Martyrdom of God's Spy

On the Martyrdom of God's Spy

By John Taylor; 2006 July 09

I dreamed this morning about ritual. What I remember is very vague, something about going to Anglican churches that were all empty until I came across this one dynamic priest who had a large, thriving congregation. His secret, he explained, was that he had innovated with rituals; he had found a way of being true to the old while reaching out to the new. I suppose I must explain that my father's family is Anglican, my Aunt is a lay nun and my Uncle Ron, now deceased, was a priest. Now that I think of it, perhaps this dream was in response to an internet "newspaper" article I read just before retiring to bed last night about how Steven Hawking recently asked this question to the Yahoo Answers List: "How can we assure the survival of human race over the next two hundred years?" He got tens of thousands of answers to his query, one of which was:

"If you really are Steven Hawking then you have already answered your own question, the only way to be sure is to begin colonizing the moons and planets of our solar system."

So it would seem that the answer given by my daemon in a dream was that renewing human rituals is the key to human survival. I rose out of bed, mechanically performed my morning rituals, which included 95 repetitions of the Greatest Name and reciting the Tablet of Ahmad. I plunked onto the sofa, waves of sleep inertia still washing over me and turned my mind over and over on that question, how can ritual be the answer? It is true that fundamental physical needs are not going to change. But it is unlikely that having everybody on earth performing the same exercise ritual at the same time will ever be feasible. The Chinese do it, it is true, with those outdoor Tai Chi dances, but it is hard to imagine that happening elsewhere, in every culture, least of all the individualist West.

Thomas happened to be alone with me for breakfast, as Mom was puttering and Silvie was in the bathtub. I didactically explained to him why breakfast is the most important meal of the day, how I make mine as balanced as I can, a cup full of Gazpacho for veggies, two free range eggs smothered in olive oil and ground flax seeds, a half cup of pomegranate juice, green tea, a high grain cereal with milk. He asked his typical, relevant questions, "If you could cover the head of a pin with atoms, would there be a million of them?" I did not know, but volunteered that electrons are much smaller, that you could squeeze a great deal more of them onto the head of that pin. "Would there be a million and ten, then?" he said, his eyes growing larger. Probably more, I speculated. The next comment followed in logical progression, at least for a six year old. He put his fingers together very close, "If you had an atom this big, then you probably could only squeeze one of them onto the head of a pin." Most probably, I replied.

I have noticed that for my daughter the life of the imagination is the big thing, she loves to write fictional stories about bats all day long. But Tomaso uses his imagination differently, it is pervaded with what you could call "if granny had wheels she would be a trolley-car" thinking. For example, yesterday I broke out the boxes of lego blocks that I had stored for years under the basement stairs, and he set to work on them in the garage, spending hours building a "spaceport." He mounted a defender canon on one wall of the space port and placed a space dragon behind to guard where it could not shoot. Now if I had said to him, as I often do, "Yes, but I have a super blaster here and will blast your spaceport out of the sky. "Yes," he would reply, "But if you did, I would have a super blaster reflector that would reflect it back to you and blow your ship out of the sky." For him his response is always a logical consequence of the attack. In imagination he is always prepared with an adequate, devastating response to any imagined dangers. In other words, he and Steven Hawking are very much alike.

Silvie is preparing a little drama starring her stuffed toys about the martyrdom of the Bab for the celebration at Anne Nichols home this afternoon, and she just came asking if it is all right to shine a light on the place where the Bab is. My on-the-spot judgment was that it would be irreverent to have the flashlight represent His Person but shining a spot on the place where he is would not be. "Can I use powdered sugar for the smoke of the guns?" Um, our hostess would probably not appreciate that on her living room floor. Try this white plastic, it looks a little like smoke. Then Thomas calls us both down to see the sets he has designed for the play. Silvie and I go down to the garage and see what he has prepared. It looks exactly like yesterday's Lego space port. Silvie is appalled and objects, "It is supposed to be set in Baghdad, not in space."

As you see, there are interruptions upon interruptions now that the kids are home from school and this morning I have just given up, forgot about concentrating, gone with the flow and just wrote about what was happening instead of doing what I wanted, joining forces with Steven Hawking to save the world. It was working for a while too, I was writing something. But wait, I am not supposed to be writing anyway, it is a Holy Day. I give up. Have a happy Martyrdom of the Bab. Talk among yourselves. Enjoy the occasion. Tomorrow I will turn my mind to the ritual whisperings of my ritual dream.

Oh, wait. I wanted to mention that over breakfast while talking to Thomas I cracked a new book that I had just bought from the Haldimand Library's remaindered book sale, one I read back in the 1980's called "The Discoverers," by Daniel Boorstin, and which has influenced me a fair bit over the years. Its headpiece quotation is what Lear said to his dying faithful daughter when he in mad despair hoped and dreamed that they might live a private, happy life together in peace:

"And take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies."

That is the ritual we need, a discovery of the mystery of things found out by God's spies. Like Hawking, we need to ask the right question, find out the way to make the human tragedy into a comedy, devise successful rituals without form, like the priest in my dream did, rituals to fulfill the essentials of human needs and leave room for diversity in what is not essential. That is what the Martyrdom of the Bab was all about anyway, wasn't it? Making invincible spaceports out of a barracks square in Baghdad. Wait a minute, the martyrdom did not take place in Baghdad, it was Tabriz, wasn't it? Excuse me while I check out some rehearsals.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

How Can Everybody Be Super?

How Can Everybody Be Super?

By John Taylor; 2006 July 07

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - William James

As some readers may have guessed, I am subscribed to one of those word-a-day electronic mailouts (actually two of them) and the inflow of new vocabulary on a daily basis is influencing me more than I would have thought. For instance, yesterday's word was hubris, meaning "overbearing pride or presumption." I knew that, of course, but I did not know that it comes from the Greek "Hybris," meaning "excessive pride or wanton violence." A tyrant is proud and violent, the two go together. Built right into the word then is a link between pride and violence that the Baha'i principles recognize, especially in the principle of elimination of prejudice. As every new Baha'i learns, the Master taught that the root of prejudice is pride as much as ignorance, and that all wars are ultimately caused by various forms of pride and prejudice.

Another interesting thing based upon this principle I came across yesterday. In California a new "Museum of Tolerance" just opened up, and it has two entrances, one for those with prejudices and one for the prejudice free. Needless to say, those who try to enter by the second door are blocked. The door is permanently locked in order to make the point that nobody is completely without prejudices. This entranceway, like the Greek word Hybris, has built into it a central aspect of mainline Baha'i doctrine on prejudice, that only a perfect human being is free of prejudice and the only perfect person who was not a Manifestation of God was the son of a Manifestation, one `Abdu'l-Baha.

The idea that freedom from pride and prejudice is the mark of perfection is also pretty central to the teaching of Jesus. For example, when He set forth the beatitudes while standing on the mount He placed this one first:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

So on one the one side of the spectrum are those with hubris, the sort who would walk through the door marked "for the unprejudiced only" without hesitation, and on the other extreme end of the spectrum are the poor in spirit, those who unhesitatingly and without reflection walk through the doors marked "for the prejudiced only." In theory, the poor in spirit would all be believers in God, since contact, through prayer and reflection, with the supreme Being would inure them, would burn into them a profound sense of humility. In fact God promises to do just that, will we nill we, whether we choose door number one or door number two.

"I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir." (Isa 13:11-12, KJV)

Interesting the juxtaposition here among hubris, being brought down, and ending up "more precious than fine gold." Here are "human values" with a vengeance. And it seems to imply that I was wrong about that spectrum image with the poor in spirit on one side and those inflated by hubris on the other. Like the curators of the Museum of Tolerance, God may expect us to be gulled, to try to get through the locked doors and fail. Then, having been humbled, we can learn what poor in spirit really means. Only then is the Kingdom of Heaven ours. Only then are we reasoning and not rearranging prejudices. Maybe our powers of reason are designed to answer questions cannot be answered, chaotic questions like:

"By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?" (Job 38:24-5)

This reminds me of a subtext in the movie "The Incredibles," which the kids have been watching repeatedly lately. At an early point in the film the bad guy, who is an arrogant boy rather than a sophisticated man (for once!) makes a very interesting point, "Yeah, special, everybody is special. But if everybody is special, then nobody is special." First time around I happened to be in the room and I almost stopped the video and made a comment, but then thought better of it. Interrupting is rarely appreciated. Second time around I sat in and watched the whole film with them. At the end the bad guy describes the future he is planning where everybody will have super powers like the Incredibles family, and repeats a paraphrase of what he had said earlier on,

"Then anybody will able to buy my inventions and gain their own super power. And when everybody is super, nobody will be super. And you supers will all be out of a job. Moo hahaha!"

Silvie herself stopped the film and asked what he meant. How can it be that if everybody is super nobody is, if everyone is special, no one is. I said that the word "special" implies unique, which happens only when something is utterly unlike any other thing. But if all other things are special also there can be no category "other things" by which to compare that thing's unique quality. QED. They were vaguely unsatisfied. Mom, shouting from the kitchen, jumped in on their side as always and said something to this effect: there is an infinite array of qualities. It is quite possible that every individual thing is similar to other things in most ways but still has a small number of attributes that are unique to it. Hence you can say that this thing is special and also that everything else is special too. QED.

I could only mumble something to the effect that if the bad guy is planning for everybody to be super in order that nobody will be super anymore, it cannot be a good thing. Otherwise he would be the good guy. As soon as I said it I saw the flaw in my own argument. Was I not defending the bad guy's argument that if everybody is special nobody is special? By doing that was I not siding with evil rather than good? My head started to hurt and I asked Silvie to hit the play button again.

We were talking about Bertrand Russell's class of all classes that are not members of themselves. And I figure if Russell spent ten years of brain breaking effort trying to solve that and by his own admission completely failed, I am not going to succeed in a short essay. It seems that after a century, Russell's all destroying paradox is entering popular literature. I guess the reason I sided with the bad guy was that I vaguely remembered `Abdu'l-Baha using the same paradox to convert Sutherland Maxwell from an atheist to a Baha'i. As I recall it, Maxwell said that he did not believe in a God who is everywhere and the Master agreed, a god who is everywhere is nowhere and therefore cannot exist. The only God that can conceivably exist in our minds must be substantiated, must have a locus, a sort of virtual place in space and history, one that we term the Manifestation of God. QED. As I recall, this conversion took place in 1909, a year or so after Russell published the Principia Mathematica but at least ten years before Wittgenstein refuted it in Russell's eyes.

But let us get back to prejudice and reconstruct Marie's perfectly valid argument that it is possible for one thing and all things to be special at the same time. By saying that something is special we are talking about what are called differentia. The Dictionary of Philosophy defines "differentia" as "that part of the essence of a thing that distinguishes its species from all other species in the same genus." The very fact that they are not the same thing gives an object a differentia from all others. This is axiomatic. As long as we assume that A is different from B, they have to differ some ways and be the same in other ways or there could be no comparison in the first place. If this were not so, there would only be A, there would be no B. But, and this is the big question, would B be utterly inconceivable?

I think not. The human power of imagination enables us to create B's and C's and an infinitude of other entities that are the same and different but without reality. This ability is unique to humans. In this world, on this plane we are special and superior, and no other known being is special in this way. Like all powers, this can be good or it can be bad, or both, or neither, as we make it. However, as I understand it, the Liar's Paradox, Russell's Barber's paradox and several other uncertainty principles do not refute this but rob it of cogency. Whatever comes out of it is not persuasive, it is a nugatory shibboleth (to use two words-of-the-day together) that cannot illuminate or say anything meaningful because the conclusion is assumed by its premises.

By the same valid but un-cogent logic it is always possible for a reasoning human to say, "I am better than you, we are superior to them," and be perfectly correct. Not only correct but popular. That is why backbiting and gossip are so common and addictive, because it is always easy to validly criticize someone who is not present. This superficially reinforces bonds by giving a sense of camaraderie with those who are like you and close by. We always have virtues that those not present do not. The meanest intelligence easily finds a way to put others down validly. For in some ways I am always better than you, no matter how bad I may be. Even Hitler was superior to you and me in certain ways. It is always easy to say with validity, as Hitler did, "We are better than them." If he had been a member of the Khoi tribes of Southern Africa or an ant in an anthill, he still could have picked out ways in which his group was superior to others. We are special. We are better. Of course in other ways I am worse, we are worse, but that is never popular to say.

Thinking beings, then, face tremendous temptation. What greater joy is there than being right all the time? A bigot, a Hitler, a person with hubris is consistent, constructs valid arguments to his heart's content, and suffers not the contradiction of cogency. His thinking sounds specious to those of like mind. But the law of justice is clear:

"Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him." (Lev 19:17)

So, to get back to the question that forms the title of this essay, how can everybody be super? It is possible but only, paradoxically, when everybody is humble, courteous, deferential to truth in all its forms. Only poverty of spirit enables beings with super powers to walk the face of the earth -- for spirit is the greatest, the only super power because it is not limited by form and substance. Superman and Mr. Incredible are helpless before the power of the Holy Spirit, and this power inculcates one overweening value, the fear of God, which is the essence of wisdom.

"The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate. Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength." (Prov 8:13-14, KJV)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Garbasaurus

Garbasaurus vs. Universal Civil Society

By John Taylor; 2006 July 05

As part of my decision to be more physically active, I have taken to listening to audio tapes while practicing table tennis. That is how I came to listen to Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, who is according to the blurb the most influential apologist for that faith in the last century. I learned a few things from these lectures, which were originally written for radio, do not get me wrong. However, as with Lewis's Screwtape Letters, I came away from the experience with a slightly creepy, clammy feeling. As always with Christians, you can listen all day to what they say and not a word of it makes sense. Their argumentation seems like the "Garbasaurus," a sculpture of a T-Rex made of flotsam from the Speed River that a bunch of do-gooder student volunteers at my Alma Mater, Guelph University, dredged out and put together in order to make a point about art, or recycling, or archeology, or something. You look at the Garbasaurus and try to think of it as art, as an image of a T-Rex, but you cannot get away from what it is literally, a pile of garbage. I do not want to sound insulting about anybody's beliefs, least of all the followers of His Holiness Jesus Christ, but that is just how I react each time I sincerely try to make sense of their logic.

Actually it is worse than that. Whereas the Guelph students tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, Christians make a sow's ear out of a silk purse by consciously isolating belief from its consequences. Not a word of what Lewis says in Mere Christianity has the slightest hint of social reference. To me the make-it or break-it question about any belief is how it answers this question: What difference does it make if I believe this, as opposed to anything else? By that I do not mean, what difference would it make to me, how good or righteous would I feel, but what difference would believing it make to the world, to others, to the social fact. To cut off any belief, even one as powerful as that of Christ, from its potential to change the world is to castrate it. It may change your heart but it is never going to mean thing to the salvation of the world until it understands social repercussions as essential conditions of faith.

Why Christian theology's doctrinal divorce from practicability? Why would any belief system go to such lengths to use its own rope to hang itself? The answer is clear: monasticism. Asceticism, isolationism, exclusivism, all are the mark of the beast, monasticism, the most pernicious and cancerous of all killers of meaning. This is what the Qu'ran warned against,

"O you who believe! most surely many of the doctors of law and the monks eat away the property of men falsely, and turn (them) from Allah's way." (Qur'an 9:34, Shakir Ali, tr)

By "eating away" property falsely is no doubt meant the notorious drain on the finances of Christians that the monastic orders sucked out of them throughout the Dark Ages. But the greatest "property" given by a teacher is his teaching, and the monks most importantly ate away at Jesus' most precious legacy, His ability to melt the barriers between hearts and change the social fact from within. Thus long after the monastics' financial burdens were eased in modern times, their doctrinal legacy lived on in the thinking of Lewis, who factored social good completely out of faith's equations.

It is demonstrably impossible to show forth virtue when you are alone. You may feel the brilliance of the divine, it may be a an intimate reality for yourself but as far as the world is concerned your precious light is lost, as if sunlight had hit a cloud and radiated back out into the darkness of space. Most Baha'is are familiar with what Baha'u'llah told the monastic orders of Christendom,

"Seclude not yourselves in your churches and cloisters. Come ye out of them by My leave, and busy, then, yourselves with what will profit you and others. ... He that secludeth himself in his house is indeed as one dead. It behoveth man to show forth that which will benefit mankind." (Summons, 1.136, p. 70)

Isolation, being cut off from people in a room or on a mountain top ends up as a kind of ethical suicide. `Abdu'l-Baha seems to be elaborating upon this moral dictum in a less well-known statement,

"People must live for one another, and not live in seclusion as do the monks and nuns. People should not live solitary lives. Light is of no value in an empty room. A tree is of no service to any one on the summit of a mountain, but should stand in a place where it will give shade and where its fruits can be gathered. The believers should be together as much as possible. Two lamps in a room give more light than one." (AB, in Baha'i Scriptures, p. 440)

This clear and emphatic teaching of the Baha'i Faith is based upon sound principles, the same from which Christ derived the parables of the talents, of the light and the bushel, and several others. Unfortunately that did not save Christianity from being brought to its knees by monastic movements, in the first thousand years of its existence financially, after that only doctrinally. A similar thing happened with Sufism in Islam, in spite of the Qu'ran's explicit disapproval of monastic leanings. The great Rumi' explains why the removal of temptation cannot by definition help the problem of lust that isolation from the world purports to solve,

"Hadst thou no concupiscence there could be no abstinence.
Where no antagonist, what need is there of armies?
Ah! make not thyself an eunuch, not a monk,
Because chastity is mortgaged to lust.
Without lust denial of lust is impossible
No man can display bravery against the dead."
(Mathnavi of Rumi, E.H. Whinfield tr., Vol. 5)

Immanuel Kant also recognized the importance of this principle in the fifth thesis of his 1784 "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View," which he capsulates thusly:

"The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men."

Only in a society with maximum freedom, the freedom that comes of being ruled by law, not by rejecting law, can nature attain to its ultimate end, Kant goes on to explain. The purpose of our nature requires that there be "mutual opposition" among our members, something that can only happen when coupled with "the most exact definition of freedom and fixing of its limits..." Doing that is the job of "a perfectly just civic constitution;" I think this constitution must be what Rousseau had called the social contract, and what Baha'is call the Covenant. This common constitution moderates what today we might call competitive, dog eat dog instincts and domesticates them for the common good. He says,

"Thus a society in which freedom under external laws is associated in the highest degree with irresistible power, i.e., a perfectly just civic constitution, is the highest problem Nature assigns to the human race; for Nature can achieve her other purposes for mankind only upon the solution and completion of this assignment. Need forces men, so enamored otherwise of their boundless freedom, into this state of constraint. They are forced to it by the greatest of all needs, a need they themselves occasion inasmuch as their passions keep them from living long together in wild freedom. Once in such a preserve as a civic union, these same passions subsequently do the most good." (Idea for a Universal History, translation by Lewis White Beck. From Immanuel Kant, On History, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963)

Kant then compares this social domestication of individual competitiveness under the rule of law to a forest. There, each tree is constantly fighting with its neighbor for sunlight, but at the same time it depends upon the trees next to it for shelter from the elements. Forest trees grow tall and straight, isolated trees end up stunted and deformed. I was intrigued by this comparison, and since we have the bounty of living in a rural area and I have been driving the kids to and from soccer games in Cayuga, Caledonia and Hagersville lately, I have been observing the trees and how they turn out with this in mind.

On the whole I have confirmed what Kant says, with qualifications. In his time trees grew more naturally, and now of course in a farming setting like here in Southern Ontario almost every tree was artificially planted by somebody. They do not come up as they would in a competitive ecosystem. And in extreme climates, trees do end up very stunted, in fact miniature "Bonsai" trees are so twisted and tiny that they last thousands of years and become prized works of art, which of course is leading to their virtual extinction. Even around here although you do see tall trees growing in isolation, and they are as straight and healthy as they would be in a forest, there are still fewer tall ones than in woodlots, and to my eye they spread out more, and do seem to be more crooked, though perhaps I am imagining it. Again, without human help they would never make it, they would have been crowded out by rapidly growing bushes as saplings. In nature tall species only are found in a well protected, mature forest. Anyway, here are Kant's exact words ending the Fifth Thesis:

"It is just the same with trees in a forest: each needs the others, since each in seeking to take the air and sunlight from others must strive upward, and thereby each realizes a beautiful, straight stature, while those that live in isolated freedom put out branches at random and grow stunted, crooked, and twisted. All culture, art which adorns mankind, and the finest social order are fruits of unsociableness, which forces itself to discipline itself and so, by a contrived art, to develop the natural seeds to perfection."

Let us compress Kant's analogy into an aphorism: the fruits of unsociableness bear the seeds of perfection. Garbasaurus will never move, never have life, will never even be a work of sculpture because it comes out of a system that until now has fallen short of and even rejected its perfect civic constitution.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Full Service House

The Full Service House, Part I

By John Taylor; 04 July, 2006

Note: this is a re-write of an essay drafted last October.

The 1960's and 1970's saw a mass retreat by idealistic youth who went "back to nature." The flower children changed how thought, dressed and ate. Organic farming began out of that, and it has since become, in modified form, a billion dollar industry, the fastest growing branch of mainstream agriculture. Some youths "opted out" completely and fled into the wilderness to live as hermits, while others experimented with communal living on cooperative farms. Their ideal was a leaderless community run by common consent, a truer democracy than those implicated in Vietnam and the Cold War. Unfortunately, few communes lasted longer than a decade and those that endured were run by strong leaders more autocratic than old-style leaders in society at large. After the initial burst of enthusiasm the movement died out in North America.

The true inheritors of the commune movement turned out to be certain Danish and other Scandinavian architects and planners. They erected entire housing blocks using some of the best principles worked out by those idealistic youths. In fact, the evolution of communal dwellings, known as the Kollektivhus, predated the youth revolution. It had already started in the early 1950's. In his history of housing, Norbert Schoenauer writes,

"One of the first postwar Danish collective houses, Hoje Soborg (1951) designed by architects P. E. Hoff and B. Windinge, was built in a Copenhagen suburb, Gladaxe. The 120 dwellings of this five-story elevator serviced building ranged in size from one to four rooms. Apart from a doorman, collective services included a common dining room with central kitchen catering, housekeeping services, a children's center serving all age groups, two guest rooms for tenant's visitors, and, at the roof level, common party and meeting rooms with access to a terrace garden." (6000 years of housing, by Norbert Schoenauer, WW Norton & Co., New York, 2000, p. 460)

The evolution of collective or communal housing continued until by the late 1970's an improved version was now called a "service house." One in development in Stockholm was so popular that it had a waiting list of 13,000 names. Schoenauer writes,

"Collective habitation is an attractive proposition to many families and households. A young working couple would find it very convenient to move into an apartment building where food catering and housecleaning is available on request. Similarly, a new family, transferred from their hometown to an unfamiliar city, would find security in a collective house. Working single parents with preschool children would benefit greatly from using the in-house day-care and kindergarten. Elderly couples and retired people too can benefit from collective services offered in these buildings. In particular, single people: whether young, middle-aged, or elderly, divorced, or widowed: are all potential collective house residents who want to live in comfort without sacrificing their privacy." (Id.)

As a result of the high demand, many of these Scandinavian projects were built too tall and large and became overly institutionalized; it was difficult to maintain a homey, informal atmosphere in a high-rise. Meanwhile, in North America there was no effort to see that in-home services reached more than a tiny elite.

"If Otto Fick were alive today, and he visited an American family living in a luxury apartment complex like Chicago's River city, a building with 24 hour doorman service and amenities such as swimming pool, sauna, exercise room, rooftop party room, and roof gardens as well as food delivery from an in-house restaurant, he would insist the River city is a Kollektivhus, although in reality it is a mixed-use development. In fact, most American luxury apartment buildings offer services to the residents that are similar to those of collective habitation. But Fick's original intention of making similar services accessible to moderate or lower income groups remains just a dream." (Ib., 460-462)

This dream I share with Fick. Service house attributes would be basic, requisite parameters in the design of mound architecture and hillside housing developments.

The problems that have turned up in service house developments tend to be the same as a commune: how do you maintain both unity of thought and economic viability? How to reconcile volunteer services with commercial, for-profit enterprises? How do you maintain informal, consensual management among large numbers of tenants? Schoenauer writes,

"Experience shows that moderate sized collective house, with 60 to 100 dwellings and collective services limited exclusively to residents, may be desirable from a social point of view but unrealistic economically. Moderate sized collective habitation is only viable if the residents are willing to operate it communally, as is the case in low-rise communal houses such as Bofaellesskaber, in Denmark, or in a mixed-use apartment building where collective services are provided by in-house commercial outlets." (Ib., 460)

Done right, a collective or service house can be made an attractive choice for the poor as well as the wealthy. This would happen if every high density housing development be required by design to offer such facilities. Just as we all require basics like food, clothing, shelter and -- as is increasing recognized, exercise -- everyone needs the same range of collective services that Fick envisaged, such as communal gardens, kitchens, dining and childcare, cleaning services delivered to the home, and, close by, participatory education and entertainment.

I see no reason, therefore, not to have both communal services and commercial enterprises operating simultaneously in what is being called "co-opetition" (cooperative competition, where rivals participate in agreeing upon common standards, a phenomenon now restricted to the world of high technology corporations). With a new kind of flexible, open, computerized building code it would be easy to tweak residency so as to enforce basic standards of diversity, striking a balance between the number of rich and poor, short and long-term residents, and to strike a happy balance of immigrants and native-born, as well as mixing various racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Credits and funding would be conditional upon how a given move contributes to the basic human need for unity in diversity.

For example, an employed resident would pay cash for local services, such as cooking and laundry, in order to save the most time and effort. Even those who enjoy cooking, for example, might still wish to have a fresh salad delivered and served every day. Meanwhile poorer residents of the service house would have the option of participating full time in the growing, preparing or serving of that salad. Depending upon need and time invested, this could be done on a voluntary basis or, depending upon merit, a part-time service could grow into a full time career.

A service house neighborhood therefore would not have a hard distinction between employed and unemployed, between working people and the retired or disabled. A person who loses their job could make ends meet by spending their time puttering in neighborhood collective gardens, or communal kitchens, workshops, recreation centers, or other local facilities. Subsistence living in cooperative services would offer a carry-over job to skilled workers, and a way for the interloper and immigrant to integrate quickly into the community.

What is essential is that all have equal access to basic human needs, for example, a standard, high quality, scientifically designed and locally grown diet including every proper nutrient the body requires -- for example, that salad delivered along with meals -- but also, less obvious but just as essential, all should have access to those time saving services that increase everybody's productivity, whether the person is privileged or not. This is in the interest the rich as well as the poor. A service house should be a design for everybody, not only the rich or only the middle class or only the poor but all of them at once.

The big wrench in the works of communal housing is politics. It has proven very difficult for people with widely varying backgrounds, opinions and outlooks to arrive at democratic decisions. The few communal projects that endure tend to do so by ejecting dissenters; as a result they end up with no diversity among their members. Schoenauer points out:

"Communal housing groups seem to function best, and with less friction, if their members share similar values and have similar backgrounds. This is one of the reasons they are so successful in Denmark, a country with a culturally homogeneous population. It is tempting to compare the members of communal housing to a large extended family or a clan, but there are two basic distinctions: (1) membership is voluntary, and (2) there is no patriarch or leader and all important decisions are made democratically." (Ibid., 466)

While everybody likes the ideal of a full participatory democracy, in practice consulting is slow drudgery, consuming much time and energy and -- let us face it -- it is extremely tedious for most people most of the time. Participants who try to reduce boredom by spicing up deliberations tend only to stir up more contention, which tears away the roots of the tree. Yet the potential benefits of communal living are too great to ignore. Schoenauer, in summing up the educational advantages of one experiment in communal housing, Bofaellesskaber, points out that such contacts can be edifying too, forcing upon residence the discipline that democracy demands. Here,

"First, individuals have the option at all times either to enjoy the privacy of their own homes or to engage in social activities the community's common areas. Second, these residential communities foster voluntary social interaction as well as social and environmental responsibility; most communities practice composting and recycling. Last, but not least, they foster first-hand experience in harmonious communal living: not unlike members of band-type food gathering societies, they learn to compromise after realizing that what is good for the individual may not always be in the best interests of the community." (Ib., 466)

Next time, I will go into more detail about the computerized building codes that I referred to earlier, the invisible legislative structure behind the girders that would make this kind of development possible.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Peace Chapter

Peace and Justice Guide, Chapter on the Peace Plans of Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, Bentham, and Kant

By John Taylor; 2006 July 02

Driven by an impulse I cannot resist, I include today a chapter from the book, "Guides to Peace and Justice, from Ancient Sages to the Suffragettes," by one Sanderson Beck. The full text of this chapter he has made available on the Net at:

<http://www.san.beck.org/GPJ15-Rousseau,Kant.html>

This Beck fellow is a very clear writer and this little history of the peace proposals leading up to Kant's Sketch of Perpetual Peace could not be better. I learned a great deal from it this morning when I came across it. Read it carefully, as it will help understand where I am coming from with this ten year recycling decade idea. To my amazement, I discovered that this paperback  history of peace also contains a chapter on the Baha'i peace contribution, called: "Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha on World Peace," which you can read at:

<http://www.san.beck.org/GPJ17-Bahaullah.html>

I skimmed it and found no problems or inaccuracies, though if I were doing such a chapter I would lay more emphasis on the Master's Letter to the Hague and the UHJ's Peace Message. What a pleasure to see the cover of this peace book,

http://www.san.beck.org/HP1-cover.html

And then to find displayed there, among others, the smiling picture of the Master! I also skimmed Beck's web site and noted that this guy has attained about the highest qualification of a peace activist that you could ask for: he was jailed for protesting the illegal American invasion of Iraq a couple of years ago. Here is someone who puts his freedom where his mouth is!

I found what Beck says about Jeremy Bentham here particularly interesting. I keep thinking that Bentham is poorly understood, that his genius has hardly been plumbed. As machine intelligence starts to rival our own, some sort of hedonic calculus will have to be devised sooner or later, if only to justify our morality to them and to keep the machines from taking over and ruling us for our own good. Yet the best thing about this chapter is how it places these thinkers together in such a way that, as Baha'is, we can appreciate how each of them augments and supplements the other, and how it all leads up to the Proclamation of Baha'u'llah. Truly, He was speaking to this tradition of seeking world peace and showing exactly how it will be implemented.

Saint-Pierre's Peace Plan

Abbe Charles-Irenee Castel de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743) was educated at a Jesuit college, where he studied the classics, logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. He joined a strict order of monks, but he had to leave it for reasons of health. He moved to Paris in 1680 and was at court from 1693 to 1718, when he was expelled from the French Academy for refusing to approve of the title "Great" for Louis XIV. He studied both the theory and practice of politics and was particularly influenced by Plato, Bodin, Machiavelli, Grotius, Pufendorf, Richelieu, Doria, and Hobbes. Paix Perpetuelle was first published in 1712, but he expanded that sketch to a two-volume edition the next year, which was translated into English in 1714 as A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe. He added a third volume in 1717 and published abridgements in 1729 and 1738. Saint-Pierre tried to gain publicity for his effort by giving credit to France's king Henri IV for the "grand design" that was actually written by Sully years later in 1638. He attended the peace conference at Utrecht in 1713 as the secretary for the Abbe Polignac, one of the three French plenipotentiaries. This gave him first-hand experience of the peacemaking process and stimulated him to work on his plan that could make peace perpetual.

Saint-Pierre attempted to use the philosophical methodology of Descartes in order to gain certainty by means of intuition and deduction. His first idea had been to include all the nations of the world; but then he limited his confederation to Europe so that the whole project would not seem impossible. Examining the various means which could prevent war among European nations, he inferred that a federation of states is the best solution. Whereas Hobbes showed that for the protection and benefit of individuals there must be unity in the state, Saint-Pierre went a step further in reasoning that to safeguard the peace between nations there must be a unifying federation. Although accused by Rousseau of unrealistically expecting people to be rational, Saint-Pierre did recognize that passions control the actions of most people. Therefore to overcome motives of self-interest the fear of violence must be used to enforce law and justice. Foreshadowing Rousseau's ideas, he posited that society protects people from violence by a contract and can express its sovereign will by establishing a permanent federation among the states of Europe.

Saint-Pierre's plan took the form of an elaborate treaty divided into articles that were fundamental, important, and useful. States of various forms of government could be in the federation, though most at this time were monarchies. The laws founded on justice were to be equal and reciprocal for all. Saint-Pierre pointed to the confederations of German and Helvetian states and the United Provinces of the Netherlands to show the practical advantages of union. He began his plan with peace and contrasted this to the French war aims that would have initiated the biased plan of Sully.

Saint-Pierre proposed twelve fundamental articles. First, all the Christian sovereigns of Europe shall form a permanent union for peace and security, endeavoring also to make treaties with Muslim sovereigns, and the sovereigns are to be represented by deputies in a perpetual senate in a free city. Second, the European society shall not interfere with the governments except to preserve them from seditious rebellions, and he even went so far as to guarantee hereditary sovereignties. Third, the Union shall send commissioners to investigate conspiracies and revolts and may send troops to punish the guilty according to the laws. Fourth, territories shall remain as they are unless three-fourths of the Union votes for a change, and no treaties may be made without the "advice and consent" of the Union. Fifth, no sovereign shall possess more than one state. Sixth, Spain and France shall remain in the house of Bourbon. These previous five articles have been criticized for not allowing a natural process of change. Seventh, chambers of commerce shall be maintained, and each sovereign must suppress robbers and pirates or pay reparation; if necessary the Union may assist them in this.

Eighth, no sovereign shall take up arms except against a declared enemy of the European society. Complaints shall be discussed and mediated by the senate in the city of peace. The Union shall defend the sovereigns who agree with its decisions. After at least fourteen nations have joined the confederation, any sovereign refusing to join is to be declared an enemy by the rest of Europe, which is to make war on it until the state joins or is dispossessed. The ninth article specified that the senate was to represent with one delegate each the following 24 powers: France, Spain, England, Holland, Savoy, Portugal, Bavaria, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Switzerland, Lorraine, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the papal states, Muscovy, Austria, Courland, Prussia, Saxony, Palatine, Hanover, and ecclesiastical electors. Obviously this scheme allowed extra votes for the divided German and Italian states. Tenth, each state shall contribute to the expenses of the society in proportion to its revenues. Eleventh, the senate shall take up questions after a plurality vote, and three-fourths is needed for a decision. Twelfth, none of the fundamental articles may be altered except by a unanimous vote of all members.

In the important articles Saint-Pierre gave more details he recommended such as Utrecht as the seat of the senate, which shall have an ambassador in every province of two million people. No sovereign shall keep more than 6,000 soldiers in his nation. Enemies of the union shall be punished with death or life imprisonment, and anyone reporting a conspiracy shall be given a reward. Every year on the same day sovereigns shall renew their oath to the Union. If a state has no succeeding sovereign, the Union may regulate the succession or allow a republic to be formed.

The useful articles are even more specific. The commander-in-chief of the federal forces shall not belong to any sovereign family. Rotating senators shall preside week by week. The four standing committees on politics, diplomacy, finances, and war are to be supplemented by committees of reconciliation, which shall adjust difficulties or report them to the senators for their decision. Freedom of religion is allowed. The Union may agree on weights, measures, and coins. The senate may mediate between conflicts of non-members and support the sovereign who accepts its offer. The European Union shall encourage Asia to establish a permanent society also.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Conscience is the voice of the soul. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Firmly convinced as I am that nothing on this earth is worth purchase at the price of human blood, and that there is no more liberty anywhere than in the heart of the just man, I feel, however, that it is natural for people of courage, who were born free, to prefer an honorable death to dull servitude." Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a fascinating individual, whose unorthodox ideas and passionate prose caused a flurry of interest in 18th-century France; his republican sentiments for liberty, equality, and brotherhood led eventually to the French Revolution. He was born on June 28, 1712, but his mother died in giving birth to him. His father had him reading romances and classical histories such as Plutarch before apprenticing him to an engraver. Rousseau loved to walk in nature; frustrated at being locked outside the city gates of Geneva at nightfall, at the age of sixteen he left his home to wander on his own. He was guided by a Catholic priest to Madame de Warens, who took him in for about ten years and eventually became his mistress. Rousseau studied music and devised a new system of musical notation, which was rejected by the Academy of Sciences. Throughout his life Rousseau often earned his living by copying music. In Paris in the 1740s he entered literary society and wrote both the words and music for an opera Les Muses Galantes. Rousseau lived for thirty years with an uneducated servant girl, who bore him five children, according to his Confessions, but all of them were given to an orphanage in infancy.

In 1749 Rousseau burst into prominence by winning an essay contest on the theme: "Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals?" Rousseau criticized social institutions for having corrupted the essential goodness of nature and the human heart. In his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" he elaborated on the process of how social institutions must have developed into the extreme inequities of aristocratic France, where the nobility and the clergy lived in luxury while the poor peasants had to pay most of the taxes. In his "Discourse on Political Economy" he suggested remedies for these injustices. In 1756 he retreated to a simple country life and wrote a romantic novel La Nouvelle Heloise, which won the hearts of many. Some historians consider Rousseau the initiator of the romantic rebellion in art and literature.

Rousseau's two greatest works were published in 1762-The Social Contract and Emile or On Education. For Rousseau society itself is an implicit agreement to live together for the good of everyone with individual equality and freedom. However, people have enslaved themselves by giving over their power to governments, which are not truly sovereign when they do not promote the general will. Rousseau believed that only the will of all the people together granted sovereignty. Various forms of government are instituted to legislate and enforce the laws. He wrote that the first duty of the legislator is to make the laws conform to the general will, and the first rule of public economy is to administer justice in conformity with the laws. His natural political philosophy echoes the way of Lao-zi. He suggested that the greatest talent of a ruler is to disguise his power to render it less odious by conducting the state so peaceably that it seems to need no conductors. Rousseau valued his citizenship in Geneva, where he was born, and he was one of the first strong voices for democratic principles. He believed there could be no liberty without virtue and no virtue without citizens.

Rousseau explained that citizens depend upon education. In Emile, a revolutionary book in educational theory, Rousseau described how a boy can learn most naturally by direct experience. Rousseau recommended awakening the inner goodness that comes from the heart and warned against the evil contrivances of "civilized" society.

"Where are there laws, and where are they respected? Everywhere you have seen only individual interest and men's passions reigning under this name. But the eternal laws of nature and order do exist. For the wise man, they take the place of positive law. They are written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason. It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free. The only slave is the man who does evil, for he always does it in spite of himself. Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He takes it with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere." 1

Yet Rousseau was not against positive law. On the contrary, laws protect those who are free from the vile man who violates them. We are free within the law, but again the laws must be in harmony with reason and the general good.

Rousseau's political writings stirred up controversy, and threatened by the established powers, he fled into exile to Prussia and also visited David Hume in England. Later he was able to return to France. In 1768 a populist revolt protested for more rights against an oligarchy of twenty-five councilors in Geneva. Rousseau counseled against violence but encouraged them in their struggle and predicted that in ten or twenty years the times would be far more favorable to the cause of a representative party. In fact the American Revolution was about ten years away and the French Revolution about twenty. Rousseau discussed many different forms of government and indicated that there are various factors to consider in deciding on the best form of government for any given state. Generally he favored "elective aristocracy"-not hereditary but republican. In his Constitutional Project for Corsica he advised them to adopt democratic government and to abolish hereditary nobility. Consulted on Poland's government, he recommended the gradual enfranchisement of the serfs and a multi-level civil service system whereby one could advance by merit.

In pain often from a prostate disorder, Rousseau's moodiness and paranoia of other influential people increased in his later years. Fearing distortions of his life by others, which actually were written later, Rousseau tried to tell all honestly in his Confessions and other autobiographical works. He died on July 2, 1778.

Rousseau's writing about a federation to establish lasting peace was actually a summary and critique of the plan devised by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. In 1754 an admirer of the late Abbe, Madame Dupin, suggested to Rousseau that he bring to life the good ideas in Saint-Pierre's writings. In his Confessions Rousseau gave his reasons for taking up the project.

"Not being confined to the function of a translator, I was at liberty sometimes to think for myself; and I had it in my power to give such a form to my work, that many important truths would pass in it under the name of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, much more safely than under mine." 2

He also explained why he felt Saint Pierre's ideas were not effective.

"In the offices of all the ministers of state the Abbe de St. Pierre had ever been considered as a kind of preacher rather than a real politician, and he was suffered to say what he pleased, because it appeared that nobody listened to him." 3

It is noteworthy that out of the twenty-three volumes of Saint-Pierre's works Rousseau selected "Perpetual Peace" for his first essay, which was published at Geneva in 1761.

Rousseau began his description of Saint-Pierre's project by expressing the feelings in his heart.

"Never did the mind of man conceive a scheme nobler, more beautiful, or more useful than that of a lasting peace between all the peoples of Europe. Never did a writer better deserve a respectful hearing than he who suggests means for putting that scheme in practice. What man, if he has a spark of goodness, but must feel his heart glow within him at so fair a prospect? Who would not prefer the illusions of a generous spirit, which overleaps all obstacles, to that dry, repulsive reason whose indifference to the welfare of mankind is ever the chief obstacle to all schemes for its attainment? I see in my mind's eye all men joined in the bonds of love. I call before my thoughts a gentle and peaceful brotherhood, all living in unbroken harmony, all guided by the same principles, all finding their happiness in the happiness of all."4

Yet Rousseau was aware of the need for hard reasoning, and he promised to prove his assertions and asked the reader not to deny what one cannot refute.

Although governments have been instituted to control private wars, Rousseau lamented the national wars, which are a thousand times worse. In "The Origin of Inequality" he had described how individuals joined together to avoid conflicts, but the larger bodies reverted to even more disastrous conflicts.

"Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason; and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honor of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their fellow men; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth.5

To remedy these dangers Rousseau argued that a federal form of government must be devised to unite nations, as nations unite individuals, under the authority of law. In his time this type of government was fairly new; but he noted that it did exist in the Germanic Body, the Helvetic League, and the States General of the Netherlands, and the ancients had the Greek Amphictyons, the Etruscan Lucumonies, Latin feriae, and the city leagues of the Gauls.

Rousseau pointed out that Europe has much in common-the history of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, geography, blood-ties, commerce, arts, colonies, and printing. Yet the violence in practice contradicts the moral ideals and rhetoric of governments. Treaties are temporary and very unstable; there are few or no common agreements on public law; and in conflicts between nations might makes right as weakness is taken for wrong. Nevertheless the boundaries of countries remain fairly stable because of the natural conditions of geography and culture. No one country is powerful enough ever to conquer all the others; but if nations ally together for conquest, they end up fighting among themselves. The Germanic states and the Treaty of Westphalia stabilize the international situation. The conflicts, which do continually agitate, never seem to result in any advantage to the sovereigns. Commerce and economics tend to keep the power of states fairly balanced. Since it is so difficult for one nation to conquer others, it is easy to see that the federation would be able to force any ambitious ruler to abide by the terms of the league.

Rousseau delineated the following four necessary conditions for the success of the federation: every important power must be a member; the laws they legislate must be binding; a coercive force must be capable of compelling every state to obey the common resolves; and no member may be allowed to withdraw. His plan proposed five articles. The first establishes a permanent alliance with a congress so that all conflicts may be settled and terminated by arbitration or judicial pronouncement. The second article determines which nations shall have a vote, how the presidency shall pass from one to another, and how the contribution quotas shall be raised to provide for common expenses. The third declares that existing boundaries shall be permanent. The fourth specifies how violators shall be banned and forced to comply by means of the arms of all the confederates. The fifth article recommends a majority vote at the start, but three-quarters after five years, and unanimity to change the articles.

Rousseau explained how the six motives which lead to war are all removed by this plan.

"These motives are: either to make conquests, or to protect themselves from aggression, or to weaken a too powerful neighbor, or to maintain their rights against attack, or to settle a difference which has defied friendly negotiation, or, lastly, to fulfill some treaty obligation." 6

Actually the federation makes every purpose easier to accomplish except the first, that of conquest, which it most effectively deters by gathering all powers against the aggressor. Also under the alliance a country need not fear a powerful neighbor, because the alliance together has far greater power.

Sovereigns should not complain of losing their prerogatives because the federation merely is forcing them to be just. Rousseau estimated that nations would save approximately half of their military budgets. He enumerated the many evils and dangers of the prevailing conditions in Europe such as injustice because of might, insecurity of nations, military expenses, attacks, no guarantee for international agreements, no safe or inexpensive means of obtaining justice when wronged, risk and inconvenience of wars, loss of trade during crises, and general impoverishment and lack of security. The benefits of arbitration are: certainty of settling disputes peacefully, abolition of the causes of disputes, personal security for rulers, fulfillment of agreements between rulers, freedom of trade, smaller military expenses, increase in population, agriculture, and public wealth and happiness.

Rousseau wrote a brief critique of Saint-Pierre's project, but it was not published until 1782, four years after he died. First he wondered why Saint-Pierre's plan had not been adopted, and he suggested that it was because the princes were short-sighted in their ambition and greed for power. They were too proud to submit themselves to arbitration; their wisdom was not equal to their confidence in good fortune in the risks of war. They were too blinded by their self interest to see the wisdom of the general good. Rousseau recounted how Henri IV had tried to use self-interest with the powers of Europe to mold together a commonwealth, but he died. Rousseau finally concluded that the only way a federation could be established would be by means of a revolution; but sensing the violence in that, he considered it as much to be feared as to be desired.

Jeremy Bentham

"All trade is in its essence advantageous- even to that party to whom it is least so. All war is in its essence ruinous; and yet the great employments of government are to treasure up occasions of war, and to put fetters upon trade." -Jeremy Bentham

"When the worst comes to the worst, peace may always be had by some unessential sacrifice." -Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was born February 15, 1748 in London and died there in 1832. He was the son of an attorney, and by the age of four he was reading and beginning to study Latin. He gained a degree at Oxford in 1763, and becoming a lawyer, he criticized Blackstone, an influential legal thinker. To his father's chagrin Jeremy never practiced law or traditional politics. Instead he developed his own legal philosophy, encouraged social reform, and wrote thousands of pages codifying laws. His most famous work An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was circulated among his friends and finally published in 1789. A practical thinker, he founded the utilitarian philosophy which seeks "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He explained his fundamental concept as follows:

"By utility is meant that property in any object whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of the individual." 7

By means of this "hedonic calculus" Bentham attempted to measure the positive and negative consequences of any decision. He went beyond a simple hedonism by describing seven dimensions of the pleasure or pain to bring a qualitative evaluation into the quantification. Thus one must consider the intensity, duration, certainty, and nearness of the pleasure or pain. In addition the results of the pleasure or pain can be estimated in terms of fecundity and purity; fecundity means whether there will be further pleasures or pains later, and purity whether pleasures or pains are likely to be followed by their opposites. Finally one must consider the extent in terms of how many people may be affected. Bentham used these principles in deciding on the appropriate punishments for various crimes. In prison reform he sought to reform morals, preserve health, invigorate industry, and spread instruction. In 1792 he was made a French citizen, and he advised that new government as well as that of the United States of America. He influenced many who were called "Benthamites," particularly James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, who wrote on Utilitarianism.

Bentham's essay "A Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace" was published a year after his death in The Principles of International Law, but he wrote it in 1789. Bentham declared that the whole world is his domain and that the press is his only tool. Everyone suffers from war, and the wise consider it the chief cause of suffering. Bentham's plan has two main propositions-to reduce military forces in Europe and to emancipate colonies. He emphasized the importance of a peace proposal, even if the world is not ready for it, because in that case there is a great need for ideas on peace. He asked for the prayers of Christians, and for the welfare of all civilized nations he had three goals-"simplicity of government, national frugality, and peace."

Bentham proposed that it is not in the interest of Great Britain or France to have colonies, alliances, nor a large navy. Perpetual treaties ought to limit troops and establish a common court of judicature to decide differences. However, Bentham was clearly pacifistic in stipulating that the court not be armed with coercive powers. As he stated later on, he relied upon the power of public opinion. For this reason he was especially perturbed by the secrecy of British foreign affairs, such that he had to read the Leyden Gazette to get any news about British diplomacy, as there was none in the home press. Therefore he argued strongly against secrecy in international relations. He also complained that newspapers always took the side of their own nation. "It is that we are always in the right, without a possibility of being otherwise. Against us other nations have no rights."8

The colonies cause nothing but trouble for England and France and should be given up. This is in the interest of the mother country because of the danger of war, military expense, corruption by patronage, and complication of government. He cited Gibraltar and the East Indies specifically. It is also better for the colonies themselves to be self-governing. Neither are alliances in the interest of Great Britain, because they lead to wars; also treaties to give advantage in trade are artificial economically and are not useful in the long run. The naval forces need only be strong enough to defend commerce against pirates. The pacification treaties, which are to limit the number of troops, are to be publicly announced. Bentham described the folly of attempting conquest and the madness of war. In modern times it is useless to the people. Bentham believed that trade is always advantageous to both parties, but war is ruinous.

Establishing a judicial court is in the interest of all. Bentham recommended a Congress of deputies from each country that should be public in its proceedings. Its power is in reporting its decisions to public opinion. Here Bentham appeared to be excessively idealistic in comparison to Saint-Pierre and Rousseau, who felt the need for enforcement. Bentham naively believed that if secrecy were given up, the public would no longer support wars. He pointed to the example of the Swedish soldiers, who refused to fight Russia. His pacifist ideas are not wrong, but they would depend upon an enlightened public opinion. He declared that the plunging of a nation into war against its will by ministers is not only mischievous but unconstitutional. He pointed out that punishing the authors of war does little good for the people of the nation. Since the war-makers cannot be punished effectively, they ought to be abandoned by the people. However, Bentham considered this not possible in his time. In war individual crimes are greatly multiplied; yet they win the approval of people. Since ministers are not deterred from misconduct, they are easily seduced by ambition and greed into wars, especially when shielded by secrecy.

Bentham's plan is quite sketchy and obviously not comprehensive, but he did show the usefulness of disarmament and the dangers of colonialism and secrecy. He sensed the power of public opinion but also saw how effectively it was squelched in his time. He did not really present the executive and legislative powers for a federal system, as did Saint-Pierre and Rousseau; but he did establish the principles of an international judiciary and open public opinion on international affairs.

Immanuel Kant

"If only freedom is granted, enlightenment is almost sure to follow." -Immanuel Kant

Dare to know!
Have courage to use your own reason!
-Immanuel Kant

"Reason, from its throne of supreme legislating authority, absolutely condemns war as a legal recourse and makes a state of peace a direct duty, even though peace cannot be established or secured except by a compact among nations." - Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724 at Kvnigsberg in East Prussia and lived his whole life there. His parents were pious and emphasized inward morality. In 1740 he entered the University of Kvnigsberg in theology, but he also studied physics. After his father died in 1746, he worked for nine years as a family tutor. He lectured at the university on physics, mathematics, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, geography, and natural sciences. In 1770 Kant was appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics. After working on it for a decade, in 1781 he published his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. In this book Kant analyzed how the mind itself structures our understanding of reality by conceptual categories. More books followed, and Kant is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the age of enlightenment. Kant held that God, freedom, and immortality are transcendental ideas essential to the moral life.

In his ethical works Kant formulated the categorical imperative as a guide for conduct: "Act according to the maxim which can at the same time make itself a universal law."9 Thus a person of good will always treats others as an end, not as a means. Kant found that two things filled his mind with increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. His lectures were popular, and he followed a regular routine. His daily walks were so punctual that the people of Kvningsberg could set their watches by his regular appearance. The only time he was known to have missed his daily walk was when he became absorbed in reading Rousseau's Emile. He died on February 12, 1804, and his last words were: "It is good."

Kant's philosophy had a critical perspective, and he showed how by using higher human reason and justice we can transcend the brutal strife and arguments of war.

"Without the control of criticism, reason is, as it were, in a state of nature, and can only establish its claims and assertions by war. Criticism, on the contrary, deciding all questions according to the fundamental laws of its own institution, secures to us the peace of law and order, and enables us to discuss all differences in the more tranquil manner of a legal process. In the former case, disputes are ended by victory, which both sides may claim and which is followed by a hollow armistice; in the latter, by a sentence, which, as it strikes at the root of all speculative differences, ensures to all concerned a lasting peace." 10

In The Science of Right Kant discussed the right of nations and international law and also the universal right of mankind. Ethically, people ought to be treated as ends in themselves and not mechanically as a means to some end. Therefore the ruler has no right to treat his people as objects for some warlike purpose. The people do not owe a duty to the sovereign; in Kant's view rather the sovereign has a duty to the people.

"As such they must give their free consent, through their representatives, not only to the carrying on of war generally, but to every separate declaration of war; and it is only under this limiting condition that the state has a right to demand their services in undertakings so full of danger." 11

Kant defined three rights of peace: neutrality, guarantee, and alliance. Neutrality is the right to remain at peace when a war is nearby. Guarantee is "the right to have peace secured so that it may continue when it has been concluded."12 Alliance is the right of federation, that states may defend themselves in common against attack. However, there is no right of alliance for external aggression or internal aggrandizement.

Kant applied the categorical imperative to the relations of states and rejected any action or policy which would make peace among the nations impossible. Kant pointed out that nations, like individuals, must enter into a legal state, in this case, a union of states, which is the only way to establish peace and the public right of nations. Thus a permanent congress of nations must eventually become practical so that differences may be settled by means of a civil process instead of by barbarous war. Kant based the right to a universal peaceful union of all nations on the juridical principle of legal justice rather than on the moral ideal of the philanthropic or ethical principles. Because all people originally share the soil of the Earth, they have a right to associate with each other. Even though perpetual peace may not be real yet, Kant emphasized that we must work to realize it as our duty. He concluded,

"The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason." 13

In his "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" Kant stated that Nature forces people to a cosmopolitan solution, making a league of nations the inevitable result of social evolution. Until then humans must suffer the cruelty of conflicts. The answer lies in a moral order, which can only be brought about through education. This enlightenment requires a commitment of heart to the good that is clearly understood. He lamented that rulers spend little money on public education, because they spend it paying for past and future wars. Kant predicted that the ever-growing war debt (which was new in his time) would eventually make war impractical economically. He foresaw that this and the value of interstate commerce would prepare the way eventually for an international government, even though there had never been one in world history. Looking toward the goal of world citizenship, he suggested that the philosophical historian ought to note how various nations and governments have contributed to this goal.

Kant felt that war is the greatest obstacle to morality and that the preparation for war is the greatest evil; therefore we must renounce war. "The morally practical reason utters within us its irrevocable veto: There shall be no war."14 Yet without a cosmopolitan constitution and the wisdom to submit ourselves voluntarily to its constraint, war is inevitable. The obstacles of ambition, love of power, and avarice, particularly of those in authority, stand in the way. Again education must foster the building of character in accordance with moral principles. The full realization of our destiny, the sovereignty of God on Earth, ultimately depends not on governments but on justice and conscience within us.

Kant's major work on peace entitled Perpetual Peace was published in 1795. That year in the separate treaty of Basel, Prussia ceded France territory west of the Rhine so that it could partition Poland with Russia and Austria. Kant was so indignant at this that he wrote Perpetual Peace as a just treaty that could be signed by nations. He stated six preliminary propositions for a perpetual peace among states:

1. No treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war.

2. No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or donation.

3. Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.

4. National debts shall not be contracted with a view to the external friction of states.

5. No state shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another state.

6. No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible: such are the employment of assassins, poisoners, breach of capitulation, and incitement to treason in the opposing state.15

The reasons for these are fairly obvious. He added that a state has no right to wage a punitive war because just punishment must come from a superior authority and not an equal.

In introducing the three definitive articles, Kant observed that the state of nature tends toward conflict and war; therefore peace must be actively established and maintained by a civil state. Civil constitutions are of three levels: the law of persons, the law of nations, and the law of world citizenship.

The first definitive article states, "The civil constitution of every state should be republican."16 By this Kant meant that the laws must be applied to everyone universally and fairly-in other words, government by law, not by favored men. Thus the principles of freedom, common legislation, and equality must pertain. He hoped that requiring the citizens' consent to declare war would prevent its devastation, because it is usually the people, not the ruler, who sacrifices and suffers. By republican Kant meant representative of the people, but not necessarily democracy, which he considered more likely to be despotic than representative government by one (autocracy) or a few (aristocracy). In a pure democracy it is not possible to separate the executive power from the legislative function.

The second definitive article states, "The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states."17 This constitution establishes the rights of states through a league of nations. Kant noted that Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and many other irritating comforters have been cited to justify war, but their code cannot have legal force. Victory in war goes to the stronger, but it does not settle what is right. At its conclusion a peace treaty ends that war, but to end all wars forever there must be a league of peace. The more republics associate with each other, the more practical a federation becomes. In the federation a supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power may be established to reconcile the differences between nations peaceably. But if nations do not acknowledge these supreme powers, then how can they safeguard their rights? Using unilateral maxims through force leads to "perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows both the atrocities and their perpetrators."18 Therefore states must give up their savage (lawless) freedom in order to find a greater freedom and security within the constraints of public law.

The third definitive article states, "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality."19 Everyone has the right not to be treated as an enemy when arriving in another land. How prophetic Kant was when he wrote, "The narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world."20 Thus he did not consider a law of world citizenship high-flown nor exaggerated but rather indispensable for human rights and perpetual peace.

The guarantee for perpetual peace, for Kant, is the design and process of world history which we call providence. People have spread throughout the Earth and have been forced to develop lawful relations with each other. States were formed for defense against violations, and man has been forced to be good for the sake of others by laws to keep the peace. Although differences of language and religion have kept states separate, competition nevertheless maintains an equilibrium, and commerce has made peace far preferable to war.

Kant argued that politics must eventually be moral because the moral laws are eternal and transcendent of political stratagems. Like Bentham, Kant emphasized that justice must be public and open to scrutiny. He reasoned that political maxims must be able to be public in order to be legitimate; those which need publicity in order to succeed are both right and politically advantageous because they must be in accord with the public's universal good. Therefore it is our duty to publicly promote those policies which lead to the universal good of lasting peace.

Notes

1. Emile or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. Allan Bloom, p. 473.

2. The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. W. Conyngham Mallory, p. 635-636.

3. Ibid., p. 661.

4. A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. C. E. Vaughan.

5. Second Discourse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters, p. 161.

6. A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tr. C. E. Vaughan.

7. The Principles of Morals and Legislation by Jeremy Bentham, p. 2.

8. A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace by Jeremy Bentham in Jeremy Bentham by Charles W. Everett, p. 221.

9. Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals, Second Section 436 by Immanuel Kant, tr. Lewis White Beck, p. 63.

10. The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, p. 222.

11. The Science of Right 55 by Immanuel Kant, tr. W. Hastie.

12. Ibid., 69.

13. Ibid., Conclusion.

14. Ibid.

15. Perpetual Peace 343-346 by Immanuel Kant, tr. Lewis White Beck et al, p. 85-89.

16. Ibid., 349, p. 93.

17. Ibid., 354, p. 98.

18. Ibid., 357, p. 101.

19. Ibid., 357, p. 102.

20. Ibid., 360, p. 105.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

Release from Tutelage, Part II

Year of Release from Tutelage, Part II

By John Taylor; 2006 July 01

Yesterday we discussed the prime directive for year one of the principle planning decade, the involvement of everyone on earth in reflection, be it Ad Hoc and informal or some sort of regular meditation program incorporated into each of the subsequent planning years. Although the main activity of this year is ethereal contemplation that does not mean that there will not be concrete goals to aim for as the Liberation from Tutelage Year rolls around each decade. Indeed the goals of the more practical later years of the decade -- such as promotion of education and economic adjustment -- are not ends in themselves but means to one end: to free up time and energy in peoples' lives, to enable a modicum of happiness, health and leisure. Insofar as the examined life that Socrates and other great teachers modeled as the apex of human existence requires such a measure of well-being, filling practical goals will naturally serve the ends of this year of contemplation. But necessary as they are, they are not sufficient.

The sufficient condition of an examined life is a life-long, systematic investigation of truth. While a teacher cannot steer the specific direction of this search without compromising the student's autonomy and freedom, experience does show that an examined life can be taught, although primarily by example. That is why the promotion of the arts is a central goal of this year, and first among all arts, the theatre. Consider this testimony about the early development of one of the Twentieth Century's most influential seekers, Mohatma Gandhi,

"But on the whole the boy was not remarkable; according to his own testimony, at any rate, he showed no great aptitude for study. He was extremely shy through his early years and used to run to and from school to avoid talking to anybody. One episode of his childhood seems to have made a great impression: it was a performance he saw by a traveling dramatic company of the play Harishchandra, based on a great story in the Mahabharata epic. It narrates the sufferings and ordeals of a king of old who sacrificed everything for the truth. Only a few days before his death, Gandhi told me this story at considerable length. As a child he used to act out Harishchandra to himself, he said, "times without number." The idea of the truth as supreme good was thus early implanted, and was to become, in time, a central idea governing almost every region of his thought." (Vincent Sheean, Mahatma Gandhi, Reader's Digest Great Biographies in Large Type, Vol. 5, Pleasantville, NY, 1989, p. 12)

The world's major religions and cultures can offer dozens of stories of genius that can be made into plays similar to Harishchandra. These would be performed locally and in special venues internationally throughout the Year of Liberation from Tutelage. Like the religiously rooted theatre of Ancient Athens, attendance at the theatre festival would be obligatory; it would be the duty of every world citizen to support it, and most particularly those who would benefit from them the most, children and youths, would be obliged to attend.

Gradually a canon of the most effective and inspiring plays for annual drama festivals would evolve, but those that I would specially single out for the goals of Year One, the Year of Investigating Reality, are a series of plays that I propose be written and performed everywhere about the life and death of Socrates. These would include almost the entire text of Xenophon's Memorabilia, as well as special episodes treating of Plato's allegory of the Den, Plato's Symposium, and of course the trial and death of Socrates. All of philosophy, as has been famously said, is merely a set of footnotes to this great teacher's biography, so it is of capital importance that the main story to which the footnotes refer be made well-known to all possessors of a mind. Drama can carry this flame directly to each new generation while at the same time periodically reminding adults to come back and re-examine where their own lives and careers are taking them.

A major value coming out of this year is an appreciation for "quality time" alone and in silence. At the same time, though, this activity is useless unless lessons learned then are shared with others in constructive conversation. This means, broadly, allowing for more opportunities for dialogue in the average person's daily routine. I would therefore envision philosophers and animators "embedded" in the plays, who would immediately afterwards lead discussions and seminars with spectators. These would match make a mentoring program in reflection and meditation for younger spectators, of which I will speak more later.

The general goals of this year are more general and amorphous than most years. Possibilities that spring to mind are: To improve access to nature, since time spent in natural surroundings almost compels reflective thought; to beautify the built environment and guarantee a measure of rest, recreation and leisure as a fundamental human right; to increase the diversity of human contacts and the variety of recreational pursuits, and to improve friendships.

While all these are eminently desirable, a goal is not a goal unless it can be measured and assessed. What are the primary, most memorable measures of success for this year? Lists of statistics, important indicators that they may be, are not personal and dramatic enough. So the big question for the year of liberation from tutelage is: What can be taken as the prime indicator of a free thinking society? I am suggesting two things. One, a royal family as model, and two, a reduced number of human hours spent behind bars. Strange as it may sound, these two go together.

Every place should have a figurehead family to take the brunt of fame, to act as lightning rods of public opinion, to attend and bless public ceremonies and official functions, and thus allow officials and administrators to do their unglamorous jobs in peace behind the scenes. The American Presidency, which combines both roles, asks more of one person than is healthy or reasonable to expect of a mere mortal. The conflated job involves contradictory role playing, which only worsens the reputation of politicians as professional deceivers. Most important, the institution of monarchy has another, less obvious role relevant to the Year of Liberation from Immaturity.

Take the British royal family and their much publicized marriage difficulties throughout the Twentieth Century. These were not just personal tragedies, they raise an important question: If the royals, with all the prestige, wealth and all the human resources of society at their command cannot raise children who grow up to raise their own loving, happy, united families, what hope is there for ordinary families scrabbling for their daily bread? This question alone is enough to keep the likes of me in a quandary for an entire ten year cycle.

Let us imagine a royal family chosen in the first place for its success in working the meditation, the mystery plays and philosophical discussions of Year One. These would be busy, successful, famous people, but they would not, by definition, be the sort of celebrity who sacrifices personal relationships for career. Everything, the best and the worst, would be En Famille.

Once they are raised to royalty, all attention in regional media would center upon how the children in the royal family grow up, how they develop their own examined life -- and what does an examined life mean but constantly being examined, first by oneself, then by the body politic in the form of parents, and finally carrying one's own examinations, that is, rewarding and disciplining one's own children in turn? These children would be raised according to the best curriculum and program of rewards and punishments available. It would be dynamically updated by the world's best educators. Most important, it would all be in the public domain, so that any other family, no matter how poor, could easily follow along.

Here is where the second indicator kicks in. No lover of freedom can feel entirely free and easy as long as even one person in the world is enslaved or caged like an animal. A life squandered behind bars is a latent threat to freedom everywhere. And, needless to say, the best way to keep people out of prison is to avoid crime before it happens, that is, to educate the poorest along with the elite, to raise every child to be a just, law-abiding citizen. It is a good motto: "No child left behind." This would mean that every convict in prison (along with his family, preferably) will automatically have to undergo the same rigorous discipline program, the very examinations and sanctions that the heir to the throne bears under. To ask anything more or less than that would be hypocrisy on the part of all of us.

As the first family prospers and the number of inmates drops, individuals will be propelled a great distance along the path of happiness and an examined life. As that happens society will find itself every more solidly established in peace, freedom and prosperity.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com