountered the emphasis in the Faith on building world unity on a local level. However I was less impressed by the pioneering ideal of "staying at your post."

 

Lately I have gone back to rethink Fuller and his seminal ideas.

 

"Seminal" is a good word for Fuller's thought, for it comes from the Latin for "seed." Seeds change completely in both form and substance as they grow into mature plants. Fuller's ideas have the touch of genius not because they are always literally correct but because they draw us into the revolutionary mind-set that we will need to unite this fractured world.

 

Whenever I read about Fuller's life I so admire and envy his indefatigable energy. If there is a spectrum of human vigor he would be at one end of the scale and I would be at the opposite extreme, total indolence and listlessness.

 

I remember in high school for my obligatory science fair project I wanted to reproduce his great invention, the geodesic dome, using drinking straws. My brother and father promised to help. They were both professionally involved in the building industry. They were busy and put it off.

 

Finally, on the night before my due date I decided to put together the straws into a dome of about one foot in radius all by myself. I bent the straws into triangles of the proper dimensions, taped them shut, and then taped the triangles together into the dome shape. Being tired, I did this while lying on my back in bed holding it up over me. I didn't know about safety glasses at the time. As I held the partly built dome over my head some grit fell into my eye, causing extreme pain. I jumped out of bed and danced around with uncharacteristic vim. Then I washed my eye out and after considerable delay. When my family saw that I had finished the dome on my own, they were amazed that I had done it at all, especially my brother and father. I had a reputation for being sunk in books. I got a mediocre mark for my dome but I consoled myself with the thought that Fuller himself had been booted out of Harvard twice.

 

The past week I have been trying to build a geodesic dome the same way again to amuse the kids, but now drinking straws have bendable joints, which makes it much harder. But the real problem is the same as before, I don't have the energy to start. I wonder how I did it back then without even getting out of bed. At least now I know about safety glasses.

 

If you want to know about my life before I was married, when I was a totally listless single, read the Russian novel "Oblomov" by Goncherev. It is a love story, but the hero Oblomov is too lazy, listless, unenergetic, call it what you will, to win his love, and at the end a more energetic lover plucks his sweetheart from before his eyes. Survival of the fittest, the more vigorous male spreads his genes to the next generation. I found it incredibly sad when I read this story.

 

Anyway, back to Fuller, who by some quirk of evolution was vigorous, ethical and temperate (if you ignore his heavy social drinking for most of his life). He died in a most romantic way. His lifelong wife was in a coma and he came to visit her bedside and had a massive coronary. He died instantly. She died, still in a coma, a few dozen hours later. Neither ever knew that the other had died. This is the happy opposite of Romeo and Juliet, who both died thinking that the other was dead, and both at their own hand.

 

The Fullers' courtship was highly romantic too. In those days it was long before the present corrupt practice of dating and courting in the back seats of gas guzzlers predominated. It was the done thing to have a "date" with a girl not by going off alone but by spending the entire time of courtship with her in the company of her family. As the father of a little girl who is getting more beautiful every day, I wholly approve of this practice. When she is older, if a young man is serious he had better get used to spending time with our family. He will have to replicate like a turtle, not a bee. No bees in my gene pool. We turtles splash water on bees that fly nearby.

 

Maybe Fuller started off as a bee but that long courtship with her and her family (she was the eldest of many younger brothers and sisters) changed him into an ethical turtle. Only a turtle would at the age of eighty-something sit and die at the bedside of his beloved wife when he could have been off doing some last minute pollinating with some younger and more beautiful flower.

 

Fuller had the unfortunate experience of having his first daughter die. I had read about it before and was aware that the depression he went into afterwards was to lead to some of his most powerful resolutions, such as the idea that in life you usually have a choice, you can make a living or you can make sense, but not both. Having an amazingly faithful wife he was able time and again in subsequent years to cast off the practical, money-making choice in favor of the more interesting failure.

 

Fuller goes from one interesting failure to another instructive financial disaster for decades after making this resolution. Finally after WWII his wife inherits some IBM stock (don't sell, readers of his biography shout: please don't sell it!) which she sells to finance Buckminster's craziest scheme of all, the geodesic dome. But against all the logic of experience in their lives together, this insane dome idea turns out to be a world beater, a far better -- though probably not as lucrative -- an investment than even stock in IBM.

 

Back to the daughter of Buckminster Fuller that died. As a father now the story is heartbreaking and I could barely read it as told in the biography of Robert R. Potter. Let me condense. Bucky was on his way to a football game and the daughter asks him to bring back a pennant. He goes to the game, then out drinking with his buddies. When he arrives back home she is down with a fever. She comes out of it long enough to ask for the promised pennant, then she dies. He had forgotten to bring it for her and her last words were met by news of a promise unfulfilled. During a long grieving period this circumstance tormented him, as well as the fact that he had caroused instead of attending at her bedside.

 

At least, this is the story in English, as retold by his biographer Potter. It is both tragic and poignant. Here is her story as Fuller himself retold it using his own particular, peculiar and outlandish diction in his 1967 book, Ideas and Integrities.

 

"Towards the very last of the (First World) War my first daughter was born. She subsequently contracted each of the war-aggravated epidemics of influenza, spinal meningitis, and infantile paralysis. I was increasingly resentful that the effectiveness of teleologic processing of man's all-history experience came only to maximum projected design effectiveness in turnover and turnaround exploitation patterns arbitrarily selected at sub-total experience magnitude." (p. 22)

 

Yeah, that always steams me too. Probably the same kind of thing that is killing scads of babies every minute around the world right now. Fuller continues,

 

"It was visible to me that the death of our child on her fourth birthday, 1922 resulted from then-unheeded environmental process integrations of comprehensively unattended yet design-preventable factors." (p. 23)

 In other words, poor diet and housing, especially the latter, were to blame for conditions that caused the illnesses that killed their child. Money and technology went to the war while whatever most affects people, food, shelter, were and are always neglected. It has not changed since then either. He is absolutely correct that most deaths are preventable and most misery in the world is the result of callous indifference, ignorance, failure to learn from our mistakes, neglecting to design things intelligently or put money where it will do the most good. In the word of Plato and Abdu'l-Baha: imitation.

 

My brother and sister were killed in an accident before I was born, but the stupidity that led to their death similarly bothers me. They were in a car stuck on a level train crossing when a train hit it. The driver was confused by the gearing of a newly purchased foreign car and could not get it going. This was, to use Fuller's words, design preventable. All cars should be standard both in design and parts. They should not be allowed anywhere near trains. We let the slaughter on our highways continue for the same reason we let most of the humanity live on in misery and poverty. It has always been the way. It is dauntingly hard to change habitual thinking patterns.

 

Principle

 

Fuller's rise from tragedy provoked a long depression, then his realization that we need to direct our thought and resources to the good of the whole planet, the whole human race. In other words, Baha'i principles one and two, search for truth leading to oneness of humanity. All must search for truth and from that work the oneness of humanity into their thinking. Principles one and two unconsciously informed Buckminster Fuller's "comprehensivist" thinking.

 

For example, in a speech given to the newly formed NASA in June, 1966, Fuller in unusually clear language set forth some his most seminal questions (search) and asserted his seminal optimism, his hope and faith that failure is built into imitative thinking, not our reality (oneness).

 

"What are the resources? What are the tasks necessary to make 100% of humanity a success? How can we ever do so without ever advantaging one human at the expense of another? How may we render all the world and all its treasures enjoyable available to all men without having one interfering with or trespassing upon the other? How may we reform the environment so that the integrity of all society is not violated by the free initiatives of the individual nor the integrity of the individual violated by the developing welfaring advantage and happiness of the many? Man is born a potentially complete success. The reasons humanity loves its children is that they start off in such perfection of potential. Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success just as the hydrogen atom is intended to be a success. It is only the fabulous ignorance of man and his long and wrongly conditioned reflexes that he continually allowed the new life to be impaired...".

 

Fuller's great personal revelation came in Chicago while walking along the lakeshore, some years into a deep funk prompted by the death of his daughter. He was about to throw himself into the lake and swim out until he drowned. He was disgusted by the in-built obscurantism of learning, how everybody is brainwashed in school and taught to just shut up and listen. He realized that thinking for yourself is pushed into the background.

 

"Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel (experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." (Critical Path)

 Old thinking is built into the very tools for thought that we use, language. Like a monk who takes a vow of silence, Fuller refused to speak for a couple of years. This, as his biographer notes, must have been pretty hard on his long-suffering wife (unless, like my shy seven-year-old daughter Silvie, he picked and chose the objects for his mutism).

 

In his self-imposed isolation Fuller gradually learned to place the whole first, to think in terms of the whole world and avoid the specialist's distortion and part-first perspective. His value to the world, he realized, was his experience in it, even if by most standards he was a "failure." His long succession of creative failures had given him a special view of what the world needs. It needs not personal triumphs over others but a triumph of all for all.

 

"The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual."

 

In a very similar way `Abdu'l-Baha, in his first written work, talks about how people's personality and particularity permanently distorts their view of the world. Hence, He says, there is an imperative need for the universal view of the Manifestation, who sees beyond time and space limitations. Only a pure and perfect being can take the seeker beyond his or her own limited, partly imitative standpoint. This is the only practical way to get around the tendency to de-prioritize at least a part of universally important truth.

 

For example, most people vaguely agree with Baha'u'llah's emphasis on unity, where He states, "The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." But not having the direct experience of knowing, loving, valuing, sacrificing for it, it is always shunted into some de-prioritized backwater, and thus in effect denied, until it is too late. Fuller's image for this was of "spaceship earth," a vehicle surrounded by a vacuum, one mistake and you are dead.

 

"Looking at it as the spaceship that it is, there's just one spaceship here. It's the only one we're going to get. What are the total known resources, and what is the total knowledge, and how do we use those total resources and knowledge for everybody on board this ship? Absolutely give no attention whatsoever to nations ever again. It must be really how to make it work for everybody. That's what I'm talking about. We're now talking about making it work for everybody." (Earthian's Critical Moment, http://www.bfi.org/earthian.htm)

 

This insight, inspiring as it is, is also frightening. Like many of the Baha'i writings, Fuller used the word "crisis" to describe its desperate, ongoing necessity.

 

"Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis - a crisis without precedent. First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omni-disintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole." (introduction, Critical Path)

 

In my next installment we will get into the brilliant tie that Fuller makes between world thinking and morality.