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.

Corruption Series, Part One

Thoughts about Corruption

By John Taylor; 2010 Dec 10, Qawl 18, 167 BE

First of a Series of Essays on Corruption

We had our annual meeting celebrating Human Rights Day this Wednesday, featuring this time Mrs. Mehri Muvaddat, from Toronto, who spoke of her suffering under the sadistic hands of the Mullocracy. During the early years of the Iranian Revolution she had the honour of being elected to a Local Spiritual Assembly, which meant a spell of several months in Evin Prison. As a lawyer, she had the contacts to get herself bailed out, but she did not succeed in saving her husband, a brilliant refrigeration engineer, who was shot.

Since I read a lot of science, I have been stumbling over certain nonsense written by members of my former "religion," atheism. As a result, I could not resist asking one of their questions, "What kind of a God would allow this kind of thing to happen? Was not your faith tested when they all but destroyed your family?" She admitted that it was a test and followed up with a pretty good answer, citing Abdu'l-Baha's teaching that we are better off when religions do harm, but that much good can come of it when it is done right. Then I asked, "Why do you think they are doing this to minority faiths?" Her answer was more than adequate, eloquent even. It can be summed up in one word: corruption. And one more word, lust for power. Okay, three words.

Anyway, I have been going through and editing what I have already written for my book. I am snagged right now on the chapter about just that, corruption. In search of background and inspiration, I have been going over what I have collected on that topic, which I call "p22cor," or political corruption.

To my surprise, one thing I noticed is that I evidently have only written a couple of essays directly on corruption over the years. So maybe what I will do over the next week or so is to write a few rough essays about corruption, using some of the relatively rich store of material I have saved up here. Unlike my normal writing for this book, I will be free to use Baha'i material, which, believe me, makes it a lot easier for me.

I have glanced over some of what the internet has to offer about corruption. Transparency International, an NGO from Germany that monitors corruption in governments around the world, offers a colour-coded map of the levels of corruption in nations around the planet. You can look at it at:

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results

The first thing I noticed was that Canada, along with Australia and a couple of other countries, was the squeaky cleanest country in the world. I felt pride mixed with some confusion at that news. It is true that Canada follows the Master's advice in Secret of Divine Civilization not to underpay one's bureaucrats. We treat them well, and their unions, CUPE and others, are among the most powerful interest groups in Canada. They make sure that employees of the government are well treated. To skimp on pay for officials, especially police officers, is a golden invitation to corruption.

Low pay is one invitation to corruption, but not the only one.

Last night at our Philosopher's Cafe at the Wainfleet Library, we had a broad ranging conversation ostensibly about "Advice." One of our regulars, Stan, arrived late and was bewildered to find that from the innocuous conversation starter of "advice," we had wandered way over to the excesses by the Toronto Police Services at the recent G20 summit in Toronto -- at the price of over a billion dollars taxpayers got the largest mass arrest and worst violation of human rights in Canadian history. In the early 1970's Canadians were traumatized by Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act in response to terrorists in Quebec. But at least Trudeau had taken the question to Parliament. This travesty at the Toronto G20 summit was done in secret. Even most Ontario politicians did not know that an obscure law had been invoked until jails and holding cells were packed with crowds of innocent victims. Somehow, the secretive cabals in power today have managed to make Trudeau at his darkest hour look good! By bypassing due process, modern power brokers transgress worse than Trudeau did almost no protest and trauma on the part of the public. Surely this is corruption to a high degree.

Amusingly but also tragically, one of these incarcerated suspects happened to be named "Adam Nobody." Seriously. This Nobody guy was being roughed up by three cops, when they asked him his name, as is required by law before an arrest takes place. Thinking that by giving the name "Nobody" he was flouting their authority they beat the living daylights out of him. Since the TPS thugs-in-uniform had had the foresight to cover their name tags, these three cops thought they would get away with this assault. But thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone camera, they were identified and are now up for the wrist-slapping that unlucky cops who are caught red handed sometimes receive. Similarly, the all seeing eye of Little Brother noticed that some of the "protesters" who were breaking windows and lighting police cars on fire were wearing police issue boots. Hmm.

What are the causes and solutions to this sort of corruption? First of all, there has to be financial oversight and transparency all the way down the line. There is no way that a billion dollars should be spent like that behind closed doors, without consultation with the public and their representatives. Every proposal for a large expenditure must be brought to a broad cross section of society and decided openly and correctly. And here’s another idea: make secrecy illegal. We should have done that as soon as the song came out: “Evil grows in the dark… under rocks and trees…” And behind closed doors.

One of our Philosopher's Cafe members expressed dismay that Canadian police officers are going to Afghanistan and Haiti to teach proper police procedure when they can perpetrate what was done in Toronto during that summit -- that is, to requisition two old police cars, strip them of equipment, and then offer them as "bait" to protesters, who started them burning. These old cars were used as pawns in a game of spin doctoring. The cops stood by as they burned for days, causing a media frenzy that justified in the mind of the public the extraordinary expenditures that had been made. If our leaders had any sense or backbone, heads should be rolling at the Toronto Police Services Board for setting up a ploy like that.

A big cause of this mentality is the closed ranks of the police. Every organization, when it is not diverse in makeup and their sources of information are too narrow, sinks into groupthink and corrupt practices. Especially cops. Petty mindedness is surely a major cause of corruption.

One good sign that this is being addressed that I have noticed is that, in Hamilton at least, police officers are volunteering for the new "living book" program at the Hamilton Public Library. A living book is when a member of the public can book a half hour interview with a person of their choice, say an astronaut, carpenter or firefighter, and ask them whatever they want. This sort of contact is just what the average police officer needs, since their job puts them in contact mostly with a narrow cross section of society, literally the lunatic fringe, which creates stereotypes and habitual reactions that are parlous at best.

Next time, some guidance from scripture, Baha'i and earlier, and wise thinkers about the causes and solutions of corruption.

Pansophia

Corruption and Misemployment

By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 19, Qudrat 16, 167 BE

So far we have two new institutions for Cosmopolis Earth, the stele and the worker's palace. Each is a technical aid in applying justice and other principles of Cosmopolitanism. The stele is a robotic mediator and an aid in stake-holding, fitting individual effort into the overall plans of Cosmopolis Earth, and vice versa.

As we saw, the spread of steles will establish a new right to advice, an expectation on the part of all to be properly guided at every stage of human endeavor.

The second institution is an adaptation of Flora Tristan's worker's palaces, a tool for equality between women and men at the grassroots level. More broadly, the worker's palace, to be built in each locality or neighborhood, would fulfill a major social goal that is now largely neglected, to assure that everyone has a hand in the world of work, preferably by plying a trade or profession. As everybody enters fully into an organized calling, the main source of corruption in human affairs will be cut off.

The Root of Corruption

In Panorthosia, John Amos Comenius holds that the root of corruption is lack of organization. Reforms cannot last until we somehow eliminate corruption. In a prayer "for the reformed age," Comenius wrote,

"So many efforts at reform have been attempted in all ages, often apparently reaching the brink of success but always relapsing into the former state of corruption, that we mortals are now as in the past as hapless as Sisyphus, and without thee [God] our efforts always have been and are and ever shall be doomed to failure." (Panorthosia, Chapter 27, p. 248)

For Comenius, fecklessness and idleness -- what we now label as unemployment -- are both causes and results of a vicious circle of disorganization. Every time work halts or jobs are lost, a random, disorganizing element is injected into our lives. Fewer hands can touch the reins of power, wealth concentrates into fewer pockets and a vicious cycle of centralized power accelerates. So dangerous is it that he would have made unemployment socially unacceptable, indeed illegal. Nor, as he points out, was he the first to think this. He cites many precedents in history where legislators laid down obligatory work laws.

"The Egyptians of old had a wise law, like the Chinese of today, forbidding the deaf, the blind, the halt, the maimed, and even the victims of gout, from going idle, regardless of their wealth. Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, passed a special law against the idle and indolent, giving everyone the power to bring an action against them. Also God in His holy word passed the law: 'If any will not work, neither shall he eat.' The Romans had no temple to Fors Fortuna, the so-called patron goddess of the idle and unemployed, inside the city, but built one across the Tiber to demonstrate that idleness must be kept away from the boundaries of a well-established city." (Panorthosia Ch. 24, VI, pp. 103-104)

Of course, one can be overemployed as well as unemployed. Like everything in life, work is beneficial only in moderation. There is a sweet spot where one's service is fulfilling but not overwhelming. When it blocks out leisure, it is excessive because leisure is necessary to a reflective, examined life. On the other hand, too much leisure and too little work breeds dissipation and excessive pleasure seeking.

As it is, the workplace is plagued by unemployment and the threat of unemployment and, worst of all, misemployment or crime. Comenius explains what true full employment would mean,

"No-one in the state should be allowed to be idle, in the sense of failing to make an honest living for himself and his family by serving society in general through farming, craftsmanship, trade, or politics. My argument is (1) that no-one should learn to misbehave through having nothing to do. Therefore this should be prevented in the individual's own interests; (2) that others should not be corrupted by this bad example; (3) that there should be no occasion for begging or sharp practices; (4) that in such circumstances the idle body does not nourish any of its parts."

The wisdom of this is clear. When society fails to involve young people very early in a productive trade, criminals willingly step in. Youth gangs and organized crime get a stranglehold on the lives of adolescents by offering entry positions as petty crooks, preying upon the common good. Full employment from the earliest age would help end one of the great blights on humanity, crime and misemployment, within a generation. Of course none of this would be possible if the local community did not make every effort to provide semi-skilled work for young apprentices. This would be one of the goals of Flora Tristan's worker's palace. Even if entry level jobs were heavily subsidized at first, the community would still profit overall from the savings of a steep drop in the crime rate.

Needless to say, the educational system has a central role to play. Its first duty should be to assure that every child in the world learns a trade. Having a balanced, fruitful career organizes one's life and makes it easier to hit an optimum level of work and leisure. It canalizes effort into meaningful investigation over the long term.

Vocational training must therefore start early, in primary school. Each pupil should be fully apprenticed in at least one trade upon graduation from middle school. This was commonplace until the mid-twentieth century but it for spurious reasons it was abandoned in favor of over a decade of sitting in a classroom.

Taking vocational training up once more would help both society and the youths themselves, since recent research indicates that adolescents need working relationships as early as age 15. Plying a trade would improve the general happiness and even brain development of adolescents. (see, Joe Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen, Escaping the Endless Adolescence, as discussed in, http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/nurture-shock/2009/11/05/why-teenagers-are-growing-up-so-slowly-today.html)

Once we have full employment, wisdom will become an attainable goal. Wisdom, Comenius believed, will mark our collective coming of age, the very consummation of human evolution. Once we enter into the cosmopolitan condition, it will even be possible to attain what he called pansophia, universal wisdom.

"For in the final age of the World man must come to the highest stage of all. Therefore philosophy, or the love of wisdom, is not sufficient; wisdom itself must be present, and not its shadow but its body, and its body in whole and not in part; therefore it is not merely wisdom, but Universal Wisdom, that we need. Similarly politics or poliarchy (skill in governing cities or kingdoms) is not enough; this final age requires Universal Rule, or wisdom in maintaining any human society at any time in peace and prosperity. Lastly, religion is not sufficient; what we need is Universal Religion, binding all souls to God in every way with all His virtues." (Comenius, Panorthosia II, Ch. 10, Para 43, p. 169)

In the next section we will look at an institution designed to enable universal wisdom, the stoa.

Plato, Power and Corruption

By John Taylor; 2010 Sep 30, Mashiyyat 04, 167 BE

In Panorthosia, Comenius put great stock in the Biblical admonitions not to "respect persons" and to "call no man master." (Matt 23:10) Corruption, in Comenius' view, is an inevitable consequence of disobeying the divine commands not only to call nobody master but also to "seek and ye shall find," never to delegate one's own obligation to search and serve to anyone else. He built the entire structure of Panorthosia on this egalitarian imperative, which he considered to be of the essence of faith. Before continuing with our discussion of Comenius, I want to explore this crucial issue of power and corruption further. Since it is discussed in detail in Plato's Laws, I will concentrate upon that work in particular.

Generally speaking, it is a bad idea to invest too much in any one individual or elite. The most familiar caveat is Lord Acton's saying that, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton thus linked power with corruption after observing a Vatican counsel, but it applies to any concentrated knowledge, influence or power. The sad history of charismatic dictators and authoritarian regimes shows how dangerous inordinate power is when concentrated inordinately into one person, one profession, class or any other homogeneous group.

In his final work, the Laws, Plato holds that power is a good if and only if it is an outcome of wisdom. We call someone a good person if he or she maintains good relationships; this ability to be good to others is the same thing for an individual that we call wisdom in the state. "One needs to reflect that wisdom and friendship, when stated to be the aim in view, are not really different aims, but identical..." (Laws, 693c, R.G. Bury, tr.) Wisdom, then, is when society has a sense of due proportion; and that can only come out of temperance and moderation, which allow us to see holistically the entirety of life.

Power corrupts, therefore, not because it is bad in itself but because it can distort vision, break a just balance and destroy the natural order. Power needs to be given in prescribed doses that are small and diffuse enough that imperfect human beings can bear under it. 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)

Plato's comparison of political corruption to inappropriate technology and to overeating is highly significant in view of recent trends. Obesity is the emblematic illness of the past half century. It has spread to a large proportion of the population. In many nations, both wealthy and poor, a majority are now clinically overweight. Similarly, our technology, powered as it is by burning hydrocarbons, could not be further from due proportion. It became known to experts and leaders in the late 1980's that this combustion was causing global warming, but that knowledge seems only to have accelerated our dependency upon what Plato calls a sailing ship with far to large a sail. This "rankness" in our bodies and our technology clearly is a result of the third factor that Plato mentions here, giving too much authority to the soul. Later in the Laws, Plato explains how the fall of individuals is writ in larger letters in the decline of the state.

"... if he 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)

The question then arises: how can we devise a government that does not allow anyone -- or any segment of society -- to possess "absolute and irresponsible power"? Comenius' answer was to establish an entire new philosophy designed to remove the dissension and divisions that sicken and weaken most of the body politic.

"Therefore the new philosophy will have as its new ultimate goal the reconciliation of disagreements by discovering, establishing, and bringing to light true ideas of everything, and by referring every particular thing to these, elements of agreement and disagreement should be readily revealed, so pointing the way of return to agreement." (Panorthosia, Ch. 11, para 5, p. 176)

In order to do this, he set up a new division of labour in both leadership and "followership." He envisioned a set of three institutions -- instead of the monolithic political structures we now have -- that are designed from the ground up to prevent absolutism, to be responsible yet as local, non-centralized and non-specialized as possible. Next time we will look at them in more detail.

::

Comenius, Openness and Fiscal Transparency

Faith and Fiscal Transparency

We have been examining the roots in spirituality of two principles of good governance on the local level, subsidiarity and fiscal transparency. However, as our technology becomes more sophisticated the twin principles are showing up there as well. As the Wikipedia article on subsidiarity points out, computer programming increasingly makes use of a kind of subsidiarity.

"The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, cybernetics, management, military (Mission Command) and, metaphorically, in the distribution of software module responsibilities in object-oriented programming (according to the Information expert design guideline)." (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity>)

Object-oriented programming languages use certain conventions and standards that keep high level instructions from getting lost in the jungle of details in the machine-level architectures that carry them out.

The Importance of Being Transparent

The other twin principle is fiscal transparency, that is, having "glass pockets," which assures that everybody, starting with local taxpayers, knows exactly how their money is being spent. Studies have shown that humans are naturally more averse to loss than they hope for future gain. Therefore, if everybody knows exactly how local representatives are spending their money, there will be fewer junkets, boondoggles and other gross waste of funds that tend to arise in centralized structures.

This principle has always been an essential part of science, and with the rise of the internet it is spreading into technology. When the Internet had hardly begun the open systems movement, led by the Open Frontiers Foundation, devised rules for reconciling legitimate property rights with open, communitarian sharing. Large numbers of volunteer experts now write "open systems" software, the best known of which is the Linux operating system. The idea of publishing non-proprietary formulas for products has spread from there to unexpected products like chocolate bars, beers, soft drinks and gourmet coffee.

These idealistic volunteers believe that holding knowledge and discoveries back from the world stifles the freedom that is essential to prosperity, free markets and creative discovery in science. They are suspicious of the trade secrets, the non-disclosure agreements and centrist leanings of state capitalism and oversize corporations. 

Openness, by contrast, is part of the same sense of community and shared interest that led in pioneer days to barn raisings and quilting bees. The difference now is that helpers need not gather at the same place and time in order to work together to build something. The Internet permits volunteers work efficiently together at any time of day, from anywhere on the planet.

Comenius and "Forbid them not"

John Amos Comenius, who lived a century before Adam Smith, traced the lesson of freedom and openness back to an incident in the life of Jesus. His disciples came to him and protested that others were using his name to perform miracles. "Forbid them not," was his reply. (Mark 9:38) When there are competitors there is no need to oppose, since "ye shall know them by their fruits." Those who are not against us are for us. Such tolerance, openness and tentative reservation of judgment has since become a core value of both science and, in economics, the free enterprise system. Comenius thought that the "forbid them not" principle means that we should break up all monopolies, oligopolies and closed systems, be they in religion, the labour market or wherever else.

"The early Christians condemned Monotheletes for heresy; today no-one should play the part of a Monopolist. Everything should be common property except insofar as is necessary to preserve order and avoid confusion between parties. The same rule should be observed in the church and in schools. In Mark IX, 38, the disciples say 'We saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us, and we forbade him.' This should be a living example for modern disciples ... who do not allow the teaching and practice of their doctrines except by their own members and their own colleagues, regarding them as workmen of the same tribe. But although this seems a wise order of things (in politics, religion, and also education), yet it has turned into tyranny, and therefore the tribes in Belgium wisely rejected it. It should also be abolished in the church and all over the world. Every kind of work within reason should be open to all, and the state should profit, no matter who undertakes it. The works should testify whether anything is reasonably and profitably undertaken." (Ch. 24, pp. 105-106)

Nor is this emphasis on openness exclusive to Christianity among the world's religions. The Qur'an, for instance, teaches that enlightenment stands above left and right, East or West, right brain or left brain. God's light shines out on its own; it benefits all, without ownership by human beings.

"Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness of His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, (and) the glass is as it were a brightly shining star, lit from a blessed olive-tree, neither eastern nor western, the oil whereof almost gives light though fire touch it not --  light upon light --  Allah guides to His light whom He pleases, and Allah sets forth parables for men, and Allah is Cognizant of all things." (Q24:35, Shakir)

Transparent Faith

It is important to keep in mind the religious foundations of these twin principles, for no doubt they demand a great deal more faith on everybody's part, especially those in central, "senior" institutions. Subsidiarity means that income sources -- taxes for government and profits for companies -- are indirect; funds pass through several middlemen before coming into their hands. Transparency prevents the confidential schemes and private arrangements that are commonplace in the present system. Since everybody knows how funds are spent, now and in the future, decision making, especially at first, will tend to be slow, complex, closely negotiated process.

Subsidiarity gives local governments latitude to spend tax revenue as they please before passing it on to higher governments. Won't this reward irresponsibility? If junior governments collect income taxes and only when local needs are covered pass on the remainder, what is to prevent them from withholding payment completely? What is to stop localities from spending tax money on junkets, leaving nothing for higher levels of government?

The same hard questions apply for owners and managers of corporations. In a cosmopolitan economy, would not cooperatives be less efficient? Would a democratic workplace, where workers are allowed to elect their own bosses, reduce their ability to make difficult choices? Would profit sharing schemes blur the line between owners, managers and employees?

These are all legitimate worries. As we shall see, the answer is the recapitulating decade plan, and its three-way partnership among science, religion and politics, put forward by John Amos Comenius. Only this is likely to prepare future citizens to bear the challenges and responsibilities that principles like these demand.

::

Age of Corruption

The latest serious essay, a draft of a chapter of People Without Borders, can be found on the Badi' Blog. It was written on August 09, 2010, and is called

Next Chapter: The Composition of the Consistory

and it can be found at:

http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/more-on-composition-of-consistory.html

Today's unserious essay, not for the book, is:


The Age of Stupid Corruption

By John Taylor; 2010 Aug 12, Kamal 11, 167 BE


This month my father paid for cable television for our home, a mixed blessing to be sure. Until now I had resisted letting TV through the door because of the damage that its propaganda does to the brains of young minds -- unfortunately, our kids already got around that by becoming addicted to broadband internet, which we already got from the cable company. Fewer advertisements on the Net, but just as sedentary. I resisted cable television for my father's good too, because I thought it a very bad thing for old people, too. I was convinced that that flow of images has to speed up dementia. Everybody else, including my brother, disagreed and said I should let him fry his brain in front of the idiot box, so at last I caved in. His dementia is progressing anyway, now that he is in his 90's.

One of the benefits for me is the "on demand" movies on TMN. This gave me the chance to watch the British climate change documentary "The Age of Stupid," which has not yet come out on DVD. Its thesis is that what is left of the next generation will look back at our time and wonder why we did nothing to save ourselves from the disasters that warming was obviously bringing about. I was a little disappointed that Age of Stupid is just three or four mini-documentaries cobbled together under a bare introductory theme of a librarian looking over them. He is living alone in a deep sea tower in the middle of the North Sea. Here moribund governments set up a large archive to save the art and artifacts, the best of what remains of civilization so that future generations can look back in anger, spit at us, and call us names like "stupid."

I do not want to review the whole film, but one part of it sticks in my mind. In Switzerland, a bunch of mountain dwellers line up on a highway to protest the harm that the tunnel has done to their formerly isolated way of life. They object that trucks ship milk out of their valley, take it to factories in Italy and then ship it back to them as processed yogurt. Does it not make more sense to just make the yogurt here? Surely it would be cheaper and fresher?

Again, a strange thing to protest at first blush. But I have had a week to think about it. I recall one of the books on my huge pile of half read books by my bed -- I reviewed it here -- about the same area in Switzerland. This dentist went through in the 1930's found that the peasants were almost totally isolated by the mountain peaks but that they had perfect teeth and were very well nourished. They had picnics with races, the prize being a bowl of cream. Now that trucks connect them, that is all gone forever, but they protest anyway. What are they protesting?


Corruption as Lack of Organization

In my opinion, the real problem that they -- and all environmentalists -- should be protesting is not a wave on the ocean like trucks and roads but the underlying cause of it all: corruption. Clearly, the trucking lobby and the oil lobby greased enough palms to see that roads go everywhere, even through mountain valleys, whether they were needed or not, whether they do good or not. Then the yogurt factories in Italy were happy of the increased business, and if a few local customs, languages and cultures go by the wayside, who really is going to care in a hundred years? Okay, global warming is going to wipe us all out, so it matters even less.

What we should be asking is not, "Why are we so stupid?" but rather, "What is the cause of the corruption that is killing us?" The most commonly cited answer is this:
 "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton

Acton is right that power is a factor in corruption. This has the ring of truth. However, that is like saying that stove fires are caused by heat, or that automobile accidents are caused by speed. I think it is more exact to say that power is like sunlight hitting a lens. If the lens is convex the energy of the sun burns or corrupts by becoming too concentrated. That is when power concentrates into too few hands. Then the energy becomes the servant of tyranny and absolutism. That is the kind of corruption that Acton was talking about.

However, our main problem now is that the lens is convex, and the sunlight is diffuse. Literally, the heat in the atmosphere is being diffused by CO2, and being absorbed by soot and particulate pollution. Heat hits the atmosphere and is diffused, and so everything is heating up. Earth is becoming another Venus, where temperatures are 800 degrees plus. But it is also true metaphorically. We are so stupid and supine because we let our own mental powers go to waste in diffused, idle, unorganized lives.

To use the Swiss example, the peasants lived pure lives because they were isolated, not because they were organized around purity. All it took was a tunnel and a road to ruin it all. If they had been organized in the first place, the road and tunnel would have had little destructive effect. They would have been in a position to let only enough traffic through to benefit, not to harm.

This idea that lack of organization causes corruption I got from John Amos Comenius in the Panorthosia. He was convinced that disorganization is caused by idleness, and that idleness corrupts that he would have made unemployment both illegal and socially unacceptable. As Baha'is we would have no trouble agreeing with that, since we know that Baha'u'llah laid down the law about work in the 33rd paragraph of the Aqdas,


"O people of Baha! It is incumbent upon each one of you to engage in some occupation -- such as a craft, a trade or the like. We have exalted your engagement in such work to the rank of worship of the one true God. ... Waste not your hours in idleness and sloth, but occupy yourselves with what will profit you and others. ... The most despised of men in the sight of God are they who sit and beg. Hold ye fast unto the cord of means and place your trust in God, the Provider of all means." (Kitab-i-Aqdas, p. 30)


I knew that Baha'u'llah made that a law, and that he clearly links work to our reason for being created, i.e., worship of God. But it took Comenius to make me realize the connection of this law to corruption. Unemployment should be illegal and considered socially unacceptable because it introduces a disorganizing element into our lives and society. Comenius cites many historical precedents for obligatory work laws, most of which was news to me.


"No-one in the state should be allowed to be idle, in the sense of failing to make an honest living for himself and his family by serving society in general through farming, craftsmanship, trade, or politics. My argument is (1) that no-one should learn to misbehave through having nothing to do. Therefore this should be prevented in the individual's own interests; (2) that others should not be corrupted by this bad example; (3) that there should be no occasion for begging or sharp practices; (4) that in such circumstances the idle body does not nourish any of its parts.

"In this connection the Egyptians of old had a wise law, like the Chinese of today, forbidding the deaf, the blind, the halt, the maimed, and even the victims of gout, from going idle, regardless of their wealth. Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, passed a special law against the idle and indolent, giving everyone the power to bring an action against them. Also God in His holy word passed the law: 'If any will not work, neither shall he eat.' The Romans had no temple to Fors Fortuna, the so-called patron goddess of the idle and unemployed, inside the city, but built one across the Tiber to demonstrate that idleness must be kept away from the boundaries of a well-established city." (Panorthosia Ch. 24, VI, pp. 103-104)


That is essentially what I am advocating in People Without Borders, my book in progress, that we organize our lives and get everybody to participate in saving ourselves from the dissipated corruption of global warming.


End Underemployment As Well As Unemployment

That means not only everybody working, but everybody working smarter. As Baha'u'llah points out, we need to organize work in such a way that not only all hands are moving but that all are focusing upon a trade or career. That way the worker can be scientific about what he or she does, not just slave away at what Buckminster Fuller called a "reflex machine." The entire world of work is degraded when everybody is not focused on a trade or profession. Yet you do not see placards in the streets saying: "End unemployment forever!" Nobody sees it as remotely possible, yet that is just what needs to be done.

Think about it. How does organized crime get a hold on people's lives? Why are youth gangs so prevalent? They prey upon young people who have not been apprenticed to a trade and make them into criminals. They have the choice of joining a gang or hanging about on the street doing nothing. If every child had a trade by age 12 and were fully apprenticed by age fifteen, these blights on humanity would be wiped out overnight.

I can see the ill effects of our stupid over-schooled educational system on my own daughter. No, she is not in a gang, but neither is she expected to do anything at age 15 but go to school and play, be it at the computer or in her entertainments. She is profoundly unhappy and everybody says to me, it is normal, it is part of adolescence. Sure, just like global warming is normal, part of our collective adolescence. Death is normal. Society is treating her like a large child, and the damage is apparent. She should be plying a trade, doing the world and herself some good, at this age. Instead, teachers unions assure themselves of guaranteed work by keeping kids behind the walls of schools until they are eighteen. And we cave into this swindle and tell them to "stay in school," as if sitting behind a desk during the most energetic years were some sort of moral imperative. Instead, we should be saying to them, "Ply your trade."

Here is the rest of Comenius' prescription,


"We should follow these examples and enact laws to the effect that (1) the rich should devote time to study and serve the public interest by acquiring wisdom; (2) the poor should practise trades. Anyone who fails to comply should be liable to punishment. The cure of idleness alone, if obtainable, would destroy the core of the abominable disorders of the world; plunder, theft, gambling, and fraudulence in many forms would come to an end. Hence it follows that no beggars should be tolerated in the state, far less bands of them, such as gypsies. In fact we must see that everyone has an honest occupation to profit him in body and soul as well as in material goods." (Panorthosia Ch. 24, VI, pp. 103-104)

JET
August 12, 2010

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