BACKGROUND: ROBERT MULLER'S PLENARY LECTURE (20 June 1995):
In his plenary speech, Robert Muller, retired Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, pointed out that during the past half century the activities of the UN passed through three stages. Between 1945 and 1966/70 the focus was exclusively humanistic, on the areas of human rights--efforts to avoid wars, reduce infant mortality, contain epi- demics, and abolish racism. No one at the time thought of the earth; the UN Charter is a charter for humans. About 1970 global ecology became an issue after Sweden had sounded pollution warnings at the first UN World Conference on the Environment. In 1980 climatologists warned of the possibility of global warming. Since that time we are in a third period: earth is now Number One and Humanity is Number Two. We are aware of ourselves as part of and dependent on the earth. During the first period we took up human rights, this was the human approach. Now we have to deal with the rights of the planet itself.
At the 1992 International Council of Human Duties at Trieste, Italy, an interdisciplinary group of scholars raised the question of our responsi- bilities toward the planet and eventually issued the International Declaration of Ethics, Human Duties and Responsibilities. Muller recommended that the president of Italy place these concerns as an item on the agenda of the UN. If the UN were to take up these issues, he suggested that they follow a technique, ironically developed by the military--design a science of ethics, a strategy of ethics, and a methodology of ethics.
Referring to changes over history, he pointed to instances of radical shifts in our perceptions of what is good and what is evil. For most of human history war was considered a noble pursuit. Hence war could be waged in good conscience and heroes could slaughter in the name of God. Today war is no longer considered a good but an evil. Since humanity is now global it is up to humanity as a whole to define what is good and what is bad in the light of the wisdom of philosophy and spirituality. In order to do this we need a "science" or careful systematic analysis.
Then there is strategy. Muller suggested the approach used in his schools that places humanity within the context of a series of concentric circles from outer space to genetic structure, from the solar system down to the atom. In terms of protecting our planetary home, for example, he would prohibit polluting outer space with anything from killer satellites to space junk and Coca Cola or beer commercials. The next circle involves the atmosphere and might specifically lead us to such issues as the role of the ozone layer and the need to protect it. Next comes the biosphere, the fragile layer around the earth where--as far as we know--all the life in our solar system is located. At the innermost center, we have to look at building blocks from gene to atom. Here we need specialized ethics to deal with such controversial developments as genetic engineering and nuclear testing. Finally, to implement and enforce global ethic we need a world court of ethics. We must do that all of this for the human family. The whole human family.
Muller mentioned a number of specific critical points, such as population control and overconsumption and garbage production. One American is consuming thirty times more than people in the poor countries. In the poor countries a dead person leaves behind forty times his weight in trash whereas in the rich countries it is forty thousand times our weight in trash. Most of these are issues that relate to business and industry. Muller pointed proudly to his "new girlfriend" Barbara whose little firm tries to promote good causes and ethical business practices.
The frustrated comment, "We live in a world of idiots," led to a discussion of the behavior of nations, professional ethics, and--once again the terrible track record of religious fundamentalism in precipitating hatred and disunity. In a tone reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin, Hindus, and Jains (with a bit of Carl Sagan thrown in) Muller reminds us that we are all compounds of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous. We are cosmic matter, but not only cosmic matter: we are conscious beings in a universe that is 13 billion years old. "This is the deep understanding of the miracle of life: If an insect disappears, when we kill a human being we kill a miracle."
Muller's proposal for the planet includes two UN new world conferences in addition to those already established--a World Conference on Spirituality, under the leadership of the Dalai Lama, and a World Commission on Ethics to deal with Human Duties and Responsibilities. In addition, each of the 32 UN agencies--including the World Bank--should have an office on ethics. In fact, Muller insists, he would like to make 1886 an International year of Ethics and order to prepare for making "the next millennium the age of ethics when we would finally know what is right and wrong amongst ourselves and our relationship with this miraculous planet."
MORNING SESSION (20 June 1995)
LEONARD SWIDLER:
In his introduction to the workshop, Swidler pointed out that people from different parts of the globe need to come up with a common statement concerning the acceptable minimum standards of ethics, a document that would grow out of a consensus-generating dialogue. (As I am typing these words on my notebook computer, I am looking out the Amtrak window and am struck by the peaceful presence of a picturesque and sleepy brick railroad station. It reminds me of villages in Austria and Germany, much like the little Bahnhof behind my grandmother's summer house in the metropolis of Unter-Oberndorf near Vienna. Suddenly I notice that most of the outside is covered with black spray-painted swastikas, and I find myself getting sick at the persistence of evil; yes, indeed, we need a global ethic!). This way, various groups would put their efforts into it from the outset and would feel committed to sharing it with their fellows. Another practical advantage would involve maintaining a certain level of control of the project. The way we raise the questions is going to determine the kinds of answers we receive. The answers can only be in the language, the conceptualization, that we present in the question. Swidler then read sections from his "Towards a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic," starting with "II. From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue" and continuing with "III. Need for a Global Ethic."
Since the 16th-century "Age of Discovery" the earth has tended more and more to become, as Wendell Wilkie put it in 1940, "One World." This increasingly happened in the form of "Christendom" dominating and colonizing the rest of the world. When the Chinese were at their zenith it didn't affect the West, and something new begins to develop after the 16th century which comes out of Christendom for good and for ill.
In the 19th century, however, "Christendom" became less and less "Christian" and more and more the "secular West" shaped by a secular ideologies, alternative to Christianity. Still, the religious and ideological cultures of the West, even as they struggled with each other, dealt with other cultures and their religions in the customary manner of ignoring them or attempting to dominate, and even absorb them--though it became increasingly obvious that the latter was not likely to happen.
As the 20th century drew to a close, however, all of those ways of relating become increasingly impossible to sustain. For example: What happened in other cultures quickly led young men and women of the West to die on the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima or the desert sands of Kuwait. But more than that, the "West" could no longer escape what was done in the "First World," such as the production of acid rain, in the "Second World," such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident, or in the "Third World," such as the mass destruction of the Amazon rain forest, "the world's lungs."
At the same time the world has been slowly, painfully emerging from the millennia-long Age of Monologue into the Age of Dialogue. Until beginning a century or so ago, each religion, and then ideology--each culture--tended to be very certain that it alone had the complete "explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly." Then through a series of revolutions in understanding, starting in the West, but ultimately spreading more and more throughout the whole world, the limitedness of all statements about the meaning of things began to dawn on isolated thinkers, and then increasingly on the middle and even grass-roots levels of humankind: The epistemological revolutions of historicism, pragmatism, sociology of knowledge, language analysis, hermeneutics. In other words, it makes a difference whether you are male, female, African, and so forth.
Now that it is more and more understood that the Muslim, Christian, secularist, Buddhist, etc. perception of the meaning of things is necessarily limited, the Muslim, Christian, secularist, etc. increasingly feel not only no longer driven to replace, or at least dominate, all other religions, ideologies, cultures, but even drawn to enter into dialogue with them, so as to expand, deepen, enrich each of their necessarily limited perceptions of the meaning of things. Thus, often with squinting, blurry eyes, humankind is emerging from the relative darkness of the Age of Monologue into the dawning Age of Dialogue--dialogue now understood as a conversation with someone who differs from us primarily so we can learn, because of course since we now gropingly realize that our understanding of the meaning of reality is necessarily limited, we might learn more about reality's meaning through someone else's perception of it.
When the fact of these epistemological revolutions leading to the growing necessity of interreligious, interideological, intercultural dialogue is coupled with the fact of all humankind's interdependency -- such that any significant part of humanity could precipitate the whole of the globe into a social, economic, nuclear, environmental or other catastrophe--there arises the pressing need to focus the energy of these dialogues on not only how humans perceive and understand the world and its meaning, but also on how they should act in relationship to themselves, to other persons, and to nature within the context of reality's undergirding, pervasive, overarching source, energy and goal, however understood. There are many people in the world who do not wish to be part of an organized religion, and they, too are part of our family.
In brief, humankind increasingly desperately needs to engage in a dialogue on the development of, not a Buddhist ethic, a Christian ethic, a Marxist ethic, etc., but of a global ethic--and I believe a key instrument in that direction will be the shaping of a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. I say ethic in the singular rather than ethics in the plural, because what is needed is not a full-blown global ethics in great detail--indeed, such would not even be possible--but a global consensus on the fundamental attitude toward good and evil and the basic and middle principles to put it into action.
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Clearly also, this ethic must be global. It will not be sufficient to have a common ethic for Westerners or Africans or Asians, etc. The destruction, for example, of the ozone layer or the loosing of a destructive gene mutation by any one group will be disastrous for all.
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I say also that this UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF A GLOBAL ETHIC must be arrived at by consensus through dialogue. Attempts at the imposition of a unitary ethics by various kinds of force have been had aplenty, and they have inevitably fallen miserably short of globality. The most recent failures can be seen in the widespread collapse of communism, and in an inverse way in the resounding rejection of secularism by resurgent Islamism. [In a sense a global ethic is happening in that we are dealing with each other, but it is happening in a very disintegrated fashion.] That the need for a global ethic is most urgent is becoming increasingly apparent to all; humankind no longer has the luxury of letting such an ethic slowly and haphazardly grow by itself, as it willy nilly will gradually happen. It is vital that there be a conscious focusing of energy on such a development. Immediate action is necessary: 1) Every scholarly institution, whether related to a religion or ideology or not, needs to press its experts of the widest variety of disciplines to use their creativity among themselves and in conjunction with scholars from other institutions, both religiously related and not, in formulating a Global Ethic. 2) Every major religion and ethical group needs to commission its expert scholars to focus their research and reflection on articulating a Global Ethic from the perspective of their religion or ethical group--in dialogue with all other religions and ethical groups. 3) Collaborative "Working Groups," of scholars in the field of ethics which are very deliberately interreligious, interideological need to be formed specifically to tackle this momentous task, and those which already exist need to focus their energies on it. 4) Beyond that there needs to be a major permanent Global Ethic Research Center, which will have some of the best experts from the world's major religions and ethical groups in residence, perhaps for years at a stretch, pursuing precisely this topic in its multiple ramifications.
INGRID SHAFER:
I presented a paper on the religious and philosophical foundations of a global ethic, including the following excerpts.
An ethical system of a particular religious or cultural group delineates the values by which the members of that community are expected to live, especially as they relate to one another. The term has also been applied to the standards that govern our atti- tudes and actions towards non-human life and the natural world (especially among Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists, and to a lesser extent in some of the Levitic codes of Jewish scripture). Even when ethical systems are not fixed in written form, they tend to be deeply ingrained in a given cultural unit and passed down from each generation to the next in whatever ways that group has developed to preserve its most central, foundational values--those ways of thinking, being, and acting that have developed over time through interaction with surrounding conditions (human as well as natural) and in their interplay make a community uniquely itself. A group's ethical system is inextricably braided into the self-understanding and sense of belonging of the members of that community and reflects the deepest, most stable structures which hold the community together, much like the hub of a wheel allows the spokes to revolve in unison and keeps the wheel from flying apart.
Hence, ethical systems tend to be very resistant to change, and conflict results when previously isolated groups come into close contact as a result of migration, population growth, territorial expansion, commercial interaction, the conquests of war, missionary activity, through the written word, print, and other assorted media. Conflict tends to be especially pronounced when such contact with the "other" is sudden and large scale. Until some ten years ago, the rate of this culture-mingling process, while clearly accelerating, was nevertheless fairly predictable. Since the middle 1980s, however, something occurred that may well be called the twentieth century "cyber-revolution" by future historians.
I am referring to the exponential increase in the number of personal computers, high-speed modems, fax machines, the Internet, and other newly developed tools for almost instant and either free or at least low cost mass communication (such as the World Wide Web). Humanity is suddenly faced with the challenge of the spawning both of literally millions of separate information-and-attitude sharing and disseminating groups that draw their membership from anywhere on earth and, concurrently, as a by-product, the rapid globalization of the human community. No longer are images and text travelling by themselves. Computer information arrives along with human commentators who, in all ways except skin-to-skin contact, are as accessible as one's next-door neighbors and may come out of a physical community ten thousand miles and several continents removed.
This development was truly unprecedented and could not be fully anticipated until it was actually occurring, even though as early as 1949, the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin not only linked terms such as "ultra-hominization" (Man's Place 109) with the natural sciences but anticipated an essential role for "those astonishing electronic machines (the starting point and hope of the young science of cybernetics) by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied ... [leading to] an auto-cerebralisation becoming the most highly concentrated expression of the reflective rebound of evolution" (111). Forty years after his death Teilhard would, one suspects, be gratified to see the world wide web weaving itself around the globe, spinning the beginnings of his noosphere, allowing ever new and more complex links, nodes, synapses, and networks to emerge and take on a life of their own--turning into the global super-brain.
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Religion, as Leonard Swidler reminds us, is the symbolic and mythic language members of a community use to explain their world, to give ultimate meaning to and find ultimate meaning in existence, and to live according to what they have constructed or found. The rules of conduct presented as commandments are the riverbeds left behind the actual process of successfully forming a community; some are still flowing with life-giving water millennia after they began, but others are empty and dry. They are also inextricably connected to the rest of the landscape: rules taken out of their socio-economic and historical context and transplanted to different soil become obstacles to growth.
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The combination of multinational corporations, supersonic travel, film, television, and especially the phenomenal proliferation of internet communication, has resulted in radically novel modes and vastly increased frequency of people-to-people contact across vast distances, both by disseminating ideas almost instantaneously across the globe and by making it possible for individuals to move to faraway localities temporarily or permanently. This contact and mingling of often widely diverse worldviews, especially combined with the instability of population, presents humanity with an unprecedented challenge: both as opportunity for increased inter- human understanding and as risk of heightened xenophobia and withdrawal into private ideological fortresses. We can choose to permit this challenge to help us grow by focusing on our common humanity coupled with respect for individuality, or we can allow it to shatter us into antagonistic shards by emphasizing differences, viewing variegation as an evil to be eliminated, and remaining blind to commonalities.
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The method we choose, and how we apply it, will affect the fate of humanity and possibly the entire planet. If we permit ourselves to learn from the patterns of biology, we can clearly see that the path of evolutionary success is the road of permeable boundaries, tentative endings, experimentation, multiple winding paths, and flexibility; we can also see that the path of extinction--if followed to the extreme--is the road of closed boundaries, fixed endings, absolute certainty, a single straight and narrow path, and rigidity.
GLOBAL CIVILIZATION IS NOT A FUTURE POSSIBILITY; IT IS A PRESENT-DAY REALITY. Unlike most previous civilizations, it appears not to have gradually and naturally evolved a single central religion while conversely being shaped by that religion. Instead, much like the Hellenistic world of the late Roman Empire, contemporary global civilization is marked by religious, intel- lectual, and cultural pluralism. However, there would be no sense of coherence whatsoever and the issue of a global ethic would never have arisen if those who see themselves as shapers of this new universal civilization were not already committed to cross-cultural inter-religious dialogue. In fact, the very pluralism of the present age has taken on the markings of religion. The willingness to engage in this sort of dialogue is also a sign of psychological maturity and respect for the personhood of others.
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If we want to help build a future for humanity and the world it is absolutely obligatory that we develop an ethic governing human-to-human relationships to which people from all over the world, and particularly community leaders, can agree. In addition, the many destructive ways in which human beings affect the environment have made it a matter of planetary survival that we develop nature-friendly standards of interacting with the environment.
If we can also learn to include non-human nature into the loving embrace of the Incarnation, then, I believe, we will reach an even deeper current of the universal law of love, one that allows a confluence of the religious stream of Abraham with the rivers of India and China as we share our stories of faith. In the words of David Tracy, "then the autonomy of each will be respected because each will be expected to continue, indeed to intensify, a journey into her/his own particularity" (The Analogical Imagination 449). Tracy continues, "The actuality of variety and the demand for authentic particularity unite as the environment of all. An analogical imagination may yet free us to a communal conversation on behalf of the kairos of this our day--the communal and historical struggle for the emergence of a humanity both finally global and ultimately humane" (TAI 453).
DISCUSSION:
PEACE PILGRIM:
We all know the Golden Rule; we just need to follow it. Peace begins
within ourselves. We know that love overcomes hatred.
INGRID SHAFER:
The global rule applies not only to friends and neighbors, but to a
global humanity. We are competing with each other instead of really
listening in genuine dialogue.
BOB TRAER:
(Traer is General Secretary of the International Association for
Religious Freedom, with headquarters in Oxford, England.) The only world
we can have is a community of communities. The American model of
diversity is individualistic, based on a loss of past, building a new
community as though it didn't come from an old community. Much of the
world now is resisting that model and insisting on the language of
cultural rights. This may be wrong in some ways, but I think it may also
be right. The question is, how we can create a community of communities,
how we treasure the particularity of community life in relationship to
our different religious and cultural ethic forms and at the same time
create possibly some new relationships and create a just and manageable
kind of social system so that the conflicts can be resolved with a
minimum of destruction and lingering alienation.
WOMAN PARTICIPANT (works in health field):
It is easy to write a paper and say "this is a good thing," but tying it
into daily life is more difficult. The purpose of the conference was
finding ways of actually applying it. People see that's it is going to
mean a life style change Most of the participants here don't know how bad
off most of the inhabitants of this planet are, how hungry and sick
people are. When we decide which pair of shoes to buy we need to be
informed that perhaps this was made by slave child labor somewhere in
Indonesia. To have to spend three times as much on a pair of shoes or
paying someone at least minimum wage is a bit uncomfortable. It is
difficult to get people to come because it is trying to enlighten them
into their responsibility.
JONATHAN GRANOFF:
We have dual loyalty because we have loyalty to our client and we are
officers of the court. We have to have a code of ethics, a minimalist
code of conduct, because there are built in conflicts. In the field of
international affairs, global affairs, the way the representatives of
nations operate, in the international forum there is no ethical code. so
an ambassador operates in essentially the same way as a general does in
an army, which is to gain the utmost advantage for his member state, so
he can ethically lie, he can ethically deceive, he can ethically take
disingenuous positions with good conscience in order to advance the
interest of his member state. That is the global ethical code that exists
right now; it is an ethic modeled after Thomas Hobbes' vision. Life is
nasty and brutish and short and get the most for yourself, and get the
most for yourself and nations operate on that model as do corporations
and major institutions. That's the major model we are talking about. If
you have a global code of ethics that would apply to all of the
institutions then the ambassador would have an ethical obligation to the
world community and the representative of a nation would have a duty to
the forum in which the world community expresses itself. Then the
positions that are taken would have to dramatically change. Going through
the exercise of creating global ethic's minimalist standards and then
articulating them within institutional frameworks is by no means a merely
philosophic or academic exercise, but could have tremendous political
repercussions.
LEONARD SWIDLER:
Rules of conduct. If we could superimpose those codes of conduct and see
where they coincide. If we could find that we could say, here we have in
common, a, and b and c; maybe c prime, but after that we start to lose
groups. Once we have the foundation, then we can start to build; then we
can start to learn from each other. We make judgments culturally; my
understanding of Catholic Christianity at age 66 is more profoundly,
truly, authentically Catholic than it was at 26. Then I would be out
here making you all Catholic. There has been an advance in the Catholic
community. There has been an advance in lots of communities. If we can
do this in one community, then we can also come together when we have
learned to trust each other, and we can say "George, guess what, your
community really ought to do something about slavery; slavery just is not
something we can accept these days." He'll say, well, everybody agrees
on that. What about women? There are lots of groups today which say,
"women, now how, they may have to take a certain place in society,"
certain fundamentalist groups. Are you going to be willing to accept
that and say we have no right to make a judgment about that culture? Are
we going to say, it's OK for Nazis to kill all Jews? We can't approach
them on the basis of divine law, but we can appeal to then on the basis
of common humanity. That is a position that was developed in the West
and is now accepted very widely; after all the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights has been signed by practically every nation in our world
today.
AFTERNOON SESSION: (20 June)
DIANE SHERWOOD:
Global Ethic begins with a vision. We need to release the psychic energy
inside of us. The more people have the vision in common, the more the
energy builds up. There is a potential for change. The Soviet Union, the
largest empire in the world, without barely a bullet shot, dissolved.
People wanted a life they trusted for themselves, a trust in their own
internality, their own way of perceiving reality as opposed to a trust in
the external world. The other example is South Africa. How did that
country go from all-white to a country of mixed races now working
together for the common good. Today I find myself asking, "Can God really
change capitalism?" "Can God really change the behavior of transnational
corporations?" I want to start with a positive vision of the future. The
rise of cosmic unity--the union of the Transcendent, the Human, and the
Universe. When these three come together, the more the energy builds, the
more there is the possibility for "bringing down the fire," and this is
something that I think the global ethic should capture. It should throw
fuel on that fire and to use Ingrid's terminology, not to be proscriptive
but prescriptive, not to say, "thou shalt not kill," but to say, "We must
treat each other in a humane fashion."
We must get rid of the current economic system which is based on unlimited material growth, that we have to do something in terms of the world internally, bringing the human personality in harmony with the larger whole.
We suggested that there be convened in 1996 the first global conference on socially responsible business, finance, and industry. I would like to suggest that as many religious people, people concerned with ethics, people involved in business come to Istanbul and begin a religious- business dialogue in 1996.
The second ray of hope I am looking to is the increasingly large number of groups that are beginning to talk about socially responsible business. The sixths largest housing developer in the country is not for profit, it builds low profit, low income housing. Groups all over the world are beginning to work on those areas. One of the things that helped South Africa was the whole question of sanctions which sprang out of the socially responsible business groups that began to refuse to invest in corporations that were involved in South Africa. Large Fortune 500 companies were upset that five percent of their profit was lost because five percent of the population no longer wanted to buy their product. That five percent makes all the difference in the world, so there's an enormous amount of leverage.
If they are concerned about what corporations do, consumers have the power to make the world a better place. She spoke of a young man she met at the Copenhagen conference who was working with the Danish government. He had a paper called "Partnership for New Social Development" which called for businesses to act with social responsibility in all countries in which they operate, to create more jobs, to create even more jobs--the exact opposite of what today's corporations do. To respect the integrity of the employees to fight for better social conditions. Ensure that production and processes are feasible for the mentally as well as physically disabled, and to adopt a joint social responsibility with the health, nutrition, and housing infrastructure. In sum: start with a vision!
JONATHAN GRANOFF:
If we are concerned about values from a global, universal perspective we
have to recognize what we are up against: The most morally persuasive
institutions in the world are the world's militaries. The militaries are
populated by people who are willing to give their lives for their values,
and that's a very morally persuasive argument. It's ironic that human
beings are more likely to give up their lives for the ideas of nation,
the ideas of race, the ideas of religion, the ideas arising from conflict
than being willing to give up their lives for love, for peace, for
harmony, for compassion. Those few rare examples of human beings who made
that surrender--in Sufism we call it dying before dying--to that divine
power of love made the ultimate sacrifice in a way before they died, who
died to love, such as Jesus' total identification with the God of Love.
The people who have made those spiritual leaps, they are aware of the
conduits, the extraordinary insight into the nature of being, experience
of an ineffable unity--mysterious, unlimited, beautiful beyond words and
symbols. Referred to as Allah, Yahweh, Krishna, God. It always has
infinite love, mercy, compassion, and an unlimited power. If you look at
the five billion people on the planet, most of the civilizations have a
record of people who went off by themselves on a vision quest either
under a Bodhi tree or into a cave or the desert and experienced this
total mystery that humbled them, so the rest of their lives they spent as
servants, they seemed to articulate broad utterances of love for
principles with pure ethical implications arising from that experience,
such as "thou are that." You are inextricably intertwined with it and so
is everybody else. Everybody. There is no God but God. It even speaks out
of the burning bush. There is nothing that it doesn't touch.
Then you find it articulated in ethical principles, such as the Golden Rule with its multicultural dimension--the Baha'i, the Christian, the Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Judaic, Native American, Zoroastrian articulations. Then it starts to get difficult, because then you start to institutionalize it in terms of particular circumstances--we set up societal structures founded on those ethical principles. A few centuries ago, if you juxtaposed John Locke's concept of man as a rational being with Jefferson who has this tremendous faith in the intrinsic wisdom of the people, and when you read his letters you see that faith derives from his acceptance of Jesus' message of love and that inspired his capacity for expression and being able to create institutions to protect with equal inalienable rights--something special, something sacred. The opposite would be the Hobbesian vision of life being short, brutish, nasty, and a competitive jungle. The Jeffersonian vision has allowed the wealth and blessings that many of us are privileged to experience. Humankind is endowed with inalienable rights. When they are allowed free expression under a rule of love tremendous benefits occur. Then you find societal structures founded on those ethical principles, such as the Declaration of Independence, or the Declaration of Human Rights which is a modern document of a similar level. In some cultures that are not as legalistic as ours we find them in mythical expositions on how society should function. In our society we have codification into legal regimes with statutory codes of conduct to guarantee that these rights are not trampled. And then after that you get manners, fashion, etiquette, and these, when they are in a healthy order are all harmonious: etiquette, consideration, is a beautiful word, sidereal, relates to the stars, to be in harmony with the stars.
REFLECTION:
Without the willingness to love and accept ourselves in our humanness complete with imperfections, all our other relationships will be stunted. We can't care for family, friends, strangers, the earth, even God without loving ourselves any more than we can care for ourselves without loving God, the earth, other people. Love of self and love of other, love of God and love of self, are two sides of the same coin. Neither is real apart from its obverse. For far too long we have confused niggardly selfishness based on fear and want with love of self rooted in trust and abundance. The former takes, grasps, holds on; the latter takes, gives, lets go. For too long we have failed to realize that genuine self love is the most powerful antidote to selfishness. If we take without giving, we will soon be alone and find nothing else to take. If we give without taking, we shall soon have nothing to offer and will be equally alone. Both are forms of death: the former turns life into a stagnant pond; the latter into a dry well. Both are forms of taking--from others or ourselves. Instead, we must learn to accept as we give, give as we take. It's alright to possess if we don't allow ourselves to be possessed by our possessions. There is death in the stagnant pond and the dry well. There is life in the spring fed lake which nourishes the land of which it is a part.
The present is supposed to be an age of moral and religious confusion. The boundary lines between right and wrong, we are told, are no longer marked clearly for everyone to see and obey. In this perspective--critics insist--churches have failed to keep up the highways of moral life. Lanes are no longer clearly marked, few if any speed limits are posted, stop signs are down, traffic lights are out of order, and cops look the other way. If this is so, it may well be a blessing, and a challenge to mature spiritually. Precisely this uncertainty presents an opportunity. "May you live in interesting times," may be a Chinese curse, but I see it as a blessing.
Toddlers must leave their cribs and learn to sleep in regular beds without rolling off the sides. Five-year olds must learn to walk to kindergarten on their own. Sixteen-year olds must learn to drive safely, even if there are no road signs. Growing up involves a gradual shift from blind obedience to the letter of the law to responsible action according to the internalized spirit of the law. Maturing comes at a price: we can't always play it safe. We must be willing to take risks, make mistakes, stumble, fall. As the German poet Goethe put it in his Faust, God won't abandon those who earnestly and honestly try.
Blind obedience to a neat set of simple, unambiguous regulations is no longer possible or even desirable. Contemporary conditions are too complex to permit rigid rules for every possible situation. People must take the responsibility for their decisions and chart a middle course between two kinds of destructive irresponsibility: lazy refusal to think for themselves and arrogant, selfish independence which exceeds their capabilities. They must understand themselves well enough to know both their potential and their limits. They must follow the counsel of their individual conscience as the arbiter of their choices. They must have faith in themselves--without arrogance. Almost all people know the difference between positive and negative motives, between altruism and selfishness, caring and indifference or cruelty. People know when they are motivated by greed, envy, revenge, hatred, and other destructive emotions. They may choose to reject life according to the law of love, but this does not mean that this possibility never existed for them. And so I dream of a time when we will truly fulfill our human potential, become who we are meant to be--not worms but men and women who respect themselves and each other as brothers and sisters, children of the Infinite.
I have a dream: That one day human beings will fully understand that we are all one family, no matter how diverse our gender, age, homes, customs, tastes, shapes, ethnic roots, religions, languages, and countless additional qualifiers that make us unique and separate us. I have a dream that one day we will be sufficiently sure of ourselves that we won't secretly doubt that we are worthy of being loved, and hence will not be afraid to love. I have a dream that one day we will know that love is not a pie which grows smaller as it is shared, that loving is not an either-or proposition: either we love others or we love ourselves. Quite to the contrary. When we are told to love our neighbors as we love ourselves we are simultaneously told that it is perfectly natural and good to love ourselves. Self-love is the model for love of others. Loving others as we love ourselves, treating others as we want to be treated, shows that the boundaries between self and other are permeable. In the mutual movement of reaching out to others, connecting with them, feeling empathy for their reaching out to us we expand ourselves as they expand themselves. We are no longer solitary individuals but part of an inter- dependent community. We exist in the relationship. Once again the falcon can hear the falconer. We are not rootless and ruthless atoms out to get "them" before "they" get us but independent, responsible parts of the we-they continuum. We realize that by cutting "them" we are actually severing the web of the whole. What harms us harms them and what harms them harms us. Ultimately we no longer think in terms of them and us but solely in terms of "we" as we draw all of humanity, all of creation, into the healing circle of our unselfish "love of self-and/in-other." Then we will truly belong, as David Steindl-Rast put it, to the universe. We will have come home and discover that we have been there all alone. Only now we will be know it. Point Alpha will have returned to itself in Point Omega.
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Last revised 16 February 1998 by Ingrid Shafer