Everything Watched

Everything Watched Improves

By John Taylor; 2006 December 08

“The evil do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it completely.” (Prov 28:5, NRSV)

Every once in a while I take a stab at setting up a website and internet address where these Badi' essays could have a permanent home. But I get distracted. I go at it great guns for a while and then something always happens and I lose interest. Finally, I end up going back to doing things the way I have always done them in the past. Last week I was investigating getting a website and domain name at the biggest American internet provider, Go Daddy Dot Com, but that site had a link to the blog of the company's founder, one Bob Parsons. I hit his blog hotspot and right away found an essay that he proudly declared is the most popular entry that had had ever written for his blog, called, "Everything that is watched improves." I include the full text at the end of this mailout.

Clearly, this Parsons fellow has one up on me. I have absolutely no idea which is my most or least popular essay. No doubt that is because I do not obsessively measure everything the way he does. Maybe if I did, I would be as successful as he is, or even as his hero JD Rockefeller was. Or at least, that is what capitalist ideology would have me hope for, however vain such dreams of wealth may be. But most to the point, maybe if I did take a tape measure to what is most important my ideas would be better formed and ready to implement. What Parsons is doing as the CEO of a large corporation is the very thing that every Baha'i is supposed to do morn and eve, take himself or herself into account. And it is what Socrates advocated and every philosopher should do, that is, live an examined life.

An appreciation of the centrality of vision is at the heart of both science and philosophy. It has been such from the very beginning. Bacon wrote in his Novum Organum,

"Man, who is the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand no further than he has observed, either in operation or in contemplation, of the method and order of nature."

This was taken up by John Lock in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," with his theory that the mind starts off as a Tabula Rasa. This theory is confirmed by the latest sleep research which is finding that the reason we all have to sleep in order to live is so that the brain can forget. Our mind has to reboot when we sleep in order to wipe its blackboard clean and start out with new visions, new impressions the next day.

Consider the definition of justice. Plato pictured it as the sort of meter of all virtues that measures our overall contribution to the world. Justice is the dashboard of the soul. Baha'u'llah defines justice very similarly; the "essence" of all He has revealed for us, He states, is the ability to "discern with the eye of oneness His glorious handiwork, and look into all things with a searching eye. (Tablets, 157) It is a dynamic display that may be invisible to our outer eyes but is clear to the soul, however much we may wish we ignore it; to turn away and not consult it regularly is to let our happiness drift into parlous, rock-strewn waters.

Or consider another powerful statement of Baha'u'llah in the first Taraz. He says that He hopes that the "power of perception" will be enhanced in order that most people will find the purpose for which they were created. He goes on to say that,

"In this Day whatsoever serveth to reduce blindness and to increase vision is worthy of consideration. This vision acteth as the agent and guide for true knowledge. Indeed in the estimation of men of wisdom keenness of understanding is due to keenness of vision." (Tablets, 35)

I have been unable to get away from this theme since I first came across Parson's essay. Philosophically, what he does in leading businesses is so essential to everything!

It may be more difficult to put a tape measure to what Baha'is and philosophers are trying to improve than it is for a business leader, but try we must. There is no reason that we cannot measure virtues in the same manner that a company measures productivity, goodwill or depreciation. I studied business in High School and I remember puzzling over abstract concepts like that. Give me metaphysics or epistemology any day! To me accounting factors like goodwill and depreciation are strange, incomprehensible abstractions, yet they are routinely measured and factored into hard-nosed accountants' spreadsheets. They affect the bottom line just as much as concrete, measurable factors like wages and profits do. If that is so, why cannot we make up charts and displays to measure and illustrate loving-kindness, or humility, or any other divine perfection? This is why I repeat so often that the Einstein of the 21st Century will not be a physicist, he will be an accountant.

Or maybe an illustrator. That is the ticket. A cartographer is the genius we need, the inventor who comes up with a three-dimensional dashboard output display of every measurable factor in our lives and correlates them visually with whatever divine virtues we have set as our goal. Such a dashboard, connected dynamically to the net, would be able to illustrate measures that would be inconceivable without it. For example, one internet consulting company makes a living by going out and canvassing people to find out their real, candid and anonymous opinions about the impressions a client is making on those around him. This allows an executive to really "see himself as others see him." Imagine if we all had such an automated dial like that on our desktops and dashboards! If my virtue for the day was abstinence, for example, the peer feedback meter might glow red, contradicting my subjective opinion that a jelly donut with every meal falls within the bounds of a spare diet.

It is funny how true it is, and tragic too, that everything depends on our vision, on what we pay attention to and the clarity and purity of the background into which it is placed. Everything, including our collective survival. Look at Al Gore's career, trying to get his fellow senators to see the increasing signs that the planet is being choked to death, then when his bid for president fails going around giving a slideshow, persistently trying to give a vision of where nature is going to the entire world. I was so enthusiastic about the film, An Inconvenient Truth, and showed it so often, that it seems that my seven-year-old son Thomas got the wrong idea about global warming. He thought it might never snow again. When the snow fell a few days ago and actually stayed on the ground, he rushed out of bed first thing and made a snowman. He was almost more ecstatic about the arrival of snow than the coming of Santa. I was very puzzled about why there was all this enthusiasm. He is seven years old, this is not the first time he has seen snow. Then, yesterday Marie explained to someone else his unstated fear that it might never snow again. Blame it on me, and the vision of Al Gore.

Everything that is watched improves.
by Bob Parsons
http://www.bobparsons.com/JohnDRevisited.html
reposted Monday, November 13, 2006

The secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil. Its simple. Putting it to work in your business. Here is one of the most popular articles that has ever appeared on this blog. Given the timeless value of Mr. Rockefeller’s secret and the number of businesses I encounter that could benefit from putting it to work, I thought it might be worthwhile to re-publish it again.

Everything that is watched improves.

One thing I learned early in my business career is that anything of significance that is measured and watched, improves.

John D. Rockefeller knew the importance of business intelligence.

Back before I started Parsons Technology I became impressed with something I read about John D. Rockefeller. In fact, I still think about it and use it to this very day. I learned that Mr. Rockefeller was one of the few people in his industry (perhaps the only one) who knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine and deliver a barrel of oil. In fact, he was entirely aware of all his costs. Knowing this information (and acting on it) gave him a huge competitive advantage. He knew how much he could price a barrel of oil for and still turn a profit. He was always keenly aware of each area of revenue, cost and market share, and he worked on improving in every area. As a result, he did cost saving things like manufacture his own oil barrels, have his own cartage company, and on and on.

He eventually managed his way to where he could sell a barrel of oil, with impeccable customer service, and turn a profit at a price less than what it cost his competitors to deliver the very same product. By paying close attention to the things that mattered, Mr. Rockefeller made his Standard Oil Company so successful that he became the wealthiest man in the world!

I measured everything significant at Parsons Technology.

So when I started Parsons Technology, I began the habit of measuring everything that I felt was significant on a daily basis. I did this with unit sales cross referenced by the print advertising I purchased and direct mailings that I did throughout the month.

I worked to sharpen profits every day.

When I sold Parsons Technology, the company was snail mailing anywhere from 6 to 8 million offers each and every month. Because our monthly investment in printing, postage, and fulfillment systems was huge, it became imperative that we knew where we stood at all times. We developed a system that allowed us to project the success (or failure) with reasonable certainty of any mailing, after receiving just a few days of results. If the mailings appeared to be successful we planned more of them, and if the opposite was the case, we immediately cancelled anything similar we had in the works. This allowed us to sharpen our profitability each and every day. Also because we watched and constantly worked on improving each aspect of the cost of doing direct mail, our costs were just a fraction (often less than 50%) of what it costs our competitors to do the very same thing.

While our direct mail and advertising tracking systems at Parsons Technology became very sophisticated, they were very similar to the systems I developed and used much earlier when it was just my then wife and I trying to make the company succeed.

My staff and I try to watch everything important at Go Daddy.

I use the measure and watch everything of significance rule at The Go Daddy Group. We prepare a detailed daily profit and loss snapshot, of the prior day's business, for each of our operating companies and for each of our significant products. We make major business decisions daily and do so as soon as the information appears (which may be only a few hours old) to warrant key decisions. To quote an overused cliche, We are able to turn on a dime.

Real-time information about your business is critical.

Real-time information that actually gets used is particularly helpful when launching a new product. Its extremely handy for finding the right advertising and positioning that maximizes any new products sales. But the benefits do not stop there. Current information can also provide an incredibly effective early warning system that lets you know if there is a problem that needs immediate attention.

Traditional financial reporting does not cut it.

Traditional financial reporting is done monthly. In many businesses that is when you will see the only financial statements showing how the company performed. Often these monthly financials are produced by the accounting department sometimes a few days after the end of the month, and oftentimes much, much later. By the time the people in charge get their hands on this information and are able to digest it, small problems have become large problems, and many an opportunity is long gone.

You need to know how you are doing on a daily basis.

I think business, particularly in today's age of the internet, needs to be managed on a daily basis. On an overall basis, knowing how each key part of my business did the prior day tells me where I should focus my time. I also use other statistics which I get real-time to pinpoint opportunities and problems.

Old news has little value.

As you might already guess, one of the big points I am trying to make here is that for business information to have any real value, it has to be current, and ideally real-time. Beyond that, someone needs to be paying attention to it, thinking about it, and making an effort to improve upon it.

You can start building your business intelligence systems in small steps.

There used to be a time, before the computers and the problem solving software we use (like spreadsheets, databases, etc.) today, when knowing how your business stood on a daily basis was quite a challenge (of course that did not get in the way of John D. Rockefeller). With the tools we have today, there is no reason why every company (should) not have this type of information. If you do not have daily performance information at your company, you cannot make it appear all at once. What you can do is to implement your information systems in small steps and improve them daily. Start with the stuff that really counts, and then as the ideas flow (and flow they will) build upon your systems. Before you know it, you will be in control like never before and you will marvel at your systems. The point is to get started. That is how its always worked for me.

My rule even helps me stay in shape.

Measuring everything does not just help with business systems. I also use this rule to help keep me in reasonable shape. I do not track much but I track enough to keep me working out and building physical strength. Every time I work out, I keep track of the day, how many minutes of cardio exercise I have done and how many calories I think I have burned. I also track how many push-ups I do. Just seeing this information (I keep it on a spreadsheet on my laptop) lets me know if I have been lagging, and when I notice that I have been falling behind, I do something about it. This simple little system works well for me. In fact, I can tell you how often I have worked out every week for the past three years.

Machiavelli again

Machiavelli and Civil Society

By John Taylor ; 2006 December

Some kind of Hippocratic oath should be devised for
every profession; what is more, certain features of
the doctor's Hippocratic oath should be in every
profession's oath, most particularly the wonderful
dictum: "Above all do no harm." Teachers in particular
should pay attention to that, for poorly designed
educational systems do more to stifle than edify young
minds. It would be impossible to measure the loss to
society of thousands of minds being systematically
stifled, so it is best to start off every teacher's
career with an oath promising to do everything
possible to avert possible harm to students. The
teachers in Florence in the time of my hero, Niccolo
Machiavelli, were apparently very harmful.

What saved him from the conniving, harm-doing teachers
of the time was a lucky happenstance. His father made
up the index for the latest edition of Titus Livy's
Discourses on the History of Rome, and in recompense
for his labor was awarded a copy of the final
publication to keep for his library. At the time, a
person in his income bracket could never afford to buy
such a book. As a result, the young boy had access to
Livy's work, which he pored over in fine detail
throughout his adolescence, free of teachers' dirty
looks. It fed his genius, and after a career as an
official and man of action (he organized and trained a
local militia, following his own doctrine that
mercenaries do more harm than good) he returned to the
Discourses, commented on them, and read them to a
small circle of republican sympathizing friends. It
became his masterwork. In fact, Rousseau had an
interesting theory that Machiavelli's most famous work
was really a sham that affected the pretence of
instructing kings but in reality is a "handbook for
republicans," in other words, a demonstration of what
not to do, and why it is wisest to steer far clear of
a dictatorship. In a later edition of his Social
Contract Rousseau added this footnote:

"Machiavelli was a gentleman and a good citizen; but
being attached to the Medici, he was forced during the
oppression of his country to disguise his love of
liberty. The very choice of an execrable hero reveals
his secret intention, and the antithesis between his
principles in his book The Prince and those in his
Discourse on Livy and The History of Florence proves
that this profound political thinker has so far had
only superficial or corrupted readers. The Pope's
court strictly prohibited his book, which I can well
believe, since that was the Court he depicts most
plainly." (Social Contract, note, p. 118)

Machiavelli's abiding contribution to political
thought is his understanding of the value of what has
been called "civil society." The same Virtu (or
initiative, the nerve to do what has to be done in a
particular situation; for Baha'is, the Guardian and
his plans and gardens stands as the epitome of virtu)
that makes a prince great is multiplied in a republic,
because a large number of citizens, not just one, must
show forth this all too rare virtue of virtu. Rousseau
was clearly influenced by this when he wrote,

"If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern
itself democratically. A government so perfect is not
suited to men." (Contract, 114)

Machiavelli's appreciation of the value of civil
society starts, then, in Livy's thoughtful
observations on the history of Rome . Rome rose
quickly from an insignificant village to a large
empire for good reason. What did the early Romans have
that nobody else, including the cultured Greeks and
the brilliant Jews, did not have? There were thousands
of other towns, all ambitious, why did Rome win out?
What was it about them that people in other places did
not have?

Clearly, as Livy and other historians of the period
point out, the Romans somehow learned to breed and
teach successive generations of united, responsible
citizens willing to serve selflessly all aspects of
the Roman civitas. Romans consistently put their best
and brightest in positions of trust, and they
consistently lived up to that trust. That was their
secret. These bands of dull but dedicated men
fulfilled the hardest, rarest part of leadership,
summoning up the integrity and toughness to undergo
the travail of uniting together, forming a reliable
civil service and erecting the many other often
complex pillars of civil society that uphold a healthy
republic. Later, when Rome was the biggest kid on the
block, it became militarized, corrupt, tyrannical and
oppressive. It still bred some great thinkers and
writers in isolation, but all-in-all the virtu of the
early Romans had been eclipsed.

For Machiavelli Roman history offered an important
object lesson for all times. He believed that with
republican virtu "a people is more prudent, more
stable and has better judgment than a prince." (quoted
in Curry, Introducing Machiavelli, p. 94) Baha'is of
course will think right away of Abdu'l-Baha's teaching
about consultation, that a group of nine in an
Assembly is better and smarter than one leader if and
only if they are united, loving and practice good
consultation skills.

Civic society is collectivist, it is upheld by good
laws designed to steer people away from private profit
and power grabbing and towards duty. It should not
only punish but offer greater rewards for putting
public before private service. For Machiavelli the
real opponent of a republic is not a single ambitious
tyrant but a tendency among the many to break up into
factions. (yes, the Baha'i parallel is the law against
backbiting...) "I have seen the enemy," Machiavelli
might have said, "And it is not a prince but a
partisan."

Curry offers two modern examples of the harm that
selfish partisans do. In 1995 one man, Nick Leeson,
brought down the two-century-old Barings Bank in a few
minutes by gambling on the Tokyo stock market. Curry
imagines Machiavelli's snide comment: "What do we
find? Not merely greed and mismanagement, but
uncontrolled risks taken in secrecy without any regard
for civic responsibility." I would add to that a
Canadian example, Highway #407. Here was a covert deal
with a Spanish and Australian consortium made in
secret by an Ontario government just before an
election permanently selling out the rights to the
world's highest priced toll highway. Now there is a
permanent drain running straight through Toronto on
purses both public and private -- well, if only I
could summon up Machiavelli's ghost to comment on
that!

A second example Curry cites is documented by
historian Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book, "The
Revolt of the Elites." In America the top fifth of the
population have made themselves financially
independent of its crumbling industries, cities and
public services. They hire their own security (private
security guards outnumber police by a large margin),
send their children to private schools, gate
themselves off in segregated neighborhoods and send
their money off-shore where it is immune from
taxation. Then they ask, "Why should we pay for public
services that we do not even use?" They have no common
life or sense of civic obligation, and tend to have
more in common with the elites of Europe and Asia than
their fellow Americans. Since they own the mass media,
the common ideology of all classes, especially in the
States, has come naturally to reflect their values, or
lack thereof. Curry rightly points to a famous
statement of Margaret Thatcher that epitomizes a trend
that at the time had only begun to pick up momentum.
She said:

"There is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families."

This, from a head of state, was the cock crowing
thrice, the ultimate betrayal. Compared to that,
Caesar's coup d'etat in Republican Rome was a mere
knee-jerk. Curry has Machiavelli reply: "Nothing I
ever wrote was worse -- this is a republican nightmare
and a sure recipe for social and political disaster."
Then, if I may update this, in the second Bush
administration the so-called Republican party in the
States (it should be renamed the "Antinomian
Republican Party") learned to reach out to church
basements for a new voter base. This was only natural,
for the ideology that calls itself Christian today is
just as individualist and devoid of social conscience
as Maggie Thatcher tried to become.

But the beauty of Machiavelli is that he criticized
liberals as well as conservatives. He is one of the
few thinkers in history to treat government as the
rule of real people, and to criticize the tendency of
theorists to, well, theorize, to break things up into
idealized parts instead of realizing that everything
depends upon peoples' integrity and responsibility. He
said that he had never seen a government that could
not be improved upon, any more than he had seen a
person who was perfect and could not be improved upon.

We Baha'is have seen a perfect person, the Master, and
we do look forward to a sort of ultimate unification,
that of the entire human race in a world government.
But I do not think that anything in the Baha'i
perspective argues against the fact that, even now,
none of us is perfect or that government will not
constantly improve. In that sense, Machiavelli is a
thinker for the ages, even unto the Golden Age of a
united humanity.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

Eat Pie

Eat Your Epigenetic Pie

By John Taylor; 2006 December 07

Recently we ended an essay with a sort of prophesy from the Gorgias predicting chaos if the body ruled over the soul, which is to say, if the soul lost the ability to discriminate among the arts of cookery, health (gymnastic) and medicine. Without the discernment to pick among them they would all mingle in an indiscriminate mass. Which is pretty much the way things are today. An example. In my early school years they taught us that the earth could support one carnivore for every ten herbivores; if all of us became vegetarians there would be one tenth the pressure on the environment.

Naively, as a child I thought, "Like QED, eh? It would be a simple matter to settle on this as a broad social goal and with big helpings of advertising and relatively little sense of deprivation on anybody's part we could all be vegetarians in the few decades before I turned fifty." Instead, no, the reverse has come about. The very idea of rational social planning is firmly ejected from the public agenda, even in the face of looming climatic disaster. In Texas and a few other corporate-corrupted states -- in violation of all laws of free speech -- it is actually illegal to write anything that the beef and chicken lobbies might find objectionable. In other words, I would find myself in jail for restating the basic ecological facts taught to me in primary school.

The reason I became a vegetarian was that my body tends to be more sensitive to unnatural chemical insult than most. My wife loves meat, and eating what she cooked literally crippled me with arthritis. I could only putter and dawdle around leaning on a cane. I crawled painfully, slowly into the car, and once there applying the brake or accelerator caused shooting pain up my legs. Eventually if I was to function at all, I had to break off from what was being served and do my own vegetarian cooking separately. Today I make up huge batches of gazpacho soup and bean salad regularly, enough to last over a week of daily servings, and, thank God, I can walk, and even run.

Anyway, the latest biological discoveries are explaining why I am so much more frail and sensitive than those around me. There used to be a big argument about whether illness and other characteristics and abilities are caused by nature or nurture. Now however a huge new factor has suddenly jumped into the middle of things. If it were up to me I would combine the words, "nanurture," or "nurchurchure," but scientists perhaps wisely are calling it "epi-genetics." There is even talk of mapping out the epigenetic code, a task that would be orders of magnitude tougher than mapping the genetic code.

Epigenetics comes out of Scandinavia where they do what would be done everywhere if we had a lick of sense: they record detailed health records and keep them over many generations. We junk ours after a few decades -- I know that because on a work assessment in the 1980's I was given the job in Chedoke hospital of going through the medical files of the old sanatorium and choosing what to keep and what to toss; this was extremely painful to me, because in my mere minion's opinion it all should have been kept. I would have been happier being forced to shovel gold artifacts, diamonds and pearls into a blast furnace.

Anyway, the researchers with the intact Scandinavian records found out that girls raised in conditions of plenty passed on to their granddaughters a higher incidence of diabetes; similar visitations were passed on from boys raised in various adverse conditions to their grandsons. So, why am I sensitive?

My father's father was apprenticed young in England as a carpenter and painter, and he must have suffered severe chemical exposure because he ended up in later years working part time as a church janitor, and he eventually lost all his hair, was bedridden and died of cancer a few months before I was born. My mother's father, according to family legend, was a soldier in the Great War, and suffered under several mustard gas attacks. For the rest of his life he woke up in the middle of the night screaming. My mother was born in 1916, though, so her genes may not have been damaged if the gas attacks had not yet occurred. I cannot look earlier in his history because that is pretty much all I know about him (there was a divorce after the war ended, though I know he raised another family, most of whom lived to become seniors).

In view of the discoveries of epigenetics, it is interesting to think back on how the grandfather-grandson tie must have affected Shoghi Effendi. His grandfather was, we believe, morally and spiritually perfect, but that does not mean that He was not affected by physical adversity. We know that He very much was, and indeed if he had been invulnerable that would take away from His moral courage. Vulnerability is part of His meaning, his lessons about what perfection is all about. Indeed, reading Dr. Afrukhteh's memoirs I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Master paid careful attention to his health. He discussed it with Afrukhteh at various stages of the latter's medical education, and later hired him as His doctor. I am no expert in medical history, but I was surprised to learn that Afrukhteh checked His cholesterol and found that it was clear. I did not know that medicine even knew about that, and here the Master was, apparently, carefully adjusting his diet to keep it down. Since I read that I have been eating more of what the Master ate, pomegranates, dates and figs.

At any rate, the Master's epi-genome must have been assaulted more than just about anybody in that age of epidemic disease. Not only did He suffer frostbite crossing the mountains and deserts in the family's exile, but he also consciously sought out wherever He lived the sickest and poorest people in the area in order to help them. This must have meant constant exposure seriously damaging areas, and any number of chemical and biological harms. Think of the filthy places in which the poor lived then.

With the Master's intuitive knowledge, He must have been aware of the long term consequences of what He was doing. He must have known what we now know, that the male is the real weaker sex, and that male issue of fathers regularly traumatized are weeded out. For example, fighter pilots, regularly exposed to forces of many gravities, almost always father girls, not boys. Male sperm dies, or is damaged by such conditions. So it happened to the male sons of the Master, none lived past young childhood. They were weakened. Yet Abdu'l-Baha never diminished, even to the last days of His life, giving money to the poor and visiting them in their affliction.

Is it any wonder, then, that Shoghi Effendi turned out sickly from an early age, and died relatively young of a heart ailment? And that he could not conceive issue, male or female, reason unknown? He no doubt suffered the epigenetic consequences of his grandfather's charity and self-sacrifice. True, it was exacerbated by the betrayal of an unfaithful family. But the fact that in spite of all that Shoghi Effendi accomplished so much in his short life, surely here is a example and a lesson for us all.

And there is an epigenetic lesson too. Now that we are getting a better idea of the long term consequences of our actions, is it not time to unscramble the "chaos" that Plato's Socrates talked about at the start of this essay? We must separate out cookery, health and medicine, then harmonize and prioritize them, and in so doing let the soul rule over the body. We spend billions on over-the-counter drugs, on cosmetics and cuisine, and what are all they but mere dressing up the body and food and pretending that they are healthy? Plato rightly called it a form of flattery. And flattery is nothing but lying, lying in a good cause, but lies nonetheless. Surely really being healthy is better than pretending to be! Surely it makes more sense to put our money into that first, and then if something is left over we can buy a little perfume, makeup, cough syrup or have a meal at a high priced restaurant. But for God's sake and our sake, let us do first things first.

Battalions of Nationalism

Cuisine and the Beleaguered Battalions of Nationalism

By John Taylor; 2006 December

I admit to a touch of exasperation when I heard the UHJ talk (I think it may have been in a Ridvan Message or the letter to the Counselors) about the "worldwide decline of religion." Oh Jayz, I thought, first it was the Guardian and now the House is going on about this? If faith systems are in such a tailspin, when are they going to hit the ground, crash and burn?

Here in Dunnville religion seems to have undiminished force in peoples' everyday life, more now than ever, as far as I can make out. Only one thing gives a shadow of doubt, a composite photo displayed near the entrance of all members of Grace United Church, where Silvie and Thomas go weekly for their scouts meetings. Of over a hundred portraits of grey heads and wrinkly faces, only a small handful is middle-aged or younger. The picture is shown with pride, no doubt, but a chill runs down my back when I look at it. They might as well have put up a death mask. Then on the radio I heard a United Church minister (I am interested in this church because my mother was a member before she became a Baha'i) proudly and openly admit that when she is on holiday and people ask what she does for a living she says, "I do public relations for a large east coast firm." Boy, and I thought Peter had made a roundabout denial!

But then the killer came when I ran across a worldwide Ipsos Reid survey in MacLean’s Magazine that reported an unmistakable decline in religiosity over the past fourteen years ("A Diminishing Role for Religion," November 20, 2006, p. 35) in virtually all nations of the world, with the exceptions of the Middle East and Russia. I found the drop so startling that I cannot resist reporting its bare outline here on this Badi' Blog. People were asked if it is the case that religion plays a "very important role in my daily life." In 1992, 83 percent of Americans said yes, now only 63 percent agree. Canadians were 61 percent, are now 39 percent. Britain went from 41 percent to 23, France from 37 percent to 17, Spain from 69 to 31 and India from 79 to 55. I find these figures as frightening in their way as the accumulating data on global warming. Basically, the hellish hotter our outer world, the hellish cooler our inner, spiritual life becomes. As most of my readers well know, Baha'u'llah predicts that "chaos and confusion" (WOB, 186-7) will result from the decline of religion, so from these hard statistics let a chill run down all our backs.

In view of the House's perspicacity about the fortunes of religion, I am reluctant lightly to toss out the window their ideas on nationalism. In their letter to religious leaders they all but wrote a eulogy for this primal urge in the ethnic peoples of the world. They wrote:

"The beleaguered battalions of nationalism face a similar fate. With each passing crisis in world affairs, it becomes easier for the citizen to distinguish between a love of country that enriches one's life, and submission to inflammatory rhetoric designed to provoke hatred and fear of others. Even where it is expedient to participate in the familiar nationalistic rites, public response is as often marked by feelings of awkwardness as it is by the strong convictions and ready enthusiasm of earlier times. The effect has been reinforced by the restructuring steadily taking place in the international order. Whatever the shortcomings of the United Nations system in its present form, and however handicapped its ability to take collective military action against aggression, no one can mistake the fact that the fetish of absolute national sovereignty is on its way to extinction." (UHJ, Letter to Religious Leaders, paragraph 4)

This is quite a fetish. I see little awkwardness or irony on the faces in the crowd in Central Park across the road from us on Canada Day. But maybe, as the House says, the faces of those wholly buried in patriotic fervor are graying and not being replaced, just like the hundred little portraits in the entranceway of Grace United Church. From the traditional perspective, there cannot limited sovereignty any more than a female can be a "little pregnant." Sovereignty means having no higher authority to appeal to. Here is how Rousseau pictured it:

"Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his own limbs, the social pact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same power which, directed by the general will, bears ... the name of sovereignty." (Social Contract, 74)

Rousseau goes on in this chapter named "The Limits to Sovereign Power" to stipulate that although you and I may be able to move our arms and legs anywhere we want, there are bounds to the ability of a sovereign to rule. (Come to think of it, I cannot place my arm and hands anywhere I please, as I regularly find out to my sorrow in the kitchen.) Even the most mighty potentate cannot, for instance, impose on his subjects any burden which is "not necessary to the community," reason being, it is a law of nature that there be "nothing without a cause." (Ibid, 75) This law of nature, by the way, Abdu'l-Baha affirmed forcefully in his early meetings with Western pilgrims; He even predicted that one day we would understand why there are those two little ridges above our lips (there is a name for them but I forget). A leader, then, who imposes an unnecessary burden on his people is ceasing to be a leader, and why? Because he is not being scientific. Everything must be done for an established purpose, just as every part of the body is designed to serve some end. Leadership is a science, a skill meant for the betterment of both the body and soul of humankind.

If a leader trashes the body politic without good reason, it is a mark of failure, injustice, folly. Hence Baha'u'llah's condemnation of the kings of Europe who were robbing their huddled masses blind in order to pay for more and better armaments. These were tyrants, not kings, for they were violating the grounds of their own legitimacy. Just as the betrayal of religious leaders caused the decline in religion, so these tyrants are to blame for the awkwardness on patriots' faces that the House sees (but which lesser observers like myself have more trouble discerning.) There is an increasing demand, or need, for a broader sovereignty that embraces all people, the whole planet.

Leadership as an art is the use of sovereignty to better our collective body and soul. Leadership of the body has fallen into the same disrepute as leadership of the soul; politicians and priests are equally reviled by most members of society. So little do we understand leadership that we do not have the words or images to describe it. Consider for example one strange thing that I have been realizing lately reading the Gorgias. The thing is that we have no name for the art of body management, but that the Greeks did. They were very clear on what is very obscure to us. Take this, from Plato's Laws,

Athenian Stranger: And in the case of the body are there not two arts, which have to do with the two bodily states?
Theaet: What are they?
Stranger: There is gymnastic, which has to do with deformity, and medicine, which has to do with disease. (Plato, SOPHIST)

Gymnastic? What the heck is that? Clearly, Plato meant the study and management of healthy bodies, as opposed to medicine, which takes care of sick and diseased bodies. Is there a word for this now? If somebody says she is a gymnast we think she is a tumbler. That is a highly skilled specialist, but not one with general relevance to all owners of bodies. We have worked out common terms for the study of sick and diseased minds, psychiatry, and of healthy minds, psychology. But there is no general study of healthy bodies as a part of everybody's education and daily life. Sure, universities have physical education and kinesiology faculties, but their interests seem restricted to a few elite athletes and their influence is negligible. The Greeks on the other hand treated gymnastics as a higher calling than medicine. Consider this, for example,

"My good friend, the sophist and the rhetorician, as I was saying to Polus, are the same, or nearly the same; but you ignorantly fancy that rhetoric is a perfect thing, sophistry a thing to be despised; whereas the truth is, that sophistry is as much superior to rhetoric as legislation is to the practice of law, or gymnastic to medicine." (Plato, Gorgias)

Gymnastic rules medicine. Imagine that. Imagine what it would be like if even one penny of every dollar we spend on drugs and the health care system went into what the Greeks called gymnastic, that is, in maintaining healthy bodies. If we did that, we might have a hint about what leadership is, of how to be a good steward of the planet. As we learn in the Republic, gymnastic, the study of the body, and music, the science of the soul, though outwardly they are distinct, both have a common end.

And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to practise the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless in some extreme case.

That I quite believe.

The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to develop his muscles.

Very right, he said.

Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other for the training of the body. What then is the real object of them? I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the improvement of the soul.

Let me end this with an astonishing passage from the Gorgias. Having read it I will never see the multi-billion dollar cosmetics and culinary industries with the same eyes again, for both are signs of our collective acceptance of flattery over consultation.

Gorgias: Never mind him, but explain to me what you mean by saying that rhetoric is the counterfeit of a part of politics.

Socrates: I will try, then, to explain my notion of rhetoric, and if I am mistaken, my friend Polus shall refute me. We may assume the existence of bodies and of souls?

Gor. Of course.

Soc. You would further admit that there is a good condition of either of them?

Gor. Yes.

Soc. Which condition may not be really good, but good only in appearance? I mean to say, that there are many persons who appear to be in good health, and whom only a physician or trainer will discern at first sight not to be in good health.

Gor. True.

Soc. And this applies not only to the body, but also to the soul: in either there may be that which gives the appearance of health and not the reality?

Gor. Yes, certainly.

Soc. And now I will endeavour to explain to you more clearly what I mean: The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to them: there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art attending on the body, of which I know no single name, but which may be described as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another, justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference.

Now, seeing that there are these four arts, two attending on the body and two on the soul for their highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men's highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death.

A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them.

Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic. I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time you will be able to follow)

gymnastic :: cookery : medicine;

gymnastic :: sophistry : legislation;

as cookery : medicine :: rhetoric : justice.

And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them. For if the body presided over itself, and were not under the guidance of the soul, and the soul did not discern and discriminate between cookery and medicine, but the body was made the judge of them, and the rule of judgment was the bodily delight which was given by them, then the word of Anaxagoras, that word with which you, friend Polus, are so well acquainted, would prevail far and wide: "Chaos" would come again, and cookery, health, and medicine would mingle in an indiscriminate mass. And now I have told you my notion of rhetoric, which is, in relation to the soul, what cookery is to the body.

Happiness in Law

Our Happiness is in Keeping the Law; Instauration Manifesto Introduction

By John Taylor; 2006 December 04

They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I have been working these years on a book that I think will benefit humanity, but for the life of me I could not find where to start. I am grateful to Al Gore and the producers of the feature documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" for pointing out that step. To see what it is, read the introduction below. For those who live near Dunnville, we are celebrating Human Rights Day by having a showing of that documentary in the Garfield Disher Room of the library next Sunday night, December 10, at 7:30 PM. Our monthly fireside will take place on Tuesday, December 12, same place, and will be on Life After Death, speaker, Betty Frost.

Recently climate scientists gave their highest marks for the accuracy of the science in An Inconvenient Truth. I looked up the reviews of the film on rottentomatoes.com and found virtually unanimous praise for it; Roger Ebert wrote that he had been reviewing films for many years but had never said this about one until now: "You owe it to yourself to see this film." Not long ago, though, the American Association of Science Teachers refused a donation of some 50,000 copies of "Inconvenient Truth," one to each science teacher to show to their classes, because they say that the film is a form of partisan politics and accepting the gift may detract from future fundraising efforts. In other words, some say, they are a shill for the oil and gas industry.

Here is what I have to say about it. Think of the atrocities of the Nazis, the guilt only partially expiated by the Nuremburg trials. Then think of how posterity will judge the shills who persistently ignored the signs of global warming, pushed it out of the public eye and refused to allow anything to be done about it. Bad as the Nazi atrocities were, this looks to be a disaster on a much greater scale. And no wonder Al Gore makes this issue so clear; he has been trying to point out the implications of basic science to policymakers for over two decades! As somebody said, "Democracy is not just ruled by money, it is money." And Gore is no stranger to whoring favors to moneyed interests. But the point is that he is at least trying to reverse the corruption. Where scientists have no voice, he is speaking on their behalf, because paying attention to the scientific writing on the wall is in all of our higher interests.

Our Happiness is in Keeping the Law

Introduction to "The Instauration Manifesto."

Many archeologists believe that the human race evolved its oversized brain in response to the many rapid and severe climate shifts that have taken place irregularly through the past several million years. What could not kill us only made us smarter. Now that global warming is upon us, pre-history repeats itself, only this time the rapid shift is of our own doing. But we can console ourselves that our mental equipment was designed to respond to such crises.

Climate shifts are compounding. The melting of the polar ice caps and the ice sheet over Greenland is well under way. This will raise sea level by many meters and flood populated areas in coastal regions around the globe. Our present arrangements are by any standard grossly inefficient. Waste is part of an infrastructure that belches out ever more of the very greenhouse gasses that, we now know, caused the climate crisis in the first place. In order to function we must pump up our bodies with artificial stimulants and anti-depressants, and these chemicals, released into the environment, are doing further damage to freshwater ecosystems.

As carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, it is becoming evident that a worse genie may be let out of the bottle. As the permafrost layer melts it is liable to release massive quantities of methane, a far more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Even at this late date it is still not clear whether this monumental transformation will result in increased warming or the reverse, a stoppage of the Gulf Stream and a sudden plunge into freezing temperatures, an ice age of a thousand years in duration, as has happened at least once before in the geological record.

At stake are many lives, and with the introduction of methane into the atmosphere, perhaps all life as we know it. All in all, the Climate Crisis poses a greater cumulative challenge by orders of magnitude than any natural disaster since the beginning of recorded history. Massive flooding of low lying areas will surely provoke a refugee crisis on an unimagined scale. Hundreds of millions of people, possibly billions, will suddenly be deprived of potable water, food, shelter, livelihood and every other essential of survival. Somehow those living on high ground will have to accommodate a rapid inflow of immigrants without crushing the infrastructure or overloading the ecological mechanisms that maintain agriculture, which in turn keeps us all alive.

These sudden strains could easily bring nature to a tipping point beyond which civilization will not be viable. Such collapses are frighteningly frequent in history, as Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, documents. But difficult as it will be to organize such a mass migration from flooded lowlands, it would be far better than the alternatives, civil war, sudden population drop and any number of Mad Max scenarios of post-apocalyptic anarchy.

Fortunately, with unity and firm political resolve, careful consultation, planning and prompt action, it would be by no means impossible to accommodate any number of climatic refugees with a minimum of violence and dislocation. An adequate response would mean rapid, massive changes to every area of human life, starting with the formation of a world government strong enough to enforce the rule of law and adequately regulate the global economy.

Like a heart pumping blood to every cell in the body, a world federation will have to impose standards and organize a massive overhaul of the infrastructure not just in privileged places but on every spot on high ground. It is the purpose of this manifesto to point out the specific changes to the design of infrastructure that would enable a newly formed world government to reverse the slide to environmental oblivion.

Although the desire to survive adversity should be motive enough, we should be aware that deep down there is much more to it than that. This symphony human culture over thousands of years has been preparing to play. We have bodies and minds designed over millions of years to cooperate in rapid response to dire challenges posed by our environment. To the extent that we are aware of this, we will realize that our happiness as individuals is bound up in seeing that it is resolved. Plato's Socrates, discussing the rudiments of justice, declared:

"For the questions in dispute are by no means trivial, but are, one might say, matters wherein knowledge is noblest and ignorance most shameful -- the sum and substance of them being knowledge or ignorance of who is happy and who is not." (Gorgias, 472c)

We were made to eliminate waste, to be happy in purity, naturally, by living a healthy, moderate lifestyle, by getting involved in one another and promoting the overall good of all humanity. Most of all, each of us is happiest when we know that we are working to remove obstacles to happiness, even at the price of our lives.

"And yet, my friend, I would rather that my lyre should be inharmonious, and that there should be no music in the chorus which I provided; aye, or that the whole world should be at odds with me, and oppose me, rather than that I, who am but one man, should be out of tune with and contradict myself." (Gorgias, 482c)

To be happy each citizen of the planet must see and understand the problem and must devote his or her time and resources to resolving the climate crisis. Our integrity depends upon our resolve to do the right thing.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish (or, cast off restraint): but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." (Prov 29:18, KJV)

RE: Atheist's Challenge

Science teachers’ association accused of oil company influence

Nov 27, 2006 Special to World Science

Some science educators are questioning whether the lead­ing organization
of U.S. science teachers has acted as a shill for the oil industry.

The controversy erupted after the National Science Teach­ers’ Association
rejected an offer of 50,000 free copies of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the
popular film on global warm­ing by erstwhile presidential candidate Al Gore.

A producer of the movie claimed that as one reason for rejecting the DVDs,
the teachers’ group stated that accepting them could hinder its fundraising.

Writing in Sunday’s Washington Post, a producer for the movie sug­gested it
may be no coincidence that the group’s funders include Exxon-Mobil Corp.
The company has for years tried to “stifle” ho­nest discussion of global
warming, the producer editorialized.

Spokesmen for the association and Exxon-Mobil did not respond to re­quests
for comment for this article.

Most scientists believe industrial emissions are gradually warming Earth’s
climate, killing off a range of species and threatening possible environmental
catastrophe. The oil industry—which could suffer financially from regulations
designed to curb the problem—has sought to play down or dismiss the fears.

The idea that the industry might influence a group closely involved in
educating American children sparked an out­cry across the blogosphere this
week, including from some scientists.

The association “seem[s] in the pocket of the oil indus­try,” wrote P. Z.
Myers, a biologist and associate profes­sor at the University of Minnesota,
Morris, in his popular blog “Pharyngula.”

The Arlington, Va.-based teachers’ association, which des­cribes itself as
the world’s largest group of its kind, claims a membership of more than
55,000 science teach­ers. The group describes its mission as promoting
excel­lence and innovation in science teaching.

The Washington Post opinion piece was by Laurie David, a producer of “An
Inconvenient Truth” and wife of comedi­an Larry David, creator of the
television shows “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

She wrote: “At hundreds of screenings this year of ‘An In­convenient Truth,’
the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every
student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.”
Thus, “the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000
free DVDs to the National Science Teachers’ Asso­ciation” for classroom
use. But the teachers turned it down.

“In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that oth­er ‘special
interests’ might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want
to offer ‘political’ endorsement of the film; and they saw ‘little, if any,
benefit’” to the group or its members in accepting it.

However, she wrote, “the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by
leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students
in Norway and Sweden.”

Also, she added, “there was one more curious argument in the e-mail:
Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place ‘unnecessary risk upon the
[group’s] capital campaign, es­pecially certain targeted supporters.’ One of
those sup­porters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp. That’s the same
Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to
muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort
to solve it.”

The oil industry as a whole, and with other corporations, have been similarly
influencing education for years, she argued.

David abstained from directly accusing the teachers’ group of bending to oil
company influence. She also of­fered some words of sympathy for the
organization, sug­gesting it might have trouble raising money.

Some bloggers were less generous.

“Memo to the Christian Coalition: The NSTA is for sale. For a mere million
bucks a year, I’ll bet you could get them on board with Intelligent Design,
too,” quipped Sara Robin­son, co-author of “Orcinus,” a liberal blog.

But the blog of the U.S. National Association of Manufac­turers sided with
the teachers’ group, criticizing the movie as “politics masked as science”
and accusing David of hy­pocrisy. “We applaud the move of the nation’s
science teachers, who teach the scientific method every day, who hopefully
are instilling in young minds some degree of cu­riosity, inquisitiveness and
yes, even skepticism,” the blog stated.

Atheist's Challenge

An Atheist's Challenge
By John Taylor; 2006 December 02

When I was a student at Guelph University I hung around with the likes of Jimbo and Afshin, and there was also Ed de Jong, who as I recall was living in Angus at the time. We did not see him as often because of the distance. Ed is a dedicated Baha'i who pioneered to South America in intervening years. We just reestablished email contact and he sent the following, of which I quote only part:
Hi ... I'm trying to put this together and would like some comments on what I'm doing. Is this worthwhile? What improvements would you make -- even if it's radical? If you know of any related texts or arguments, please pass them along. It's for my brother, but if it's usable for people in general considering atheism as an alternative to religion, that would be good too.
Here goes:
I just read Dawkins "Why There is Almost Certainly No God." A few questions that I would like to raise ... Just because most politicians are power-seeking egoists does not mean ALL are. Just because many used car dealers give a bad name to used car dealers, doesn't mean you cannot find one honest one. Even if the majority of religious people seem to be off the track about evolution, reality or reason doesn't mean that all of them are. It could be considered prejudice to paint all with the same stripe.
This point, Ed, is your most effective one. As a former atheist, I would say that this should be the seed that you try hardest to nurture to fruition. I have not read Dawkins book but I heard a lecture by him this week on CBC, and have read summaries of his arguments in newspaper articles. He is the most vocal crusader for atheism and against religion since Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud. As I understand it, he argues like this:
There is no more, or less, evidence for God than there is for believing in beings such as fairies or pixies. There is no more or less reason for believing in Him than any number of other gods held in reverence by millions throughout history. In Viking times, you believed in Thor because everybody else did, and because questioning it meant death. Same for Jupiter in Roman times, Zeus for the Greeks, and so forth. All these gods are discarded, defunct, believed in by nobody. We laugh at anyone who does believe in them. In order to increase the humor, Russell used to talk about believing in orbiting toasters, and Dawkins talks about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The atheist Dawkins says that he has to be agnostic about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It may well exist. Though there is no verified evidence so far that a FSM is flying above us, it would be arrogant to say that such a thing may not someday manifest itself. Same thing with God. The atheist and agnostic will accept it when there is clear evidence compelling them to accept that God, as opposed to Jupiter, Thor, fairies or FSM's exist.
We see here the divide and conquer technique in its full splendor, though perhaps here it would be more accurate to picture it as an atomizer, you know, the device on a spray bottle that turns liquid water into a fine mist. Once God is broken up into a little droplet indistinguishable from other drops and from the air around us, He can be dismissed along with the thousands of other obsolescent doctrines that catch on for a while and then are tossed on the garbage heap, forgotten, and left to disintegrate.
What, indeed, is to distinguish theism from other beliefs? For one thing, well, One Thing. To believe in God is to posit One over many. There is a unity behind the many outer appearances, the atomized mist that our eyes witness of the universe. It is therefore appropriate that the consummate believers in the many should attempt to use the atomizing technique from which they derive their own agnosticism on those who know the One. But the fact is, as `Abdu'l-Baha pointed out, the word "agnostic" literally means "ignorant." One cannot derive knowledge from ignorance, only from truth. For the same reason, you cannot drink from an atomizing spray bottle.
Thus theists hold that theism is not a belief like any other, but that it is rather the beginning of knowledge. It is the truth from which we take the leap of faith that allows the advancement of all knowledge, and all good. From the One comes many. From the many comes nothing but more multiplication. Consider the following parallel situation using a similar twist of terminology meant to atomize and conquer:
A school wishing to establish peace among battling students comes out with a policy of "zero-tolerance" for violence. The student representative comes back with a protest:
"You teachers are just playing with words. Zero-tolerance is just a sanitized way of saying `intolerance.' In other words, you are bigots. You want to exclude the many alternative ways of behaving that do not fall under your narrow set of values. What makes your set of beliefs any different from any other? We are followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and he tells us that there are many other things in heaven and earth than fall under a teacher's philosophy."
What would the teachers have to say against such an argument? They would be in the same boat as the theists affronted by the atomizing argument of crusading atheists. One against many. The teachers would have to say, "We are not upholding just another opinion among many other opinions. We are not bigots. We are simply establishing the known preconditions for peace. And peace is a necessary precondition for gaining more knowledge." Thus the student who rejects the zero-tolerance policy is not doing what he purports, that is, upholding choice and a more open-minded, creative, multi-lateral spectrum of values, he is really choosing ignorance, violence, and ultimately death. Hence the crucial dictum of God in the Pentateuch:
"I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that you may live, you and your seed... (Deut 30:19, WEB)
Yahweh in the next verse declares that He is "your life, and the length of your days..." In other words, this is no mere difference of opinions, or clash of contrasting but ultimately indistinguishable values. This is the difference between life and death, success and collapse. For the human body politic lives and dies according to the quality of the ideas upon which it agrees upon and, as it were, "ingests." It is not just a matter of choosing a belief from the vast smorgasbord of opinions devised by philosophers and prophets, be right or wrong, flakey or solid. It is a vital matter of our collective survival, and of choosing a prosperous, happy future for us and our children. Choose life, God implores us.
The world's religions offer a big picture of the results to be derived from reverence for life (choosing life), or, more narrowly defined, belief in God. These systems constitute centuries-long experiments in the efficacy of theism. True, some have been tossed on the garbage heap, in fact, a great many. But many more have survived and thrived for millennia. They continue to live on in the hearts of millions, even billions of people. Lives are changed, made better. The poorest people in the world tend to believe, and their courage in living hopeless lives is a proof in itself of the vitality of theistic belief. The beliefs of the very rich tend to be forms of denial, atomized mist. To pretend that all religions are useless, dead and gone and that the only living, enlightened belief is atheism and agnosticism is as bigoted and parochial as anything upheld by the most blathering fundamentalist.
The atheist will of course respond that all religions are evil and corrupt, that they only lead to fanaticism, to yet more conflict and violence, and ultimately they do more harm than good. This is a crucial stage, the next logical step in the argument. I do not have space or time to defend the world religions here, but I did recently come across a good mini-response by Scott Adams, the cartoonist who writes my favorite strip, Dilbert. In his book "God's Debris" he imagines the following dialog:
"Are you saying that all the religions work? What about all the people who have been killed in religious wars?"
"You cannot judge the value of a thing by looking only at costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people. From society's viewpoint, religion works." (Scott Adams, God's Debris, A Thought Experiment, Andrew's McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2001, p. 32)
In other words, a fair accounting of religion involves, as with everything else, a clearheaded cost-benefit analysis. Sure, religion comes with a price, as do all things. Sure, it can be used for great benefit or great harm, as can any tool in my garage. Religion covers the highest plateau of our existence, but it also is about the worst evil to which a human can sink to. To use Baha'u'llah's image in the Hidden Words, the teeth of a comb can be used to dress the locks of the Beloved, or they can be used to tear at His throat.



--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com

question

A reader asked the following question.

"We were just discussing ... life after death for victims of accidents and violent deaths. We wondered about the state of their souls. Often when one gets feelings of unease and a sense of a disturbed being present ... ghosts? Do these victims ascend to the Abha Kingdom upon death or are they in some sort of limbo until their souls find peace? Are there any writings on this?"

At the heart of the beliefs of monotheistic religions is the conviction that God is the One True Agent. All power is in His Hands, though mediated and carried out in this plane by the Manifestation of God. We Baha'is are buried with a ring on a finger declaring: "I came forth from God, and return unto Him, detached from all save Him, holding fast to His Name, the Merciful, the Compassionate." (Aqdas, 228) He is the one origin. God transcends thoughts, and even talk of oneness. He is beyond us, and His acts are not to be questioned. But a worse lie than talking of oneness, is to talk of God in terms of duality.

"Beware lest ye speak of duality in regard to My Self, for all the atoms of the earth proclaim that there is none other God but Him, the One, the Single, the Mighty, the Loving." (Summons, 23)

A person who believes that God is end and origin, and that the end and origin is one, cannot believe that spirits whose name is legion can interfere with the one, or whatever is between the One origin and the One end. They have no direct power in this world. God has all power, God is one, we refer all to Him. There is nothing to fear from any entity, or any force, known or unknown. In one of the first Baha'i books that was made available in the West (about one century ago this year) the Master is reported as saying:

"You have asked regarding the influence of evil spirits. Evil spirits are deprived of eternal life. How then can they exercise any influence? But as eternal life is ordained for holy spirits, therefore their influence exists in all the Divine worlds." (From a Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Baha to Mrs. Ella Goodall Cooper: Daily Lessons Received at 'Akka p. 78, 1979 ed.)

Even on this plane of existence what we do is not what we think we are doing. Our power is illusory. "God's hand is over their hands," as the Qu'ran puts it. Thoughts are weak when willed, how much weaker when they fall outside of our conscious direction.

"You should not be afraid anyone can affect your mind. Even when we want to catch the thoughts of those we love most we cannot do so, how much less other people succeed in penetrating our minds." (From letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, dated January 18, 1951, in Lights of Guidance, p. 518)

Scientists are investigating with more sensitive instruments certain haunted houses to see if there may not be some kind of trace magnetic force causing the sightings and other strange phenomena. About such things we must remain agnostic until hard evidence is available.

At the same time, science is discovering how very prone to suggestion the human mind is. The latest advice to cooks, for example, is that they talk their dishes up before presenting them to those about to eat. Do not just say, "Here's your salad, go wild." Talk of how wonderful the ingredients are, tell their story, use complex terminology. That does more for the enjoyment of the meal than just about anything. Double blind taste tests have been showing, contrary to conventional wisdom, that with the right mental priming of the pump cheap wine taste as just as good as your 400 dollar a bottle special. Conversely, the expensive stuff gets reviews as bad as the cheapest if the server suggests that it is bad. This placebo factor is a real force, it can cure sick people, it can conjure up demons that do real harm. The power of the mind is more mysterious than we can know, and the only cure is to feed the mind more of the truth, more knowledge, until it gains the vitamins it needs for robustness.

 No doubt the power of suggestion, plus generous helpings of half truths and wishful thinking, accounts for the huge literature of half-baked sightings of ghosts, aliens, and so forth. If you want an antidote to such things, read the magazine "Skeptical Enquirer," or their excellent website and article archive about any particular subject you have in mind, to get the point of view of scientists using the scientific method. Anything with a hint of superstition is not for Baha'is, who have more important things to do with their short time on earth.

 "Fear ye God and abandon vain imaginings to the begetters thereof and leave superstitions to the devisers thereof and misgivings to the breeders thereof." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 104-105)

 "The reality underlying this is that the evil spirit, Satan or whatever is interpreted as evil, refers to the lower nature of man. This basic nature is symbolized in various ways. In man there are two expressions; One is the expression of nature, the other the expression of the spiritual realm. The world of nature is defective. Look at it clearly, casting aside all superstition and imagination... God has never created an evil spirit; all such ideas and nomenclature are symbols expressing the mere human or earthly nature of man. It is an essential condition of the soil of earth thorns, weeds and fruitless trees may grow from it. Relatively speaking, this is evil: it is simply the lower state and basic product of nature." ('Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 294-295, 1982 ed.)

 "O ye two blessed souls! Your letters were received. They showed that ye have investigated the truth and have been freed from imitations and superstitions, that ye observe with your own eyes and not with those of others, hearken with your own ears and not with the ears of others, and discover mysteries with the help of your own consciences and not with those of others. For the imitator saith that such a man hath seen, such a man hath heard, and such a conscience hath discovered; in other words he dependeth upon the sight, the hearing and the conscience of others and hath no will of his own." (Selections, 29)

 "This is the Cause that hath made all your superstitions and idols to tremble." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, para 168, p. 80)

 "People for the most part delight in superstitions. They regard a single drop of the sea of delusion as preferable to an ocean of certitude. By holding fast unto names they deprive themselves of the inner reality and by clinging to vain imaginings they are kept back from the Dayspring of heavenly signs. God grant you may be graciously aided under all conditions to shatter the idols of superstition and to tear away the veils of the imaginations of men. Authority lieth in the grasp of God, the Fountainhead of revelation and inspiration and the Lord of the Day of Resurrection." (Baha'u'llah, Tablets, 58)

 "To any of your friends who are confused on this issue, you can explain that the principle of harmony between religion and science, while it enables us, with the help of reason, to see through the falsity of superstitions, does not imply that truth is limited to what can be explained by current scientific concepts. Not only do all religions have their miracles and mysteries, but religion itself, and certain fundamental religious concepts, such as the nature of the Manifestations of God, are far from being explicable by present-day scientific theories." (The Universal House of Justice, 1996 Feb 16, Misc Questions - Talisman, Baha'i Encyclopedia, Virgin Birth)

 "As to the question of evil spirits, demons and monsters, any references made to them in the Holy Books have symbolic meaning. What is currently known among the public is but sheer superstition."

 "That the "Most Great Name" exercises influence over both physical and spiritual matters is sure and certain...." (The Universal House of Justice, 1998 Dec 16, Traditional practices in Africa)

 "The Cause everywhere has suffered from spiritualists with psychic pretended powers, and it is high time to take a step along that line." (From letter written on behalf of Guardian, dated July 10, 1928, to an individual believer, in Lights of Guidance, p. 518)

Laws of An Algorithmic Constitution

The Three Laws of Humanotics; An Algorithmic Constitution

By John Taylor; 2006 November 26

"The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me, the two things that fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on." (Immanuel Kant, from the conclusion of the second Critique, inscribed on his tomb)

Weeks ago, a question slipped into my cranium and refused to leave. It never stops bothering me, buzzing like a trapped fly that never pauses to rest. The question came in a reverie late one night after reading my fill of Rousseau's Social Contract. I had begun wondering, what will happen as computers become super-intelligent? How will interconnected, super-fast thinking machines affect the way we humans govern ourselves? What will happen as robots begin walking among us, robots that are continually connected wirelessly to this intelligence? How will that affect what we are, what we aspire to do? This, Socrates taught, is the noblest of all questions,

"Of all inquiries, Callicles, the noblest is that which concerns ... what a man should be, and what he should practice, and to what extent, both when old and when young." (Plato, Gorgias, 488a)

The imminent birth of the super-intelligence -- I can only call it super-intelligence because it is neither artificial nor human, but each magnifying the other -- has to change the equation of what we should do, and what we should practice, whether young or old, as individuals and as groups. Surely there will emerge a common language, not a human language or a computer language, not mathematics, the language of nature, but some combination of all three, that will guide and direct the plans of this networked super-intelligence. What will it be? And this (the other questions are just leading up to this question, the fly in my cranium) is the big question that has been bugging me:

"Will there ever be a cosmopolitan constitution written not in words but as an algorithm?"

As noted here not long ago, mathematics describes static relations, and algorithms are better at dealing with dynamic relations. An algorithm is like a recipe, it is a set of procedures done one by one, each action following the one before.

By algorithmic I am not talking about a single program, but a program of programs, a language of languages, an interconnected, autonomous internet of thought, of no fixed size or dimension, a morphing entity operating in many minds and computers, one in use wherever people meet and consult, working all kinds of intelligence in concert to find and remember the best solution to every problem of governance.

Then this article from the New York Times shot through the pipes: "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense," by John Markoff, November 12, 2006. As always, it was written for and from the point of view of the business sector, but the implications are much broader. The following passage from the article in particular jumped out at me:

"Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as Page Rank, systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a vote, but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.) One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites."

This direction of research offers the prospect of a tremendous leap in human intelligence. In the near future every move we make, every choice, every glance, every micro-expression on our face, will be a vote duly noted and used by somebody, whether we know it or not. Scientists for over two decades have been studying chaos theory to understand how swarming behavior works, and how it can be exploited for benefit. Swarming takes place throughout nature; chaos exists even in simple systems, and swarming emerges from it. It is the old myth of Uranus emerging from chaos, played over and over again, wherever we look in nature and in human affairs. Swarming affects our buying choices in a store, our voting in an election, and even the clotting of our blood when wounded.

One day every question we ask, be it a whim, a passing query or a gadfly in the brain question like my computerized constitution question, will be registered and subtly change the interface between man and machine, and man and man. One project, dubbed Cyc, was designed two decades ago to amass commonsense in a huge encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. It too, although the focus of Cyc is now very different, is mentioned as cutting edge in the New York Times article.

"There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest."

The article describes how Google researchers have begun to figure out ways to tap the enormous unused work potential in adults' casual play. It seems that the time and mental resources that people lavish on the internet every day playing puzzles and other trivial pastimes is enough staff hours to rebuild the twin WTC towers from foundation to top, every single day.

So the question is, can making politics into a game or puzzle played by millions of people in their spare time, using feedback and forth to the internet super-intelligence, be the way to an algorithmic world constitution? Is this the primrose path to cosmopolitanism? If so, we must agree upon a prime directive, we must determine first things and put them first.

The reason that science fiction writers so often conjure up the nightmare of machines becoming smarter than us and then threatening to usurp human self-rule is that we feel, deep down, that we have no idea what is essential, what our prime directive should be. This is because, as a race, humanity has not addressed Socrates’ Most Noble Question, "What should we be, and what should we practice, and to what extent?" Failure to answer this question cogently and concisely means that we can never safely program an autonomous robot. It will always be subject, under some concatenation of circumstances, to inflicting harm on human beings. Isaac Asimov tried to answer this problem with his three laws of robotics, and the Will Smith movie "I Robot" offered an effective refutation of Asimov's formulation. The question remains, how can we enter into dialog with intelligent machines when we ourselves have no commonly agreed upon "three laws" of human moral agency?

Actually, maybe we do. We have the Golden Rule, a moral dictum that is truly cosmopolitan in the fourth of my dictionary's four definitions of the word: "found in most parts of the world and under varied ecological conditions, as, a cosmopolitan herb." The rule to do unto others as we would have them do unto us is found in every major religious tradition, and therefore it can be taken as the first cosmopolitan law of moral behavior, be it instantiated by human or artificial intelligence. It is unlikely to be refuted by a clever screenwriter, as Asimov's laws of robotics were.

The Golden Rule has stood on its own throughout the ages without need of revision. However it was "prepared" for use by the super-intelligence as two more laws of cosmopolitan algorithmic law by Immanuel Kant. His formulation has stood for over two centuries. This is how my Encyclopedia Brittannica sums up Kant's ethical philosophy:

"The essence of morals is the commandment not to perform any act that one would not want to become a precedent for all human action and always to consider an individual as an end in himself, not as the instrument of another's purpose."

These then would be the first three laws of humanity and robotics: one, the Golden Rule, to do unto others; two, to do nothing that will set a bad precedent if universalized; three, to avoid instrumentalizing, to treat each human always as an end in herself.

If the goal is unity in diversity, then all must be firm on clear essentials, something like these three laws, and at the same time very broadminded about non-essentials, what falls outside their purview. But most important, each and all must be very clear on and skilled at distinguishing between the two. Each human, computer and robot can work the three laws out in each particular situation, but the results, that is, the amount of unity in diversity in the broad picture, would be fed back into the super-intelligence for assessment and refinement of the algorithmic constitution.

Mathematics of Governance

Rousseau and the Mathematics of Governance

By John Taylor; 2006 November 24

I have boundless admiration for the genius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his masterpiece, "The Social Contract." Here he seems to be grasping towards an automatic, almost a mathematical kind of governance. He actually proposes that the power of a prince be divided by the number of subjects in a strict ratio according to the latest census. The Prime Minister of Canada, for instance, would be one over thirty three million Canadians. In other words, his power is extremely diffuse compared with the number of subjects under him. At the same time, there is established what might be thought of as a spiritual force, or a magnetic field connecting them. This sounds ridiculous, but at the same time it has a spark of genius. As James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" points out, there are ways of tapping into the extraordinary insight of many minds working together by simply averaging out their opinions, even if they are ostensibly blind guesses. Once we start learning how to do that, political science will become an applied science. Government and consultation will change completely.

Rousseau's insights, in my opinion, have not even begun to be followed up on. For one thing, he recognized a certain relativity among the various types of government, and among the organs of a single government.

"Throughout the ages men have debated the question, `What is the best form of government?', and yet they have failed to see that each of the possible forms is the best in some cases and the worst in others." (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, Penguin Books, London, 1968, p. 111)

This requires some background. Traditionally only three possible kinds of human government are allowed, rule by one, rule by a few, or rule by many. This was established by Aristotle, and picked up for modern political thought by Montesquieu and Rousseau. Rule of one is called monarchy, rule of the few is aristocracy, and of many, democracy. Rousseau, following Montesquieu, is saying that each of these has advantages at certain times, in certain circumstances, according to the stage of development of a given people.

Reading this, I wondered about where the Commonwealth of Baha'u'llah fits in. Strictly speaking, the Baha'i administrative order itself is a kind of aristocracy, since the House of Justice is made up not of one or of all Baha'is, but of a few. They are a non-hereditary Aristos (meaning, "the best"), and their power is restricted to In Camera sessions; they are elected, and their term is limited to a five year term. This Aristos, like all real-world governments, combines the other two elements too. The broader mould of a Baha'i world order would fit monarchic and democratic elements in as well. We have faith that no good would be excluded from the commonwealth of Baha'u'llah. But still, according to the classical formulation, it is at core an aristocracy.

The problem facing human government is how to deal with transformation and progress. Peoples and communities change over time, often unpredictably; and the change, even in Rousseau's time, was accelerating. As he points out, a community learns virtue, or slips into vice, and nobody is served notice as to which direction they are heading. The best government for a people afflicted by one vice, or endowed with a certain virtue, will vary according to the degree of vice or the stage of virtue that they happen to be in. This followed the standard medical model of the time, where health was believed to be the result of a balance of certain "humours" within the body.

"... often the government that is best in itself will become the most pernicious, if the relations in which it stands have altered according to the defects of the body politic to which it belongs." (Ibid., p. 107)

According to Rousseau, in every nation there are three balancing elements, also based on the triune of the one, the few, and the many; first there is the executive (sometimes termed the prince), then the legislators, and last, the people. These connect by a strict "geometric progression," a mathematical relationship that adapts dynamically.

"... as there is only one mean proportional between each relation, there is also only one good government possible for a State. But, as countless events may change the relations of a people, not only may different governments be good for different peoples, but also for the same people at different times." (103)

Rousseau's model resembles a magnet that suddenly connects when its invisible field contacts visible iron filings. The three elements, the prince or sovereign who rules, the magistrates who give laws, and the people who obey, all balance. The sovereign does not rule himself, he as it were "channels" the collective power of the people. Similarly the parliament does not make laws for itself but for justice. Their balancing unity connects the power and will of the nation. The health of the state depends upon each conforming to its respective role.

"Furthermore, none of these three terms can be altered without the equality being instantly destroyed. If the Sovereign desires to govern, or the magistrate to give laws, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder takes the place of regularity, force and will no longer act together, and the State is dissolved and falls into despotism or anarchy." (103)

This is what Rousseau describes, anarchy and tyranny, the effects of failing to connect at a deep enough level. In spite of stronger, more sophisticated nationalistic, sovereign governments, despotism and anarchy have become the marks of our age.

Think of the monumental dithering and procrastination of governments in the face of the climate crisis. Never in history has there been anything like the daunting challenge facing political science today. It is a frightening prospect, millions of refugees flooding the high ground, increased hurricanes, massive starvation, all the while leaders of thought are choking people's minds with predudices, stirring up ancient ethnic and religious hatreds.

Kant had a great insight, inspired by Rousseau, when he used the word "cosmopolitan" to describe the level at which the ideal government for a given situation connects and brings all under it to life.

Cosmos comes from the Greek word "Kosmos," referring to the primeval state of things that predominated before there was order. According to Greek and Hittite legend, Gaea (earth) and Uranus (heaven) emerged from chaos and the ordered, understandable world as we know it began. Nothing could exist in chaos; it was confusion, death, the opposite of order. The cosmos is just the reverse, a universe that is orderly, harmonious and systematic. In English, a cosmos can refer to any complex, orderly, self-inclusive system. The latest cosmos to come into being is the World Wide Web. Every day the Web grows and becomes more complex, but its order and accessibility are not compromised. In fact, most have come to expect the latter to improve as well, and thanks to the power of supercomputers running search engines, so it has.

Combine cosmos with Polis, meaning "city," "government" or community," in Greek, and you get cosmopolitan. To say "cosmopolitan" is to say "world order" in one word. If there is to be unity in the world, one must begin in the belief that our universe is ordered. Both science and religion are based on this basic cosmopolitan perception. Science begins in strong faith that our world is ordered by law, that it is comprehensible and therefore subject to our influence. Religion holds that these laws were made intentionally by a good and loving God for our use and benefit.

But today both religion and science are failing to galvanize the magnetism we need to address our challenges. They are not cosmopolitan. A burdensome legacy of narrow loves and loyalties is threatening any active survival response that anybody, even the most starry-eyed dreamer, can imagine happening. Old faiths and patriotisms become a disease and prejudice blocks the magnetism we could get from a world embracing belief system, a universal body politic. They say that radical crises require radical solutions; here is how `Abdu'l-Baha put that saying:

"It requires a universal active force to overcome these differences. A small disease needs a small remedy, but a disease which pervades the whole body needs a very strong remedy. A small lamp may light a room, a larger would light a house, a larger still might shine through the city, but the sun is needed to light the whole world." (Abdu'l-Baha, Abdu'l-Baha in London, p. 59)

The world is in darkness. It lacks the powerful light of one sun, and of wills turned to it. In the gloom we attempt to solve one problem and knock into others solving other problems. Sovereign nationalistic governments founder, and the ecosystem reflects that in global warming. A cosmopolitan form of governance, based upon a firm constitution, would reverse the trend. Our next essay, "An Algorithmic Constitution" will look into possible ways and means.