Featured Image: Chou Tun-yi or Zhou Dunyi. By 清宫殿藏画本. 北京: 故宫博物馆出版社. 1994., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The United Nations General Assembly on 20 October 2010 proclaimed the first week of February of each year as the “World Interfaith Harmony Week” among all religions, faiths and beliefs. The General Assembly resolution recognized :
“The imperative need for dialogue among the different faiths and religions in enhancing mutual understanding, harmony and cooperation among people.”
The week has a potential to promote the healing of religion-based tensions in the world.
Thus, the Association of World Citizens welcomes this effort to develop respect and mutuality among diverse cultures and religions. Today, there is a broad and deep movement toward openness and goodwill among religious and spiritual communities. New awareness of shared ethical principles opens the way for creative engagement.
There is a need for cooperative action to bring the wisdom of religious traditions to meet the economic, environmental and social challenges that humanity faces. The ecological crisis has a spiritual dimension. We must help humanity to develop a reverence for all life and respect for the sacredness of the Earth, our common home.
Image by Basil D Soufi, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
A Voice For Our Time in finding harmony is that of Chou Tun-yi.
(1017-1073) known as the Master of Lien-hsi. During the Song dynasty (960-1279) , after a period of division and confusion, there was a conscious effort to bring together into a harmonious framework currents of thought which existed in China but often as separate and sometimes hostile schools of thought: Confucianism, Buddhism, philosophical Taoism, and religious Taoism. These efforts were called Tao hsuch -the study of Tao.
Chou Tun-yi was a leading figure in this effort. He developed a philosophy based on the harmony of Yin and Yang, a harmony known through intuition as each person has within himself the capacity to know what is right. This capacity of intuition, what Chou Tun-yi called “straightforwardness in movement”, properly developed, will lead to impartiality and universality, the Confucian ideal of Sagehood. (1)
Today, the currents of thought linked to Christianity and Islam needed to be added to the currents of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. However, the need to develop the capacity of properly using intuition remains a vital approach – a goal for Harmony Week.
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Featured Image: Portrait of Herbert George Wells by George Charles Beresford. Black and white glossy print. 150 mm x 108 mm (1920). By George Charles Beresford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Image: Eleanor Roosevelt holding poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (in English), Lake Success, New York. November 1949. By FDR Presidential Library & Museum, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thus, it is usefil to look at some of the intellectual preperations both within the League of Nations and among individual thinkers for the Universal Declaration. One of the most widely read was that of Herbert George Wells “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of the World Citizen” which is found in his book
“Phoenix: A Summary of the Inescapable Conditions of World Organization” published in 1942.
The Declaration of the Rights and Duties of the World Citizen had been translated into 10 languages and sent to 300 editors of newspapers in 48 countries.
H.G. Wells from the 1930s on was concerned with the ways the world should be organized with a world organization stronger than the League of Nations. Such a world organization should be backed up and urged on by a strong body of public opinion linked together world-wide by the unifying bond of a common code of human rights and duties.
At the end of the First World War, H.G. Wells was a strong advocate of the League of Nations, but as time went on, he became aware of its weaknesses. He wrote in 1939:
” The League of Nations, we can all admit now, was a poor and ineffective outcome of that revolutionary proposal to banish armed conflict from the world and inaugurate a new life for mankind… Does this League of Nations contain within it the gem of any permanent federation of human effort? Will it grow into something for which men will be ready to work for and, if necessary, fight – as hither to they have been willing to fight for their country and their own people? There are few intimations of any such enthusiasm for the League at the present time. The League does not even seem to know how to talk to the common man. It has gone into official buildings, and comparatively few people in the world understand or care what it is doing there.”
Image: Stanley Bruce chairing the League of Nations Council in 1936. Joachim von Ribbentrop is addressing the council. By Commonwealth of Australia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thus, there was a need for a clear statement of world values that could be understood by most and that would be a common statement of the aspiration on which to build a new freedom and a new dignity. Wells had a strong faith in international public opinion when it was not afraid to express new and radical thoughts that cut across the conventional wisdom of the day. He wrote in 1943:
“Behind the short-sighted governments that divide and mismanage human affairs, a real force for world unity and order exists and grows.”
Wells hoped that the “Declaration of the Rights of the World Citizen” would become the fundamental law for mankind through the whole world – a true code of basic rights and duties which set out the acceptable shape of a just world society.
Therefore wells set out 10 rights which combined civil liberties already common to many democratic states with economic and social rights; which were often considered as aspirations but not as rights.
Thus among the 10 rights we find the Right to Participate in Government, Freedom of Thought and Worship, the Right to Knowledge, Freedom from Violence including Torture, along with the Right to Education, the Right to Medical Care, the Right to Work with Legitimate Remuneration, the Protection of Minors, Freedon of Movement about the Earth.
The drafters of the U.N. Charter in 1945 included a pledge by member states:
“To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small.”
Much of the debate from 1946 when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights was created until December 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed concerned the relative place of civil liberties and of economic, social, and cultural rights.
However while the text of H.G. Wells is largely forgotten today, he had the vision of the strong link between freedom of thought bsed on civil liberties and the need for economic dignity set out in the economic, social, and cultural rights.
Image: Portrait of Herbert George Wells by George Charles Beresford. Black and white glossy print. 150 mm x 108 mm (1920). By George Charles Beresford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Featured Image: Through the Russian Revolution. By Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.
Alexandre Marc ; (19 January 1904 – 22 February 2000) was born as Alexandre Markovitch Lipiansky in Odessa, Russia in 1904. He later simplified his name by dropping Lipiansky; (which his sons have reclaimed) and modifying his father’s first name to Marc; which he used as a family name. His father was a Jewish banker and a non-communist socialist.
Alexandre was a precocious activist. He was influenced by his early reading of F. Nietzsche; especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He started a non-conformist student journal; while still in secondary school during the Russian Revolution; asking for greater democracy and opposed to Marxist thought. This led to death threats made against him by the Communist authorities.
The Forerunners of the Nazi Movement
The family left Russia in 1919 for France; but not before Alexandre had seen some of the fighting and disorder of the Russian civil war. These impressions left a deep mark; and he was never tempted by the Russian communist effort as were other intellectuals in France; who had not seen events close up.
During part of the 1920s; Marc was in Germany studying philosophy; where intellectual and philosophical debates were intense after the German defeat in the First World War; and the great difficulties of the Weimar Republic. He saw the forerunners of the Nazi movement.
Anti-Nazi German Youth
Marc was always one to try to join thought and action; and he had gone back to Germany in 1932 to try to organize anti-Nazi German youth; but ideological divisions in Germany were strong. The Nazi were already too well organized and came to power the next year. Marc; having seen the destructive power of Nazi thought; was also never tempted by Right Wing or Fascist thought.
Seeing the destructive potential of both Communist and Fascist thought and sensing the deep crisis of Western civilization; Marc was looking for new values that would include order, revolution, and the dignity of the person.
L’Ordre Nouveau
There was no ready-made ideology; which included all these elements; though two French thinkers — difficult to classify — did serve as models to Marc and to Denis de Rougemont and some of the other editors of L’Ordre Nouveau:Charles Péguy and J Proudhon . Marc wrote a book on the importance of Péguy at the start of the Second World War.
Marc was living in Aix-en-Provence at the time; and the book was published in still unoccupied Marseilles in 1941. He also met in Paris Nicolas Berdiaeff,Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel. It was from these meetings that the personalist doctrine of L’Ordre Nouveau was born. The rallying cry of personalism was “We are neither collectivists nor individualists but personalists …the spiritual first and foremost, then the economic, with politics at the service of both of them”.
once a Jew, always a Jew
In 1943 when all of France was occupied, he was in danger of arrest both for his views and his Jewish origins. Although in 1933; Marc had become a Roman Catholic in part under the influence of intellectual Dominicans; for the Nazi occupiers — as well as for some of the French Vichy government — “once a Jew, always a Jew”. Therefore he left for Switzerland where he was able to study the working of Swiss federalism with its emphasis on democracy at the village and city level. He was also able to meet other exiles from all over Europe who had managed to get to Switzerland.
Alexandre Marc seemed destined to use words which took on other meanings when used by more popular writers. The name of the journal L’Ordre Nouveau was taken over after the Second World War by a French far-right nationalist movement influenced by a sort of neo-Celtic ideology and was widely known for painting Celtic cross graffiti on walls in the days before graffiti art filled up all the space.
The Jewish philosophers
Revolution, especially after the Nazi-Fascist defeat, could only be considered in the broader society in its Marxist version. Person, which as a term had been developed by the Roman stoic philosophers could never carry the complexity of meanings which Marc, de Rougemont, and E. Mounier wanted to give it.
Personalism.
The Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas also used the term “personalism” in the same sense as Marc; but their influence was limited to small circles. In fact, “individualism” either seen positively or negatively; has returned as the most widely used term. In some ways; this difficulty with the popular perception of words exists with the way Marc uses “federalism” by which he really means “con-federalism”.
The Foundations of the European Movement and the European Federalists
Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont met again in Switzerland at the end of the Second World War; when de Rougemont returned from spending the war years in the USA. They started reconnecting people whom they knew in the pre-war years; who also saw the need for a total reformation of European society.
Both de Rougemont and Marc were good organizers of meetings and committees; and they played an important role in 1947 and 1948; setting up the first meetings for the foundations of the European movement and the European federalists; especially the August 1947 meeting at Montreux, Switzerland; in which world citizens and world federalists were also present.
The Cold War.
Both men stressed the need for education and highlighted the role of youth to move European unity; beyond the debates of the 1930s and the start of the Cold War; though both continued to stress the importance of the themes; which brought them together in the 1930s.
Centers for the Study of European Federalism
They were both founders of centers for the study of European federalism and an exploration of European values. It was in the context of seminars and publications of the two centers; that I worked with both in the 1970s. Culture in the philosophical sense was crucial for both; and their efforts in Geneva and Nice were rather similar.
Marc and de Rougemont had a personal falling out that lasted nearly a decade; due, it seems, to the tensions surrounding the break up of de Rougemont’s first marriage. But even during this break; de Rougemont always spoke to me highly of Marc and his ideas.
Distrust of European Integration
De Rougemont knew that I was seeing Marc and had an interest in the intellectual; currents of France in the 1930s. The two men came together again later; especially after de Rougemont’s happy second marriage. From his death be; de Rougemont spoke to Marc on the telephone concerning the need to reprint the issues of L’Order Nouveau; since the articles were still important. The reprinting has been done since.
Both de Rougemont and Marc shared a distrust of European integration; as it was being carried out within the European Community and later the European Union; Both men stressed the need for local democracy; and shared a strong distrust of the politicians prominent in the nation-state system.
The Lobbying of Governments on Federalist Issues.
De Rougemont went on to give most of his attention to the role of regions; especially the trans-frontier Geneva area; which combines part of Switzerland and France and is an economic pole of attraction for the Italian Val d’Aoste.
Marc continued to stress what he called “global” or “integral” federalism; a federalism with great autonomy and initiative at every level as over against “Hamiltonian”; federalism which he saw as the creation of ever larger entities such as the United States; whose culture and form of government Marc distrusted.
Hamiltonian Federalism
Marc remarked that ‘Hamiltonian federalism’; as a whole was turning its back on spiritual; cultural and social questions and devoting itself to a form of action that can be defined; as ‘political’ and underlined the contradiction that is inherent in the lobbying of governments on federalist issues.
The Future is within Us
De Rougemont was the better writer. His last book The Future is within Us; though pessimistic; especially of political efforts, remains a useful summing up of his ideas. (2) Although Alexandre Marc wrote a good deal; his forms of expression; were too complex, too paradoxical, too filled with references to ideas; which are not fully explained to be popular.
Marc’s influence was primarily verbal as stimulant to his students. Having seen early in his life the dangers of totalitarian thought; he always stressed the need for dialogue and listening; for popular participation at all levels of decision-making. As with ‘order’ ‘revolution’ ‘the person’, ‘federalism’ was probably not the term he should have chosen to carry the weight of his ideas.
A Complex Man
The other Alexander — Hamilton — has infused the word ‘federalism’ with the idea of unification of many smaller units. ‘Popular participation’ is probably a better term for Marc’s ideas; if the word ‘popular’ could carry the complex structure; which Marc tried to give to the word ‘person’. Con-federation is probably the better term for the de-centralized administrative structures that Marc proposed.
Marc was a complex man; one of the bridges; who helped younger persons to understand the debates; which surrounded the Russian Revolution; the rise and decline of Fascism and Nazism; and the post-Second World War hopes for a United Europe. As de Rougemont on his death bed said to Marc:
“We have been able to do nothing, start again, talk to the young and we must carry on.”
Notes
For the 1930s period see: Christian Roy. Alexandre Marc et la Jeune Europe: L’Ordre nouveau aux origins du personnalisme (Presses d’Europe, 1998) J. Laubet del Bayle. Les non-conformistes des années 30 : Une Tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique francaise (Seuil, 1969) Michel Winock. Esprit : Des intellectuels dans la cité 1930-1950 (Seuil, 1996)
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Henry Usborne (16 Jan. 1909 -16 March 1996). By Rene Wadlow.
Henry Usborne was a British Member of Parliament (M.P.); elected in the Labour Party landslide in 1945. He was re-elected in 1950.
He was an engineer and Burmingham businessman yet a socialist. Born in India; he always had a broad view of world politics.
He was concerned that the United Nations; whose Charter had been signed in June 1945 before the use of the atomic bombs had the same weaknesses as the League of Nations. Soon after his election; he spoke in Parliament for the U.N. to have the authority to enforce its decisions; an authority which the League of Nations lacked. He spoke out for a code of human rights and for an active world bank.
League of Nations Association.
The early years of the United Nations were colored by the growing tensions between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The start of the Cold War. There were deep disagreements over the future of Germany. Non-official contacts between English and Soviets became more difficult. Proposals for international control of atomic energy were refused or not acted upon within the U.N.
Thus Usborne; while still favorable to the efforts of the U.N. felt that more popular support for a stronger U.N. was needed. He was influenced by the experience of the 1934 Peace Ballot; which had been organized by the U.K. League of Nations Association. Voters in this non-official vote were asked if they were in support of Britain remaining in the League of Nations. Over 11 million votes were cast with some 10 million in favor of remaining in the League.
It is likely that those who wanted out did not bother to vote. Nevertheless; the 1934 Peace Ballot showed strong popular support for the League.
Usborne played a key role in 1946 in the creation by world citizens and world federalists from Western Europe and the U.S.A; in the creation in a meeting in Luxembourg of the Movement for a World Federal Government. With these new contacts; he envisaged a vote in the U.S.A; and much of Western Europe to elect delegates to a Peoples’ World Convention; which would write a constitution for a stronger world institution.
The U.S. Constitutional Convention.
He proposed that there be one delegate per million population of each State participating. He did not envisage that the U.S.S.R. and its allies would participate; but he hoped that India would as Jawaharlal Nehru had played a key role in developing support for the United Nations. (1)
In October 1947; he went on a speaking tour of the United States. His ideas were widely understood as they followed somewhat the pattern of the U.S. Constitutional Convention. The delegates; had originally been chosen to develop amendments to the existing Articles of Confederation. They set aside their mandate to draft a totally other basis of union among the states; which became the U.S. Constitution. Understanding did not necessarily mean support; yet a fairly large number of organizations were willing to consider the idea.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the main campaigner of the Indian National Congress, 1951-52 elections. The poster reads ‘for a stable, secular, progressive state; VOTE CONGRESS’. By Indian National Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Third World War.
However; in June 1950, war was started in Korea. Usborne and many others were worried that this was the start of the Third World War. Usborne as many other world citizens turned their activities toward the need for a settlement with the U.S.S.R; and forms of arms control if there was no possibility for disarmament. The idea of the creation of an alternative world institution; stronger than the U.N. was largely set aside. The focus became on strengthening the U.N. by finding programs; in which the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. could participate; such as some of the early proposals for U.N. technical assistance programs. (2)
Usborne; as other world citizens, put an emphasis on developing a sense of world citizenship and a loyalty to all of humanity; without spelling out the institutional structures; such world citizenship should take. At the end of his second term in Parliament; he left party politics; but remained an active world citizen always willing to share his convictions.
Notes.
(1) See Manu Bhagavan. The Peacemakers. India and the Quest For One World (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2012). (2) See Stringfellow Barr. Citizens of the World (New York:Doubleday and Company, 1952).
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Featured Image: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. Public Domain. By https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Antonio_Borgese#/media/File:G._A._Borgese.jpg
“The era of humanity has not begun, but the age of nations has ended. It ended in 1914 when the world wars began. Hence, earth and sky be Commonwealth to all, that Man at last may raise must Nations fall.”
Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882 -1952) whose birth anniversary we note on 12 November, was an Italian-born professor of literature at the University of Chicago and a leading world citizen in the late 1940s. In 1931, Borgese was a visiting professor at the University of California when Mussolini announced that an oath of allegiance to the Italian Fascist state would be required of all Italian professors. Borgese did not go back and wrote to Mussolini:
“My dwelling place can only be where it is permitted a writer to be truly a writer.”
Borgese published “Goliath: The March of Fascism” (1937) when few in the United States were following political events in Italy. He developed further his views as the Second World War developed in “Common Cause.” (1)
In 1939 he married Elizabeth Mann, youngest daughter of the German writer Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in Princeton, New Jersey. In the mid-1970s, I knew Elizabeth Mann Borgese, who had become a specialist on law of the sea issues.
Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate in Literature 1929. By Nobel Foundation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
G.A. Borgese was a leading member of the University of Chicago-based Committee to Frame a World Constitution which wrote the “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution” (1948) (2) As Borgese wrote:
“The popular assumption that the present movement toward world unity originates essentially in the technological revolution as applied to ‘ weapons of mass destruction ‘ is a fallacy derived from the superstition of our time, which is the adoration of the tool, the cult of the material causes. Techniques and tools are the product of spiritual evolution which in successive waves of reactions and actions they become contributing factors. They are not the first causes. It was not the Legion that made Rome, not the phalanx that built Macedonia, but conversely. For the age of nations, after a span of six centuries was as good as dead for reasons far deeper and more complex than any technological change, in 1914 – when uranium was quietly number 92 on the periodic table, and plutonium was nothing and nowhere.”
For Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, we need to change the way we think of ourselves and each other, not as members of separate nations but as citizens of one planet with justice as a core value. Justice is a timeless and universal idea whose historical appearances and demands are variously and progressively determined by the various configurations of the ages. At a time when there is injustice in many parts of the world, it is useful to recall the vital efforts of Giuseppe Antonio Borgese.
Notes.
1) G.A. Borgese. Common Cause (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943) 2) G.A. Borgese. The Foundations of the World Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)
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Featured Image: Maurice Béjart. By Huster at French Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons.
January 1st is the birth anniversary of Maurice Béjart, an innovative master of modern dance. In a world where there is both appreciation and fear of the mixing of cultural traditions; Maurice Béjart was always a champion of blending cultural influences.
He was a world citizen and an inspiration to all, who work for a universal culture. His death on November 22, 2007 was a loss; but he serves as a forerunner of what needs to be done, so that beauty will overcome the walls of separation. One of the Béjart’s most impressive dance sequences was Jérusalem, Cité de la Paix; in which he stressed the need for reconciliation and mutual cultural enrichment.
Maurice Béjart in rehearsal – Fold according to Fold – with Rita Poelvoorde and Bertrand Pie (1976). By Jean-marie waregne, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Spirit of His Father.
Béjart followed in the spirit of his father, Gaston Berger (1896-1960); philosopher, administrator of university education, and one of the first to start multi-disciplinary studies of the future. Gaston Berger was born in Saint-Louis de Sénégal; with a French mother and a Senegalese father.
Sénégal, and especially Leopold Sendar Senghor, pointed with pride to Gaston Berger as a “native son” — and the second university after Dakar was built in Saint-Louis and carries the name of Gaston Berger. Berger became a professor of philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille and was interested in seeking the basic structures of mystical thought; with study on the thought of Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; both of whom were concerned with the basic energies which drive humanity forward.
Berger was also interested in the role of memory; as that which holds the group together writing that it is memory which allows us “to be able to hope together, to fear together, to love together, and to work together.”
In 1953, Gaston Berger was named director general of higher education in France; with the task of renewal of the university system after the Second World War years. Thus; when Maurice-Jean Berger, born in 1927, was to start his own path, the name Berger was already well known in intellectual and administrative circle.
Maurice changed his name to Béjart; which sounds somewhat similar, but is the name of the wife of Molière. Molière remains the symbol of the combination of theater-dance-music.
Maurice Béjart was trained at the Opéra de Paris and then with the well-known choreographer Roland Petit. Béjart’s talent was primarily as a choreographer; a creator of new forms blending dance-music-action. He was willing to take well-known music such as the Bolero of Maurice Ravel or The Rite of Spring, and The Firebird of Stravinsky; and develop new dance forms for them. However, he was also interested in working with composers of experimental music such as Pierre Schaeffer.
Béjart also continued his father’s interest in mystical thought; less to find the basic structures of mystic thought like his father but rather as an inspiration. He developed a particular interest in the Sufi traditions of Persia and Central Asia. The Sufis have often combined thought-music-motion as a way to higher enlightenment.
The teaching and movements of G. I. Gurdjieff are largely based on Central Asian Sufi techniques even if Gurdjieff did not stress their Islamic character. Although Gurdjieff died in October 1948; he was known as an inspiration for combining mystical thought, music and motion in the artistic milieu of Béjart.
The French composer of modern experimental music; Pierre Schaeffer with whom Béjart worked closely was a follower of Gurdjieff. Schaeffer also worked closely with Pierre Henry for Symphonie pour un homme seul and La Messe pour le Temps Présent; for which Béjart programmed the dance. Pierre Henry was interested in the Tibetan school of Buddhism, so much of Béjart’s milieu had spiritual interests turned toward Asia.
Georges Gurdjieff, head-and-shoulders portrait. By Janet Flanner-Solita Solano papers., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“Opening The Heart To The Light of Love.”
It was Béjart’s experience in Persia where he was called by the Shah of Iran to create dances for the Persepolis celebration in 1971 that really opened the door to Sufi thought — a path he continued to follow. A Sufi theme is “opening the heart to the light of love.” Sufi movements, which Béjart adopted, is to develop movements in time with the beating of the heart.
Béjart also followed his father’s interest in education and created dance schools both in Bruxelles and later Lausanne. While there is not a “Béjart style” that others follow closely, he stressed an openness to the cultures of the world and felt that dance could be an enrichment for all social classes. He often attracted large audiences to his dance performances, and people from different milieu were moved by his dances.
Béjart represents a conscious effort to break down walls between artistic forms by combining music, dance, and emotion and the walls between cultures. An inspiration for world citizens to follow.
Vladimir Yaroshenko (the Chosen Man), “Le Sacre du printemps” by Maurice Béjart, Polish National Ballet (2011). By Ewa Krasucka TW-ON, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Featured Image: Jacques Maritain, French philosopher and writer. By Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
By René Wadlow.
Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 -23 April 1973); was a French intellectual who spent the years of World War Two in Princeton in the USA. He was a friend of the anti-Nazi German author Thomas Mann; who also lived in Princeton. Both men were among the active advocates of world citizenship. When Thomas Mann’s daughter, Elizabeth Mann Borgese, was editing the world citizen journal Common Cause from the University of Chicago in the 1947-1950 period; Jacques Maritain wrote a number of articles for the journal along the lines of his thinking set out in his Man and the State.
Thomas Mann. By Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
At the time that he was writing for Common Cause, he was the Ambassador of France to the Vatican, having been named ambassador by Charles De Gaulle from 1945 to 1948. Maritain had supported De Gaulle during the war when many French Catholics had sided with the Vichy government or were silent.
Jacques Maritain had become a well-known French intellectual in the 1930s for his writings on a wide range of topics but always in a spirit of spirituality in the Roman Catholic tradition. However, he was born into a Protestant family with anticlerical views which were common at the start of the Third Republic in the 1870s.
Maritain was converted to the Roman Catholic faith in his early twenties after a period of depression linked to his search for the meaning of life. He had married young to his wife Raissa, who came from a Jewish Ukrainian family who had come to France due to a persistent anti-Jewish atmosphere in Ukraine. Both Jacques and Raissa converted to the Roman Catholic faith at the same time as a result of intense discussions between the two.
Raissa became well known in her own right as a poet and writer on mystical spirituality, but she also always worked closely on the writings of her husband. Their spiritual Catholicism was always colored by their early friendship with unorthodox Catholic thinkers, in particular Charles Péguy and Leon Bloy. After Raissa’s death in 1960, Jacques Maritain moved back to France from Princeton to live in a monastic community for the last 12 years of his life.
His writing on the spiritual background for creative actions for the benefit of the world community can be an inspiration to us all.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Rene Wadlow. “Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building…
Featured Image: Erich Fromm. By Müller-May / Rainer Funk / CC BY-SA 3.0 (DE) By Rene Wadlow. I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New…
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Featured Image: Photo by Cody Pulliam, Unsplash. On a proposal of the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstzan, the United Nations General Assembly has set 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice. It…
Featured Image: Albert Camus, Nobel prize winner. By Photograph by United Press International, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
By Rene Wadlow.
Albert Camus (7 Nov 1913- 4 Jan 1960) would be 108 years old, had he lived beyond the car crash, which took his life in 1960 as he and another editor from the Paris publishing house, Gallimard; were driving too fast from a Christmas vacation in the south of France toward Paris.
Camus; who had been the youngest writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957; had chaired the committee of support for Garry Davis’ world citizen efforts in Paris; and had contributed his writing skills to the statement; which Garry Davis and Robert Sarrazac read, when interrupting a session of the UN General Assembly meeting in Paris in 1948 in aplea for the UN to promote world citizenship.
A month later the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; which many saw as a reply to Garry Davis’ request as the Declaration sets the basis for world law directly of benefit to each individual.
The Stranger.
Albert Camus in 1948; was still a highly regarded editorial writer for Combat; which had begun life as a clandestine newspaper in 1941; when France was partly occupied by the Nazi troops, and half of France was under the control of the anti-democratic regime of Vichy.
Although the Germans occupied Paris; they allowed publishing, theatre and films to continue if the German censors found nothing too overtly oppositional in them. Thus, Camus’ novel L’Etranger (The Stranger) was published in 1942 by the leading publisher, Gallimard.
This short novel is written in a style which owes something to the early style of Hemingway. L’Etranger is a cry of revolt against man-made standards of absolute morality — a theme he develops more fully in his political-philosophical book on the use of violence L’Homme révolté (1951) translated as The Rebel. (2). As he said in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm
“the nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.”
Citizens of The World.
Albert Camus was born in Algeria; the son of a French father killed in the First World War; when he was only one and an illiterate Spanish mother; who raised him while working as a cleaning woman. Camus was intellectually stimulated by his father’s brother; who read books of philosophy and was active in the local Masonic lodge. Camus’ intelligence was spotted by a secondary school teacher; who helped him get a scholarship to the University of Algiers; where he studied history and philosophy, writing a master’s thesis comparing the Gnostic ideas of Plotinius and the Christian ideas of St. Augustine.
Camus was faithful to his Mediterranean roots, and his thinking is largely that of the classic Greek and Roman Stoics, the first to call themselves “citizens of the world.”
Camus is the champion of the “now” rather than the “later”. He is critical of Christian thought; which he interprets as “putting up with the injustice of the now in order to be rewarded in heaven later” along the lines of the satirical song based on a Salvation Army hymn “there will be pie in the sky by and by”. He was particularly opposed to the “Christian” policy of Franco’s Spanish government. He had been strongly influenced by the struggle of Republican Spain and the Spanish civil war writings of André Malraux.
The Rebel.
The same refusal to sacrifice the present for a potentially better future; made him a strong opponent of the Stalinist Soviet Union. For Albert Camus; there was no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither executioners nor victims (the title of one of his most quoted essays). It is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future.
Camus is perhaps more memorable as a great journalist and an editorialist than as a novelist. He had put his reputation on the line in defense of Garry Davis; even being put in jail for a short time for having joined Davis in a street protest in front of a Paris prison; where Davis was protesting the conviction of a young man; who had refused military service — a man working to “satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart.”
As Albert Camus expressed his world citizen ethos at the end of The Rebel “The earth remains our first and last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.”
Garry Davis with his World Passport (January 9, 1957). By Wim van Rossem / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Notes.
Albert Camus.The Rebel (New York : Vintage Books, 1956, 306pp.)
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Rene Wadlow. “Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building…
Featured Image: Erich Fromm. By Müller-May / Rainer Funk / CC BY-SA 3.0 (DE) By Rene Wadlow. I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New…
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Featured Image: Photo by Cody Pulliam, Unsplash. On a proposal of the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstzan, the United Nations General Assembly has set 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice. It…
Featured Image: V. Khlebnikov by N.Kulbin (1913, Akhmatova’s museum).jpg By seefilename, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
(November 9, 1885 – June 28, 1922).
By René Wadlow.
Let Planet Earth be sovereign at last. Planet Earth alone will be our sovereign song.
– Velimir Khlebnikov.
Velimir Khlebnikov was a shooting star of Russian culture in the years just prior to the start of the First World War. He was part of a small creative circle of poets, painters and writers; who wanted to leave the old behind and to set the stage for the future; such as the abstract painter Kazimir Malevich. They called themselves “The Futurians”. They were interested in being avenues for the Spirit which they saw at work in peasent life and in shamans’ visions; however, the Spirit was very lacking in the works of the ruling nobility and commercial elite.
Self-Portrait (1908 or 1910-1911) (Kazimir Malevich). By Kazimir Malevich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
As Charlotte Douglas notes in her study of Khlebnikov:
“To tune mankind into harmony with the universe – that was Khlebnikov’s vocation. He wanted to make the Planet Earth fit for the future, to free it from the deadly gravitational pull of everyday lying and pretense, from the tyranny of petty human instincts and the slow death of comfort and complacency.” (1)
Khlebnikov wrote:
“Old ones! You are holding back the fast advance of humanity. You are preventing the boiling locomotive of youth from crossing the mountain that lies in its path. We have broken the locks and see what your freight cars contain: tombstones for the young.”
Vélimir Khlebnikov (before 1922). By Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Futurian movement as such lasted from 1911 until 1915; when its members were dispersed by the start of the World War, the 1917 revolutions and the civil war. Khlebnikov died in 1922 just as Stalin was consolidating his power. Stalin would put an end to artistic creativity.
The Futurians were concerned that Russia should play a creative role in the world; but they were also world citizens who wanted to create a world-wide network of creative scientists, artists and thinkers who would have a strong impact on world events. As Khlebnikov wrote in his manifesto To the Artists of the World:
“We have long been searching for a program that would act something like a lens capable of focusing the combined rays of the work of the artist and the work of the thinker toward a single point where they might join in a common task and be able to ignite even the cold essence of ice and turn it to a blazing bonfire. Such a program, the lens capable of directing together your fiery courage and the cold intellect of the thinkers has now been discovered.”
The appeal for such a creative, politically relevant network was written in early 1919 when much of the world was starting to recover from World War I. However, Russia was sinking into a destructive civil war. The Futurians were dispersed to many different areas and were never able to create such a network. The vision of a new network is now a challenge that we must meet.
Note.
1) Charlotte Douglas (Ed.) The King of Time: Velimir Khlebnikov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Rene Wadlow. “Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building…
Featured Image: Erich Fromm. By Müller-May / Rainer Funk / CC BY-SA 3.0 (DE) By Rene Wadlow. I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New…
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Featured Image: Photo by Cody Pulliam, Unsplash. On a proposal of the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstzan, the United Nations General Assembly has set 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice. It…
Today, there is a growing awareness that cooperation is required to protect and manage integrated ecosystems which cross national frontiers. This is particularly important in the case of forest management. Trans-frontier conservation cooperation, in which two or more States cooperate in the management and the conservation of forests has increased a good deal in recent years.
Much of this effort is due to the work of world citizen Richard St. Barbe Baker. From the late 1920s to the early 1980s, Richard St. Barbe Baker traveled the globe, warning of the dangers of forest destruction, forest clear-cutting, and the greedy waste of natural resources.
We had supper together in Geneva in 1964, and he recounted his experiences in the Sahara trying to prevent the southward movement of the desert toward the Sahel States. He told me of his adventures in the Sahara with a European driver who wanted to kill himself by pushing the team to its limits. Fortunately, St. Barbe Baker, who had a deep spiritual base, was able to convince his teammate that life was worth living. Even without wanting to kill oneself, the study of the Sahara was difficult. St. Barbe Baker tell the story in his book Sahara Challenge (1954).
Men of the Trees.
Richard St. Barbe Baker was born 9 October 1880 in Southhampton, England and learned the art of planting trees from his father, a Protestant minister devoted to the conservation of Nature. After his studies at Cambridge University and service in the British Army in the First World War, he went to the then British colony of Kenya and began his work on forestry protection. He first worked among the Kikuyu, a major tribe which already had ceremonies to be in harmony with the forests and the trees. He recognized their value and methods protecting and sustaining the forests.
In 1922, he created the society “Men of the Trees” which is the group most associated with his efforts. He stressed that there is a need for conservation of genetic resources, wise management and utilization of existing natural forests with due regard to their long-term productivity.
Baker stressed the need to view the earth as a living whole and described the role that trees played in regulating weather, conserving soil, and regulating rivers.
In the introduction to the republication of his book My Life My Trees, Peter Caddy of the Findhorn community wrote:
“Here is the life of an Earth healer, struggling against apathy, indifference and plain greed – a man ahead of his time …If one man can do so much, what coundn’t we achieve if all of us worked together.” (1)
Subsistence Forestry .
Skillful conservation and management of forests is vital to people who practice “subsistence forestry”. In subsistence forestry, trees and tree products are used for fuel, food, medicine, house and fence poles and agricultural implements. In some cultures, before taking anything from a tree, an offering is given, thus making an exchange.
For those of us who do not live from subsistence forestry, there is still the need to pay close attention to trans-frontier conservation which plays an essential role in the protection of ecosystems. These areas provide possibilities for promoting biodiversity and sustainable uses across politically-divided ecosystems.
Note.
1) Richard St. Barbe Baker. My Life My Trees (Forres: Findhorn, 1985).
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Dr. Rene Wadlow. “Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building…
Featured Image: Erich Fromm. By Müller-May / Rainer Funk / CC BY-SA 3.0 (DE) By Rene Wadlow. I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New…
Featured Image: Photo by Lan Johnson in Pexels By Rene Wadlow. The United Nations General Assembly has designated 5 April; as The International Day of Conscience. An awakened conscience is essential to meeting…
Featured Image: Photo by Cody Pulliam, Unsplash. On a proposal of the Ambassador of Kyrgyzstzan, the United Nations General Assembly has set 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice. It…
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