Worldshift 20 calls for spirit, compassion and personal responsibility

Can we possibly create the world of which (most of us) dream?
Yes but only if we act quickly. It is up to us now, at this most critical of times in the world’s history, to determine whether we grow or die – “whether the 13.8 billion year experiment that resulted in our lives will end within the next century or two.”

This is the message from the newly created Worldshift 20 Council, composed of “twenty prominent global citizens from diverse cultures and religions worldwide.” They include for example Paul Ray (best known for his research and book on the “Cultural Creatives”, and who incidentally endorsed my own book), Deepak Chopra, Ervin Laszlo, Hazel Henderson, Marylyn Schlitz, etc., and all well known for their work and concern for the sustainability of our present life on earth.

They urgently call for a new philosophy, a new Consciousness and the leadership to go with it, reminding us of Einstein’s perceptive observation all that time ago that the same consciousness that produced the problem cannot get us out of it. The call is for a re-orientation within the public sector, replacing obsolete notions of governance that clearly have not worked (witness the G20 debacle in Copenhagan). They want to foster an understanding that our present crisis is a “whole-system crisis of the human spirit” and that leaders must embrace this notion, alongside the development of overriding compassion for all other beings.

But the leaders of the G20, the Worldshift Declaration points out, did not create the world’s problems – they perpetuate them:

“A lack of gratitude toward the environment, exploitive treatment of animal life, plant life and the world of nature, discrimination against people, cultures, and nations – these kinds of destructive behaviors do not originate solely from the minds of a small group of leaders. They also arise from the consciousness of billions of individual human beings. We must support the efforts of each global citizen, whether in a leadership role or not, to take responsibility for uplifting their consciousness thereby safeguarding the future of our human society and the Earth.”

I cannot do justice to the Worldshift Declaration in such a short post and I would urge all readers who care for the future of this planet – and you must be if you are reading my blogs (!) – to go to their website and study the Declaration, from which I have quoted and drawn the notes above. Also take time to read the individual statements of the council members. And then think: how can I change my own behaviour to help the cause of Worldshift 20? How can I influence those around me in our daily lives of work and play?

I will be returning again and again to the work of Wordshift 20, as I think the ideas it embraces are so fundamentally important to our future survival, the future of the World and Mother Earth herself. The notions they have come up with, of the need for spirit and compassion to infuse our lives, and their recognition of the need for personal responsibility from all the billions of individuals now alive, to make this happen, are central to the theme of my own book. We are entering upon very exciting times. The rewards are enormous if we win – and we cannot afford to lose!

Why do we need money?

The Greek Philosopher and scientist Aristotle explained in his Politics in c 330BC why money had been invented. The art of acquisition, he said, for which a currency was required, arose out of the simpler barter of goods, and he saw this as quite natural and healthy. But when ‘The supply of men’s needs came to depend on more foreign sources, as men began to import for themselves what they lacked, and to export what they had in superabundance: …in this way the use of a money currency was inevitably instituted,’he wrote.
But Aristotle made the distinction, between essential and therefore laudable expenditure for the daily needs of food, shelter and clothing, and the acquisition of money for acquisition’s sake by profit associated with retail trade. The latter he censured,

"because the gain in which it results is not naturally made, but is made at the expense of other men. The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Currency came into existence merely as a means of exchange; usury tries to make it increase."

Aristotle did not trust money because he could see that it could feed an insatiable desire way beyond what was necessary for our needs and he saw this as unethical.

In addition to life’s basic survival necessities of warmth, clean air, medicine, clean water, food and housing, all human beings worldwide have a need and a human right to be free, to be respected as equals, able to choose their own destiny and to fulfill their full emotional, intellectual and spiritual potential. We are all entitled to the five basic human justices, of monetary and social justice, economic and environmental justice and of the right to peace.

I believe that to really achieve such justice in our world we need to allow the healing qualities of compassion and vulnerability and spirituality to infuse our lives and our actions in our financial housekeeping.

In later posts I shall reflect further on this and on where and why our present economy is flawed. Meanwhile Rediscovering Values, by Jim Wallis, is a good place to start reading. (also mentioned in a previous blog).

© 2010 Eleanor Stoneham

What is Good

I wasn’t looking for this book specifically. It caught my attention in a second-hand bookshop and I thought it might have a contribution to make to the debate on religious tolerance and the future of the world; I have not been disappointed.

This is a book for the general reader, we are told, a non- academic survey and an exploration of the Western philosophical basis of morality, ethics and “the Good Life,” from the ancient Greek pagan philosophers through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution and Enlightenment to the present day. It is a fascinating read.

The tension between the fundamentally different ways of viewing the nature and source of our values, the opposing viewpoints of the secular and the transcendental, has been felt throughout history, he tells us, but never more so than since the scientific revolution, and this tension is one of the greatest problems facing the modern world.

It is written from the Humanist’s perspective, so needless to say it has a certain bias in that direction. Unfortunately as with so much humanist and atheistic writing I found the examples he uses against Christianity and religion generally are prone to too much exaggeration, with sweeping generalisations, often not bearing much relation to what is really practised and believed today by those who have a faith in the Western world, where his focus largely lies.

For example, in the opening pages he compares the surely extreme story of a Japanese secular appreciation of aesthetics (the prose he quotes from In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki certainly conveys well the natural beauty of the world and our experiences of it) with the equally extreme story of the Christian Victorian upbringing of one child, telling us that this latter style is still common throughout the world where religion plays a dominant role. Perhaps, but I think Sam Harris makes the point rather more accurately in The End of Faith. “We should not ignore the fact,” he writes, “we must now confront whole societies whose moral and political development- in their treatment of women and children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their intuitions about what constitutes cruelty- lags behind our own.”

Grayling describes religion as “the technology of man’s impotence” and dismisses the metaphysical – his arguments of logic starting from the premise that there simply is no metaphysical or supernatural presence. The truth is we simply do not know, we simply cannot know, although there is some fascinating recent empirical research on the power of prayer, the presence of the supernatural, and the metaphysical. But it is very likely true, he says, that supernatural phenomena are just the way the brain works, nothing more.

So it follows that many of his arguments do not have a strong base, are not well supported. What values can we attach to a supernatural or metaphysical belief that itself cannot be taken seriously, he asks. So he dismisses anything built around that belief. My life as a Christian, apparently, is totally dictated by self -interest, my good deeds are done not from any motive of altruism or compassion, but to avoid the posthumous punishment of hell and damnation in an afterlife, and in return for posthumous rewards, to achieve “eternal bliss.” Really?

Christian morality is irrelevant, he says, to modern life, and to contemporary attitudes about what is acceptable – on human rights, oppression, war, poverty, the rich/poor divide. Christianity distracts attention from these things that really count, he writes, by concentrating instead on the “trivia” of teenage pregnancies, sex before marriage, abortion etc. The claim of the contemporary churches that they support charity and help the people of Third World countries in their distresses, demonstrating peace, kindness, brotherly love and charitable works, is the “soft face” of the church, displayed to the world when we are on the “backfoot,” a minority interest looking to recruit, primarily amongst the lonely, the desperate, the timid. When we come from a position of strength, he says, things are very different, witness the Inquisition and the Taliban, for example.

These exaggerations and inaccuracies and the language of disdain he too often uses when talking of religion or faith spoil an otherwise good book, because it is a good book, I enjoyed reading it and have learnt much about the history and thoughts of the great philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day. Of course the purpose of the book, as he admits, is to promote humanism and to show why this is the only way forward for the future of the world. Much of what he has to say is carefully reasoned; he has some very sound arguments and good points to make. But biased inaccuracies around faith and religion feed the minds of the unbelievers with ever more ammunition for their intolerance and serve only to dismay those with a faith.