Justice I

Justice for Unity; First in a Series

By John Taylor; 2007 January 11

This past fall our monthly Philosopher's Cafe meeting in the Wainfleet Library discussed the topic, "What is love?" I was less than satisfied with the results. I realized that I firmly believe that it is impossible to talk about love in a vacuum like that without first being very firm on an antecedent question, "What is justice?" So I rather forcefully suggested that we discuss that question as well, and today we will be doing that. Normally Stu, using his training as a primary school teacher, handles the introductory classroom preparation for our Philosopher's Cafe by looking up a few quotes on the given topic and using them as conversation starters. I do not participate in this, not out of laziness but because I do not think that such forethought is in the spirit of the Socrates Cafe movement, which places the onus on participants, even as far as choosing a topic spontaneously and on the spot.

Nonetheless, I feel so strongly about our topic justice that this time I have indulged in some belated propaedeutics. I went over what I have written in past years and to my shock and awe I discovered that the amount is sparse. Pick just about any other Baha'i principle and there is more than enough material to overwhelm, but not so with justice. What I do have tends to be on sub-categories of justice. I have written no fewer than thirty essays on suicide, five on reward and punishment, and only six on law and justice itself. Of those six probably more than half are about law rather than justice proper. Part of the explanation may be that in categorizing the essays over the years I felt that justice is such a basic that it would have undermined the foundations of other principles to have separated out everything touching upon it.

Nonetheless, justice is an independent Baha'i principle, as the Master affirmed several times, and I definitely should treat it as such. So I will start off now a new series on justice as an independent Baha'i principle. But before I do, let me share this slightly revised version of an essay I submitted for a High School law course that I took just before we bought this house and moved to Dunnville. In a sense it marks the first and last of two major phases in my life, the last of a dormant, research phase and the first of this daily essay period. I have made revisions but left the argument and presentation largely as they were.

 

Justice for Unity, An Alternative to the Adversarial system

 Originally submitted for a course in law at St. Jean de Brebeuf High School, Instructor: Mr. C. Silvestri, 18 December, 1996

 
If one historical lesson is universally recognized, it is that if we are to permanently better our world we must begin by improving the laws that condition justice, for justice is the very grounds of our existence. "No peace without justice!" is a chant we inevitably hear from demonstrators and activists. A turning point came with the modern resurgence of medieval intolerance in the gross abuses of human rights by the Nazi Regime before and during the Second World War. This prompted the 1947 United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Similarly, the environmental crisis has prompted a series of consultations which will lead in 1999 to an "Earth Charter." (Cameron Smith, "Earth Charter draft involves global input," Toronto Star, 5 October, 1996, p. C6) Perhaps the reason we are so quick to declare universal rights and slow to implement them on the world level is that we are confused about the very nature and purpose of law.

The textbook definition of the purpose of law is that it aims to fulfill the goals of society, to resolve disputes, to protect the person, property and rights, and to provide order in society. (Talos, Steven, et al., Understanding the Law, McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, Ltd., Toronto, 1990., pp. 29-31) Unfortunately, the goals of society as presently understood are too narrow to provide order and security, especially on a world level. They manage to bolster the Status Quo but are glaringly inadequate to solve ingrained, structural injustices. To mention only the most egregious example, the relatively tiny population of North America wastes the energy and controls the lion's share of world resources; even among North Americans a tiny minority has virtually all the wealth and property. Bad as it is, the imbalance is steadily worsening with the passage of time.

If this massive failure of distributive justice is ever to be righted, we must clarify our understanding of the purpose of law and rethink what justice is all about. Justice is an extremely difficult concept to nail down because it is at the same time the most universal and the most particular of quantities. It is universal in that everybody deserves a fair shake, but how can we know what is fair when there is such diversity? Everybody is an individual with particular needs, tastes and inclinations. Hence, one of the oldest definitions of justice is, "To each his own," Suum Cuique Tribuere.

A just order, then, would be universal, it would assure that the rights of the weak are protected while giving every citizen a maximal say in what is theirs. Such universality is a broadly recognized outcome of natural law theory and at the same time it pretty much defines the belief in God, a belief that world-wide opinion polls agree is held by the vast majority of the human race. A supreme God can be presumed to have a purpose and a use for every creature. An official paper put out by the Catholic Church demonstrates what this entails,

"`Justice' is not simply a matter of proper distribution of goods (distributive justice) but also of permitting and indeed requiring each person to participate in the production of those goods (social justice)." (Conference of Catholic Bishops, quoted in Lebacqz, Karen, Six Theories of Justice, Perspectives from Philosophical and Theological Ethics, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1986., p. 69)

My own religion, the Baha'i Faith, similarly upholds distributive and social justice, and perhaps goes further. Baha'u'llah, the nineteenth century religious reformer who founded the Baha'i Faith, wrote that justice, wonderful as it is, is not an end in itself; it has a particular purpose,

"The light of men is Justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Baha'i World Centre Publications, Haifa, Israel, 1978, pp. 66-7)

Any law will uphold justice if and only if it promotes unity. A just world order would promote unity, both for individuals and on as universal a level as possible. Baha'is further believe that when everybody participates in any social goal, a spiritual power for good is unleashed in the heart. We promote a methodology we call "consultation" designed to bring religious attitudes and insights into play in bringing diverse personalities and viewpoints together in harmonious unity.

Many criminologists already recognize universality not only as a goal for the justice system, but as an alternative to the present advocacy model.

"A participatory justice system, using dispute resolution techniques such as mediation and negotiation and having as a primary objective consensual agreements between parties and restoration of order, has the potential to be less costly, more efficient, and more effective than the competitive and conflict oriented approaches of the current adversarial model of criminal justice." (Griffiths, Curt, et al, Canadian Criminal Justice, Butterworth’s, Toronto, 1989., p. 595)

The danger, they point out, is that the state will use community participation only to legitimize current practice, to tighten their control and further expand the size of an already bloated system. (Griffiths, ibid, p. 525) Clayton Ruby writes that "Modern victim movements are supported by the establishment - police, prosecutors, government - only when they ... settle for the establishment agenda: harsher penalties and more criminal prosecutions." (Clayton C. Ruby, Spousal Abuse: Establishment Agenda Just Won't Work, letter to Toronto Star, 16 November, 1996., p. d3) The criminal justice system, this famous Canadian jurist points out, works only by incapacitation, and their support vanishes when these groups insist on financial support for their real needs.

Clearly, any system based on conflict and punishment cannot involve everyone, since it assumes a world made up of "bad guys" and "good guys". For Baha'is, this conflict model is a symptom of a deeper problem.

"Whether in the form of the adversarial structure of civil government, the advocacy principle informing most of civil law, a glorification of the struggle between classes and other social groups, or the competitive spirit dominating so much of modern life, conflict is accepted as the mainspring of human interaction. It represents yet another expression in social organization of the materialistic interpretation of life that has progressively consolidated itself over the past two centuries." (Office of Public Information, Baha'i International Community, The Prosperity of Humanity, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Ill., 1995, Paragraph 13. This document was put forward at the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, 1995 by the Baha'i International Community, a non-governmental organization at the United Nations)

Conflict is inimical to a fundamental tenet of Natural Law theory, which holds that we should follow the example of a loving God who created all and nurtures everybody. "All have sinned" and all are dependent on divine mercy rather than justice. It follows that a legal system intended to uphold unity would try to eliminate disputes before they arise. That this is not so is attested to by the fact that by one estimate less than one percent of the seven billion dollars spent annually on police, courts and jails in Canada goes to crime prevention. (Estimate of Judith Higginbotham of the urban safety committee of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, quoted in "Municipalities Urge National Crime Group, Seek More Spending on Prevention", Toronto Star, 6 December, 1991, p. C14) It is well known that Eastern nations get by with a fraction of the number of lawyers as the U.S. by using alternative means.

"The role of law in China and Japan ...is somewhat different from its role in Western nations. Respect for the processes of law is low, at least outside matters of business and industry. Tradition looms much larger in everyday life. Resort to legal resolution of a dispute is truly a last resort, with conciliation being the mechanism that is preferred for social control." (Article, Law, in Funk and Wagnall’s New Encyclopedia, 1996 "Encarta" electronic version, R. R. Donnelly and Sons, Publishers)

Another reason to be suspicious of the adversarial system is that it arose from a patriarchal model of governance. Gwynne Dyer and others have taken the idea of patriarchy out of its former feminist context and placed it in the mainstream of peace theory. (cf. for example, the four hour CBC documentary "The Human Race" by Gwynne Dyer, reviewed in Macleans Magazine, 5 Sep/94, p. 52) In essence, patriarchy was a way of ordering a society so as to make it a more effective military force. Women were to stay at home and have as many babies as possible while boys are trained from birth to grow up to become good cannon fodder. Though there is no need for comprehensive military preparation now, and the need for equality for women is widely recognized, our society refuses to cast aside the remnants of patriarchy. For example, boys are still enthusiastically raised in the "us" versus "them" mentality of competitive team sports, traditionally a physical and mental preparation for war. In law, advocacy grew from trial by combat, (Talos, ibid., pp. 326-7) a system that could only arise in a society where every citizen was expected to be a trained soldier.

In a conflict-based system gross structural injustices seem natural, even inevitable. The grand achievement of constitutional law in industrialized democracies has been to assure adequate rights for the people living under strong nationalist governments. But structural injustices on the world level seep down and tend to nullify this achievement. Two examples, one linguistic, the other financial, underline this point.

On a world level, the language barrier reinforces fundamental inequities. Most of the human race is excluded by the minority language they speak from defending their fundamental human rights in the forum of world opinion. In Canada, the lack of an officially sanctioned and promoted world inter-language (that is, a second language, such as Esperanto, taught alongside one's cultural language that would be used for communication outside one's ethnic group) sets English, French, and Native languages into direct competition with each other. This artificial conflict of interests periodically threatens the survival of the nation itself.

Elite languages like French and English have constitutional protection but the languages of the founding peoples, though no longer officially forbidden, are in large part ignored, their perpetuation sporadically funded, if at all. No doubt, these languages could make a unique contribution for Canadian justice reform. For example, many native languages rely on verbs rather than nouns, which conveys "an emphasis on the belief that people are not forever one thing or another," and they avoid labels like `criminal' or recidivist'. (cf. review by Rupert Ross in The Toronto Star, 12 October, 1996, of Ross, Rupert, Returning to the Teachings, Exploring Aboriginal Justice, Penguin, 1996)

In economics, the lack of a world government allows the extremely wealthy and multi-national corporations to operate outside the legal restraint of any state. In the financial sector so-called "off-shore" financial institutions siphon trillions of dollars each year from the tax base. (cf. Naylor, Richard, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1987) This has ravished poor countries for many decades, but lately even wealthy nations are sinking into debt and severe financial restraint. Thrift is good, but scrimping on infrastructure, especially education, is counterproductive; in the long run letting trillions of tax dollars to leak away reduces overall wealth and increases the expenses of patching up problems caused by, for example, an ignorant, crime ridden populace. It is not a coincidence that the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, is at the same time the most conflict-oriented, the most openly subscribes to the doctrines of power politics, and in its inner cities is, with few equals, the most crime ridden.

As a Baha'i I believe that a universal, cooperative model instituted under a world government would be the only reform that could conceivably solve these structural problems of language, budgetary deficits and crime.

How might `justice for unity' be implemented? What might seem an insurmountably difficult task could come about quicker than expected. While technology may seem to have little to do with "justice for unity," it is technical means that define how universal unity can be. Millennia ago transportation was so slow that only unity on the level of a city-state was practicable. Now, instant communication between anyone anywhere in the world allows unity that is both intimate and universal, everywhere on the planet.

Computers and communications have revolutionized every discipline, but the legal system remains largely untouched. Advances that are unhesitatingly accepted elsewhere become bogged down in the mire of red tape and the potential for abuse of human rights. Unfortunately, there is great suspicion between citizens and government, and among people, police and the criminal justice system. Some criminologists, for example, doubt the effectiveness of technological means, not in themselves, but because of a lack of broad support for the justice system in the community. (Curt Griffiths, et al, Canadian Criminal Justice, Butterworths, Toronto, 1989, p. 593) This atmosphere of suspicion for change is inevitable in an adversarial system.

Improvements like video and electronic surveillance in police investigations, database information systems, and monitoring of offenders under house arrest "may only be the tip of the technological iceberg." (Griffith, idem.) Work is being done to simplify civil cases and pre-trial motions by using fax and conference calls to argue them. (Tracy Tyler, "Argue by fax, phone, civil lawyers urged," Toronto Star, 29 October, 1991, p. A6) Artificial intelligence can even be used to predict judicial decisions, thus making abstruse legal problem solving available to non-professionals.

"Nevertheless, such strategies may serve only to extend the power of the criminal justice system without improving its effectiveness in addressing the needs of communities, victims, or offenders. If it is acknowledged that criminal justice agencies are largely reactive in nature and are able to respond only to the symptoms rather than the causes of crime, caution should be exercised in assuming that the adoption of more sophisticated technologies will solve the crime problem or increase the effectiveness and relevance of the criminal justice response. In the coming years, the application of high technology will raise numerous ethical and legal questions, but may also provide an opportunity to replace the nearly two-century-old techniques of parole, probation, and correctional institutions." (Griffith, Ibid., pp. 593-4)

The way for legal technology to address the root causes of crime is to engage everyone in an educative dialogue, a discussion aimed at establishing justice for unity in the hearts and minds of all. I would suggest that this could be done using public meetings, extended by internet resources such as Usenet Newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat discussions. But ultimately such reform would have to rely on the media, which now are unfortunately owned and run by private corporations. Their concern right now is to promote corporate interests and products by attracting interest in the seamy, bloody aspects of legal transgressions, not in improving the legal system itself. While it is not at all clear what it would take to reform the press, broader ownership among community, religious and government groups would no doubt help.

The cooperative model of justice for unity would not abolish the law but fulfill it. It calls for the expansion of legal thinking into the consciousness of every world citizen. This means charters of rights and freedoms not only between people and government, and people and the environment, but also between workers and employers, and individuals and any other type of organization. An "Employee's Bill of Rights" has been proposed (proposal of David W. Ewing, in Freedom Inside the Organization, for an Employee's Bill of Rights, cited in Spence, Gerry, With Justice for None, Destroying an American Myth, Times Books, New York, NY, 1989., p. 333) that would protect workers from discrimination due to justly criticizing their employer, against being fired for any outside activities, and would protect their privacy and assure the right to a fair hearing upon being fired.

Combining high technology with `justice for unity' will no doubt bring the long arm of the law into areas of human life that cannot be foreseen. Under a `justice for unity' system one can be confident that this would be a good thing for both society and the individual.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baha'u'llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Baha’i World Centre, Haifa, Israel, 1978.

Griffiths, Curt, et al, Canadian Criminal Justice, Butterworth’s, Toronto, 1989.

Lebacqz, Karen, Six Theories of Justice, Perspectives from Philosophical and Theological Ethics, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1986.

Office of Public Information, Baha'i International Community, The Prosperity of Humanity, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Ill., 1995.

Spence, Gerry, With Justice for None, Destroying an American Myth, Times Books, New York, NY, 1989.

Talos, Steven, et al., Understanding the Law, McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, Ltd., Toronto, 1990.

Potluck

Are Potlucks un-Baha'i?

By John Taylor; 2007 January 09

Six of nine members on our Local Spiritual Assembly are obese, which unfortunately is only slightly above the average for the population of Canada. At our last meeting we strayed from the written agenda and discussed this issue for the first time. Before moving on, it was decided to discuss the matter further at the open forum of the Feast -- so I do not think I am letting any confidential information out if I discuss it here in general terms.

The nub of the issue is, should we be having potluck refreshments after every meeting as we have been for time out of memory? This is an unshakable consensus that Potlucks are proper procedure, not for some but for all meetings. Yet this form of supply, be it refreshments or a whole meal, reverses the normal laws of moderation and not only condones but actually imposes an attitude that immoderation is not a sin or excess but a moral obligation. Every must bring something, that is universal participation, and that is a Baha'i principle.

Myself, I have reservations, especially about the Feast. After all, Baha'u'llah in confirming the Bab's institution of the monthly Feast in the Aqdas, says,

"Verily, it is enjoined upon you to offer a feast, once in every month, though only water be served; for God hath purposed to bind hearts together, albeit through both earthly and heavenly means." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, paragraph 57, p. 40)

Why did He add "though only water be served?" Mostly we assume that this means we can hold a Feast at the home of the poorest believer, at a home so poor that they cannot even afford food, only water. This assumes that Baha'u'llah really wanted to say here: have all you can eat at the Feast, stuff your face, but once in a while hold a Feast at a poor person's place where they cannot afford food. Do not leave them out. Maybe there really are Baha'is who are that poor, I do not know. But even if that is the case, the very existence of potluck nullifies the possibility of a water-only feast, ever. No matter how poor that person is, even if their children have been raised up from babes-in-arms on water instead of mother's milk, there will always be a superabundance of food at their home because every member of the community will be expected to carry with them an armful of goodies. Why would He have written that? Had the institution of potluck not been invented yet? Had nobody ever thought, why not make it an obligation for everybody who comes to BYOB -- oh yeah, booze was not allowed in Muslim lands but BYOF bring your own food anyway? Did the idea never occur to them? No, wait, maybe they had thought of it and rejected it. Even here in the West if you brought your own food to a traditional household you were not helping but deliberately insulting the host by implying that they did not know or care or, worst of all, possess the resources to have guests. In Eastern households even if you are dead poor and sworn never to go near an infidel, if one turns up as a guest they feed you anyway and are even more insulted at any offers of help.

Now we are far past such primitive notions of hospitality. Now we reverse the burden. If some poor irresponsible blighter turns up empty-handed at a potluck the implication is clear to all. Here is a moocher, a freeloader. Not an honored guest, mind you, but a good-for-nothing seeking to live off the bounty of others while giving nothing back in return.

Wait a minute. Maybe the idea of hospitality is not dead. Didn't the Master in a Tablet addressed, "O thou steadfast in the Covenant," write,

"The host, with complete self-effacement, showing kindness to all, must be a comfort to each one, and serve the friends with his own hands. If the Feast is befittingly held, in the manner described, then this supper will verily be the Lord's Supper, for its fruits will be the very fruits of that Supper, and its influence the same." (Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 425)

Everybody knows what the Lord's Supper looked like because Leonardo Da Vinci was there and painted it in every detail. In his painting Jesus is being served like all the others, but on another occasion Jesus shocked the disciples by serving them Himself, just like the Master describes above, then even more by ordering them to allow Him to wash their very feet with His own hands. If Jesus tried that today of course He would be gently but firmly informed that although the Aqdas says we should wash our feet every day or every other day, depending on the season, nobody ever washes other peoples' feet. We are beyond that.

Yeah. We are beyond a lot of things today. Beyond justice, morality and moderation; did Baha'u'llah not write, "Whoso cleaveth to justice, can, under no circumstances, transgress the limits of moderation." (Gleanings, p. 342) No circumstances, that is, except when it comes to the refreshments that Adolph Nobody serves after every meeting. After all, diet does not matter much in the Baha'i teachings. No, wait, that is not so either. One's diet, the Master once wrote, does have something peripherally to do with morality, and even had something to do with the provenance of gross diseases.

"But man hath perversely continued to serve his lustful appetites, and he would not content himself with simple foods. Rather, he prepared for himself food that was compounded of many ingredients, of substances differing one from the other. With this, and with the perpetrating of vile and ignoble acts, his attention was engrossed, and he abandoned the temperance and moderation of a natural way of life. The result was the engendering of diseases both violent and diverse." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections, 152-3)

This idea that our attention becomes "engrossed," that our powerful brains turn us away from natural needs and sensory input, turns up more than once in the words and writings of the Master. Last month the science news sources reported a study that confirms His opinion startlingly. Some researchers, looking for something else, persuaded some gullible students to get down on their knees and sniff around for a scent. Lo and behold, they found that humans can track almost as well as bloodhounds can. We just had never tried it. Every textbook in existence will tell you that dogs have senses of smell millions and millions of times more sensitive than humans. Turns out that ain't quite the case. Turns out nobody had even thought of testing that unproven presupposition. Talk about "engrossed"! That is just gross.

Do you get "simple foods" at a potluck? Not exactly. You get a mix, a hodgepodge of randomly chosen dishes, some homemade, some store bought, some relatively healthful, others total decadence, sweet, fudgey, sticky indulgences that a sensible person would sample once a year, if ever. They are all there, the good, the bad and the ugly, in plenty. If somebody comes down with food poisoning after a potluck the problem of tracing the possible sources of contamination are multiplied a hundred times compared to a meal served by a single host. Responsibility is chopped up into tiny pieces and the dangers multiplied with each chop. In fact the number of bad outcomes is legion -- ah, there is another name for Adolph Nobody, Legion, the name of the demon Jesus chased out of the madman and into the herd of pigs. And I use the word "pig" advisedly, of course.

You may say that there is some evidence that the Master did not think a banquet was a bad thing in itself. After all, in His Tablet to the peace conference at The Hague the Master encouraged us to think of the Baha'i principles as a banquet table where you walk along and heap onto your plate whatever dish appeals to you. But there is a big difference between a banquet and potluck.

You go down the table set out like a hog trough at a potluck and a huge array of other peoples' food is laid out. What could be better? Except that this is no ordinary panoply like one that you would encounter at, say, a salad bar. At a restaurant you know that ultimately nobody there cares if you take this or that dish. The owner might care if you take too many of the most expensive dishes, but rarely is the owner present, only employees who could not care less what you take.

Not so with a potluck.

I remember once my friend Ruth in Hamilton taking her contribution of baked macaroni and cheese to a potluck (a contribution entirely consonant with her income group; like me she was a disabled person) and after it was over she found that nobody had touched it. Small wonder with the abundance of other choices of rich and expensive dishes sitting beside it, but nonetheless it was plain to be seen that she was hurt. She had made a sensible choice and received her due punishment. After that I made a point of finding out what she had taken and sampling it. After that I made a point of looking at all the less popular dishes. I was a bachelor at the time and still only in the category that nutritionists call "overweight" rather than "obese," so I could afford to be "nice" in this way. Now I look back at that and think, this is just wrong. Since when was overindulgence, eating more mixes of already tangled mixtures of foods, an ethical act? This is morality turned topsy-turvy.

Throughout history a spread of unlimited all-you-can eat food laid out in banquet format was very expensive, the lot of kings, and not often encountered by most people in daily life. More to the point, when it was encountered it was not welcomed but frowned upon. Dante put gluttons in the third circle of hell, their skin perpetually torn off by the three headed dog Cerberus. To have a potluck at the end of every meeting at that time would have been quite possible even in those lean times but to do so would certainly have been considered excessive, wasteful and irreligious, especially if there were no host to serve it. No host, that is, save good old Adolph Nobody. He is our designated host at a potluck. Him and his same-sex spouse, the demon called Legion. Yet few Baha'i meeting planners worry that these vast spreads of corner to corner foods might go against the spirit of the Baha'i Faith, a creed that the Guardian called "the religion of the Golden Main."

As the Master says above, it is the responsibility of the host to be kind and a comfort to all. Is a potluck a comfort? Quite the reverse. Opinion polls say that the vast majority of women and a growing percentage of men are worried about their diet and the amount of calories they are taking in. As one of those diet conscious men, I do not go away from a potluck "comforted." I go away with a heavy burden of guilt, regret, despair and even self-contempt. I have overindulged and I know it, and I regret it, and I would like to turn back the clock and go back when I am not slightly hungry and show the world how impervious I can be to temptation, but I cannot. Time goes in one direction and we are all weak at some times and strong at others and if we have any sense at all we will do what we can when we are strong to protect ourselves when we are weak by removing such temptations, by planning to remove such temptations.

After all, society does not leave booze or cigarettes or heroine or pornographic images lying around in the open, selling or giving it away to all comers, why is food any different? Why is it moral for Baha'is not to pander to those immoral weaknesses and turn around and leave out nutritional disorders? One person last night tearfully declared, "I am addicted to food. It is just the way I am. Since I became a Baha'i I have gained fifty pounds." Now that I think of it, I have gained more than that since I became a Baha'i, though slower and over a much longer period. But I resist calling myself an addict. "Addict" is a word that victims of Adolph and slaves of Legion use. True, I am susceptible to the munchies more than most, but that is my physical nature, the result of millions of years of evolution. I have a right to expect that society, and especially loving Baha'is, will respect my weakness and not exploit it needlessly by having more potlucks than absolutely necessary.

It sounds egotistical doesn't it? But consider, this is not personal, it is structural. To use an example from a study I mentioned recently, every time we urinate we harm the sewer system. And of course if we want to minimize our footprint on the environment by going outside, we are likely to be arrested and punished by the law. I am structurally obliged to contribute to our common downfall.

Or, to use another argument mentioned last night, what would happen if we left heroine needles out after every meeting and expected attendees to shoot up. Say forty percent become addicted as a result of this, and the rest just had a high old time without any consequences. Would the addicts be to blame? Could the non-addicts rightfully say, "Just because you get addicted does not mean that my fun has to be spoiled by depriving me of this convenience?" No, it is just that a percentage of human bodies have an addictive reaction to one substance and others do not. A percentage will always become addicted to cigarettes, to booze, to sex, to food, to you name it. The more exposure the more the risk. It is a universally recognized moral duty of planners to take this human susceptibility into account and do everything possible to reduce temptations to vice and overindulgence. The negligence is quite literally killing me, and it is killing my self-professed food-addict friend, and the non-obese and meeting planners, obese or not, simply do not care.

Some may doubt our duty to plan for such things as lifestyle deficiencies. Many doubt our duty to do so collectively, in such apparently trivial matters as planning and catering our meetings. I have been slow-burn, residually angry about that presupposition, in myself and others, for a long time, so I took a dip in Ocean to see how often the phrase "order our lives" turns up in the Master's writings. I discovered the following:

"Surely, when we realize how God loves and cares for us, we should so order our lives that we may become more like Him." (Paris Talks, 120)

"Therefore, you must without delay employ your powers in spreading the effulgent glow of the love of God and so order your lives that you may be known and seen as examples of its radiance." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 8)

"Therefore, order your lives in accordance with the first principle of the divine teaching, which is love." (Promulgation, 8)

"Therefore I say unto you that ye should strive to follow the counsels of these Blessed Books, and so order your lives that ye may, following the examples set before you, become yourselves the saints of the Most High!" (Paris Talks, 61)

"Let us try to understand the commands of the Most High and to order our lives as He directs." (Paris Talks, 108)

So, let us assume that we are ordering our lives to obey and imitate God. Would we be popping pills when we could be making lifestyle changes to accomplish the same thing? Sunk in despair about how my weight increases no matter what I do, I have been reading the medical research literature lately, especially on nutrition, probably as much as some doctors. I notice that researchers are belatedly recognizing that rather than come up with some new drug for disease, it is both safer and cheaper to investigate the properties of some fruit or vegetable and prescribe that as preventive medicine instead. This is just as the Master predicted.

"It is, therefore, evident that it is possible to cure by foods, aliments and fruits; but as today the science of medicine is imperfect, this fact is not yet fully grasped. When the science of medicine reaches perfection, treatment will be given by foods, aliments, fragrant fruits and vegetables, and by various waters, hot and cold in temperature." ("Some Answered Questions", pp. 257-59)

These same scientists are also recognizing that even with the apparently quick and easy, and often cheap, expedient of prescribing a drug, the problem arises that poor lifestyle negates what good the drug does. Neither scientists, nor doctors, nor patients have much control over the structure of peoples' lifestyle, what the Master calls the ordering of their lives. Only planners control that, and their power was handed over to Adolph Nobody long ago. I find the same thing in my dietary efforts. I have managed to improve the quality of what I eat. Now cook my own food, in large part, I eat a healthful diet and feel incomparably better. But no matter how much I try, the bulk amount that I eat stays high, much higher than it should. No doubt I am better off, but the full benefit of a good diet only comes, according to the best study, if there is a much, much lower intake of calories. Which is why I must return to the Aqdas.

Baha'u'llah, in my opinion, is not saying "though only water be served" in hopes that poor Baha'is can host Feasts, He is using the example of water because no matter how stringent your calorie counting, no matter how strictly you are watching everything you eat, you can and should still drink a great deal, an abundance of water. Water is zero calorie, it can be indulged in almost without limit (almost, I say; there are at least a couple of documented cases of people dying from drinking too much water. This is very rare, though). This explanation and this alone, I suggest, reflects the massive amounts of love that Baha'u'llah intends to be indulged in great quantities at Feasts. Check it out again:

"Verily, it is enjoined upon you to offer a feast, once in every month, though only water be served; for God hath purposed to bind hearts together, albeit through both earthly and heavenly means." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, paragraph 57, p. 40)

As things are now the majority of the world's population is either overweight or obese. Take a vote on just about anything, and they will win. Their sad lot is the direct effect of the overlordship of Adolph Nobody and Legion. In the Aqdas I see the true Lord accommodating the physical need of most bodies most of the time to avoid taking in too many calories. Abdu'l-Baha Himself restricted his intake, providing a most perfect example. Eat, the True Lord says, and if eating is bad for you or too great a temptation, then for God's sakes, drink lots of water, My point is that abundant indulgence symbolically expresses the physical and spiritual love-feasting going on, not massive intake of calories.

Shrilling Pen

Note on Baha'u'llah's Shrilling Pen

By John Taylor; 2007 January 07

A friend long ago professed disappointment upon inspecting my then-smaller book collection that I did not appear to have any old and valuable books. That, it seems, is what book collectors accumulate. Myself, I collect interesting books that are cheap because nobody wants to collect them. I go for intellectual rather than financial substance. A good example is Spike Milligan's war memoir, "Mussolini, His Part in my Downfall." I had ignored the several other volumes of this series but this beat up paperback I picked up for a quarter or two at our local Sally Anne, and to my surprise it turned out to be good, casual, bathtub, just-before-sleepy time reading. As a fan of World War Two literature it was a disconcerting reality check to learn that the daily life of a soldier was not blood and guts exploding all around you, at least not most of the time. It was traffic jams, bureaucratic entanglements caused by literal minded prigs, idleness, boredom, small talk, casual reading, complaints about the brass and various small-time subversions of authority, and yes, for Milligan's band of brothers, a lot of comedy and camaraderie.

Milligan was in the artillery, and judging from what he says here the gunners seem to have had it slightly easier than the grunts in the trenches, as long as they could escape being targeted by their counterparts on the other side. Milligan uses his wit not only to survive but to buck up the spirits of his brothers-in-arms. My heart warms to read this, as his Goon Show performances similarly warmed my childhood. They came to me in a strange way; we were living in an old farmhouse and my brother had left an old and obsolete-even-then reel-to-reel tape recorder in his room, with one reel on it. The reel contained two or three Goon Shows but they were not labeled as such. I listened to that inspired madness over and over, trying to make out what it was all about, where it could have come from. Only later on did I learn that it had been an old British radio show in the Fifties, that the Goon Show was the main inspiration for Monty Python's Flying Circus, and that Milligan was a sufferer of manic depressive disorder and used his weird non-sequitors to counter the gloom and anxiety of that affliction. His top witticism in this book is printed on the cover:

"Britannia rules the waves, ta-ra, but on occasion she waives the rules."

At the end of his war of liberation in Italy, Milligan is sent to carry some wire across a shooting gallery for enemy mortermen, and like the majority of soldiers in that war, falls victim to that particular instrument of destruction. His body makes it out of the trauma but not his mind. He suffers from what we now call post-traumatic shock syndrome. His superior refuses to allow him to recover properly and he is finally sent home, much to his chagrin. His was a tight group of friends and it is very sad for him not to be able to continue helping them with humor; if I were a professional humorist or entertainer I would probably be inspired by this, and by the seriousness of my paradoxically unserious calling. Milligan has a quiet moment just before bed, not long before his trauma, a moment that, surprisingly, gave me a new insight into Baha'u'llah's Writings. Everybody else is gone or asleep, it is very late at night and he is about to turn in. Another gunner is writing a lonely love letter to a girl back home in the next bunk.

"He continues his lovelorn missive. `Christ, it's quiet,' he says, `I can hear the nib scratching on the paper.'"

Milligan quips, "Haven't you got a silencer?" The friend bids him "Goodnight, kind sir." (Spike Milligan, Mussolini, His Part in My Downfall, Penguin, Middlesex, 1978, p. 264)

I pricked up my ears at this, since the sound of pen on paper is a major literary device of Baha'u'llah. Adib Taherzadeh's explanation is that the particular pen He used was loud, that it made a loud scraping sound on paper that could be heard from a distance and even varied according to the length of the Arabic letter being written -- see his full explanation at the end of this send-out. That may well be the case, but think about it. In order for a sound like the scratching of a pen, be it loud or quiet, to be heard in a room there must be a relatively silent background, as in that soldier's tent, or dormitory, or whatever it was. This alternative explanation is not entirely incompatible with Taherzadeh's.

Another interesting point turned up when I tried to do a word search for "screeching" or "scratching" in the Writings. They are not there. The Guardian avoided those words, it seems. Instead he used the less common word, both a noun and a verb, "shrill." In Gleanings, for example, a prayer says,

"All praise be to Thee for having enabled me to hearken to Thy call ... and for having quickened my soul through ... the shrilling voice of Thy Pen, a voice Thou didst ordain as Thy trumpet-call amidst Thy people." (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings, 14-15)

The point here seems to be that Baha'u'llah is detached, uninvolved in the creative Writing process; unlike other writers, He is not expressing Himself, God is expressing Himself. Baha'u'llah is sitting back, as it were, and listening to the voice of Revelation coming from His moving, inspired pen. In other places, it seems to be expected that others will hear the shrilling of the pen, even the Shah of Persia, who banished Him in the first place.

"O King! Wert thou to incline thine ear unto the shrill of the Pen of Glory ... thou wouldst attain unto a station from which thou wouldst behold in the world of being naught save the effulgence of the Adored One, and wouldst regard thy sovereignty as the most contemptible of thy possessions, abandoning it to whosoever might desire it, and setting thy face toward the Horizon aglow with the light of His countenance." (Baha'u'llah, Summons, 99-100)

Again, it is not that the Pen itself is shrilling so loud, it is just that (as Milligan taught me) a silent, reflective person can so shut out the noise of the world that she can hear the shrilling clearly. Even, in many cases, as far as distant Persia. Even, in the case of the Faith's martyrs, under the threat of the roar of the tyrant's cannon. In other cases, the Pen is addressed directly. "O My Supreme Pen! Call thou to remembrance the She-Serpent..." (Epistle, 100) In other places, Baha'u'llah seems to personify the scratching of the Pen and has it address Him in the voice of inspiration,

"At this moment the shrill voice of the Most Sublime Pen hath been raised, and hath addressed Me saying: `Admonish the Shaykh even as Thou hast admonished one of Thy Branches (sons), that haply the breezes of Thine utterance may attract and draw him nigh unto God, the Lord of the worlds.'" (Baha'u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, 92)

There follows a repeat of the sublime set of admonitions called, as far as I know, the "Be generous in prosperity" Tablet. As He attests here, it was prescribed to one of his sons, one who turned out to be one of the baddest of a junkyard of bad family. Thus this Tablet explains in no uncertain terms the basic requirements of very basic faith, that is, action, faith, sincerity, the reverse of hypocritical opposition to truth. These are not just high sounding inspirational words, they constitute, as they say, strong medicine for a severe affliction, unbelief. The severest spiritual malady imaginable, for it was openly given both to a perfidious breaker of the Covenant and at the close of His Revelation to the Son of the Wolf, the most egregious persecutor at the time of the Baha'is in Persia.

And this leads us to another shade of meaning for the words "shrill" and "pen" by which the Guardian chose to translate this literary device. The word "shrill" is not necessarily the euphemism for scratch or scrape that I implied before. Shrill means, according to my dictionary, a scream, "an acute piercing sound." It can also imply strident or intemperate complaints or anger. A shrill critic is not one that uses understatement or gentle irony to get her point across. Interestingly, the Qu'ran forbids shrill language; it disallows speaking louder than the prophet in consultation with Him. It implies rather clearly that pride and a loud, shrill, contentious voice go together.

"And do not turn your face away from people in contempt, nor go about in the land exulting overmuch; surely Allah does not love any self-conceited boaster; And pursue the right course in your going about and lower your voice; surely the most hateful of voices is braying of the asses." (Qu'ran 31:18-19, Shakir)

As a result of this, I think, calling someone an ass is a more severe insult in Quranic-influenced languages than in English; an ass is not only stupid but arrogant and pretentious. The effect of asinine behavior in any forum, or family, is often seen. When one starts shouting everybody else, even the coolest head, has to shout loud as well in order to be heard. Therefore, quiet, gentle voices imply the same thing that hearing the shrill of a pen implies, a respectful, contemplative, silent background. The shrill of a pen, as opposed to a shrill voice, is heard when all around follow the advice in the "be generous in prosperity" passage, they are "fair in their judgment and guarded in their speech..." The most strident voice cannot be heard by one who does not meet this basic qualification of spirituality and consultation, as the Qu'ran teaches,

"... for those who believe not, there is a deafness in their ears ... They are (as it were) being called from a place far distant!" (Qur'an 41:44, Yusuf Ali)

Spirituality, then, is not done for its own sake, it is conditioning for consultation, and good consultation skills in turn are a prerequisite for spiritual hearing. "Those who have ears, let them hear." The spiritually deaf hear nothing, not even the shrill of the pen, much less its significance, until at the time of the end they do hear, finally, but what they do hear is the roar of hellfire.

"But they reject the hour, and We have prepared a burning fire for him who rejects the hour. When it shall come into their sight from a distant place, they shall hear its vehement raging and roaring." (Qur'an 25:11-12, Shakir)

Another interesting thing I learned in this morning's investigation is the importance of the word "pen" in the Qu'ran, which of course provided both the background and the language of the Revelation of Baha'u'llah.

We like to think of modern communication theorists as the first to teach about the importance of written language, "the pen," in human history. However, for anybody who has read the Qu'ran that is old news. Another verse elsewhere highlights the fact that writing is the most important invention ever, and that it is a gift of God. It does not come from man.

"Proclaim! And thy Lord is Most Bountiful,- He Who taught (the use of) the pen,- Taught man that which he knew not." (Qu'ran 96:3-5, Yusuf Ali)

Indeed, there is an entire Surih called "The Pen." This 68th Surih begins,

"In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful
Nun. By the Pen and the (Record) which (men) write,-
Thou art not, by the Grace of thy Lord, mad or possessed.
Nay, verily for thee is a Reward unfailing:
And thou (standest) on an exalted standard of character.
Soon wilt thou see, and they will see,
Which of you is afflicted with madness." (1-6)

Here a pen is used to address the apparent madness of a prophet. Muhammad, an illiterate, presumed to dictate his verbal inspirations into the written word. Only a privileged few could read or write, and like all experts facing amateur contributions, they did not smile on lay writings. Today a similar miracle would be for someone who does not know mathematics to churn out streams of abstruse formulae. If the result turns out to make sense and advance the state of the art, the Source must be some supernatural intelligence. At the same time the great irony is that God is in the same position, in His role as Divine Pen, of expert versus lay. He sees our presumptuous attempts to write about faith when have not mastered the basics of devotion. We are spiritually illiterate.

"Do ye not see that God has subjected to your (use) all things in the heavens and on earth, and has made his bounties flow to you in exceeding measure, (both) seen and unseen? Yet there are among men those who dispute about God, without knowledge and without guidance, and without a Book to enlighten them!" (Qur'an 31:20, Yusuf Ali)

Here Baha'u'llah's association of the divine Pen with the "be generous in prosperity" Tablet, and His recommending it to the betrayer and the persecutor, starts to make sense. While both pretend to be on the side of God, at heart they are deniers, hypocrites, far more atheistic than the most committed atheist.

"And could you see when they shall become terrified, but (then) there shall be no escape and they shall be seized upon from a near place. And they shall say: We believe in it. And how shall the attaining (of faith) be possible to them from a distant place? And they disbelieved in it before, and they utter conjectures with regard to the unseen from a distant place." (Qu'ran 34:51-53, Shakir)

Here, as promised, is Taherzadeh's take on Baha'u'llah's shrill pen.

"I recall that as Mirza Aqa Jan was recording the words of Baha'u'llah at the time of revelation, the shrill sound of his pen could be heard from a distance of about twenty paces."

A footnote elaborates:

"The Persian and Arabic scripts are commonly written with reed pens. This type of pen often makes a shrieking sound when moved in a certain way. The calligrapher could control this sound to a certain extent. For instance, he could allow the sound to accompany the writing of a particular stroke or curve throughout. This sound not only revealed the extent to which a single letter had been drawn out, but also aroused feelings of excitement in the calligrapher and the onlookers. Baha'u'llah has, in many of His Tablets, referred to the Most Exalted Pen, signifying thereby the Manifestation of God and His Revelation. He has also referred to the shrill voice of that same Pen. This expression is symbolic of the proclamation of His Message among the peoples of the world." (Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Baha'u'llah v 1, p. 35)

Implications of History

Implications of Cosmopolitan History for Intellectuals and Others

By John Taylor; 2007 January 05

I am going into Kant's Cosmopolitan History in such depth because I think it is that important.

We have backed into our globalizing post-internationalist world. We are utterly unprepared even to look ahead, much less plan our next step. It is true that I have spent much time in this blog blaming corruption of the political process for this environmental mess, but there is no doubt that most if not all of the blame lies squarely on the backs of intellectuals. They are the ones who have kept our heads resolutely turned backwards from where we are going.

Kant wrote this pamphlet over two centuries ago. In it he called for other scholars to take their courage between their hands and write a "cosmopolitan history" of the entire human race. He was well aware that it would have been impossible to write such a history at that time. The world had been barely explored. But he could not ignore the issue and he wrote an outline, just as he later outlined a world constitution, his Sketch of a Perpetual Peace.

Yet even after the passage of two centuries nobody has taken up his challenge. The closest to a comprehensive history of human beings as agents and stewards of planet Earth is Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." This book and its lessons on what it takes to survive as a race are far from being taught in every elementary school in the world as they should. The knowledge is there in bulk, but the resolve to refine it is lacking. No cosmopolitan history has been attempted by any historian, much less a body of historians, as the project would demand.

Is it any wonder that we are in such deep doodoo? Meantime, what are historians writing? You tell me. We need a world constitution and what are political scientists studying? You tell me. We need a world language, and what are linguists and literary lights doing? You tell me.

We need a world history, desperately. History teaches how to sacrifice short term profits for long term benefits. It gives us the vision to see beyond what is right before our noses, because we can see how such vision and faith worked out over decades and centuries in the past. So, difficult as such a huge enterprise would surely be, a cosmopolitan history must be undertaken as soon as possible and taught to every pupil in the world.

It is so maddening. Whenever there is lack of resolve, you do not have to scratch hard to find the reason why. Ignorance, especially ignorance of history. Yet the world's historians are inert, mere lazy lumps of fluff. The only ones worse are scientists.

Science magazines focus our attention on trivial gadgets, ephemeral product proposals beloved of their paying sponsors, and in the meantime blithely ignore what really matters. We sit back and think about superficial inventions and allow our water supply to degrade, the north pole to melt, and on and on. There is a beam firmly lodged in our eyes. Let me tell you the most important item in science news last year. It was a study reported a couple of weeks ago in Science News. Somebody did a detailed, eyes open study of the sewer system. What is so important about sewage treatment you ask? Well, if you have to ask, that is what I am talking about, total ignorance of history. It is like those bleary eyed charity campaigns for breast cancer when rectal cancer kills far more people, but what self-inflating ego is going to stand up for rectal cancer? Or sit down? Or whatever? Same thing with the sewer system. The water table is slowly degrading but this is still not something we want to talk about.

What they found was that if you separate out urine from solid sewage it cuts down the processing time from almost two weeks to a couple of days. They even invented toilets with two holes designed to enable this separation, one hole takes urine and the other the rest. These new toilets are available to buy, even though virtually everywhere the sewage disposal system is not designed to accommodate this separation. That is, the urine is separated out by Toilet 2.0 and then later on it is recombined with the solids. End result, no advantage. That is always the result without what Bucky called Comprehensive Design Science.

But the ironic thing that the study found out is that urine is valuable. It turns out that urine is high energy stuff, which is exactly why it slows down the processing of sewage. That is a good thing. Urine has many industrial uses. Even back in Roman times urine was valuable, used in washing and processing of textiles. As the ruins at Pompeii have shown, citizens walking by textile factories were encouraged to stop and take a piss. Take a walk through any modern city and try to find a place to do that. And when you do, it is wasted, sent to a processing facility where it screws up the works and makes it all much more expensive to deal with. Let us not forget that the Roman Empire lasted almost a thousand years; our Adolph Nobody world disorder has barely lasted two centuries.

Oh, did I say the scientists are the worst? No, the worst are those apparatchiks of capitalism, businesspersons. These nomenclatura of nihilism go on and on about quality, initiative and profit potential but when it comes to opportunities like this to make a profit while helping the environment all you hear is deafening silence. I can hear Scrooge saying to Marley, "But you were a good man of business." And Marley replying, "My business was mankind." Sit down for the environment, or stand up, it does not matter, because mankind is Adolph Nobody's business.

If we had planning, order would be possible. Both science and religion, ideally, are nothing but planned faith and knowledge. If we are going to plan well be must understand where we have been. We need all need to learn a common cosmological history in early childhood to know what it means to be a human being. This will be impossible as long as no common history has been written, much less made available as the heritage of all. Until this history is researched and written all that we will have to educate us about our common humanity will be corrupt propaganda, perverse ideologies, and competing nullities, prejudices and superstitions.

Glory

Environmental Glory

By John Taylor; 2007 January 03

Why are Baha'is called "followers of the Glory"? Why did Baha'u'llah choose "Baha" for His title? I thought I knew but it turns out that I did not. I learned that when read about the role of English Revolution in the Enlightenment. This was the first of the long series of revolutions, followed by the American, the French, the Russian and the Iranian Revolutions. Why was the English one so-called, the "Glorious Revolution?" What made it so glorious? Apparently they called it glorious because at its consummation there was a turnover of leaders that was (in contrast to previous events) completely non-violent. William III of Orange and his consort, Mary II, were shipped in from Holland to take over the crown. True, these events also dealt in all the issues that characterized later revolutions (not to mention the Baha'i principles) and the English revolution was arguably more successful than any other revolution, long term; but taken all in all, the glory of this event came from its victory without bloodshed or struggle.

Glory is the ideal victory, where people have become so sick of conflict that they agree to become friends and thus end competition forever. Glory is victory over war itself. Glory is when everybody wins and their victory is a permanent one. Glory is not when a general wins a bloody, temporary battle, it is when a brilliant teacher teaches a lesson to a difficult but intelligent student. Most glorious, by this measure, was the victory of Jesus, for His was a victory over Rome was won of the Spirit, as the Master explains,

"For example, Jesus Christ, single and unassisted, educated the Roman, Greek and Assyrian nations and all of Europe. It is evident, therefore, that the greatest education is that of the Spirit." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 330)

Glory is the mark of the Spirit. The divine spirit always makes a permanent change in the political landscape, again, as demonstrated in the accomplishments of Jesus, as explained by the Master:

"He educated them until they became united and agreed, and through His spirit of conciliation the Roman, Greek, Chaldean and Egyptian were blended in a composite civilization." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 367)

This was a glorious victory, the first of many by Jesus the Christ. Paul understood how spirit works and explained that spirit gains its glorious victory over outer things by turning us all into mirrors reflecting the same image. Once the inner reality is one, all else is added unto that.

"Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the LORD." (2 Cor 3:17-18, KJV)

It is evident that in our time we are sinking into the reverse of glory, total ignominious defeat by climatic disaster. In rich lands this causes only nagging worries now, but sooner or later it will surely result in loss of life, probably by mass starvation. In the stock market they call it a "correction." The population of the earth, presently at 8 billion, could drop to half, or less, of what it is now. We are in this fix because, as Paul pointed out, we have missed the reflection of one spirit in the mirror of our hearts.

Environmental failure is not a big bang phenomenon, at least not yet; it is the overall result of a thousand inglorious defeats. Our fatal lack of vision provoked many small failures of restraint, minor negligence, and a multitude of tiny insults to nature. It did not seem to matter at the time. The result was corruption, corruption etched into the very structure of our world. This is epitomized for me in a satellite picture in Popular Science (November, 2001, p. 44) showing a single view of Europe at night. The whole continent is lit up, showing that virtually the whole of its land surface is now urban. The caption reads,

"Before the 19th Century, Europe was a continent of bountiful farmland. Look at it now. Marc Imhoff, a NASA biologist, is studying the way urbanization affects the Earth. He made this map of urban clusters from Department of Defense satellite data. After cross-referencing the maps with images of soil use and plant growth, he estimates that much of the earth's most fertile lands are being turned over to development - which also contributes to a worrisome increase in global carbon emissions."

Cities by rights should be built on infertile, unproductive, non-agricultural land. That would make for viable, long term survival. Failing that, at least development should be done so as to allow agricultural land use to be combined with other urban uses -- which is basically what my Instauration Manifesto is all about.

Meanwhile, the trend continues. Temperatures are heating everything up, both the physical and the moral climate, threatening natural ecosystems first and the mind and heart of man last. Deserts are spreading and drying out while development on good land continues apace. Global warming grew from a minor concern to a huge threat because government persistently ignored the warnings of both scientists and moralists. We did not want to take the bitter medicine. We thought climate change would take centuries but now even the Bush Administration has recognized the threat of melting polar ice, at least as the danger applies to polar bears. Unfortunately the split between morality and politics is so wide now that there is little likelihood that much will be done for human beings anytime soon, even with a huge swing to the left in the United States. There is no talk among the newly elected leaders there of an end to the Pax Americana in favor of a world administration. Until that happens, power politics will be the order of the day.

"...for any one nation to declare itself to be the world's policeman is effectively to reject the possibility that the world will be governed by just laws, rather than by the assertion of raw military power. As Jonathan Glover ... has pointed out, the Pax Americana assumes a ruler of the kind imagined by the seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, one who has power but no moral authority, and a world in which conflict is merely suppressed, not resolved. Glover prefers the vision of the world offered by Kant in his book Perpetual Peace. Kant advocated a system in which the states would give up, to a world federation, a monopoly of the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that was established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner. In the modern world, that means a reformed United Nations, with adequate force at its command, and impartial procedures to decide when that force should be used." (Peter Singer, One World, The Ethics of Globalization, xiv)

The Pax Americana marks the ascendancy of power politics. What is power politics? It is a term that apparently came into use in the 1920's meaning: "Politics based primarily on the use of power (as military and economic strength) as a coercive force rather than on ethical precepts." Power politics, then, is the reverse of rule by glory; it is when expediency overrules moral authority, the triumph of brute, animal force. Ultimately, it is the eclipse of Spirit. As Paul says above, where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty. Power politics excludes liberty and enslaves us all to an illusion. Consider this commentary, which points directly to one of the fallacies involved.

"Not long ago American Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality".

Colonizing

Colonizing Earth’s Grayish Brown Areas

By John Taylor; 2 January 2007

It has been puzzling me for a long time where to go with the Instauration Manifesto. Day after day I sit down at this writing station knowing deep down that this is my best chance to make a substantive contribution but at the same time I feel weak and utterly barren. I have no idea where to take it from here. I have collected over the past year or so more than enough material to fill a book, but every time I try to dig in and unify it in a final draft, it collapses like a delicate, overextended mine shaft. I must turn and run out choking, gasping for air. Then last night I had a dream.

I dreamed that I was regularly visiting Toronto where I stayed relatively cheaply as a paying guest of the Mississauga tribe, the inhabitants of the New Credit Reserve not far from here, near Caledonia. They had somehow settled their land claims to Canada's fourth largest city, Mississauga, and had built a large hotel complex on their land in that city. The place included not only your usual accommodation and entertainment amenities but also certain spiritual and other facilities related to and teaching about their traditional lifestyle. I had been going there regularly whenever I needed to be in Toronto and though in real life I dread going to the big city, this native place made me actually look forward to it.

When I awoke from this dream I knew that here was the answer to my desperate prayers for guidance. Eureka! Here is the end of my writer's block. To give you an idea how bad the block was, the following paragraph was all I could write after trying all day yesterday:

"Viewed from space, our planet looks blue, since most of its surface is covered in ocean. If we restrict our view to the land, though, fertile areas turn up green and deserts look grayish brown. A surprisingly large percentage of the Earth's land mass, especially near the equator in Africa and Asia, is grayish brown rather than green. These receive the most energy from the sun and by rights should support the most agriculture, provide the most energy from solar panel farms, and support the largest populations on earth. Yet they are deserted. What is worse, the brown areas are spreading. Previously certain desert ecosystems were capable of supporting a surprisingly broad diversity of life; some, in Australia and Mexico, even rival the rain forests for variety if not biomass. But as the planet heats up lakes are drying and the barren regions are as devoid of life as the moon. As what little water remained underneath these desert swathes is evaporated by unrelenting heat, the challenge of re-greening and colonizing these arid regions is almost as challenging as colonizing the moon."

What I was thinking about was a sequel something like this:

The mound housing complexes could be built simultaneously in the rich, developed world and in the desert colonies built in virgin, empty territory. This would offer advantages to both areas. Mounds in the desert would offer a living laboratory, a chance to build and live in mounds built under the most difficult-to-insulate conditions in the world. If a mound can be kept cool there, it can just as easily be kept warm in developed areas, which tend to be in colder, more northern places. At the same time, their construction in wealthy places would enable high-technology enhancements to their standardized living units. Economies of scale would allow these innovations to transfer to mounds in deserts and poor regions without delay.

The Sine Qua Non of it all is the formation of a world government. A global federalism would offer the awards and benefits of world citizenship to all those who live in mound complexes. An inhabitant of a mound development in Canada would be able to move his or her dwelling unit directly to a mound development in the Gobi desert without going through all the hassles of customs and immigration. It would be in everybody’s interest to see that as many people in as many people as possible live in mound developments, since they would be much easier on the environment than our present, wasteful buildings and streets.

The question immediately arises: What would prevent massive emigration from populous but poor areas into desert mound developments, followed in turn by mass migration from there into mound developments in rich countries, taking advantage of the privileges of world citizenship that mound living offers? The answer is that the entire lifestyle of mound dwellers will be scientifically designed from the ground up. Since the privileges, rights and freedoms of world citizens would already be highly regulated and records kept of everything -- much more so than what we are used to under a decrepit nationalist state -- it would not be possible to dwell where one cannot be self-supporting. Most important, areas deemed by computer calculations to need us most and jobs that best take advantage of our skills and talents would due to subtle wage and price adjustments also be the most economical places to live in. Besides, the lifestyle benefits and amenities in a mound development would be so superior to anywhere else, even what can be offered in the richest countries, that few will worry about whether their mound is in the Sahara or Gobi deserts, or in New York, Paris or Tokyo.

After my dream, I can now add this to it all: The perfect people to sponsor and host mound developments everywhere, in city and desert, are the world's aboriginal peoples. They already have many of the prime requisites for living in a mound development, they tend to have a deep reverence for the environment and a tradition of living in harmony with the land, plus they value communal living and shared property. All these are prime requisites for mound living. As soon as a world government forms, they could be given automatic rights as world citizens, get first dibs at living in and designing mound developments, receive IPO shares in the common property of these places (which would prove much more valuable than all their land claims, in the long run) and they would also share in the obligations of world citizenship, like paying a percentage of taxes directly to the world government. That is how it should be done.

Griper's Paradox

Adolph and the Griper's Paradox

By John Taylor; 2006 December 29

I and the kids enjoy the animated futuristic series Futurama -- we buy the DVD's, we do not watch it on commercial television, infested as it is with advertisements, which are, as I explain to the kids, gray matter-sucking brain worms designed not only to steal our thoughts away and to intentionally dirty our minds, but they also, most disturbingly, rob us of the ability to feel our own feelings and value our own values. This satire Futurama features a society in the year 3000 where not only do the various races of humans mix together casually, but also outlandish aliens with or without physical bodies.

Most popular around here is its robot character Bender, who goes off on a bender when he does not get enough alcohol, instead of the reverse as with a human drunk. He is an embittered robo-rights crusader who observes little robots going around picking up after litterers and sardonically comments, "Oh, sure. Let the robot do it." I like that little criticism of that protean monster being called by academics "critical theory." But in fact the question of robot rights will surely pose a growing dilemma to ethicists as they become more advanced. At the present level they are no different from a car or a toaster, but as robots increase in both intelligence and usefulness they will surely start to claim the rights that go hand in hand with intelligence. Or at least, that is what many ethicists think.

Myself, I think that future robots will never differentiate themselves from the Internet. They will be walking portals, talking search engines, Google personified. If I talk to my toaster, my car or my computer, I will be talking to the same entity, the most intelligent, informed mind available. Most people expect robots to be independent and self-sufficient, just like people, cats and dogs are. But with instant wireless connection to the net, why dumb them down? Why not take advantage of their greatest strength, their connectivity? Why try to reproduce what living organisms already do very well? Nor will this Internet Superbrain will be entirely artificial; it may be connected and mediated by computers, as the Net already is, but much, if not most, of its processing, judgments and decisions will be done by the best thinkers available, human experts available and interconnected online. These experts now and for the foreseeable future will be primarily human, be they individuals, Ad Hoc groups or whole scientific disciplines making decisions by majority vote.

I am not talking about routine decisions, of course. These can and should be automated and handled by computer brains. If I make an observation to my robot toaster about how I want my toast this morning, the toaster or a computer-mediated toasting FAQ on the Internet will provide a canned answer. But if I ask something new or difficult, it will know enough to hand the question off to the best responder available.

I might say, "Toaster, where is life taking me?" It would listen and duly pass my question off to my life-planning software portal; if its answer does not satisfy, the question would move off to some "Meaning of Life" philosophy portal on the Internet. In other words, the answer would be handled the same as if I were at my computer, at my car, or any other machine interface. The toaster of the future, no matter how sophisticated, will always be a utensil, an "it" rather than a "thou." It will be owned, not owning, whereas the stupidest, vilest human, as long as he is sound of mind and does not barter away his own rights, will always be capable of owning any utensil.

But my point in saying all this is that the very idea of "owning" anything will be changed by these connected robotic interfaces. How could owning things in a cybernetic world order be the same as owning things now? Our primitive system of exclusive ownership will crumble to the ground. As it is now, I can take a hammer, walk into the kitchen, smash our toaster to bits and toss it into the garbage. Since I rarely eat toast I would never miss it, though I suspect the members of this household who do eat toast might have something harsh to say to me about what I did. But outside the narrow circle of this household nothing and nobody has anything to say about what my little rampage cost them.

I said before that future connected toasters will always be as much utensils as our primitive, low tech toasters today. Let us say that we did own a toaster of the future and I did the same thing. I take a hammer, walk into the kitchen and prepare to smash it to pieces. Before I can raise the hammer it would warn me of all the costs this intended act will entail. Right now this would be impossible to calculate accurately, since costs of recycling, replacement, packaging and delivery are hidden under a two foot deep slime of graft. But let us say that it is smart enough to give an estimate:

"If you smash me it will cost you about twenty dollars to replace me plus it will cost society a hundred bucks in hidden costs and add five to the seventy billion pounds of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere every day. Plus, there will be moral as well as financial costs. Willful destruction can be addictive. Plus, by destroying a functional tool you will be depriving someone else of the chance to use this toaster until it breaks down."

This is a frivolous example, but there is no telling how our thinking will change once formerly hidden information is, as it were, built into the very fabric of our environment, once every wall we see, every tool we touch is available for questioning. Connected robots working together will amount to what is being called ubiquitous computing; ubiquity will allow an ongoing dialectic with the sum of knowledge, using our surroundings as what Bacon called the Organon (an instrument for acquiring knowledge). Today only people can be grilled for information on demand, and then only certain people at certain times. Pets are so popular because they are available to relate to more often and in different ways from human peers.

Internet search engines are already giving us a glimpse of what is soon to come. Grade school pupils are getting to know Google not long after they can recognize the face of their flesh and blood teachers. Soon search engines will become more active, they will push questions at us, as Socrates did. As soon as they detect an imbalance in our life, they will start throwing out subtle questions and suggestions for righting the balance. Meanwhile, people everywhere will learn to question everything around them more intelligently. Everything before, behind, overhead and underfoot will be quite literally an object lesson designed by very clever teachers.

This will spell the end of materialism. Once people get used to gaining wisdom from objects as well as people, they will learn to value the lesson above the medium by which the lesson came. How long after that will it be before we all see that we are morally obliged to share and interchange our possessions? Why not make our union with the best of what can be known official by just getting married? By that I mean, why not just admit that everything already is partially owned by many people and by all people? Why not give them a due share in ownership? Why should the world not have a say in how things are disposed of, in whether they are wasted or not? Consider this complaint that J-J Rousseau made in his Confessions after some important people absconded with his property and refused to give it back:

"From the weak to the strong, such an act would be a theft: from the strong to the weak, it is nothing more than an appropriation of property, without a right." (Rousseau, Confessions)

Poor people are thieves, rich people appropriate; they are protected by power, law, and even language. This is a complaint you often hear from the little guy, the same gripe Bender made on behalf of the little cleanup robots: "Yeah, sure, let the robot do it." But who is there to complain when the biggest voiceless minority (so voiceless that it does not realize that it is actually a majority), All Mankind, is being ripped off? Nobody. Exclusive ownership means that I own it, nobody else has a say. That is why I think it is useful to personify the oppressor of all mankind and call him Adolph Nobody.

For me, the tyranny of Adolph Nobody over everybody was underlined lately by an argument that took place just after a group viewing of "An Inconvenient Truth." Friend A walked out incensed at how the little guy was being robbed by rich, powerful, wealthy polluters. Our planet is boiling and they are to blame.

Friend B pointed out that in this case it is the rich and powerful who have the most to lose from global warming. It is not some or a few who will lose out but everybody, and no matter how adamant they will sooner or later see the light and get onside with the protectors of the environment. If there are plotters they are screwing themselves first and nobody but an idiot would fail to realize that. Friend A was adamant that this was a conspiracy issue that the few must have something to gain by the destruction of the planet. They must have something to hide, to plot about. Nothing would veer A from his "us" versus "them," from his poor good guys versus evil elite mind-set.

I was reminded of something Michael Ignatieff wrote, that the left has permanently crippled itself by buying into an anti-Bush, oppositional, conflict theory, conspiratorial way of thinking about the world. Oppressed minorities are good at complaining, but blind griping erases the ability to rule. From our Baha'i viewpoint, both houses, right and left, are cursing themselves by kicking away at Adolph Nobody, which paradoxically gives all their power to Adolph. Meanwhile the rights of everybody are elbowed out completely. This "griper's fallacy" has been around since long before there were Marxists. Consider this example of an Adolph Nobody statement by John Adams (Thomas Jefferson's buddy) that, while having a toehold on the truth about absolute, exclusive property, ultimately misses the point about finding a solution to the problem:

"In every society where property exists there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected; they will either be made by the members to plunder the few who are rich, or by the influential to fleece the many who are poor."

Reboots and Bans

Educational Reboots and Research Bans

By John Taylor; 2007 Feb 27

Paris Talks is a minefield of mind-blowing bon mots, and among my favorites is this,

"It (science and the search for truth) means, also, that we must be willing to clear away all that we have previously learned, all that would clog our steps on the way to truth; we must not shrink if necessary from beginning our education all over again." (Abdu'l-Baha, Paris Talks, 136)

To the absent minded, to a forgetful person like me, one blown away at random times by migraine attacks, this is a supremely comforting thing to learn. It is true that I have to begin again from the start whenever I seem to be getting something done, but going back to square one is not necessarily a bad thing. It is the mark of search for truth that one is willing to do that. Many others, unwilling or proud, take wrong turns, refuse to ask for directions, and waste their entire lives. Consider the following, one of my favorite passages in economist Paul Klugman's book, The Accidental Theorist.

"I might as well raise another point. One thing that usually happens when I try to talk about the difference between serious economics and the kind of glib rhetoric that passes for sophistication is that people accuse me of being arrogant, of thinking that I know everything. I can't imagine why. No, seriously -- think about it. What someone like Felix Rohatyn is in effect saying is "I don't need to make an effort to understand where the conventional views of economists come from; I don't need to understand the stuff that's in every undergraduate textbook; I'm such a smart guy that I can make up my own version of macroeconomics off the top of my head, and it will be much better than anything they have come up with." Then along comes this irritating economist who points out a few gaping holes in his argument, basic errors that anyone who had bothered to understand the stuff in the undergraduate textbook would not have made. And people's response is "That Krugman -- he's so arrogant."
"Well, what can we do about this kind of thing? Let me be the first to admit that economists have not made it easy for smart people who don't want to get too deep into the technicalities to understand the basics. Mathematics is a wonderful tool, but there are far too few attempts to explain the fundamental models of economics with a minimum of math; we need to make a real effort to write in English, and skip the differential topology. I'm trying, but the profession has a long way to go.
"But it's also important for non-economists -- people who want to be sophisticated about economic policy without getting Ph.D.s -- to make an effort. As I said earlier, it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of attitude. The biggest problem with many businesspeople, political leaders, and others is that while they are willing to talk and read about economics ad nauseam, they are not willing to do anything that feels like going back to school. They would rather read five books by David Halberstam than one chapter in an undergraduate textbook; and they absolutely hate the idea that they need to work their way through whimsical stories about cloth and wine and baby-sitting rather than get right into pontificating about globalization and the new economy.
"But there is no way around it. If you want to be truly well-informed about economics (or anything else), you must go back to school -- and keep going back, again and again. You must be prepared to work through little models before you can use the big words -- in fact, it is usually a good idea to try to avoid the big words altogether. If you balk at this task -- if you think that you are too grown-up for this sort of thing -- then you may sound impressive and sophisticated, but you will have no idea what you are talking about ..." (Accidental Theorist, 114-115)

Next I want to talk about Michael Creighton’s latest science potboiler, "Next." In this novel he paints a world of corrupted biotech, of scientists gone wild with a passion for not knowledge but money and power. In the following, from the afterword to the book, he explains the root reason why Big Science has been become so greed obsessed, and prescribes the first step to making it better.

"Rescind the Bayh-Dole Act. In 1980, Congress decided that the discoveries made within universities were not being made widely available, to benefit the public. To move things along, it passed a law permitting university researchers to sell their discoveries for their own profit, even when that research had been funded by taxpayer money.
"As a result of this legislation, most science professors now have corporate ties -- either to companies they have started or to other biotech companies. Thirty years ago, there was a distinct difference in approach between university research and that of private industry. Today the distinction is blurred, or absent. Thirty years ago, disinterested scientists were available to discuss any subject affecting the public. Now, scientists have personal interests that influence their judgment.
"Academic institutions have changed in unexpected ways: The original Bayh-Dole legislation recognized that universities were not commercial entities, and encouraged them to make their research available to organizations that were. But today, universities attempt to maximize profits by conducting more and more commercial work themselves, thus making their products more valuable to them when they are finally licensed..." (Next, by Michael Creighton, Harper Collins, New York, 2006, p. 422-423)

This is all laudable and undeniable stuff, and I applaud Creighton for this aspect of the book. But in the following, while most of it makes eminent sense, Creighton goes out on the same thin logical limb that I railed against after the last Philosopher's Cafe meeting: the stupid consensus of opinion that prohibition failed and should be forgotten, or worse, invoked as a sort of "Remember the Alamo" for all who would forbid social engineering. "Remember the Prohibition Era," they cry. Anyway, here is what Creighton says in prescribing a cure for the corruption of science:

"Avoid bans on research. Various groups of different political persuasions want to ban some aspect of genetic research. I agree that certain research ought not to be pursued, at least not now. But as a practical matter, I oppose bans on research and technology.
"Bans can't be enforced. I don't know why we have not learned this lesson. From Prohibition to the war on drugs, we repeatedly indulge the fantasy that behavior can be banned. Invariably we fail. And in a global economy, bans take on other meanings: even if you stop research in one country, it still goes on in Shanghai. So what have you accomplished?
"Of course, hope springs eternal, and fantasies never die: various groups imagine they can negotiate a global ban on certain research. But to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a successful global ban on anything. Genetic research is unlikely to be the first." (Next, 422)

Hmm. Bans cannot be enforced. Does that mean that we should forget about banning, say, murder or robbery just because we will never find and punish every murderer or robber? There has to be something wrong with that somewhere. I would say what it is but I'm just so angry that I cannot think straight. Once again, I smell the foul odor of Adolph Nobody.