Leadership Tolerance

An Interlude on Tolerance

Tolerance, not force, is the most effective way to lead

 

 

 

 

Comments on a Passage in Panorthosia

 

 

Although world government is the obvious solution to environmental concerns, many reject the idea out of hand. Why? Essentially because of issues of trust. What could we do if a world government becomes a global tyranny? Or if it declines into a faceless, impenetrable bureaucracy? Even in the Seventeenth Century Comenius recognized the force of this objection, and addressed it by emphasizing that the keynote to power has to be tolerance. No matter how perfect the system may be technically, if it is run by bigots, warmongers or unfeeling functionaries, it will be tyrannical or violent or heartless. In an early passage in Panorthosia, Comenius wrote,

 

 

"Something should also be said about the tolerance which ought to be extended by those in positions of power both towards one another and to their subjects." (Comenius, Panorthosia II, Ch. 8, para 27, p. 120)

 

 

Comenius upholds tolerance as a positive virtue. Today, it is politically correct to make a nod at the need for tolerance, but we look at the problem mostly in a negative way. We condemn blatant intolerance, especially when it is violent. But we despair of ever rooting out jingoism, bigotry, prejudice and fundamentalism and stamping them out in all their manifestations. We point fingers all around, but accusations only distract from the self-critical stance that would improve the situation overall. Like creatures trapped in a sealed bottle, the more we flail about, the quicker we use up the oxygen that keeps us alive.

 

 

Instead, let us concentrate our minds on tolerant attitudes. Let us teach tolerance in schools, and accept only tolerant discourse in the media. Let us expect tolerant speech from leaders of thought, especially in faith groups. And, needless to say, let us choose tolerant leaders when we vote. We should expect more of such assessment in a tolerant society rather than less, for the same reasons we would expect that the designers of a high tolerance machine would make more minute measurements, rather than fewer, as they build it.

 

Furthermore, Comenius understood that there is an opposition between tolerant power and power based upon force. In the same passage, he continues,

 

 

"The situation calls for lenient, not violent action, on both sides, since it is clear that a noble spirit has been granted to the whole of human nature, preferring to be guided rather than dragged along or compelled. Anyone choosing to use compulsion only embitters, poisons and alienates men, and either makes them hypocrites or prepares the way for a fresh and perhaps greater breakaway."

 

 

A lack of lenity in wielding power explains why revolutions, in spite of noble and inspiring ideals, tend to nullify the good they aim to establish. By forcing change, they provoke resentment, reaction and violence. As Comenius says, any proposal for change has to appeal to our complete human nature, or the entire atmosphere will be poisoned. Tolerance and openness invite consent; they bolster the will and purify our common ground.

 

 

Nobody wants to be compelled to obey; to be jammed into somebody else's idea of what is right. This was portrayed in classical thought by the proverbial bed of Procrustes, an early serial killer who, the myth says, chopped off the legs of guests too tall to fit into his iron bed; when they were too short to fit, he stretched them on the rack. Tolerance describes the virtue of a good host, who seeks a larger or smaller to accommodate the needs of every guest. Without tolerance, there is no happy guest-host relationship, nor can leaders and followers get along without dissent.

 

Politically, tolerance is summed up in the supreme law of service, "Salus populi suprema lex." (Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.) Ethically, tolerance is the desire of a friend to seek good for one's friend, even against his or her own interest. In a word, love. For Comenius, love among friends has to be the prime motivation in power relations -- not compulsion or fear. Otherwise relationships are illusory and fleeting.

 

"Fear is a poor guarantee of lasting friendship. As Terence says in one of his comedies - `He who does his duty under the lash of punishment has no dread except in the thought of detection: if he thinks he will not be found out, back he goes to his natural bent. When you link a son to you by kindness, there is sincerity in all his acts, he sets himself to make a return, and will be the same behind your back as to your face'. Therefore anyone who thinks that men should be treated with violence and not kindness has no idea of how to govern human nature."

 

Love unites all with all, permanently. Fear? It can only unite against a single, immediate, naked threat. It is, in the words of the Tablet of Ahmad, uniting to assist one another, rather than true unity. As soon as the threat disappears, the fearful go right back to where they were in the beginning. This eradicates the only real ground between us, trust. There must be trust among friends. There must be trust for love to last. Otherwise, fear, like a fire, destroys the garden of goodwill between leader and follower. Baha'u'llah holds trust, and lack of fear, to be the basis of faith in God when He declares, "If thy faith be fearful, seize thou My Tablet, and preserve it in the bosom of trust." (Baha'u'llah, Epistle, 103) In the image of the Qur'an, if you place your hand in your bosom and it comes out white, then your truth is pure, your trust justified by divine confirmation.

 

 

 

 

As Comenius implies, arbitrary power is incompetent power. We all know how important tolerance and trust are, but we do not act upon this knowledge. Comenius continues,

 

"We can put our trust in those who have been won over willingly, but never in those who have been compelled by force or attracted under false pretences, which is the way to multiply our disagreements instead of removing them. For as Claudian observes 'Peaceful exercise of power succeeds where violence fails'."

 

Claudian hits the nail on the head here. There is a huge difference between compulsion and the peaceful use of power. This is what the people in the Middle East have learned as they peacefully demonstrate the power of the people. This can overturn tyrants who, until recently, had learned to suppress the slightest hint of opposition. They should be putting Claudian's statement on their placards:

 

 

"Peaceful exercise of power succeeds where violence fails."

 

The only reason that violence and oppression dominate is that most do not really believe that this is true. We vaguely agree, but in practice we accept that force always wins out. Tyrants rise to the top because in practice, compulsion works. The same is true in the family. Spouses use force because they believe that they really can dominate their spouses. Similarly, parents use violence to oppress their innocent children. Torturers inflict pain to extract information out of the mouths of prisoners.

 

In the media, torturers openly defend their cruelty to victims by referring to precedent. "Torture has been used from day one for good reason; it works, plain and simple. Otherwise, it would not have been used." On a certain level, this is true. For victors, there are undeniably benefits from the use of force and violence. Force and fear of force does bring compliance, but it is temporary. In the same way, slavery was ubiquitous for thousands of years. A people with a stronger army can conquer an entire people and force them to work as slaves.

 

 

 

 

But again, as Comenius points out, as soon as the threat dissipates, so does the power of compulsion. The real ground of enduring power, friendship, dissipates and crumbles before our feet. And, most important of all, the breach of faith poisons us because it cuts off friendship with God, Who created us all as equals. His faith keeps us alive spiritually, in the same way that oxygen keeps our bodies going. A tyrant, torturer or slave owner may temporarily benefit from oppression, like a drowning mouse frantically flailing about as it drowns. But faith and trust are capable of building an entire world, one where the threat of violence is a thing forgotten.

Citizen Physicians

Citizen Physicians

2011 Feb 10, Mulk 04, 167 BE; Citizen Physicians

Precis: An ordered state engages citizens in wisdom. Such is the goal of dialectic. A dialectician is an expert in making questions of right, law and ethics the main concern of popular, routine conversations. Dialectics progresses by experimenting with the logic of law. It tries this logic out in words before law informs action.

 

In the slave owning society of Ancient Athens there were two kinds of doctor, one for slaves and one for free citizens. Slaves had no right to be treated by physicians. Instead, they saw other slaves with experience as aids to trained medical practitioners. Such partly-trained slaves must have acted like field medics, handing out poorly understood remedies in a slapdash manner to all comers. The patients were menials and had no choice but to take the cure and shut up. A physician, by contrast, was expected to get to know his patients personally. Once the ailment was diagnosed, he took the time to explain what was wrong and why a particular therapy was necessary.

 

Plato compared this to political leaders, especially those who write and apply laws. The legal system, he said, is not therapy for free citizens but remedies for slaves. Its laws are arbitrary, handed down from above, along with a threat of violence for non-compliance. Judges mete out punishment with the cursory attention of a slave medic. Worst of all, one hand is tied behind the judge's back, as it were.

 

"...none of our legislators would seem ever to have remarked that they rely wholly on one instrument in their work, whereas there are two available, so far as the mass's lack of education will permit, persuasion and compulsion. Authority is never tempered in their lawmaking with persuasion; they work by compulsion unalloyed." (Laws 722c, Collected Dialogues, p. 1312)

 

There should be long explanations of the laws, which Plato called "preambles," in order to make them palatable to free thinkers. That way, lawmakers would act more like a free citizen's physician preferring persuasion to compulsion, by making laws pleasant and seeing to it that rules and regulations are accepted as enthusiastically as possible.

 

Comenius agrees, citing a Roman writer who said, "You should know that the most righteous thunderbolts are those which are worshipped even by those whom they have struck." (Seneca: Quaestiones Naturales, ii, 12) But love of laws should also be accompanied by knowledge. Such an imperative was central to the Law of Moses. For example, as a prelude to the ten commandments God ordered first of all that laws be discussed routinely, "when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up." (Deut 6:7, WEB) Society should be unstinting in paying workers well for a job well done, and in distributing credit where credit is due. This liberality, Comenius points out, pervades the Bible. For example, he cites: "Give her of the fruit of her hands; Let her works praise her in the gates." (Proverbs, 31:31, WEB) Comenius also noticed that rewards and honours are routinely meted out for sports heroes. Why not do the same for wisdom? The place to start should be in schools. In a section called "special awards for special merits," Comenius wrote,

 

"For if a civilised nation like the Greeks considered it worthwhile to award laurel wreaths and other prizes as an incentive to the prowess of their young men competing on the racetrack and practising physical fitness or skill in armed warfare, surely anything of this kind will be suitable in the arena of wisdom!" (Panorthosia, Ch. 22, Para 30, p. 53)

 

Wisdom can be made more attractive by distributing liberal rewards to all who make wise choices. We therefore should put as many people as possible in a position where they can judge the behaviour of others and distribute rewards for exceptionally good deeds. If we do that, then it would be a society not just of free citizens but also of active, wise physicians.

Justice Leaks Out

By John Taylor; 2010 Dec 03, Qawl 12, 167 BE

I just started attending an institute on the Baha'i Covenant (the new Book VIII) being held for tutors in my old home town of Ancaster, Ontario. At the same time, I have also been auditing a series of lectures on the history of freedom. This I do, wearing earphones, as I paint part of our basement. At the same time, the news is full of this Wikileaks affair, which, it strikes me, is part of the whole theme of this age, the tension between security and freedom, between obedience and expression, between individual right and social conformity.

Cosmopolitanism, the theme of the book I am trying to write, is all about this very theme, the need for strict rectitude in universals, and a concurrent faith that universals will translate into optimum good for individual souls. This is what Immanuel Kant talked about with his Categorical Imperative, the duty strictly to adhere to duty by turning the implications of the Golden Rule into universal laws. And Baha'u'llah seems to seek the same balance in the Kitab-i-Ahd, the Will and Testament of Baha'u'llah, which is the main concern of Book VIII.

Abdu'l-Baha, in Paris, laid out the Baha'i version of Kant's C.I. with astonishing purity. Although this is not, strictly speaking, Baha'i scripture (the original text in Persian was lost), it is still astonishing that the Master seems to have spoken in such Kantian terms about the need for duty in universal and particular undertakings.

"In the human world there are two kinds of undertakings, universal and particular. The result of every universal undertaking is infinite, and the outcome of every particular undertaking is finite. In this age all the human problems which create a general interest are universal and their results are likewise universal, for humanity has become interdependent."

"Today international laws have great influence, international policies are bringing nations nearer to one another. Therefore it is a general axiom that in the human world every universal affair commands attention, and its results and benefits are limitless; therefore let us say that every universal cause is divine and every special matter is human." (Address by Abdu'l-Baha at the Esperanto Banquet, given at Hotel Moderns in Paris, France, February 12th, 1913, Divine Philosophy, p. 141)

The Master says, "Every universal affair is divine." Think about that, what it implies for the amoral Realpolitik that dominates the international stage today. In effect, the current nationalist mind set turns every universal affair into what Baha'u'llah calls the "metropolis of Satan." Morality is irrelevant, only so called practical matters of competing interest. Compare that cynicism and what the Master says above to what Kant says in his own "peace message" (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795), which is one of the backbones of my book-in-perpetual-progress, Cosmopolis Earth.

"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant)

The fact that, as Kant points out, civil and international law remains unwritten, that is, that there is no written world constitution, is the great flaw and downfall of our current world.

This is one reason that the Wikileaks affair has gripped me harder than any news event since Watergate, which played out way back when I was in High School. I remember at the time being glued to the television, watching the hearings for days on end, devouring every article in the press about the characters of the senators and lawyers running those senate hearings. They were heroes to me, and the climax came when Richard Nixon resigned. Then he was pardoned and everything went back to normal. I longed to become a lawyer at the time. This chase for justice in high places that seemed to be happening in those hearings seemed the noblest thing in the world.

Only later did I read Noam Chomsky, who pointed out that all that fuss was just a reflection of the fact that the crime committed at the Watergate complex, bugging backroom dealings of members of the Democratic Party -- activities that were themselves highly illegal and scandalous, by the way, but that somehow never got discussed --was committed against powerful people. Nixon had already committed dozens of worse crimes, including out-and-out assassinations, against less powerful groups, but as always that barely merited a headline. Then I felt ashamed to have been sucked into watching what amounted to a show trial that had nothing to do with real justice.

Still, the diplomatic dispatches being released by Wikileaks have many of the elements that made Watergate so compelling. There is the high-tech angle, the fact that the Internet seems to be beyond the clammy claws of censorship -- although some say that censorship is just being delayed and privatized. There is the fact that powerful officials of the American superpower are being flouted in the same way that outliers are, the sort of schlep they openly torture and routinely kill as an object lesson to the powerless.

There is the secrecy angle, the fact that although only about six percent of these dispatches were officially secret, so pervasive is the cloak and dagger culture that it is provoking the most comical reactions, including apparatchiks threatening employees and potential employees of the State Department that if they dare read any of the leaks they are doomed, even if the leak mentions them, or in fact was written by themselves. One Canadian stooge even suggested sending a cruise missile against Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks -- let no American claim that they have a monopoly on whackos.

Then there are the actual revelations, which are not insubstantial in the skullduggery they uncover. The loss in America of the right of habeas corpus is a grave one, a loss for every human being, and the leaks show that the spooks are taking full advantage of their new powers. They flout the law by secretly transporting terror suspects beyond borders. In one case, a German national with the same name as a terrorist was transported to Pakistan and tortured for months. Then, when the blunder was undeniable, the U.S. Secretary of State had to intervene before the C.I.A. did what they were inclined to do, rub him out with extreme prejudice to cover up the embarrassment permanently. This is criminality at the highest levels. It of course will go unpunished, as always.

Such wrongdoing is an outward symptom of a deeper cancer. You cannot engage in the behavior that the international order demands of its minions without soiling yourself, without losing all your better principles and ideals, without sinking in the ordure floating around you. The biggest secret that these over-secretive officials and heads of state are keeping is that they have lost their principles. As Kant points out, you may have a personality but you cannot have character without holding to high moral principle.

"Character means that the person derives his rules of conduct from himself and from the dignity of humanity. Character is the common ruling principle in man in the use of his talents and attributes. Thus it is the nature of his will ... A man who acts without settled principles, with no uniformity, has no character. A man may have a good heart and yet no character, because he is dependent upon impulses and does not act according to maxims. Firmness and unity of principle are essential to character." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant)

I long for the strict moral standard that Kant held up for world statespersons.

I am happy that the information revealed by wikileaks is out in the open so soon. I do not imagine that it will change much but at least it allows future historians to understand the mind set of our cynical leaders. These mistakes are probably the worst of any generation of leaders, ever. This generation of leaders (and followers) are willfully ignoring climate change, the most basic threat to our survival. They are therefore putting the human race in the gravest peril. Speaking of recent climate talks, George Monbiot put it very well,

"What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen, is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen." (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/09/20/the-process-is-dead/)

It is frightening. In spite of all the affected concern for security, there is no single instrument for basic justice anywhere on earth ... other than the Universal House Justice, of course, which, as its name implies, is all about universalizing justice. And their true splendor will not shine for all to see until we all see the light and form a world government.

Freedom and the Ecumenical Consistory

Liberty from a Religious Point of View

By John Taylor; 2009 Sep 01, Asma 13, 166 BE

Absolute freedom, like all absolutes, is only possible for God in relation to Himself. This understanding predates monotheism, as evidenced by Aeschylus, who wrote: "For know that no one is free, except Zeus." Human freedom, then, is relative to our nature, which is both physical and spiritual. The physical requires us to compromise spiritual aspirations to some extent. Every religion teaches that we often must choose animal freedom or freedom born of Spirit. Christianity, for example,

"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Cor 3:17, KJV)

Islam emphasizes that higher knowledge offers a paradoxical freedom in which submission to a higher Will is the highest ideal. "Indeed, man transgresseth in thinking himself his own master: for to your Lord all things return." (Qur'an 96:1) Justice and righteousness are the outcome of absorption in the Will of One Who knows all.

"Amongst us are some that submit their wills (to God), and some that swerve from justice. Now those who submit their wills - they have sought out (the path) of right conduct." (Qur'an 72:14, Yusuf Ali, tr.)

This is also the essential spirit of Judaism, which has Satan, in guise of a serpent in the Garden of Eden promise Eve that, "Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Freedom on the spiritual level comes of admitting that we can never know what is good or evil on our own, or control what is inherently beyond our nature in a world of materiality. Instead, spiritual freedom is imitation of the deity, who liberates selflessly by nature and by example.

"Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Set free, and you will be set free." (Luke 6:36-37, WEB)

Animal liberty is purely physical and therefore based on rule of the strong over the weak; the former fight their way to the top with force and violence. It is not free but only a masked form of slavery. Even the top dog expresses his freedom by indulging bodily desires and appetites that have only ephemeral results. Spiritual freedom is the fruit of imitating an all-loving God, who inculcates virtues like benevolence, wisdom, independence and moderation. These virtues raise the human spirit above violence and the contradictions inherent to carnal leanings.

Immanuel Kant correctly recognized that we will never attain this higher liberation completely or be rid of the damaging freedom of a bestial nature unless and until national governments submit their sovereign authority to a world government. Then the individual will finally be free of injustice, inside and out.

"However fantastical this idea (a league of nations) may seem -- and it was laughed at as fantastical by the Abbe de St. Pierre and by Rousseau, perhaps because they believed it was too near to realization -- the necessary outcome of the destitution to which each man is brought by his fellows is to force the states to the same decision (hard though it be for them) that savage man also was reluctantly forced to take, namely, to give up their brutish freedom and to seek quiet and security under a lawful constitution." (Kant, Cosmopolitan History, Seventh Thesis, p. 256)

Such is the nature of religious freedom. It has implications that we have hardly begun to explore on the international scene. For example, any future world government that is not a tyranny would have to recognize a universal right to convert from one religion to any other religion. This right would only be tolerable to faith groups when it is widely recognized that there are features -- and not peripheral ones but essentials -- of all religions that are part of a faith heritage common to all thinking humans. This emerging entity let us call the One Common Faith, or OCF.

An increasing awareness of our OCF heritage would do more than just give a new human right, the right to convert, to every citizen in the world -- even those who live in regions where compulsion in belief is traditional. It would also enable a world parliament of religion -- an institution that Comenius called the Ecumenical Consistory -- to come into existence. This parliament would do just what the word "consistory implies. It would take the values, ideals and features that are consistent across major religions through the ages, principles like love of one's neighbour and the Golden Rule, and put them into effect on the personal level in order to enable progress on the local and international levels as well. Comenius pointed to this as the common purpose of liberation for all religions:

"For the goal of this first individual reform is that everyone should release himself from the powerful grip of external things and be restored to himself and God, for the purpose of asserting his freedom of thought, will and action upon things which make for his welfare here and to all eternity." (Panorthosia, Ch. 20, para 7, p. 22)

The very existence of a right to convert, an OCF and an Ecumenical Consistory would force all religious groups to raise their standards in order to compete with others. This would benefit all by canalizing the same competitive forces that made the modern business so potent, influential and efficient. As Kant perceived, this restraint on the baser urges of religious groups would, paradoxically, free them to attain higher levels of excellence; it would act on the social aspect of faith like the restraints that train an individuals animal nature to submit the soul to the Spirit, the true and universal liberator. 

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Freedom in Politics

Feeling Around the Dimension of Political Liberty

By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 22, Asma 03, 166 BE

This summer I am writing, day by day, what I hope will become a draft of a longer book about how a world government may transform democracy, consultation and architecture. A few days ago I wrote the following sentence:

"Just as we inhabit space that can be mapped in three dimensions, every choice we make in our lives must negotiate a position in three dimensions of freedom, religious, scientific and political."

Going over my notes on freedom it has become clear that I will have to forget about the book for the time being and write in my normal way about these three dimensions. I will start today with a chronological overview of the political dimension of liberty.

Political Freedom

The first brief but brilliant experiment in democracy took place in Ancient Athens. Pericles, in his famous Funeral Oration praising the freedom that he had helped his city attain, declared that the freedom to know is one of the foundations of democratic freedom.

"We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy, than to the native spirit of our citizens." (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book II, 39)

The open access to information that Athens pioneered has now become the heart and soul of the computer and internet revolution.

Another foundation of freedom is moderation. The Golden Mean always was and still remains the basis of any successful religion and pious life. In a play written for a religious festival, Aeschylus wrote,

"Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence."

In politics, the same rule applies. A swing to the far left or the far right lands up in the same place: slavery and tyranny. Plato in the Republic explained how this principle extends throughout nature, from the balance of nature in an ecological system to the ways of men,

"The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and the vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government. The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery." (Republic, Book IX. p. 311)

Unfortunately, in any group, the immoderate tend to outnumber the temperate, and even when they are few they inevitably shout louder. Thus, the strident easily dominate the discourse and the next step is reaction against the free discussion that is the foundation of democracy. Aesop told a fable about this called "The frogs desiring a king." The frogs tired of the anarchy of their life and petitioned Jove to send them a king. Jove threw them a log, but they soon lost their fear and jumped all over it.

"But this did not suit them, so they sent another petition to Jove, and said to him, `We want a real king; one that will really rule over us.' Now this made Jove angry, so he sent among them a big Stork that soon set to work gobbling them all up. Then the Frogs repented when too late. Better no rule than cruel rule."

Nor is there any need for cruelty. The very fact that the fate of a people is entrusted to the hands of an individual is usually enough for injustice to be done, especially when that people confronts a larger, far wealthier developed country. For example, I live on land that in the 18th Century was granted by the British to the Six Nations Confederacy. Title to the land was entrusted to its leader, Joseph Brant, who gradually sold most of it off to white settlers. Today Brant's name is understandably anathema to his people, in spite of the fact that what he did was understandable, since he had something like 16 children to feed. It would have taken great integrity to keep his hands off his people's heritage.

This story of graft, greed and corruption by trustees has been retold throughout the so-called Third World. The precious wealth of hundreds of hapless peoples and sovereign nations are routinely exchanged for a surreptitious suitcase of cash. Truly, Pericles was correct when he said that benefits of open access to information far outweigh the losses.

However, assuming that there is honesty and dependability in individuals, we often best serve freedom by letting others go about their business unhindered. The Laissez Faire approach so prevalent in capitalism today has its philosophical roots in stoic philosophy and Far Eastern sages. For example, Lao-Tzu wrote,

"If a ruler abides by its [the Tao] principles,

then her people will willingly follow.

Heaven would then reign on earth,

like sweet rain falling on paradise.

People would have no need for laws,

because the law would be written on their hearts.

(Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu, J. H. McDonald, tr., ch. 32)

The contribution of Christianity to our understanding of political Laissez Faire was its emphasis that freedom is an essential element of love. "Set free that you may be freed." God makes us free, so we in gratitude should follow the same example,

"Which of you, by being anxious, can add one cubit to the measure of his life? Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They do not toil, neither do they spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not dressed like one of these." (Matt 6:27-29, WEB)

Although Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor and a persecutor of early Christians, he reflected this spiritual principle of freedom as letting human nature run its course when he wrote,

"The universal cause is like a winter torrent: it carries everything along with it. But how worthless are all these poor people who are engaged in matters political ... All drivellers. Well then, man: do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter. For who can change men's opinions [or: principles]? And without a change of opinions what else is there than the slavery of men who groan while they pretend to obey?" (Meditations, 9:29)

Marcus was a philosopher with the power, theoretically, to be the philosopher king to which Plato's Republic was dedicated. Yet here he renounces even the dream of the Republic coming about in his lifetime. As he says, human power, especially in the hands of an individual, is severely limited and has little influence over the principles by which politics operate. The only choice we have as individuals is to look to what little freedom is given us. Beyond that, let God or nature do the rest. Such is the greater part of political freedom.

Today it is recognized that we can influence men's principles, albeit slowly and indirectly, by means of universal public education. At the same time, though, public education serves the interests of the state, which are not the same as those of the people, or for that matter, of freedom. Let me close with the warning that J.S. Mill gave in the last paragraph of his classic, On Liberty.

"A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity which does not impede, but aids and stimulates, individual exertion and development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity and powers of individuals and bodies, it substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising, and upon occasion denouncing, it makes them work in fetters or bids them stand aside and does their work instead of them. The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish." (Mill, On Liberty, p. 186)

John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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What Price Freedom?

A Roundabout Answer to a Question About Laser Tattoos


I continue reading Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the story of a dentist, traveling with a couple of doctors and nutritionists in the early 1930's. It was in this area and right around this time that Shoghi Effendi vacationed and regained his strength from his severe illness.

In the early chapter I am reading, Price and his friends examine the health of members of one village after another in various places in rural Switzerland. At the time, these isolated mountain people were just coming into contact with the rest of the world. Roads were being built connecting some valleys that had subsisted with little or no outside contact for centuries. Price found that villagers in one valley might have vineyards, which allowed grape juice and wine (and therefore vitamin C) as part of their diet, and in the next valley they did not. They never touched alcohol.

But such is the nutritional quality of locally-produced food that it made no difference, almost everybody was fit and healthy. Dental caries varied somewhere between two and four percent, compared to as much as fifty percent in places that had access to factory-processed, imported foods (in such areas, between a quarter and a half of the teeth examined had had a cavity at some point).

This is the reverse of what you would expect. You would think that if you had access to more varied foods that were made with the latest, scientifically helped food production techniques, that it would improve peoples' diet and health. Price found in every case that the reverse was the case. When upon examination a subject had a few more than the usual number of cavities and facial deformities, that they had spent a few years outside their home valley eating the modern diet. As soon as they came back, the cavities stopped appearing.

Price noticed other side effects of this healthful lifestyle. Almost everybody, being properly nourished, had a full, deep, beautiful singing voice. They practiced what we now call sustainable agriculture. On the mountainside terraces runoff topsoil was collected at the edge and carried -- by hand -- back to the inner end of the field. Labour saving devices? These people did not need to go to pay a personal fitness trainer to stay fit, they did strenuous but useful work and felt all the better for it.

Sometimes locals would hold a regional fair where athletic contests were staged. The prize for the winner of a race was a bowl of fresh cream! These Swiss treated cream as a treat, just like we do ice cream. No doubt it tasted much better, with no sugar, no chemicals, no flavouring, no colouring, no junk at all. Just cream from a cow that had spent its life outdoors eating real grass in fresh mountain air. The cows and other livestock were healthier and happier than our poor grain-fed creatures kept indoors in giant factory farms hooked up to Matrix-like milking machines. For our food producers quantity beats out quality.

Price's findings in this book are surely among the most important in dietary knowledge of the 20th Century. His discovery that local diets are superior is something that the popular mind still has not come to terms with. I am sure that if you offered the athlete's prize, a bowl of fresh cream, to any diet conscious modern, they would refuse to eat it, invoking poorly understood buzzwords like "fat" and "calories." How grossly misinformed we are about what is good for us! Misinformation on diet is rampant.

With envy I read about these Swiss peasants and long to go live in the mountains too. Flatlands are boring and un-healthful. Here in North America we have spent decades using bulldozers to erase every hill and valley to build malls and parking lots when if we had a lick of sense we would be using earth moving equipment to do the reverse, to make large, mountainous, valley-filled urban living areas whose deep contours force people and animals to climb wherever they go. That alone might end obesity, which is all but unknown in mountain people.
After Price's dietary discoveries in the 1930's, the economic bullies expunging traditional, local diets and replacing them with commercially based food became more ruthless. All around the world sinister corporations have corrupted the foreign policy of Western governments, which literally at gunpoint forced aboriginal and traditional peoples to have the "choice" of eating local, or eating fast food hamburgers and drinking carbonated sugar-water. The only capitol city that escaped was Havana, which was forced by an American boycott to become the world's greenest city (for more on this, seehttp://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/09/12/UrbanAgriculture/#). More vulnerable poor regions that refuse to "liberalize" their markets face dire, bloody consequences. Instead of learning from the superior diet of these people, unfettered capitalism routinely exploits and preys upon them for ephemeral profit. As a result, today obesity is catching up to smoking and alcohol as the overall worst health threats around the world.

What God must think of our present uglification of the human body, not to mention our planet! So terrible is our diet that obesity is ubiquitous not only in rich lands but is even worse in poor ones. Yesterday I ended the daily Badi' essay with this quote from the Master,

"Man is the temple of God. He is not a human temple. If you destroy a house, the owner of that house will be grieved and wrathful. How much greater is the wrong when man destroys a building planned and erected by God! Undoubtedly, he deserves the judgment and wrath of God." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 498)

Coincidentally, my nine-year-old son Thomas asked me a question that gave me a chance to apply this quote. He has evidently been thinking about today's fashion of tattooing the body. Yesterday, outside the local tattoo parlour, he asked, in his usual science-fictiony way, "What if when I grow up they invent a laser that will paint a picture on the body without pain? And what if it could be removed painlessly? Should I get a tattoo?" I answered that that would be his decision. If after reflection and your heart still moves you, and you consult with a variety of people, and your local LSA and your parents all agree, I suppose you might decide to get a tattoo.

However, you should consider it carefully. Historically, religion has been very suspicious of images, especially Judaism and Islam. And they have a good point. I myself find images by nature irksome, and I quickly tire of the same picture on the wall. And as the Master says, it is a fact that our bodies are temples of God. They are not our possession but His domain. Myself, I would be very disinclined to mark it up in any manner. I went into a long history of how Islam forbade images entirely, and how that forced artists to decorate temples with designs so ingenious that they actually pioneered new branches of mathematics.

In any case, essentially what happened in the chalets of Switzerland was that the people were not corrupt. They had no choice, so they chose to live well. If they had not made that choice, these mountains long ago would have become uninhabited.

As Price found, even their faces were prettier for having no dietary choice, no choice but to walk uphill so very often. As far as good health goes, the Swiss villagers were surely far wealthier than almost everybody today, even the richest of us. But we should not forget that they were information poor. The isolation of these mountain villages was total. We would think of them as hopelessly unsophisticated. I doubt if I could keep my sanity if I lived there, cut off from news, radio, phones, computers and screens, longer than a month. However, this makes me wonder. Have I become addicted to cheap data in the same way the modern diet has made me addicted to cheap calories and unnourishing fat? As a father, I am witnessing this happening to my children even worse than, at a later stage of life, it hit me. They cannot stand to be away from a screen more than a few hours.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) their data poverty, I envy the rural Swiss. At the heart of our problem, I think, is how we misunderstand and mismeasure wealth. Wealth is not money alone. All the money in the world is useless if you are sick. Wealth is happiness, godliness, a healthful lifestyle full of variety and nourishment for mind, soul and body. The lesson is that purity must come before choice. Otherwise, liberty only undermines health and leads to further corruption. Corruption should not be an option.

Some Swiss villages close by virgin ones had had roads for a while, which allowed them more choices, more contact. They traded with the outside world and chose, for example, to keep their cows indoors, feed them grain and use the milk to make the famous Swiss milk chocolate instead of giving it to their children to drink. The ugly effects on their teeth and bodies were strikingly apparent to Price and his team of doctors.

Given a choice, most, including those who had eaten traditional diets all their lives, would prefer to gobble down sweets, chocolate and ice cream, rather than good food. Given a choice, we would all be happy to let machines do all our manual labour. However, it would be most sagacious to avoid false choices before they come up. We need purity first, then freedom. Corruption cannot be an option.

Without thinking or deliberating, we on the Western diet have handed these crucial choices over to corporations and other centralized institutions. The result is desecration of our body, the house of God. We deface ourselves internally far worse than an external tattoo ever could.

That trend, in a nutshell, is what the open, multi-pronged approach in "mound architecture" would be designed to reverse. You start by building as much surface area as possible into the locality by piling up mounds of earth. Then, place modular buildings and homes into the hillside. This would introduce "labour creating" devices into the lifestyle of all. But it would also increase surface area and aid in locally-grown agriculture and urban agriculture, which could grow the sort of local, healthful food that made traditional Swiss so healthy.

But this project would involve more than an outward reengineering. It would depend upon fundamental improvements in both democracy and capitalism. Mound agriculture would ensure that as many people as possible live in dense proximity (which is easiest on the environment), and in order to do that their whole day would be designed to put purity before license. This would turn as many important decisions as possible over to locals concerned to beautify the house of God. Each neighbourhood would be plugged into an open building code under the oversight of science and a world governing authority.

Mostly, this system would remove the corruptive influence of corporations. Plato called the merchant the "nursemaid of society," but as things are now, our nursemaid is a Frankenstein monster run amuck, whose first victims are children, the poor and vulnerable. Employers routinely downsize and lay off millions of workers every day but rarely if ever do governments consider disbanding a corporation. Even discussing such a blasphemy is anathema in the press. No corporation, no matter how evil or destructive, has lost its charter in America at least three decades. Lately, even banks that commit suicide are untouchable, even at the price of trillions of dollars and are deemed "too big to fail." This is the same blind, self-destructive, ideological madness that brought down communism. Any system that refuses to reform is doomed to be wiped away. We should be thinking about what to replace the carcass with once the stink becomes unbearable.

Abdu'l-Baha saw the Great War coming, and did what He could to alleviate the suffering of those close to Him. He quietly stashed away corn and grain, and later when food was not available He just as discretely distributed it to the people. Such realism, foresight and planning is what our Exemplar did. In our present crisis of global warming accompanied by the collapse of liberal, unfettered capitalism, I believe that starting projects like mound architecture would be just what the Master would be doing if He were alive today.

That is what this Badi' Blog is dedicated to establishing.

::

Self Pleasuring

Can We Please Ourselves?

By John Taylor; 2008 Nov 20, 17 Qudrat 165 BE



I have been devoting this essay series to certain self-contradictions among my beliefs, as uncovered and challenged by a philosophical robot that I butted horns with online not long ago. Today I want to start off with a broadside that it called "Can we please ourselves?"


==========

You agreed that: So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends.

But disagreed that: The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised.

==========


The bot points out that only some forty thousand of the almost one hundred and forty thousand philosophy aficionados who completed this activity had this "tension" in their beliefs. Meaning, I guess, that I am in the bottom third of the population. Not the first time I have been caught out as a bottom dweller, I must say. Here is how it analysed the clash between my two answers to questions on the quiz.



"In order not to be in contradiction here, you must be able to make a convincing case that the personal use of drugs harms people other than the drug user. More than this - you must also show that prohibited drug use harms others more than other legal activities such as smoking, drinking and driving cars, unless you want to argue that these should also be made criminal offences. As alcohol, tobacco and car accidents are among the leading killers in western society, this case may be hard to make. You also have to make the case for each drug you think should not be decriminalised. The set of drugs which are currently illegal is not a natural one, so there is no reason to treat all currently illegal drugs the same."



I have been sitting on my counter-argument to this broadside for weeks. Not, I suppose, that I could not have given an adequate defence right away. It is just that I wanted to treat the bot as goad, a gadfly, like Socrates was to the Athenians. I felt a need to think all that it said through deeply and thoroughly. Clearly, any direct argument you might offer would be squeezed out of all recognition by the carefully pre-arranged presuppositions. It is as if somebody opened up a door and invited you to put your finger in the crack next to the door jam. The best response is to refuse to put your finger in there.


During the time I was mulling this over I ran across at least three wonderful papers by the world's most compendious Baha'i scholar, Moojan Momen. These papers, each in its own indirect way, offered a different answer to this argument. I will mention Momen's helps when the time comes. But first, my much delayed bare bones argument for advocating free agency while supporting laws against drugs.


First of all, I refuse to put my finger into the crack.


The machine puts the onus squarely on me. Why should I accept such a heavy burden of proof? Every time a new chemical is discovered, is it my job to prove that if somebody decides they want to eat, inject, smoke or otherwise introduce it into their body for any reason whatever, they should have the right to do so unless I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will harm not only that individual but society in general? Surely the reverse should be the case. Anything new must be proved safe by scientific tests beyond a shadow of a doubt before we allow it anywhere near our bodies, or even into the world at large. This is the principle of conservatism.


Second of all, why don't you put your finger in the crack?


We are at a point in history where thousands of new chemicals are being invented daily. Because of arguments like this one, the onus is on everybody to prove that each and every one of these chemicals does more harm than good. There is no conservative principle left. These chemicals are indiscriminately introduced not only into our bodies but the environment generally. More and more thinking people realize that there is no hard and firm line between the body and the planet, between individual and earth. A libertarian may think he harms only himself when he takes Viagra or snorts cocaine. But that is a dangerous illusion. Both those substances and many more are turning up in the water system, which means that plants, animals and other humans are doing these drugs right along with the selfish uses whose unbounded desires created the demand in the first place.


The sad fact is, nature does not care if a chemical is legal or not. Neither should we. We should do what is right and actively purify ourselves, the environment, and most of all, our own desires. The first step to doing that is to learn to refute and reject fallacious arguments like this one. Once that is done, we can start blocking new chemicals coming out of Pandora's Box, and when that conservatism is established, we can go on to putting more ills roaming the earth back into her Box. That is, eliminating one by one all older noxious poisons, be they legal or not. The long term survival of the human race depends on our doing this.


I guess I have been spending time on this because behind the surface dispute is another, subtler argument. Refuting a shadow proposition like that is harder but also more rewarding. This is where Moojan Momen came in handy. Let us go there.


I agreed that "So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends." But I consented with a grain of salt. Most of the salt fell on that word "should." Why is it there?


The fact is that, barring a tyranny or some other variety of dictatorial rule, people _are_ free to pursue their own ends. There is no "should" about it. They do what they want. The only thing that constrains them are the bounds of their own understanding. I cannot jump inside the skin of others and force them to do my will. In fact, thinking and doing what you want is fundamental to all thinking beings. Without some degree of free will, thought would be impossible. So freedom is a fact, it not need to be defended. People do what they want, what they think best, and there is nothing you or I can do to change that.


True, anybody can be fooled, coerced or influenced by rewards and punishments to do what others wish and what they started out not wanting. But under rule of law and morality there is no question of forcing anything upon someone who does not want to, especially if they are mature and educated enough to think competently for themselves. The only way I can see that this might change and there might be a need to argue that people "should" do what they want is if in future some technology connected brains directly to computers; then we could introduce a virus forcing others to our will. Otherwise, there is no means to force free citizens to think thoughts and pursue ends not their own.


To go from "individuals are free to pursue their own ends if they do no harm" to arguing that individuals "should" be free is to commit the `is' `ought' fallacy, the same as saying, "Trees ought to grow out of the ground towards the sky."


What, then, is behind this ridiculous proposition? Why is it so often invoked, especially by liberals, utilitarians and libertarians? What they really are after is quite different from a mere defence of freedom. By defending the right to total exclusion from interference, even from owning controlled substances, they are really making freedom into a form of absolutism, paradoxical as it sounds. "Absolute freedom" is an oxymoron if ever there was one. What they really are after is the same thing any fanatic longs for: complete exclusion. Nobody, not society, not the law, not nobody, has any right to influence or educate, other than the individual.


This is where the stellar work of Moojan Momen came in so handy. He wrote in the early 1990's a paper with the strange title, "In all the Ways that Matter, Women Don't Count." He explains what he means by that title in the paper. Check it out, and we will meet back here at the Badi' Blog next time.


"In all the Ways that Matter, Women Don't Count"
bahai-library.org/bsr/bsr04/44_momen_women.htm



--
John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/