Thoughts about the Peter Principle

Wisdom Before Justice

 

By John Taylor; 2011 Feb 24, Mulk 18, 167 BE

 

 

The Peter Principle and "Unsought Appointment."

 

Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, "The Peter Principle, Why Things Always Go Wrong," William Morrow and Company, New York, 1969

 

I just finished reading once more a book that was a bestseller in my formative years, "The Peter Principle, Why Things Always Go Wrong." I remember stumbling across it in the Ancaster High School library. Since it was, ostensibly, a humor book, I gobbled it right down. However, the book also had, it seemed to me, a message that was both original and serious. The questions it deals with still fascinate me, so several months ago I pulled a copy of the Peter Principle that I had bought in a used book sale down off my bookshelves and slowly went over it again.

 

The Peter Principle, you will recall, is the observation by a "hierarchologist," a self-styled student of hierarchies, that workers always rise to the level of their own incompetence and then stay there. No matter how skilled or dedicated they may be, good workers will be promoted in their organization until they hit the brick wall of their own imperfection. If we were perfect in every way there would be no Peter Principle. Humans would just rise and rise forever until, like helium released into the atmosphere, we would soar right on out into space.

 

 

 

But nobody is perfect. We all know that. Human talent is more like hot air; we rise up into the chilly upper levels of earth's atmosphere, start to cool down and sink back down again. No matter how brilliant we may be and no matter how those around us may seek to recognize the value of our contribution and reward us with promotions, the job we do will change around us until we are called upon to do something that we are not good at.

 

Then we either sink or, in an organization, stick just where we are. We have risen to the level of our incompetence. The book lists the many elaborate and often amusing coping strategies that incompetent workers adopt in order to distract from or cover up the fact that they no longer can do what they are called upon to do in their organization.

 

Peter illustrates his point about rising to the level of one's incompetence with an organizational chart in the form of an isosceles triangle. A small number of leaders head up the organization near the pointy top of the triangle. Under them are the vast majority of support workers, most of whom reside near the bottom line. Normally, anyone who rises from the bottom to the top will hit his or her level of incompetence long before they get anywhere near the summit. That means that only incompetents are going to head up any organization.

 

 

One traditional way of getting around this problem is to draw an arbitrary horizontal line two thirds of the way up the triangle. This is known as aristocracy. An aristocratic society in effect draws an artificial line beyond which no member of the working class can cross, no matter how qualified or brilliant they may be at what they do. Only members of the nobility are allowed to take positions at higher levels of management.

 

One might expect that organizations following this practice would collapse in a second.

 

But, Peter points out, it actually worked very well for a long time, thanks to his Peter Principle. The horizontal line (also known as a glass ceiling) had the advantage of assuring that competent workers below the line did not always rise to their level of incompetence. Bad for their career path, but good for the organization. Meanwhile, a fresh talent pool was introducing new workers into the upper levels, many of whom did not have the time to rise to the level of their incompetence before they reached the point of the triangle. This meant that leaders in the higher reaches of an organization often knew what they were doing.

 

 

Here is an example from history that Laurence J. Peter does not use, but I think it works. In the First World War, only aristocrats (who had a monopoly on university educations) were allowed to be promoted in the army beyond a certain rank. This worked as long as the military stayed at a steady size. However, as hostilities broke out millions of new soldiers entered the war. There were many more positions available for generals and other brass. The aristocracy's talent pool suddenly was, relatively speaking, much smaller. In this much larger organization, there was ample opportunity for aristocrats to rise to the level of their incompetence. Thousands of upper class twits could think of nothing better than sending millions of soldiers forward to be slaughtered in the no-man's-land between the trenches.

 

By the time the Second World War rolled around, lessons were learned. The glass ceiling was smashed, the line of privilege crossing the triangle erased. Generals were better prepared and were promoted strictly according to merit. Yet the slaughter was far worse in the Second World War than in the first, even if you count the flu bug that killed millions just after WWI. What was going on? Sure, killing technology was more advanced in the second conflict, and civilians were targeted along with combatants, but the fact remains, the better soldiers are at their job, the worse off we all are.

 

 

In effect, what had come about was a sort of meta-Peter's Principle. Organizations rise to the level of their incompetence as well as individuals. The better an organization is at its job, the more likely it is that it will be promoted to a position where it is ill suited to solve the problem set before it.

 

This is what happened in ancient Athens, which started off being run by tribes. A tribe, like many nationalist organizations today, is a monolithic ethnocracy, an organization based on similar outlook and training.

 

Leaders in a tribe rise to their incompetence based on identical backgrounds, the same language, culture, etc. For a long time, Athens got nowhere fast, ridden by tyrannies and tribalism. Its tribes or family groups consisted of hundreds of fighting organizational triangles, and there was no way between them. They fought with one another and created nothing but noise and strife. Athens was in an impossible situation. Then, Cleisthenes came up with a master stroke, the brilliant idea of drawing a line across the top of the triangle of their organizational chart.

 

This arbitrary line they called the Demes.

 

A Demes was a sort of district or neighbourhood. Once the new line was drawn, the tribe was no longer the only way to advance in the Athenian hierarchy. A citizen was identified by Demes, not family group; in order to vote, you used your name and the Demes in which you lived. In this way, a new, inter-tribal talent pool was created. Nobody had heard of a Demes before Cleisthenes, but it did not matter.

 

Having that Demes line drawn made the creativity of Athens possible. Not least of this was the invention of democracy. In fact, that is what Demes means, etymologically, a common population, a People Place, a grouping based on location rather than genes. The Demes was a district or place where members of tribes walked out of their triangle of tribalism and became something new: people, citizens, cosmopolitans. The world has never been the same since.

 

As I finished The Peter Principle I was reminded more and more of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Christ was teaching the same thing with this story. It is a sort of ethical Peter Principle. If you want to do something truly moral, the parable teaches, do it to somebody outside your usual organization, your normal point of reference. Do good to an outsider, as the man in the parable did to a beaten and robbed Samaritan lying half dead on the road. From here, from acts like this, from shots in the dark come real ethical competency. Such acts have a spiritual effect far beyond the outward action. Do good, but not only in your own group to those with the same training and ways of thinking. Go outside the box, into the void where there are no rewards or punishments, go to wherever your own sense of what is right can be the only referent. Do it in the name of compassion, and do it for knowledge. For, "the heaven of divine wisdom is illumined by the twin luminaries of consultation and compassion." Here abides true moral competence.

 

 

In effect, extending succor to the Samaritan draws a line across the void, like the Demes did in Athens. It is no coincidence that once the arbitrary Demes line was drawn on the triangle of the Athenian organizational chart, a certain wise man arose, the father of philosophy. Socrates was the first in history to define clearly just what wisdom is. Socrates recognized, openly, honestly, that he had no knowledge of what wisdom is.

 

Yet the Oracle of Delphi chose him, saying, "There is none wiser." His elevation to this station was not sought, it came from outside. Already, in terms of the Peter Principle, Socrates was utterly incompetent. He himself saw that he had reached his level of incompetence, yet he pointed it out and said to one and all,

 

"This, our own ignorance, is what we should deal with first. Start with what you do not know, not with what you do know or, to speak more accurately, what you think you know. Begin by recognizing that we have no sure knowledge of the most important things (including God Himself). Then, deal with it. Begin by starting an enquiry with all, groups and individuals, and try to find out together what wisdom is. No individual will ever know the answer, but as long as we see our limitations, in our group mind maybe we can attain to wisdom. Only with such dialectic cutting across organizations will wisdom lay the groundwork for justice."

 

This is why, I think, Baha'u'llah depicts justice and wisdom as two parts of a single procession. Wisdom goes on like a flag tilted up, before the march of a just king. Only after him does justice bring up the rear. He says,

 

"Blessed is the king who marcheth with the ensign of wisdom unfurled before him, and the battalions of justice massed in his rear. He verily is the ornament that adorneth the brow of peace and the countenance of security." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, Lawh-i-Maqsud, 164-165, Gl. 219)

 

Why wisdom first, before leadership, before justice? I think it is because heart and mind lead the body. Justice is force, reward and punishment. However, the sanctions of justice are only for those who transgress. Wisdom is love and words of love, and these are always in the van. Wisdom is learning, consultation, and it is actions of love, compassion, as Baha'u'llah tells us. Wisdom is preventive medicine. It dissipates wrongs before they can take place by washing away the cause, ignorance, the folly of imagining we are adequately competent. This is why the House of Justice so often refers to "unsought appointment" as a distinguishing mark of the Cause. They wrote,

 

"It is solely by the process of free election or by unsought appointment that the members of the institutions of this Order are assigned to their positions in it. There is no profession in either the teaching of the Faith or its administration for which one can train or to which a believer can properly aspire." (Universal House of Justice, 1992 Dec 10, Issues Related to Study Compilation)

 

For the House of Justice an entire army of the wise, of latter-day Socrates, must go on before, laying the groundwork, setting up the wisdom that is needed in order for justice, the titular, eponymous goal of the House, to be codified, promulgated and enforced. If everybody were as honest about their limitations as Socrates and a true Baha'i are, then nobody would be promoted beyond their competence. All appointments and promotions would be unsought, because all would fear going beyond their own limits. Such is the fear of God.

 

The energy for this moral courage comes from the love created by the suffering of the Manifestation himself. Baha'u'llah declared that although He Himself did not seek the high position of leadership, He still suffered more from the heedless followers of the Bab than any Manifestation before Him or after,

 

"On every side We witness the menace of their spears, and in all directions We recognize the shafts of their arrows. This, although We have never gloried in any thing, nor did We seek preference over any soul." (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 249)

 

It is in memory of this unsought appointment by our Lord that we His followers seek not to seek any distinctions but those of the spirit.

Praxeology

Praxeology; Truth in Language, Ethics in Action

 

By John Taylor; 2011 Feb 16, Mulk 10, 167 BE

 

The birth of science in the Sixteenth Century was accompanied by dozens of attempts to devise artificial languages that would approach the perfect, primal language that Adam was thought to have invented in Eden. Invented languages were all the rage among progressive thinkers. Many new languages were proposed based not only on existing languages but also everything from music to logic to mathematics. John Amos Comenius contributed an artificial spoken language whose grammar, he claimed, made it impossible for a speaker to tell a lie. Many of his writings were burned by pillagers in a war in present day Poland, from which Comenius barely escaped. It is conceivable that he did make up notes for such a language. I often wonder, though, how such an inherently ethical language might have worked.

 

Surely, though, free will and ill will, and therefore the ability to lie, are basic to thought. How could thought even exist if there were no way to make anything but perfectly veridical statements? Would that not be as impossible as legs that cannot trip or fall? A biped's very ability to walk depends upon a sort of controlled falling. Even if a totally truthful language were possible, would it be desirable? In that case, there would be nothing to distinguish truth tellers from liars. As the Ricky Gervais film, "The Invention of Lying," demonstrates, the inhabitants of a world where anything less than total candor was never encountered in everyday speech would be hopelessly naive.

 

On the other hand, computer brains may well advance in sophistication to the point where they gain free will, and therefore the potential to consciously lie. Or maybe that will never be possible. There may not even be a need to introduce fail safes. As anyone who has written computer code knows, as soon as a computer registers a "divide by zero" error, it crashes immediately. Perhaps when some high level computer language in the future attempts to tell a lie it will encounter the Pseudomenon, the Liar Paradox, like a brick wall. As soon as it thinks, "I am telling a lie," the paradox would kick in, register the self-contradiction, and bring the whole chain of thought crashing to the ground.

 

In that case, Comenius's dream might be not only possible but unavoidable. We may imagine surgeons implanting computer chips with language circuitry into the brains of patients deprived of speech for neurological reasons. Then, when the patients open their mouths to lie, their speech chip would short-circuit, shutting down their voice box. Only silence come out.

 

Even if we have to introduce artificial fail-safe mechanisms in order to assure that intelligent machines do not lie to us, this is little different from what we already do with humans, each of whom is a potential liar. This is just what Isaac Asimov proposed with his famous "Three Laws of Robotics," laws that were built into the "positronic brains" of his fictional robots.

 

 

Many philosophical problems arise from this idea, however. Some, Asimov dealt with himself in his series of novels and short stories about robots. Others cropped up later on. One contradiction is the theme of the movie based on Asimov's book of the same name, "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. Some of these dilemmas are: If a robot cannot harm a human being (1st Law of Robotics), how do you define "harm?" How can any agent know beforehand all the results of a given action? An entire discipline, history, debates causes and interactions among conscious agents in the past. Surely deciding the consequences in future of present actions poses difficulties many orders of magnitude more daunting than what historians deal with.

 

On the other hand, in spite of these reservations, once we build a working moral compass, no matter how inadequate and complex it may be, it would then be a simple matter to miniaturize its circuitry until it fits onto a single chip. This is just what happened with Geo-synchronous Positioning Satellite devices, designed to calibrate one's location on earth using signals from overhead satellites. These calculations are so demanding that early GPS devices were as large and heavy as a small automobile. Now GPS chips are tiny and inexpensive, built into cell phones and many other hand-held gadgets.

 

So, if GPS detectors can be made ubiquitous, why not a working moral compass? At the very least, this fail-safe device would assure that no robot could intentionally harm a human being. The "Predator" drones which already are dropping in price and which are capable of attacking any point on the surface of the earth, would cease to pose the clear and present danger that they do now. At least one activist is even suggesting that Asimov's Three Laws be built into corporate charters. This, he suggests, would reduce the harm from human-run institutions as well as from autonomous machines.

 

Robotics is already advancing to the point where, it is claimed, the first "moral" robot has already been built. Named "Nao," this machine works as an orderly in a nursing home. Nao moves about the facility performing rudimentary services like making deliveries, distributing medication and changing the channel on the residents' common television set. Its programming is based on a decision tree of priorities allowing Nao to answer queries and requests from residents, while making elementary choices among several possible courses of action. (Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson, "Robot be good; Independent minded machines will soon play a big role in our lives. It's time they learned how to behave ethically." Scientific American, October, 2010, p. 72). Nao can decide, for example, whether to answer a request to change the channel or before that administering pills to a certain bed ridden patient. The makers of Nao hope that as working ethical robots gain and share their experience, they will be ever more prepared as they come across new situations.

 

Like a human worker, when they encounter an unresolvable problem they have the choice of calling for help. The moral robot does this wirelessly, even sending out "crowd sourcing" queries onto the Internet. With the aid of experts, lawyers and ethicists, and even random groups of interested parties on the Internet, robots could conceivably answer the most difficult ethical issues in real time.

 

 

 

Such updating and revision is already being done, and not only in software but also in a faster, partly malleable type of hardware known as firmware. For example, Microsoft's controller-free "Kinect" interface is run by dynamically updated firmware. Off-board firmware updates, constantly revised and updated through a live wireless feed to the Internet, allows the devise to recognize each user, and respond appropriately to that person alone using visual cues alone. Although currently intended only for the XBox gaming platform, it appears that Kinect will soon be our main interface that we will use to interact with all computers. The personal computer, for the first time, will be both personal and personable.

 

Or, maybe not so personal. Who is overseeing the updating of this firmware? Can we trust a single corporation's proprietary feed to be updating the firmware that runs our world? In a time when free access to information is a hot button issue, we cannot afford to leave this issue aside. The release of unauthorized information by the likes of Wikileaks has already provoked two popular revolutions in the Middle East, with many more crowds of unhappy citizens standing in line to be next.

 

 

As democracy spreads, and as transparency and freedom of information become more sophisticated, one word will become a byword around the world: praxeology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology), the science that informs decisions and action. Ethical choices are made at every level, not just the top. Good leadership is a question of praxeology; the more democratic our world becomes, not only political but economic democracy, and every other kind of democracy, the better our praxeology must be. It is praxeology that decides what course of action machines like Nao the robot will follow. The rules of computer interfaces like Kinect are entirely praxeological in nature, and should be decided by democratic, open means.

The Epidemiology of Corruption

Plato, Power and Corruption

Proportion Prevents Corruption

Absolute or disproportionate power leads inevitably to corruption. As Lord Acton famously put it, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In this short sentence Acton sums up succinctly the thesis of Plato's much maligned final masterpiece, the Laws. In earlier works, Plato had held that the virtue of individuals is writ large in the state. In the Laws, he pictures law as a sort of writing tool to improve the state by bettering its citizenry, and vice versa. What stands in the way of this, Plato holds, is "absolute and irresponsible power," which always leads to corruption. Corruption destroys the body politic by stripping leaders of their principles, and citizens of their virtue,

"... if he (a leader) be possessed of absolute and irresponsible power, he will never remain firm in his principles or persist in regarding the public good as primary in the state, and the private good as secondary. Human nature will be always drawing him into avarice and selfishness, avoiding pain and pursuing Pleasure without any reason, and will bring these to the front, obscuring the juster and better; and so working darkness in his soul will at last fill with evils both him and the whole city." (Plato, Laws, Book 9)

Power corrupts not because it is bad in itself but because in concentrated form it distorts vision, eradicates the sense of balance and upsets the natural order of things. Power, like a powerful drug, is a good only when meted out in carefully prescribed doses. Small and diffuse measures of power allow the metabolism of imperfect humans to bear under without being poisoned. He writes,

"If we disregard due proportion by giving anything what is too much for it, too much canvass to a boat, too much nutriment to a body, too much authority to a soul, the consequence is always shipwreck; rankness runs in the one case to disease, in the other to presumption, and its issue is crime." (Plato, Laws, 691c, Collected Writings, p. 1286)

Here he compares political corruption to inappropriate technology and to overeating. With startling prescience this predicts what is happening right now.

A sailing ship with too large a sail will be manhandled by the slightest contrary breeze, and a stronger wind will upend it. Similarly, the energy that present-day technology uses is derived from the combustion of hydrocarbons, a practice that experts and leaders have known since the 1980's releases greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. Worse, the knowledge of how dangerous this is seems only to have stiffened opposition to change, and worsened our dependency. Our addiction to burning shows that technology could not be further from Plato's "due proportion."

As for "too much nutriment to the body," obesity is the emblematic illness of the past half century. It spread so quickly that in most nations, poor and wealthy, a large majority are now clinically overweight. When Plato says that "rankness runs ... to disease" in the body, he may have been referring to the now familiar tendency for the obese to succumb to a disease that was not named "cancer" until modern times. In any case, the intent of Plato's metaphor is clear.

"Rankness," translated into political language, is "partisanship," "rebellion," "war" and "treason." Unrestrained power in any one place metastasizes like a tumor, from one location to the entire organism. The malignancy grows without restraint, infiltrating and allocating precious bodily resources to resistless expansion. What it cannot grow into it poisons. In the same way, elites take more than their fair share of power and wealth, and thus spread envy and wrongdoing among have-nots.

The third disproportion that causes the ship of state to founder is what Plato calls "giving too much authority to the soul." The terminology of Abrahamic religions describes this as an idol, icon or image, anything that arrogates to itself the total adoration and absolute sovereignty that are the exclusive domains of God.

Indirect, Participatory Democracy

What would avoid concentration of power? How is this even possible? The answer that Plato puts forward in the Laws is an improved version of Athenian democracy that might be termed indirect, participatory democracy.

Many, basing their judgment solely on the Republic and earlier dialogues, imagine that Plato, himself a member of an aristocratic family, was against democracy. It is true that he held a grudge for many years against the democratic regime that executed his beloved teacher, Socrates. However, a careful reading of the Laws shows that Plato would have retained many elements of his native city's democratic experiment in his ideal lawmaking process.

Lawmakers, judges and even school trustees, he held, should be chosen by a combination of rotation by lot and indirect election. By election, he meant a nomination-free vote that chooses the hundred or so whose names that appear most often on the city's ballots. These elected citizens in turn serve in a ruling counsel on a rotating basis; they also actively serve themselves, rotating on a weekly or monthly basis. In order to reduce bribery, the citizen who serves at any particular time is determined at random, by drawing lots.

This combination of rotation and indirect elections would involve the entire population in maintaining justice.

Universal participation in the process would spread power into as many hands as possible. Those who do have power would not keep it long, nor could they predict when they will have it in future. They would, however, benefit from experience, both practical (as judges, say) and in a management capacity (as lawmakers and members of the ruling counsel).

The first job of lawmakers, then, is to immunize the population from corruption, since once it catches hold it becomes almost impossible to eradicate. Plato's way of preventing power from concentrating reminds me of a modern technique of epidemiologists.

Only about a hundred years have we known that diseases like malaria are caused by mosquito bites. Since then we have learned that an effective way of reducing the incidence of mosquito-born epidemics is to see to it that water cannot collect after a rain. By eliminating standing water wherever it is found, mosquito larvae cannot breed, and the disease vector stops dead.

In the same way, a better lawmaking process would edify the citizenry by encouraging them to participate directly in the lawmaking process. At the same time, the dangerous, addictive sort of power broker -- which Plato called drones -- would not have enough access to power to be able to breed and spread corruption.

We shall discuss Plato's suggested structure of direct democracy in greater detail in the third volume of Cosmopolitan Earth.

Moving Like Raccoon

Moving Like Raccoon

By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 06, Mashiyyat 10, 167 BE

When my children were young, they had a favourite toy which they called their "raccoon" (they are sometimes marketed as "Weazel Balls"). Raccoon was a yellow plastic ball connected to a fluffy, brown and white "tail". When they placed it on a smooth surface and flipped its switch, it vibrated furiously, rolling forward, sideways, every which way. Wobbling erratically, there was no way to guess which direction it would go next, to the consternation of Malley, our cat, and the children's delight. Raccoon's gyres and gimbals amused childish minds while exasperating the ordered feline imagination; in Hamlet's words, it made the "unskilful laugh but the judicious grieve." We all wondered how Raccoon got its strange, stutter step. When the batteries ran down we opened up the yellow sphere and found its secret. The erratic motion came from a clever design; an off center electric motor did nothing but vibrate while opposite were its batteries, which acted as a counterweight. The gyrations came from alternating balance and imbalance between these two weights.

Raccoon's mechanism is an apt metaphor for the incomplete, economic globalism that is putting our times out of joint. The ordered mind wants our thoughts and actions to synchronize and our world to roll straight forward. But an invisible misalignment in the design forces a wobble. If our education does not produce balanced citizens, if it trains only narrow-minded specialists who are sophisticated technically but clueless in ethics, philosophy and spirituality, is it any surprise that lives are unbalanced and politics disruptive? Institutions and interests work against one another in a crazy spin it is impossible to say in what direction events will roll.

One result is globalization. Quicker transportation encourages free trade across borders, making the economy more global. Meanwhile most peoples' hearts and minds are glued to one location, set in the past. At the same time, the Internet pushes hearts and minds into instantaneous travel in cyberspace, which is far faster than any transportation could ever become. As a result, individuals spin around their own "batteries" instead of the center of the whole. The source of energy aligns with us not the whole. Fanatics and partisans proliferate. They earnestly support causes which, one way or another, contradict one another. As a result, our global center spins, bursts forward, halts and turns in a completely different direction. Instead of world order everything resolves into a flittering Brownian motion.

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Reward and Punishment

Thinking about two "Great Being" Statements

By John Taylor; 2010 March 29, Ala' 09, 166 BE

Let us look today at a "Great Being" statement from the Tablet to Maqsud, one of Baha'u'llah's most important tablets. As my regular readers know, I have been mystified for a long time by these pronouncements labelled as coming from the "Great Being." Who is this Great Being? Is it another name for God? Why did Baha'u'llah label these, and not other statements, as coming from this Being? Indisputably, these are "great" in the sense that they are salient teachings of Baha'u'llah.

Certainly, the Master seems to have thought so.

Many, if not most of the Baha'i principles that Abdu'l-Baha proclaimed throughout Europe and North America, for example, come out of one or more of these Great Being statements. As we shall see, the two that I have selected for today can be applied to the principles of economic equity and of the promotion of education.

Here is the Great Being statement for today,

"The Great Being saith: The structure of world stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment." (Tablets, 163)

But this all ends at the border.

Pollution and climate change are the result of the fact that on the international level corporations and other groups act with total impunity. Money is easily shifted around the world at a keystroke; even the 9-11 attacks on the U.S. only briefly slowed the flood of hot money. Interpol reports that this finances a veritable explosion of international criminal activity over the past decade. The chaotic, failed state of Somalia, for example, allows organized criminals to turn it into an illegal dumping ground for toxic waste from around the world. Most terrorism is a cross-border phenomenon, as is modern war, particular the bloodiest war in recent memory, the free-for-all for mineral wealth in the Congo. Even stable states, like India, are uprooting their aboriginal population in exchange for bribes from mining conglomerates. I could go on but it would only discourage both myself and my readers.

Nor are there any international awards or titles available to encourage good behaviour across borders. Here is an idea, let Queen Elizabeth and other royal houses pass on their right to confer knighthoods and other aristocratic titles to some world institution devoted to that purpose. Then that body could hand out knighthoods, for example, to the police operatives who bring down the new mafias. Or perhaps a sort of Nobel prize given to officials instrumental in blocking the flow of hot money.

I would like to see a title, like "sir," awarded to entire families. That way, any man in the family can call himself "sir," or any woman call herself "dame," as long as that family maintains the highest moral standard. Let one of them be caught committing adultery or some other sexual transgression, and they all lose their title. Every family member loses out on an international honour.

I am old enough to remember when adultery was illegal, and the concern of the wronged spouse at that time was that even if he or she felt very hurt and angry at the betrayal, it remained in their material interest to be sure that their wandering spouse was not arrested and thrown in jail. The only result of imprisoning an adulterer is worse privation for the whole family unit. The innocent suffer more than the guilty. But if the loss is entirely nominal or titular, then it would remain in every family member's interest to keep each other honest -- "honest" in the Shakespearian sense of "chaste".

Another idea for a cosmopolitan award that might appeal to a more egalitarian world is to keep the bar very low, at least in the beginning. At the opening ceremonies of a world government, say, let the new institution confer upon everybody on earth a title, like "human," as in "Human Jane Jones," or, "Citizen John Smith," or perhaps the Shakespearean title for the lowborn: "sirrah," like, "Sirrah Joan Smith." Make the title universal, but a privilege that can be lost. Once the right to bear a title is revoked due, say, to wrongdoing, make it easy, after taking a course or two, to earn this basic title back with a little work. Higher titles would be correspondingly harder to regain. This could be the start of an entire system of moral education based on rewards and incentives rather than the little we have now, sterile condemnation and impotent indignation.

One reason personal sexual morality was tossed out in Western nations after the 1960's was that, as explained by a slogan of the time, "The state has no business sticking its nose into the bedrooms of the nation." That may be so, but under a Comenian world government, families would be given the power to maintain their own integrity. Thus any title would have to be approved by families first, and then confirmed by all three wings of governance, science, religion and politics. It would not be just the state, it would be science and religion, as well as the family, that stick their noses in. This would not satisfy the most liberal among us, but it would at least assure that any laws enforcing morality would be the opinion of the whole society as to what is right and what is wrong. This would strike a proper balance between being too Puritanical and being overly liberal and tolerant. The award of a title would come with high expectations of righteousness, without encouraging dour severity or a moralizing, patronizing attitude.

This prepares us for a second "Great Being" statement, which I will look at next time.

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An Escutcheon of my Own

Beauty in the Escutcheon

2009 Oct 14

Let us return to one of the most important innovations of the 17th Century educational reformer and world federalist, John Amos Comenius, author of Panorthosia, or Universal Reform. In an earlier essay called "Escutcheons for Social Diversity" we talked about his suggestion that a world government use short mottos or slogans to spread knowledge, virtue and excellence to every level of society. Borrowing from the terminology of emblems and coats of arms that were proudly displayed by nobles and knights of old, I have been calling these slogans "Escutcheons." Our earlier discussion was concerned with how the use of escutcheons could help ethnic relations in a hillside development. Today I want to focus on the personal and financial repercussions.

Escutcheons for Individuals

At the most basic level, that of the individual, Comenius held that all self-improvement comes of a strict regime of self-examination that a rival religious leader, St. Ignatius of Loyola, called the "examen," a daily or twice daily session of self-criticism. Comenius saw all reform starting in personal reform, and all personal reform starting in an examen. This can be reinforced by tracking one's progress in written or graphic form by the use of an escutcheon tracking what a person wishes to stand for, the virtues they aim to display, and so forth. In at least two chapters of the Panorthosia, Comenius sums up with the motto "Here is a splendid image of God," that he proposes for the examen of every individual,

"Therefore no matter who you are, you must reform yourself according to God's good pleasure and with His help, so that angels and pious men are able, as it were, to read on your forehead the inscription: 'HERE IS A SPLENDID IMAGE OF GOD.'" (Panorthosia, Chapters 19 and 20, paragraph 24)

This "splendid image" of the divine differs from the Tabula Rasa or blank slate of Frances Bacon and John Lock. For Comenius, knowledge is written on the soul not as chalk on a blackboard but as images on a mirror. This scripturally based model imagines the mind and soul as a glass, finite but boundless, instantly reflecting the whole universe presented before it, without limit but also without control. That is, there is no limit to how much we can learn.

However, to be created as an image or mirror of God entails the heavy responsibility of keeping the divine ever before us. We have a mind and spirit as well as a reflective soul. This means that we must not imitate or reflect passively but be critical. We have to examine, sift and prove the truth from the fleeting images presented before us.

By "splendid image of God" Comenius meant, of course, a spiritual condition of happiness and harmony, brilliant enough to be perceived by all onlookers. The saying "a splendid image of God" formalizes this; it serves as a constant reminder to post in a place of mediation or a private area of the home. Seeing the motto posted there aids the personal assessment of the examen.

All successful people subject themselves to some sort of daily accounting or weekly self-assessment, but the escutcheon can enhance that using the latest technology. Along with the slogan, various graphics and dashboard displays can have a live feed into various statistical measures of physical and emotional health, as well as measuring the current state of one's budget in relations to the financial health of one's family and community. A regular habit of checking these data in times of tranquility would keep the reflective life on track with praxis.

In designing escutcheons we will need artists as much as technicians. They will need to design its graphics to become more beautiful as accepted measures mark improvements, and less beautiful as a decline sets in. The displays on a personal escutcheon are fully configurable according to taste. A user may switch themes according to preference among many visual themes, digital, analogue or iconic. However, for each of them beauty always varies according to aesthetic standards.

One person may want to see their physical and financial health as a representation of the face and body of a person or animal. If her habits are unhealthy, the figure would gain ugly proportions. As healthy habits register, her avatar is beautified. Thus beauty, if nothing else, would reward the sacrifice, vigilance, temperance and self-denial that a virtuous life demands.

This system of standard displays on an escutcheon applies both technological and philosophical wisdom to the spiritual process described metaphorically in Oscar Wilde's short story, "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Wilde's fable describes a personal portrait that ages as its subject remains handsome and youthful. While he lives a dissipated and superficially successful life, his portrait, hidden away, gradually becomes old and ugly for him.

Unlike Dorian Gray's portrait, an escutcheon would do the reverse, be beautified by the outwardly painful, difficult and tempestuous life that all great artists, innovators and saints tend to live. If Dorian Gray had an escutcheon plugged into accepted measures of real accomplishment, creativity and innovation, it might well be ugly to start but as he learns to live a meaningful, examined life it would gradually be beautified. Indeed the escutcheon of a good man or woman might after death may well be proudly transferred directly to adorn the family sarcophagus or gravestone.

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Reflecting on Purity of Thought and Body

Here is a reflection I reflected this morning.

When the time came for me to declare my belief, I walked to the lip of the Hamilton mountain, drew in my breath, raised my hands on high, and hesitated. A dark thought came over me. How can I call myself a believer when I fart so often? It must be a dozen times a day I perform that undignified act. I went down and lived my life as before for many years. Then I read somewhere that the average person farts an average of eighteen times a day. I felt better. Maybe I should climb up again and declare my faith. So I returned, my hands were raised, my head thrown back and I was about to commit when another thought crossed my mind. How can a person who picks his nose have a claim to holiness? Sadly, I climbed back down.

By this time, though, the Great Google Oracle had been erected in every computer. I asked it if I was the only one to do the dirty like this. No, it told me, I was not. The average person picks their nose an average of four times a day. This did not entirely quiet me, though, for I had to admit that I commit that undignified act more than four times a day. Maybe even more than five times. Still, this study, I suspect, had really found only that the average person _admits_ to picking their nose four times a day. How often they actually do it may be something more like my tally.

I am ashamed to say how often I have climbed that escarpment, thought about a disgusting thing I do regularly and come back down again. Each time I raise my hands, a dark thought comes over me and I trudge back down, my head hung low. Once, I raised my arms and to my surprise I could think of nothing to offend the sensibilities of my Lord. Then I took a whiff. It was right back to square one, googling about the number of offensive bacteria that reside under the average person's arms. O God, purify my thoughts!


"If ye keep not your breath sweet in prayer,
Go, desire a prayer from the Brethren of Purity!"
For this cause spake God to Moses,
At the time he was asking aid in prayer,
`O Moses! desire protection of me
With a mouth that thou hast not sinned withal.'
Moses answered, `I possess not such a mouth.'
God said, `Call upon me with another mouth!
Act so that all thy mouths
By night and by day may be raising prayers.
When thou hast sinned with one mouth,
With thy other mouth cry, "O Allah!"
Or else cleanse thy own mouth,
And make thy spirit alert and quick.
Calling on God is pure, and when purity approaches,
Impurity arises and takes its departure."
(Rumi, Mathnavi, Vol. 3, E.H. Whinfield tr.)


"Blessed is he who keeps firm in the Path and stands for the Cause of thy Merciful Lord -- a firmness like unto the lofty mountains... Verily, I pray God to sanctify thee from the material and thus clothe thee with the garment of holiness and the mantle of purity and send through thee the glad-tidings of thy Lord from the Kingdom of Heaven." (Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of Abdu'l-Baha vol. 2, pp. 269-270)


"Obligatory prayer causeth the heart to become attentive to the Divine kingdom. One is alone with God, converseth with Him, and acquireth bounties. Likewise, if one performeth the Obligatory Prayer with his heart in a state of utmost purity, he will obtain the confirmations of the Holy Spirit, and this will entirely obliterate love of self. I hope that thou wilt persevere in the recitation of the Obligatory Prayer, and thus will come to witness the power of entreaty and supplication." (Importance of Obligatory Prayer and Fasting, XI)


Prayer is effective, the Bab says, only according to the amount with which we offer it of four virtues, spirituality, radiance, detachment and purity.

"The most acceptable prayer is the one offered with the utmost spirituality and radiance; its prolongation hath not been and is not beloved by God. The more detached and the purer the prayer, the more acceptable is it in the presence of God." (The Bab, Selections, 78; Persian Bayan, VII, 19)


Here is how the "I" becomes a Baha'i:

"One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendour of those eternal principles proclaimed by Baha'u'llah." (Shoghi Effendi, Unfolding Destiny of the British Baha'i Community, 28)

Selection from SDC

SDC Quotes by Abdu'l-Baha

Thanks to Ed for this selection from Abdu'l-Baha's masterpiece of development literature, The Secret of Divine Civilization, which, he said, my recent writing about reform calls to mind. Indeed it does.

It is unquestionable that the object in establishing parliaments is to bring about justice and righteousness, but everything hinges on the efforts of the elected representatives. If their intention is sincere, desirable results and unforeseen improvements will be forthcoming; if not, it is certain that the whole thing will be meaningless, the country will come to a standstill and public affairs will continuously deteriorate.

`I see a thousand builders unequal to one subverter; what then of the one builder who is followed by a thousand subverters?'

The purpose of the foregoing statements is to demonstrate at least this, that the happiness and greatness, the rank and station, the pleasure and peace, of an individual have never consisted in his personal wealth, but rather in his excellent character, his high resolve, the breadth of his learning, and his ability to solve difficult problems. How well has it been said: "On my back is a garment which, were it sold for a penny, that penny would be worth far more; yet within the garment is a soul which, if you weighed it against all the souls in the world, would prove greater and nobler."  (Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, pp. 23-24)

 ==========

For every thing, however, God has created a sign and symbol, and established standards and tests by which it may be known. The spiritually learned must be characterized by both inward and outward perfections; they must possess a good character, an enlightened nature, a pure intent, as well as intellectual power, brilliance and discernment, intuition, discretion and foresight, temperance, reverence, and a heartfelt fear of God. For an unlit candle, however great in diameter and tall, is no better than a barren palm tree or a pile of dead wood.

"The flower-faced may sulk or play the flirt,

The cruel fair may bridle and coquet;

But coyness in the ugly is ill-met,

And pain in a blind eye's a double hurt."

- Rumi, The Mathnavi, I, 1906-1907.]

  (Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, pp. 33-34)

  ==========

 "the happiness and greatness, the rank and station, the pleasure and peace, of an individual have never consisted in his personal wealth, but rather in his excellent character, his high resolve, the breadth of his learning, and his ability to solve difficult problems. How well has it been said:

 "On my back is a garment which, were it sold for a penny, that penny would be worth far more; yet within the garment is a soul which, if you weighed it against all the souls in the world, would prove greater and nobler."

 ==========

The apparatus of conflict will, as preparations go on at their present rate, reach the point where war will become something intolerable to mankind.

Happiness has nothing to do with choice

Sheltering Ourselves from the Crash

Thoughts about the Stock Market Crash

By John Taylor; 2008 Oct 01

To make the Badi' blog topical I will address the big headline of the past couple of days, the stock market crash that threatens to turn an economic downturn into another Great Depression. This head over heels tumble over the brink started, as often happens, with a small stumble, a housing bubble followed by a mortgage insurance scam gone wrong. Throughout the financial system, bankers and other lenders are afraid to offer credit.

As always, what seems at first blush to be an outer, material concern is really a faith issue. The human spirit depends upon belief in the future, faith that our efforts will have meaning under a benevolent providence and that in the long run we will attain happiness. In the same way the economy depends upon an invisible belief in one another. This faith, the foundation of credit, is under grave threat. A crash comes when enough lenders cease to believe in other peoples' creditworthiness.

In order to avoid a meltdown a bailout scheme was devised, modified, rejected and may soon be modified again by an American government sadly weakened by partisan squabbling, corruption and blind ideology. My favourite columnist, George Monbiot, points out the base hypocrisy of these legislators on whom the world depends to save the financial system, the banking and insurance industries, as well as the pension funds upon which workers depend for their retirement income. In his latest column he summarizes the huge amounts of corporate welfare these politicians hand out, all the while hypocritically claiming to be advocates of capitalism, discipline and free enterprise.

"... the Congressmen and women now railing against financial socialism depend for their re-election on the companies they subsidise. The legal bribes paid by these businesses deliver two short-term benefits. The first is that they prevent proper regulation, which allows them to make spectacular profits and to generate disasters of the kind that Congress is now confronting. The second is that public money which should be used to help the poorest and weakest is instead diverted into the pockets of the rich." (

Just as it was when Baha'u'llah wrote the kings of Europe, the world's wealth is being skimmed off not only into the pockets of the rich, but also into means to protect them, that is, arms research, weapons manufacture and oversize defence expenditures. At the same time those areas of the economy that affect us most, our homes, neighbourhoods and the infrastructure that maintains them, remain primitive, underfunded and neglected.

How can we reverse this flow of funds so that it goes into what is ultimately most productive, human beings, starting with the poorest and most in need? The basic moral lesson of this crisis is that materialism is a virus that needs vigorous measures to defeat. Like any disease, it is invisible. It attacks from where the eye cannot see; its fever permeates our thinking.

Another Monbiot essay called "Property Paranoia" discusses a "hedonic treadmill" that lulls the elites and the wannabe wealthy into giving their all for slight enrichment compared with their peers, ignoring the fact that any number of other sacrifices and investments would better conduce to what they are really after: happiness. Instead, the materialists forget ethics and the general good and even their own freedom and they scrape, cheat and scrimp for the almighty dollar.

"Comparison is not the only reason the professors of happiness cite for our failure to feel better as we become richer. They point to the fact that we become habituated to wealth: Layard calls this `the hedonic treadmill'. They blame the longer hours we work and our deteriorating relationships. But there is something I think they have missed: that wealth itself can become a source of deprivation. Having money enhances your freedom. You can travel further and you can do more when you get there. But other people's money restricts your freedom. Where you once felt free, now you find fences. In fact, you MUST travel further to find somewhere in which you can be free.

"As people become richer, and as they can extract more wealth from their property, other people become more threatening to them. We know that the fear of crime is a cause of unhappiness, but so is the sense of being seen as a potential criminal. The spikes and lights and cameras proclaim that society is not to be trusted, that we live in a world of Hobbesian relations. The story they tell becomes true, as property paranoia makes us hate each other. The harmless wanderer in the woods becomes a mortal enemy." (George Monbiot, "Property Paranoia", January 31, 2006)

Monbiot is absolutely right here, a spiritual poverty drains us of the ability to create real wealth -- which is love for our fellow man -- and exclusive, absolute ownership denies everybody of the right to enjoy goods by roaming through them. Sole land and home ownership are great evils, greater I think than even he realizes.

Materialism reflects from the heart out into the outer, built environment. It created this insidious, outmoded system of real estate. Housing for both rich and poor is badly designed, overpriced and underplanned. We unthinkingly use land and buildings as investments and collateral and do not worry if they do not perform their function. Housing infrastructure routinely sinks homeowners heavily into debt just to put a roof over their heads. We are addicted to precarious mortgages, easy credit, complex regulations and mortgage insurance, a complex arrangement that became a precarious house of cards that nobody understands. Earlier this year economist Paul Krugman fingered housing as the main precondition of this crisis,

"In effect, U.S. policy is based on the premise that everyone should be a homeowner. But here is the thing: There are some real disadvantages to homeownership. First of all, there is the financial risk. Although its rarely put this way, borrowing to buy a home is like buying stocks on margin: if the market value of the house falls, the buyer can easily lose his or her entire stake. This is not a hypothetical worry. From 2005 through 2007 alone -- that is, at the peak of the housing bubble more than 22 million Americans bought either new or existing houses. Now that the bubble has burst, many of those homebuyers have lost heavily on their investment. At this point there are probably around 10 million households with negative home equity that is, with mortgages that exceed the value of their houses." (Home Not-So-Sweet Home, by Paul Krugman, New York Times, June 23, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Bad housing is both cause and symptom of our gravest ill, materialism. Krugman in the same article points out another ill effect of owning a freehold dwelling: it ties workers down so that they cannot readily go where they are most needed. This binds the entire economy and prevents the people and their leaders from reacting quickly to changing conditions.

"Owning a home also ties workers down. Even in the best of times, the costs and hassle of selling one home and buying another -- one estimate put the average cost of a house move at more than $60,000 -- tend to make workers reluctant to go where the jobs are. And these are not the best of times. Right now, economic distress is concentrated in the states with the biggest housing busts: Florida and California have experienced much steeper rises in unemployment than the nation as a whole. Yet homeowners in these states are constrained from seeking opportunities elsewhere, because it is very hard to sell their houses."

We should rethink everything. We need to change the whole housing system, and indeed the institution of exclusive ownership itself. If public corporations can have multiple shareholders, why not other possessions? Why, in an age of computers, do we still allow large items like land, houses, planes, trains and automobiles to rest solely in the hands of one owner, be it individual or corporation, exclusive of everybody else?

Many tries have been made to reform housing from the ground up, but they always fail. I recently toured one of the most interesting attempts, Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, which is on display at the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit. I videotaped the entire experience and will make it available on YouTube sometime soon. Fuller understood that housing should be more mobile and high tech. The Dymaxion house is specifically designed, among other things, to be easily cleaned, to circulate the air and offer dwellers the largest possible view of its surroundings. Most importantly, it is not only prefabricated, it is also collapsible. It can be taken apart and reassembled on another location quickly and easily by a couple of workers. Such mobility would free up the workforce to do an end run around regional economic reverses. Everybody would go where they are most needed.

Because our houses are so fixed and grounded in dead earth we forget that more mobile lifestyle in an efficient, flexible dwelling would be the optimum green solution. Present houses are very wasteful, and located in places that force us to travel more than necessary. The more mobility we have in housing the less carbon and time are burned up by commuting long distances to work, as Krugman points out.

"Finally, there is the cost of commuting. Buying a home usually though not always means buying a single-family house in the suburbs, often a long way out, where land is cheap. In an age of $4 gas and concerns about climate change, that is an increasingly problematic choice."

Most important, increased public space, the right to roam and mobile housing would make us happier. Whatever our political rights, if we live in cramped, ugly surroundings we will never be free or happy. We will be prisoners confined all our lives by four walls stuck in the same locale. Ironically, as things are even the rich tend to be glued to one location longer than is good for them. Even the most beautiful mansion becomes tedious if it sits unchanged. Only the super-rich can afford to own several mansions. Multiple homes, as well as suburban sprawl among the middle class, lead to gross waste of space and further destruction of natural habitats.

Inadequate houses in lifeless neighbourhoods cause not only economic depressions like this one, but they are at the root of personal depression as well. Gloomy, stodgy living conditions are the root of the world's most common mental illness, depression. Recent studies have shown how important a good night's sleep is to mental health. Yet we allow noise to permeate our days as well as our nights. Quiet, along with heat, should be a requirement of every bedroom. In well designed houses this would happen as a matter of course, thus curing -- according to these convincing studies -- almost all mental illness.

I dream of a more flexible, open, high density housing system that would, like the dymaxion house, be extremely moveable. It could even change our surroundings automatically according to physical and psychological needs that we tend not to be aware of ourselves. At times everybody needs to be around nature, so why not have our homes move us near a park or into the country? If we crave community, let it plunk us into a vibrant city neighbourhood.