Senate of the World

 

Prospective Chapter from Cosmopolis Earth

The Senate of the World

Thoughts about Panorthosia, Chapter Fifteen

Chapter 15 of Panorthosia:

 

"Concerning the necessity of correctly establishing all our constitutions once they are correctly set up, by means of three supreme Courts or Tribunals as guardians of the age of happiness; and the form which these ought to take."

 

In Panorthosia, especially in the 15th Chapter, Comenius wrestles with a paradox within the very idea of leadership in a united world.

 

Clearly, as global order spreads, knowledge will spread until it is, in the words of prophesy, "like waters upon the sea." As everybody becomes educated and enlightened, there will be less need for leaders in the traditional sense. Each and all will be leaders and followers unto themselves.

 

 

Some think that this implies anarchy, rule by no government at all. Indeed, Comenius takes this prospect very seriously, since it is central to Christian teaching. He cites Matt 13:8-10,

 

"But be not ye called Rabbi, for one is master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man father upon the earth, for only one is your father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called master, for one is your master, even Christ." (cited Ch. 15, para 9, p. 218)

 

For Comenius, though, this forbids not government itself but any "one sole form of rule, worship or wisdom amongst men. For he forbids the use on earth of the title master, father or leader in reference to the position of scholars, churchmen and politicians." (para 9) The three institutions, the college, the consistory and the dicastery, then, are meant to fill in the "leadership gap" opened up by this dictum.

 

 

By removing absolute, personal power, the compulsion of one person over another, we do not end power completely. Indeed, the rule of law is only supreme when personal compulsion is subjugated. The implication is not anarchy, rule of nobody, but rather rule of spirit, the divine power of love. It is true that spirit is invisible, but, like the wind, it is nonetheless a real force, as anyone who encounters a tornado or hurricane can attest. Rule by God, although unseen and incomprehensible, is quite the reverse of rule by nobody.

 

 

Comenius concludes, therefore, that we should learn from the principle of "no Rabbi, no father, no master" by ceasing lazily to delegate power to others. This is both unnecessary and a cause of corruption. Instead we can "unite in brotherhood" under the rule of one God. I would add that this same egalitarian teaching is also to be found in Plato (especially in "The Laws") and the Qur’an (); thus Christians, Muslims and secular non-religious believers, comprising over half the human race, accept this egalitarian inclination already.

 

The paradox of which I spoke at first is not that real power is invisible, or that power is most effective as a consensus arising from unity in brotherhood. Rather the paradox is that notwithstanding all this, there is still a crucial role for leaders -- as long as they stay leaders of thought and do not degrade into leaders of men who transgress their limits.

 

"It is absurd for kings to be ruled, or for leaders to be led by other men. The real sun does not need oil poured into it. The real fountain does not need water poured into it." (Panorthosia, Ch. 24, para 1, p. 111)

 

Leaders of thought are essential because ideas remain as mere words until they are backed up by action. The best constitution soon falls apart without vigilant care from guardians who stand watch over it. Comenius cites the example of the Israelites, who having conquered the Promised Land, turned to farming, forgot soldiering and in time were ousted by the resurgent peoples they had conquered before.

 

Leaders, even in an egalitarian order, need to have everyone's attention in order to show the way and lead by example; they require real influence in order to uphold some ideas over others. This is now often called the "tragedy of the commons," but it was well known in the Middle Ages, being summed up in the axiom of logic that "Everybody's business is nobody's business." (Ch. 15, para 3, p. 216)

 

 

As the parable of the lamp under a bushel teaches, leaders have to shine into the darkest places if they are to have their intended effect, which is enlightenment.

 

"... the most effective remedy available is the appointment of regular guardians as soon as our sacred constitution is established, who shall have permanent responsibility for certifying that schools enlighten men's minds, churches inspire their hearts, and parliaments maintain national peace and for preventing errors from creeping in or developing." Comenius, Panorthosia, Ch. 15, para 7, p. 217

 

This new sort of leader operates on his or her own, autonomously and creatively, moved only by the Holy Spirit. He or she seeks out areas where his or her expertise is most needed, studies the situation and shares the discoveries openly with other such leaders. A non-monolithic leader, then, does not work as part of a visible bureaucracy or hierarchy.

 

In fact, the reader of chapter fifteen of Panorthosia, which describes in general terms the amorphous but still organized structure of the three Comenian institutions, is struck by the similarity between them and England's Royal Society. The most eminent scientists are appointed to this body but work apart, reporting their findings in regular conferences. The Royal Society is the model for scientific organizations in most nations around the world. Then one remembers that the Royal Society was originally inspired by Comenius's writings. Only in politics and religion are there no equivalent bodies that appoint the most prominent experts and bring them together to report on the results of their free enquiry.

 

There are, however, important differences. The criteria for choosing members of these "royal societies" are much broader. For example, someone chosen for the College of Light would not only be a brilliant scientist or educator, he or she also has to have the virtues taught in the other two institutions. A scholar,

 

"who is at the same time pious and capable will be a better director of Scholars than one who is simply a Scholar, and similarly a capable politician who is at the same time wise and pious will be a better director than one who is simply a politician without wisdom and piety." (Panorthosia, Ch. 15, para 19, pp. 220-221)

 

 

Another important distinction is that Comenius's free guardians are organized not only nationally but on a global scale. Members of national colleges elect a "president" from among themselves, who serves in the same way on a continental basis, in Asia, Europe, Africa, and so forth. Eventually these presidents come together to "constitute the senate of the world." (Panorthosia, para 15, p. 222); here they share findings in a conference held every ten or twenty-five years.

My Tahirih Moment

From Theology, the Alchemy of Faith, to Divine Philosophy

Wisdom and Folly, Speaking Qua Baha'i

"In the discussion of wisdom in your email of ... you observe that maybe `Baha'i academics all too often have not recognized that to a great extent failure to exercise wisdom represents a failure of love.' The House of Justice agrees that the exercise of wisdom calls for a measure of love and the development of a sensitive conscience. These, in turn, involve not only devotion to a high standard of uprightness, but also consideration of the effects of one's words and actions."

This letter from the Universal House of Justice (8 Feb 1998) points out several themes that turn up repeatedly in any discussion of wisdom. One is that wisdom somehow straddles the gap between love and knowledge -- in fact, the Master said that knowledge _is_ love. Another is that wisdom teaches us to curtail our tongue. A wise person thinks before talking, is never capricious and takes every use of speech, especially speech about God, very seriously. We shall be spending much time on this theme in future essays. And finally, there is the seemingly universal tendency of experts and professionals to become insular and selfish, and to regard their own interests before those of society.

As this letter of the House demonstrates, Baha'is are not immune to this form of corruption. I recently was shocked to come across a post-graduate thesis where the author was openly calling himself a "Baha'i theologian." How could this happen? Baha'u'llah has specifically and emphatically excluded a professional clergy from His Cause. In the 24th Persian Hidden Word, which the Guardian interpreted to be a reference to the "Islamic" clergy of Iran, Baha'u'llah addresses them thusly, "O ye that are foolish, yet have a name to be wise!" Their egregious behaviour is such as to bring shame upon the very word "religion," how much more the word "theologian,"

"Wherefore do ye wear the guise of shepherds, when inwardly ye have become wolves, intent upon My flock? Ye are even as the star, which riseth ere the dawn, and which, though it seem radiant and luminous, leadeth the wayfarers of My city astray into the paths of perdition."

These fools in wise man's clothes are like the morning star, that is, that ultimate greenhouse-gas planet Venus, pretending to be the sun. Anybody who mistakes them for the sun is, well, a fool's fool. A willing victim of meta-foolishness. It is true that the Mullahs are not without competition, now that the scandal from the sheltering of child-abusing clergy has reached the Pope himself. But I ask you, which is worse, failing to protect a few dozen innocents from the lusts of some of your colleagues, or openly depriving half the population of their fundamental right to contribute to society, and conniving to suppress rival religions, denying their very right to call themselves a religion?

That is why I think Baha'is should recoil in horror at the very word "theology."

Think of it this way. Baha'u'llah did not forbid polygamy, He left it up to the Center of the Covenant to rule that this custom is unjust and unfair. Same way,He left it up to us to come to that conclusion. He did not explicitly say never to use the word "theology," but it is implied. The word is unnecessary. A similar thing happened, I recently learned, with the term "timocracy;" in the 1950's some guy started using the wholly unnecessary word for the same thing, "meritocracy." He meant it as a sort of sarcastic joke, but the word caught on, being more readily understandable to a generation of scholars unfamiliar with Greek.  Before that, there was no need for the term, since timocracy, rule of honour, covers merit nicely. But there is, I hope it is apparent, very good reason to shy away from the word "theology," when discussing the Baha'i Faith, just as there is to steer away from words like "heresy," "propaganda" and "dogma," which come out of mind sets that are wholly foreign to the Baha'i spirit.

I discussed this with the learned organizer of an academic Baha'i studies forum, and he did not agree. He said that the word "theology" as presently used does not necessarily imply that somebody studying this subject area is necessarily a professional, much less a clergy-person.

I countered with this argument: the very word theology stinks of folly. Its components, "theo," God, and "ology," study of, imply that an expert is "studying God." God is by definition an unknowable essence. Therefore anybody who thinks of himself as a theologian is stepping close to the precipice. He will be tempted to assume that the progress he makes in his study will give him privileged information about God, or at least that he will know more about Him than somebody who did not study the subject area. If it were the case that the study of religion led directly to achievement in religion, then Jesus would have been the most learned Rabbi in Jerusalem, Muhammad would have been chief shaman in Mecca, and the Bab the number one Mujtahid in Shi'ih Islam.

No, one does not lead to the other. No, one does not lead anywhere near the other.

In fact, this reflection supports an even stronger formulation of this argument. Why study theology at all? Why is the very subject area on the curriculum of a Baha'i institution of learning? There is no trade of alchemist anymore for good reason. It is because that study has been discredited. Alchemy has long been recognized as a complete waste of time to learn about. I may go about boasting of my vast knowledge of alchemy but nobody should be impressed because no good comes of such learning. Yet Baha'is allow themselves to be impressed by what theologians think constitutes knowledge of God, and we let these discredited professionals lead us down the garden path by studying what they think is important.

Is that not following the morning star as if it were the sun?

Consider this anecdote, which the Master often repeated when He was an old man. He was a child being dandled on the knee of Tahirih while Quddus and other prominent Babis were in an idle discussion of the usual theological hairsplitting. Did she go along? She was certainly qualified to talk with them as equals. No, she stopped it and said, essentially, that this is all a waste of time, that religion is not about words, it is an action, a leap of faith from prayer to action. Such talk is a waste of time and wisdom dictates that it be halted post haste. "Wisdom is before the face of one who has understanding, but the eyes of a fool wander to the ends of the earth." (Prov 17:24, WEB) Faith is reflection followed by sacrificial action, and talking about it does as much good as talking about alchemy.

Did the Master tell this anecdote disapprovingly, saying that we should not do what Tahirih did, we instead should involve ourselves wholly in theological blathering? No, he told the story advisedly. Be like Tahirih.

Well, what do we call this outburst of the greatest heroine of the Babis? Oldsters talk about a "senior moment" when they forget something, so let us call it a "Tahirih moment." A Tahirih moment comes when we remember what is surely one of the most important lessons of wisdom, that we should forget talk and act; when we realize that theology useless talk about what we cannot know, ever. A Tahirih moment is when we remember to forget what deserves to be forgotten, and when we go straight to the essence of the question, sacrificial action.

It is true that whereas in the West we stereotype women as artsy fartsy, spiritual, head in the clouds types, in Iran the stereotype is the opposite. Women are practical, hard headed thinkers and men are the poetic dreamers. In that case, Tahirih would have been making a contribution towards rebalancing her society back towards a balance with the women's perspective. So be it. Her point that theology is a waste of words and time still stands.

I once had a Tahirih moment. I was on the bus going from the mountain to downtown Hamilton. I had been sitting alone in my seat for the whole bus trip wading through several pages of dense text from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Suddenly I grasped what he had been saying, but at the same time I realized that what he had said in ten pages of close reasoning could have been said in a musical phrase, a stanza of poetry, or in a flash of meditative reflection. It was interesting that it is possible to express this in words, but why? Why bother with this? If the shortest distance from point A to point B is a straight line, why go through C to Z before you reach B? Is it not a waste of time? Is it not better to do what science did with alchemy, that is, leave it aside as a wrong answer? There are an infinite number of wrong answers; and in life as in mathematics, we only have time to study the right ones.

I call this a Tahirih moment, but maybe I am being arrogant. A true Tahirih moment is the time when one decides to shut up and teach or pioneer, or to give to the fund until it hurts. Or, in the case of Tahirih and Quddus, to leave off all the garbage and palaver and start down the path to martyrdom. I call my moment that only because it helped me understand what a Tahirih moment is.

Certainly Baha'u'llah was of the opinion that words and learning do not matter a hang unless they bring about results. You should not call a skilled or learned person wise from the mere fact that they have learned a great deal. You should only call wise those who have brought their learning to a good, happy end, and who have followed the Law of God. He says, for instance, in the Kalimat-i-Firdousiyyih that,

"This Wronged One hath invariably treated the wise with affection. By the wise is meant men whose knowledge is not confined to mere words and whose lives have been fruitful and have produced enduring results. It is incumbent upon everyone to honour these blessed souls. Happy are they that observe God's precepts; happy are they that have recognized the Truth; happy are they that judge with fairness in all matters ..." (Tablets, 62)

Baha'u'llah offers Himself as an example, and then says that we all have an obligation to "honour these blessed souls." So Baha'i teaching is the reverse of anti-intellectual. Like the Jews, whose proportion of intellectual overachievers and Nobel Prize winners is partly attributable to the fact that Jewish culture values learning highly, Baha'is love and respect the learned. But only those who produce, not the poseurs and alchemists among them. And especially not the discredited theologians, who have made themselves the very personifications of sinister folly. Their mistake should be clear to all Baha'is, and we should steer well clear of their odour.

"Say, O people of the earth! Beware lest any reference to wisdom debar you from its Source or withhold you from the Dawning-Place thereof. Fix your hearts upon your Lord, the Educator, the All-Wise." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p. 149)

In the essay written yesterday, I mentioned that scientists are being implicitly arrogant by using the Latin word Scientia for their discipline, which implies that all other pursuits are not knowledge. I suggested we go back to the original name for it, natural philosophy. I did not mention another unfortunate name shift around that time. Before, the many disciplines we now call philosophy were called "metaphysics." A philosopher was a non-specialist, a generalist, by definition. Scientists and theologians were types of philosopher. Around the early 19^th century, natural philosophers started calling themselves scientists and meta-physicians started calling themselves philosophers, leading to a terrible narrowing of what I think is the most important, universal and general way of understanding the world. Everybody, especially every intellectual, should be a philosopher first, and a specialist only afterwards.

Anyway, my friend Peter read that essay that and suggested that we could do the same for what Baha'is study, we could call it what the Master did, divine philosophy. The second volume of His talks in Paris, after all, was called, presumably with His knowledge and consent, Divine Philosophy. So when we sponsor a course, please, please do not call it theology, call it divine philosophy. Give Tahirih a chance.

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Yet More Escutcheons

Groups, Boffins and Beauty

By John Taylor; 2009 Oct 19, Ilm 05, 166 BE


Escutcheons for Groups and Institutions


We have been looking mostly at personal escutcheons so far, but in reality that is only the beginning. Personal escutcheons are the foundation for a set of standard reforms to be introduced at every level of society, from the individual to the household, company, school, neighbourhood, city, region, nation, continent and the world.


Group escutcheons are a much more complex proposition individual ones. In a democratic meritocracy, groups depend utterly upon the initiative, goodwill and consensus of opinion among individuals in order to progress. Institutional escutcheons plug into the dashboard displays and escutcheons of many individuals, both within their membership and without. But they also interact closely with other groups at all levels of society.


Like a personal escutcheon, each family, company, government or other organization has some freedom to decide upon what plans, measures and criteria to display on their escutcheon, according to their current needs and priorities. However, whereas individuals design their escutcheons autonomously, setting up their own self-monitored goals and criteria of success, group escutcheons must adhere to many rules and standards imposed from within and without. Group policies must be open, their goals determined by free elections and progress verified by qualified outside parties.


As mentioned, the mottos and displays on escutcheons act as interfaces from one person or group to all others. Many of these interfaces are obligatory. Institutions, unlike individuals, are required to display their escutcheon in public. By law, schools, companies, faith groups, families, neighbourhoods and governments, must place their escutcheon in a prominent place over their door, on membership cards and their website.


Depending upon their purpose, an institution can earn the right to add certain features and distinctions to their escutcheon. Badges and emblems are designed to be a recognizable, open set of standards, determined by data gathered according to strict regulations. Badges are standard, audited by licensed specialists, and change automatically according to received criteria. Like a policeman's badge, the escutcheon serves as public notification of licensing and accreditation. Their visualizations are designed to ensure transparency, to discourage nepotism or favouritism in awarding grants and contracts. They assure that every bidder's qualifications are clear and accessible by the public, who have a right to view and analyze their escutcheon.


Rise of the Boffins


Future political scientists will surely look back on this time as having the biggest, most dangerous power vacuum ever. Our lack of leadership is staggering. Leaders at all levels do nothing but dawdle while temperatures and sea-levels soar and glaciers melt. It is unlikely that any individual leader, no matter how wise or charismatic, can possibly fit the bill. This is because the sort of leader we need today is not an individual at all.


Undoubtedly, we need good individuals to take the lead; we always have and always will. But pay too much attention to individual leaders. This is unhealthy and in fact contributes to the power vacuum. No, the real default of leadership today is not that leaders in themselves are lacklustre or inadequate, is in a sad lack of influence of experts and expertise. We leave our trades and professions forlorn, banished from the halls of power.


Everything comes of opinion, so it only makes sense that the opinion of our best experts should come before that of others. We cannot expect professionals to serve, advise and obey passively. The problem with the UN's Science Advisory Panel on Climate Change is that it is just that, an advisory panel. True, this body has increased greatly in prestige as more thinking people realize that stopping greenhouse gas emissions is vital to our collective survival.


What we really need are panels of experts with teeth. Give them power to tell governments what to do. Right now, the panel on climate change is telling the world: "Stop these emissions or we are all cooked, literally." But that is not enough. They need power to act directly, not just sit on the sidelines. Then the boffins can take the initiative and lead from the front lines in humanity's battle for survival.


What is more difficult, though, is that we need the opinion of some, those expert in important disciplines, to have more sway than others, whose knowledge is in areas that are less crucial to human survival. Some professionals, such as actors and celebrities, hog the limelight while climate scientists are allowed on only as extras. Nor is climate alone among sciences being ignored. It is just one of a thousand areas of expertise where we are not doing the right thing, or even the sensible thing. We need farmers, doctors, teachers and other experts not to be content with telling us what to do, they must be in unalienable positions of honour where they can take political leaders to task as soon as they begin to ignore fundamentals.


Here are some examples. There are thousands, if not millions of soldiers, arms merchants and spies for every expert in peace studies. The number of agriculturalists has dwindled from over half to less than one percent of the population in many regions. As a result, farmers have little influence and in their work remain dependent upon hydrocarbons for fertilizers. This threatens the world with famine at the first rise in oil prices. There are thousands of linguists, chroniclers of languages and literary lights for every educator working to remove the language barrier. The list goes on.


Beautiful Balance Sheets


In high technology industries official bodies come together periodically to adopt standards for the next generation of products. This use of the consensus of expert opinion is pretty much the definition of the scientific method. Yet this process has more influence in some areas of human endeavour than others. It is all but unknown in religion, for example, yet it is commonplace in rapidly advancing high-technology industries. The problem with the latter, though, is that technical standards tend to be comprehensible only to highly trained specialists. The lay public is not consulted.


For example, investors in stocks learn after years of patient study how to read a balance sheet. Assuming that the data are reliable in a year-end report, they can look down the listing of facts and figures about a public corporation and rapidly assess its health.




With escutcheons bodies of experts will similarly agree upon what data are important, but they will cross the line of specialist knowledge and ask what graphics could represent the meaning of this information.


Collaborating with artists, they will find ways of summarizing health that are so intuitively obvious that any untrained person using their aesthetic sense alone can tell at a glance how robust a person, company or other institution is. The financial part of an escutcheon, for example, may not display the exact amount of savings or where investments are, but it will show a graphic attesting that the party in question is in good economic shape and has adhered to accepted norms in the industry.


Of course, nature already does this with organisms. Usually any viewer can tell at a glance whether the body of a plant, animal or human is a pretty or ugly example of its kind. If it has good genes it will have a strong and elegant enough constitution to pass them on to their progeny. In such cases, the face, flower or body an organism invariably strikes the eye as beautiful. When it looks symmetrical and harmonious, then every law of evolutionary biology says that this organism will be a good bet. If it is ugly, its chances of survival are probably slim.











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As it is now, organizations are expected consciously to manipulate their public face with paid advertising, in effect bribing the public to listen. This is done at prodigious cost, not only financially but to the truth, which is routinely distorted. Meanwhile, the public has little official, unbiased, verifiable information about what a company stands for, its qualifications and past achievements.



The advantage of escutcheons is not just that they bridge the chasm between specialists and lay, but mostly that they extend open standards to areas that have stubbornly resisted change for centuries. Some of the most hidebound include morality, religion, philosophy and politics. However, even accounting, a discipline where standards are highly advanced, would be revolutionized by escutcheons.


With an escutcheon display hooked into its balance sheets, anybody with minimal training would see the most important features of an organization's escutcheon at a glance, without referring to a single statistic or number. Right over its doorway a constantly updated graphic shows the relative well-being of an institution, whether it is keeping up to its stated goals and purposes, and so forth. As graphic standards are finalized for escutcheons, more and more indicators of an institution's budgetary and financial condition can gradually be incorporated into its escutcheon displays. As it is shown across the industry to be official and reliable, clients will be inclined to pay attention to each new indicator.


When a given badge has withstood scrutiny and feedback for a decade, it will be integrated into the world curriculum. In time, any educated person in the world will be able to walk through the portals of any institution whose escutcheon shows this badge posted over its doorway and gain an instant picture of its health, its plans and accomplishments. Passers-by who want more details can use HUD's or mobile devices to drill down using its wireless feed and pass beyond iconography to the raw numbers and statistics that form them.


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Stacking the Deck for Agrarianism in the College of Light

Freedom in Science and Education, Part II

By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 31, Asma 12, 166 BE

Yesterday, we broached two questions. The first question concerns freedom and the internal workings of the College of Light, the independent world institution charged with the advancement of science and the spread of education. The other asks: what kind of relation would the college of light have with the other wings of the Comenian world government, the political and religious? Let us try, however briefly, to answer these questions today.

The distinguishing mark of governance over the last century is a persistent, systemic failure of policy makers to listen to expert advice. Instead of working with the delicate climate and other environmental systems of this planet, we systematically upset and destroy them. At the same time, science has made tremendous strides in understanding how the delicately balanced ecosystems on our beautiful planet work.

From a democratic point of view, the chief reason for this obliviousness to our basic survival is that world population over the past century has undergone a complete shift from agrarianism, where more than 90 percent of the population work the land, to an urban society. Today, the majority of the world's population live in cities.

The way cities are built means that the surroundings of city dwellers from cradle to grave tend to be completely artificial. They live a lifestyle cut off from the cycles of nature that sustain them and in their professional lives they rarely gain direct experience with agriculture or energy production. As a result, voters simply are too ignorant to care what happens to the natural environment, although they may be vaguely aware that it does keep us alive. This is why some of the worst polluters in the world are democracies. Leaders there have little concern for where food comes from and for what must be done to assure that we continue to eat well and safely.

The formation of a democratic world government would not in itself be sufficient to solve this maladjustment. It might, as we have been arguing here that it would, shift authority from the nationalist state towards a world center and out to the periphery (stronger local governance). That is, power would go to exactly where environmental dislocation is addressed most effectively. However, that in itself is not enough if the electorate, however universal and world-embracing, remains primarily urban. As long as voters know and care little for nature or agriculture, leaders will hardly push their electorate to make the sacrifices that stopping climate change demands.

The College of Light, as imagined by John Amos Comenius, is a democratic and meritocratic entity devoted to research and the spread of useful knowledge. In its operations the College of Light would have to balance the imperious demands of knowledge with the freedom and equality that democracy requires.

First, meritocracy. As we saw last time, knowledge imposes its own power relations by selecting for those who prove their love and devotion to it. Knowledge sets up its own meritocracy that raises those who command it and subordinates the ignorant. It is the duty of the learned to see to it that any inequality that does exist is natural; that is, any inequality that persists is not based on externals such as skin colour or place of birth but solely upon demonstrable knowledge and experience.

This evolutionary process of artificial selection is true in politics, where any measure that conduces to peace is chosen over what leads to war. John Stuart Mill pointed out the utility of freedom in picking out lessons about essentials from out of the vast diversity of experimentation in human groups.

"Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own." (On Liberty, 181)

The need for selection is also evident in religion. The Qur'an, for example, has God applying it to Holy Writ, "Say: `Bring down from God a scripture that is a better guide than these and I will follow it, if what ye say be true!'" (Qur'an 28:49) and it extends it also to entire peoples,

"Thy Lord is self-sufficient, full of Mercy: if it were His will, He could destroy you, and in your place appoint whom He will as your successors, even as He raised you up from the posterity of other people. (Qur'an 6:133, tr. Yusuf)

But in the realm of science and education, the principle of selecting for fitness according to merit surely applies most of all.

At the same time, the College of Light is also democratic in nature. As such, it will make every attempt to adhere to the assumption of equality and the yearning for freedom that are basic to its democratic element. Therefore, the College will see to it that everyone votes in elections of its members in some capacity. In a Marxian sense, everybody is a productive worker, actively supporting herself by her own efforts to learn and adhering to standards in service.

Although they may have to be appointed at first, eventually the membership of the College of Light (whose affiliates extend from the world center right down to a school-room in every family and neighbourhood) would be selected by tradespersons and professionals around the world in a series of planetary elections.

Unfortunately, suffrage may not include everybody at first, since all are not presently qualified tradespersons or professionals. However, the first constitutional priority of this institution is to see to it that as soon as possible every citizen attains the right to vote for the College, virtually without exception. This ambitious goal of a universal franchise could take as long as a generation to implement completely. Every world citizen would have to be trained and apprenticed to an approved trade or profession. While challenging, this commitment by leaders and constituents alike to science and education is a necessary condition for the Universal Civic Society to come into existence. The goal of a UCS is to see to it that learning extends throughout one's life and service to society, through both membership in a family and in some trade or profession.

The next question is how the College might be organized. That requires an answer to questions like:

What kind of expertise should take precedence over others?

What kind of knowledge is most useful?

This is an extremely difficult question. There are thousands of disciplines and trades whose usefulness fluctuates as wildly as the stock market. We should probably leave the choice of what is the most valuable kind of knowledge to philosophers and educators to answer. However, it seems plain that the medical and teaching professions are among the most useful kinds of expertise, since they nurture and protect both body and mind. Even more important are farming, fishing and other agricultural trades, since we depend upon them for our food. If the College of Light bases voting rights on an established hierarchy of utility, it could help reverse the trend from urbanism and turn even cities back to agrarianism. As we mentioned already, a strong democratic base in an agrarian majority will be necessary if we hope to make industry and civilization environmentally sustainable.

Specifically, I have something like this in mind. Let us say that there are twenty members on the College of Light with each major discipline voting in one representative each, except teachers and doctors who get two representatives, and farmers who receive three or four. This slightly disproportion of power, along with other measures, would encourage a greater proportion of young people to go into farming, medicine and teaching before they consider other trades.

The College could speed up the swing back to an agrarian society by starting and regulating a secondary trade of "gardener," who would assist farmers in the same way that nurses assist doctors. This new trade would encourage city dwellers to start gardens and eat locally. It would encourage most city dwellers to participate, if only on a part-time basis, in the branch of agriculture known as "urbiculture." It would also speed the spread of vertical farms and rooftop gardens, which agriculturalists would gain a new right to farm. At the very least, more pervasive gardening within city limits would increase the appreciation of city dwellers for nature and would make democracy friendlier to the environment.

John Taylor


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

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Long Live the Philosopher King!

The Democratization of Expertise

2009 July 02, Rahmat 08, 166 BE

Precis: Popular, general elections are only a first step to democracy. In future every government will surely be moderated by a UCS, a partnership between politicians chosen by a general election and experts chosen by their peers to consult with them in view of the consensus of scientific and religious opinion, and to carry out the resulting plans. Their own de-centralized justice, enforced by constant peer review, will assure that power will never corrupt the learned, as it has every centralized human institution in the past.

Over the past week we have discussed on the Badi' blog the empowerment that would be released by the establishment of permanent peace. Nothing less than the evolution of the natural world and human nature, Kant predicted, must eventually bring together east and west, north and south in a constitutional world government. The perpetual peace that this body enacts and protects would enable a universal polity that Kant called a "universal cosmopolitan condition." He envisioned this condition arising from a series of "reformative revolutions" consummating in a Universal Civic Society, or UCS. Like every social benefit, the UCS will be the outcome of improved education.

Schooling for a UCS will de-emphasize individual competition, tests, examinations and sorting the wheat from the chaff while emphasizing the ability to work creatively in a group; the curriculum will operate under the twin principles of irreducibility and subsidiarity, meaning that half a student's time is spent learning a trade (subsidiarity, learning what is close to hand for practical independence) and the other half gaining a liberal education, that is, learning whatever should be common knowledge for all world citizens (irreducibility: a cosmopolitan cannot be reduced to anything less than a master of universal learning).

We have discussed the introduction at an early point in this training of a full vote for children, as soon as they prove themselves to be serious apprentices of a given area of expertise. From their first day, primary pupils would prepare for their plunge into democracy by practicing peer review and meta-review along with group study projects teaching not only how to consult and learn in a group, cooperatively, but also how to teach group members while doing so.

Lacking such training, we now allow token, sporadic voting in politics (which is a sham because the numbers are too large for direct personal knowledge by electors) but the workplace, the trades and professions, education, law, corporations, families and neighborhoods are all more or less bereft of democracy. The result is that in politics we confuse populism with democracy. We set the mass of the people against the learned, and vice versa. Experts do not vote for one another, in spite of the fact that they, more than any other group except perhaps the family, have intimate and extended face-to-face contact with one another on a daily level. This extended contact is surely the first pre-requisite for pure democratic choice.

Ignorance of how to integrate on-the-spot peer review into group projects banishes experts from taking their rightful claim to primacy in the decision making process, especially in technical matters and in planning social reform.

The reason is clear.

The powers that be are very reluctant to encourage democratized expertise either in education or the workplace because this increased legitimacy of expert opinion would make it impossible to corrupt the decision making process. The privileged now manipulate policy by seeing to it that the only way for a politician to be nominated for democratic choice is to become beholden to lobbies and vested interests. The people are forced to take a gun to their own head and sell themselves to the highest bidder.

With firm guidance from a democratically chosen body of the learned, it is certain that other, more effective forms of democracy and capitalism would soon prevail. Bodies of experts would not only have the latest consensus of opinion of their fields of study on their side but they could also claim to be elected by their peers in a free and open elective process.

The best recent proof of how experts can intervene effectively and how they might operate in future is the U.N.'s panel of scientists (the IPCC, International Panel on Climate Change) studying the current statistical consensus on climate change. In spite of the fact that this body of experts has no direct political power and cannot do more than make recommendations, the IPCC has had spectacular success in grabbing the attention of policymakers everywhere (though most would argue that even this is still not enough). The IPCC's members are not elected by their peers, they are appointed under the oversight of a U.N. committee, and the U.N. itself is not a non-democratic body. Nonetheless the increasingly dire danger that they are studying has jettisoned them to an influence over the past five years that is unprecedented in the history of science.

The inexorable advance of global warming demands a quick and complete response. The problem demands radical change on every level of society, from individual behaviour (to point at just one example, the inefficiency and greenhouse gasses produced by meat production calls for a rapid increase in the numbers of vegetarians) to home construction (the wastefulness of buildings and neighbourhood design are major contributors to warming), to the way we travel (as George Monbiot points out, we should seriously consider grounding jet airplanes until we can figure out how to keep them from polluting the atmosphere at its most sensitive location).

As Kant said, both nature and human nature impel us to a single conclusion. Before we take a step to halt climate change we need to work out a happy combination of meritocracy with democracy by increasing the power and influence of experts at every level, and by making their education and daily operations as close as possible to the democratic ideal.

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Getting Experts and the People to Embrace

Telling Truth to Power Really Means Planning

By John Taylor; 2009 July 01, Rahmat 07, 166 BE

Precis: If we are ever to start addressing the challenge of global
warming, specialists will have to renounce their monastic seclusion
and enter into social action. This can be done by formalizing and
opening up the mechanisms of planning.

One thing that Mike Holmes, star of the television series "Holmes on
Homes," often says on his show sums up what I have been aiming at in
the Badi' essays written over the past week. He says that most
homeowners know what they want but that it is the sacred duty of
contractors and other expert tradespersons before they touch a
contract or pick up a hammer to educate homeowners about what they
need. Otherwise, disaster threatens; roofs collapse, floods occur and
houses burn down. As the song says, you do not always get what you
want but sometimes you get what you need. That sounds like a plan.
Literally. A plan is feedback between what we want and what we need, a
process that continues before and during every action. On a broader
level, Holmes is responding in a practical way to the ancient, sacred
duty of the intellectual to tell truth to power.

The learned of all types must involve themselves in social planning,
since we all have to be certain of what we need before we can possibly
plan what we want. This is especially so now, when so little truth is
spoken to power, and less is heard. It is axiomatic that a community
of world citizens would be both what we need and what we want. It
would look far more beautiful than ours, torn as it is by conflicting
loyalties.

A big reason that the environment has deteriorated this badly is that
ever since the rise of Marxism and Fascism, experts in the West have
roundly rejected comprehensive thinking, and planning most of all.
Now, the looming threat of global climate destabilization is acting as
a giant alarm bell, booming at Ivory Towers everywhere to empty out.
Experts must stop learning more and more about less and less and start
working out what we all need to know in order to plan together. Only
by uniting the people with the experts and together planning our
collective rescue can we hope to reverse climate change.

As theorists from Aristotle to `Abdu'l-Baha tell us, every conscious
plan requires three things, knowledge, volition and action. To build a
house or addition to a house you need an architect or other qualified
designer to devise a plan that takes into account current standards
and building codes (knowledge). Then, you need the power to act,
meaning the money to pay workers and buy materials (volition).
Finally, you need coordinated, punctual application of the plan by
skilled workers (action).

The first requirement of every building plan, as Mike Holmes often
points out, is that it adhere to code. Building codes protect
occupants by assuring that the new construction will not burn down or
collapse on their heads. We are threatened by global warming simply
because our building codes and other standards fall far short of what
the need is for safety on a planetary scale. We are unwilling to
respond to this increasingly glaring need because we are not world
citizens as yet. This broadening out to cosmopolitianism we need more
than anything to plan.

According to the Wikipedia article on Cosmopolitanism, the basis of a
cosmopolitan order is "nested structures of governance" that balance
two principles, irreducibility and subsidiarity. Irreducibility is the
principle that certain problems can only be addressed at the global
level. Examples are, as mentioned, global warming, as well as war and
strife among nations. The other principle of cosmopolitanism is
subsidiarity. This is the principle that decisions should be made at
as local a level as possible, since here is where the experts live.
Where there is face-to-face contact an impulse and feedback are
established between knowledge and experience.

Abdu'l-Baha spoke of such "nested structures" when He talked about
"circles of unity" or "circles of love." Each level or aspect of
society, from individual, family, skin colour, nation, color,
language, to the broadest, the human race under God, is a circle of
unity rippling out like waves from where a tossed stone enters a calm
pond. Each ripple is a wave enclosing all others, but it in turn is
enclosed by a wider wave.

According to `Abdu'l-Baha's brainchild, the Baha'i principles, the
closest wave to the center is the source of the original impulse, the
individual. As we investigate we are ever renewing our search for
truth, making the smallest but most energetic wave. The widest wave is
the goal and product of the efforts of us all, world peace. Search for
truth gives the world the cosmopolitan principle of subsidiarity,
since the self is the ultimate locality. Each of us on our own is best
qualified to work out our place in the universe and thereby advance
our own career, worship, education and service to humanity.

The principle of universal peace is the expression of irreducibility.
No matter how well we do as individuals and groups, it can all be
wiped out in a moment at the touch of the nuclear button, or more
slowly by the deterioration of the natural environment and the
destabilization of climate through global warming.

We need a truly open and democratic planning system. We need full
involvement by the learned in making standards, codes and plans that
apply subsidiarity and irreducability. That, combined with common
consent, wealth and practical action, would be our only hope to
respond quickly to the inexorable advance of global warming.


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

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