Absorbing Bucky
Yesterday, realizing the need for original, radical solutions to the environmental problem, I got interested once more in my old hero, R. Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller was a great inventor, an original mind, a globetrotting teacher about what thinking globally really is. I probably owe the fact that I am a Baha'i to his "world around" view (not world-wide, since as he pointed out “wide” comes of an obsolete scientific perspective). When I came across the Faith I was so immersed in Fuller that one of my toughest tests as a new believer was the fact that Baha'is were concerned to establish local spiritual assemblies in as many localities as possible. This was awful! Fuller, asked why his housing always was mobile answered, "Because humans have legs, not roots." He talked about "local focus hocus pocus." Everything has to be world-around, not rooted. Fortunately, I survived that test, and now I can see that that the local and global viewpoint are really twin sisters; in fact they are the abused little sisters of two bullying big brothers, nationalism and corporatism.
Yesterday I collected together some sayings of Fuller from Wiki Quotes. As promised yesterday, I will perform an absorption of these and a few other of his characteristic ideas. I hope that this will show how small a leap it was in the early 1970's for a 17 year old devotee of Buckminster Fuller to become a Baha'i.
Principle One: Search for Truth
"Dare to be naive."
"The courage to cooperate or initiate are based entirely on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the divine mind within you tells you (what) the truth is. It really does require a courage and a self-disciplining to go along with that truth."
"I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing, a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process -- an integral function of the universe." (R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb, 1970)
"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 the 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." (R. Buckminster Fuller, Letter to "Michael," 16 February 1970; Michael was a 10 year old boy who had inquired in a letter as to whether Fuller was a "doer" or a "thinker".)
Principle Two: Oneness of Humanity
"Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. . . . Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship."
"There is room enough indoors in
(jet: what with the geometric growth in world population since then, my bet is that the dance would be considerably more intimate in nature now.)
"I seek through comprehensive anticipatory design science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform humans, being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less..." (R. Buckminster Fuller, Earth, Inc. 1973)
Principle Three: Oneness of Religion
Fuller did believe in God but he was at heart a secular, hard-headed engineer. Nonetheless, his idea of a "trimtab" reminds one of the power of prayer and meditation to change the world with a tiny, imperceptible impulse.
"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab." ("call me trimtab" is engraved on Fuller's tombstone)
Principle Four: Harmony of Science and Religion
"Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, 'We are going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe.' They defined the physical universe as 'an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events.'"
"Universe is non-simultaneously apprehended." (Fuller, quoted by Robert Anton Wilson in Maybe Logic - The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, 2003)
jet: which seems to imply that both scientific and religious truth are relative, the latter relativity, of course, is the thrust of the Iqan.
Principle Five: Elimination of Prejudice
"As a consequence of the slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions `Where do you live?' `What are you?' `What religion?' `What race?' `What nationality?" are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth."
"Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate `comprehensivity.' Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us."
Principle Six: Economic Equity
"Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence. If humans are not required to earn a living to be provided survival needs, many are going to want very much to be productive, but not at those tasks they did not choose to do but were forced to accept in order to earn money. Instead, humans will spontaneously take upon themselves those tasks that world society really needs to have done."
"We produce more than enough food for everyone, but much of it rots or is eaten by rodents because we don't have the means of storing, preserving, and transporting it. But, with adequate energy we could grow, preserve, and distribute plenty of food for everyone. In fact, if needed, we could probably grow two or three times as much as we do now. And so, if we solve the energy & food problems, how do we provide good, inexpensive housing for everyone? Simple. Shelter people in mass-produced, self-contained, surplus-energy-producing, geodesic dome homes which would be helicopter-delivered to anywhere for a tenth the cost of conventional houses." (Grand Strategy)
Principle Seven: Promotion of Education
jet: Fuller's genius is mostly poetic, but I continue to be influenced by this brilliant observation. The implications of human oneness are way beyond what our limited view now can apprehend...
"The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow." (Final interview before his death, "NewsCenter4", WNBC-TV, 1983)
jet: Of course, only someone coached by the Master's emphasis on the spiritual significance of the sun and its dawning points would appreciate the full metaphorical force of this little dictum. Maybe Fuller did not see it either. Even the term "Mashriqu'l-Adhkar" means mentioning God turned to the East, the dawning place, implying that as the world turns, God is very much a moving target.
Principle Eight: Universal Language
"One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs."
Principle Twelve: Universal Peace
"In spite of all humans' innate interest in the interrelatedness of all experience, long ago these world-power-structure builders learned to shunt all the bright intellectuals and the physically creative into specialist careers. The powerful reserved for themselves the far easier, because innate, comprehensive functioning. All one needs to do is to discover how self-perpetuating is this disease of specialization is to witness the inter-departmental battling for educational funds and the concomitant jealous guarding of the various specializations assigned to a department's salaried experts on each subject in any university."
jet: The roots of war are in the shortcomings and fracture of our educational system, a fact foreshadowed as early as Plato. The idea was expounded by Comenius in his Pansophy, an attempt to lay out a universal philosophy of peace based on clarity and educational reform. Compare all this to Abdu'l-Baha's "scroll endlessly unfolding":
"Thou hast described thyself as a student in the school of spiritual progress. Fortunate art thou! If these schools of progress lead to the university of heaven, then branches of knowledge will be developed whereby humanity will look upon the tablet of existence as a scroll endlessly unfolding; and all created things will be seen upon that scroll as letters and words. Then will the different planes of meaning be learned, and then within every atom of the universe will be witnessed the signs of the oneness of God. Then will man hear the cry of the Lord of the Kingdom, and behold the confirmations of the Holy Spirit coming to succour him. Then will he feel such bliss, such ecstasy, that the wide world with its vastness will no longer contain him, and he will set out for the Kingdom of God, and hurry along to the realm of the spirit. For once a bird hath grown its wings, it remaineth on the ground no more, but soareth upward into high heaven -- except for those birds that are tied by the leg, or those whose wings are broken, or mired down." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 58)
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