Meta-ideology and Nemocracy
Taking Education From Nobody's Business to Everybody's
Precis: Adolph Nobody, my personification of the tragedy of the commons, rules by excluded middle, the corruption of fatuous, absolutist universality. Adolph Nobody's nationalist hegemony defaults on the arbitrary rule of blind, irrational nature. This I term rule by nobody, or nemocracy. Our nemocratic world disorder arises from the sad, paradoxical truth that without focus, everybody's possession ends up as nobody's. Universal reform is the reverse of this deformation, it trains each world citizen in a new ideology that can only be called a "meta-ideology": education for all.
A couple of years ago I became pre-occupied with a character I call Adolph Nobody. It seemed to me that everything that matters for our survival is being degraded by the tragedy of the commons where, if everybody owns it, nobody does. With the environment or the oceans or whatever is the common heritage of humanity, if nobody is responsible for it, then it is doomed, there is an inevitable free-for-all to see who can rape, overexploit and degrade it first. So why not give, as Shakespeare puts it, to `airy nothing a local habitation and a name'? Why not just give our non-existent world leader a name like Adolph Nothing, or Adolph Nobody?
I thought about this Adolph Nobody guy for a long time until I realized that, like Satan, he has always been around. It is just that few notice him, and those who do are afraid to recognize it. Butler wrote a dystopian novel called "Erehwon," which is `nowhere' spelled backwards. Jules Verne had a recurring character in his novels called Captain Nemo, which is Latin for "nobody." And as the palindrome puts it: "Nemo, Na! An Omen." Adolph Nobody is just that, a nobody. I may boast of knowing a celeb, but the effect on my reputation of knowing nobody is mere anonymity. That is what Odysseus wanted when called himself "nobody" during his perilous visit to the Cyclopes. Being nobody offered security from revenge.
In the play "The Tempest," Shakespeare even has some characters sing a song to the monster Caliban, which they attribute to the "picture of nobody,"
STEPHANO: At thy request, monster, I will do reason, any reason. Come on, Trinculo, let us sing.
Flout 'em and scout 'em
And scout 'em and flout 'em
Thought is free.
CALIBAN That's not the tune.
[Ariel plays the tune on a tabour and pipe]
STEPHANO: What is this same?
TRINCULO: This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.
STEPHANO: If thou beest a man, show thyself in thy likeness: if thou beest a devil, take't as thou list of.
"Thought is free", yes but it is free because it is not tied down by being enacted in a finite world. Absolute freedom amounts to the same as what absolute slavery offers, that is, nothing. Our reality is only what thought, will and action make. Even life itself offers nothing more than what we make of it, as Shakespeare's dark anti-hero Hamlet reminds us, "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." He adds that the most glorious hero in our most uplifting dreams ends up, physically, as nothing more than sewer sludge,
"To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?"
Adolph Nobody's influence is pervasive. He makes every part into a partisan seeking limited interest before the whole. You cannot learn in a nemocratic system because ends and means are ignored. Without means and ends, one's worldview becomes particularistic, absolutist and exclusionary. Nemocratic education breeds fundamentalism rather firmness in what fundamental.
What nags me is not that Adolph Nobody is the real president of the world. That is obvious. What bothers me is that nobody recognizes him. We talk on and on about global warming and the degradation of the environment. But none stop to think about how to oust Adolph Nobody from power and get world governance going.
So many people today are looking forward with hope and anticipation to the inauguration of a new President of the United States, Barak Obama. But even if everything goes right for him, can any de facto president of the world, no matter how competent, solve the problems confronting it? Not likely. He has no jurisdiction over the entire planet. He has no mandate for the world.
Nobody does.
We can turn this around if and only if Obama and other faction leaders recognize en mass who is really running things, Adolph Nobody. Nobody is at the rudder of the ship. Nobody is in the pilot's seat, and the airliner is about to go down. We must address this most urgent issue before all others.
Several months ago I was sinking into despair for the world when I came across the Panorthosia. This book is truly a gift from God to the world of today. In it Comenius states very economically the essence of the tragedy of the commons and the resultant Adolph Nobody problem:
"...since everybody's business is nobody's business, it is imperative that we select men of eminence for this solemn duty to survey the world, as it were, from a high watch-tower and see that everything that is introduced is consistent with the sound reform of our affairs (that is, that there should be no loophole for falsehood, impiety or warmongering)." (Panorthosia, Ch. 15, para 3, p. 216)
Comenius here ties the problem to the most basic philosophical lesson: that to love everything is to love nothing. To be all is to be nothing. To try every means is to try no means. To aim at totality is to hit nullity. To posit a god who is the sum total of everything is to accept no god at all; pantheism amounts to rejection of God. For every end, then, there must be a means. This is the basis of the Baha'i idea of the Manifestation of God. God assigns a way and means towards him in the Person of His Representative. The golden path to universality is through particulars. Otherwise, Adolph Nobody rules absolutely, and his absolute power leads to absolute corruption.
Comenius in the above points out three "loopholes" where the nihilism of Adolph Nobody takes root, falsehood, impiety and warmongering, corresponding to knowledge, volition and action. The first loophole is false illusions, the negation of knowledge that takes place under Adolph Nobody's educational system. The second is Nobody's religion, which causes impiety, or negative expressions of religion like fundamentalism, prejudice and hatred. The third loophole is warmongering, Adolph Nobody's politics. This is the reverse of the goal and raison d'etre of politics, which is peace.
In place of Adolph Nobody's rule in these three crucial areas, the challenge is to empower everybody to know, will and act by giving each means, or particular focal point. Let the knower will and act on particular essentials, and do so not as a partisan but in behalf of everybody. That kind of universality, nothing less or more, is what is meant by universal reform.
"Universal Philosophy should be an agent of enlightenment for all men. Universal Politics should be their agent of government, and Universal Religion their agent of blessedness." (Ch. 13, para 12, No. 6, p. 206)
Panorthosia, Universal reform needs a means or agent as it takes knowledge, will and action and encourages some (not all, just the best, according to the dictum, `Many are called but few are chosen') to take the lead in a three pronged educational initiative that will involve every world citizen.
The means, then, is enlightened experts using what Comenius calls "universal agencies of reform." This distinguishes universal reform, panorthosia, from the Ad Hoc, piecemeal agents of reform that are failing so spectacularly today.
"...would-be reformers, (that is, all men) are to be taught so that they have the knowledge, the power and the will to reform themselves and their affairs universally. Universal Agencies of Reform ... employ certain means whereby our evils may be terminated and restored to a perfect state, and our affairs once reformed may be established to prevent the return of corruption." (Ch. 5, para 22, p. 96)
The learned, be they professional intellectuals or concerned amateurs, be they dedicated to the propagation of knowledge or to protection from corruption, are tasked here with enlightenment in the three ways, knowledge, volition and action, and through the three basic disciplines, philosophy, religion and politics. Following Biblical teaching, Comenius holds that vision is the first step towards this end,
"Thus through true philosophy Man will become exactly like an eye, seeing, discerning, and distinguishing all things; through true religion he will become exactly like a magnet, enabling himself and everything about him to face towards Heaven; and through true politics exactly like a cithara made up of different strings but always in perfect harmony. And so at last all the affairs of every man and the whole of human society will thrive in light, peace, and joy." (Ch. 10, para 41, p. 169)
So to conclude, the only way to wrest power from Adolph Nobody is by vigorous effort on the part of those who know to teach and on the part of those who do not, to learn. Universal education, the application of vision and principle, then, is the only viable, universal, world surrounding "meta-ideology."
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John Tayloremail: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/
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