Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

Scarcity, Energy, Climate Solutions, and a New Civilisation

Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee, writes, “So, if our current civilization is to survive in any shape or form it needs to fundamentally rethink all energy spending, from how we harness it to what we use it for. As Michaux concludes in his number-crunching report, “replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population. There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

Erin Remblance responds, “How we make that transition to lowered demand should be the most prominent discussion in our media, classrooms and households. Why is it nearly invisible?”

She goes on to note, “Years ago the great psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book about what happens to people in dehumanizing environments. Having survived two Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim knew the subject well. Near the end of The Informed Heart, he offered this prescient observation. Jews who accepted the status quo and believed in business as usual perished. Those who did not believe in business as usual left before the Germans arrived, sailed to Russia or America or joined the resistance. Many survived. “Thus in the deepest sense the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of a philosophy of business as usual,” wrote Bettelheim. It was “a last step in no longer defying the death instinct, which might also be called the principle of inertia.”

Now a widespread inertia prevents us from seizing control of our fate. We must do all we can to overcome that torpor. The implications are plain. Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

I have two responses to Erin’s points. They are my elaboration on the two key notions in her comments: Business as usual, and scarcity of energy.

I open talking about business as usual because seeing this clearly is the foundation of any transformation of civilisation, and technological and energy paradigm shift is pivotal in sweeping civilisation transformation along. (See particularly the copious and optimistic works of Jeremy Rifkin). What some have called ‘spiritual malaise’ and others “tranquilised obviousness”, business rarely is as usual, and if, like the history of European Jews, you punish a group regularly in small to harsh ways, I reckon they might just think the next bit of noise is just more of the same.

It does take quite a bit of training to be able to get up in the morning and take a fresh look at what’s happening, and that requires even putting yesterday in the past. It also requires being fully cognizant of our biases and mindsets. Anyone who says they don’t have any are doomed to play them out. What then do we hold to that gives us some predictive viability? First is cultivating an independence of thought, a detachment from the tribe whether professional, national, sub-cultural, or party as usual. And that is not antipathy, even the opposite, what others have called “indifferent love”. This stance supports an ability to: follow the evidence from several fields of science; hold doubt without discarding anything until resolved in evidence; and reviewing fully any arguments against. This ability for independent thought supports the interdependence of all independent thinkers for it is only in the recognition of true independent inquiry (search for truth) that a collective of thinkers can divine a greater magic.

This situation we find ourselves is a call to be so much more than we have ever been, so much more than we wound up being, individually and collectively. We will either rise to the call or we will fall. And whatever happens will be what happens. As the WWII holocaust found traction, Lydia Zamenhoff chose to go back to Poland from the USA in the face of immanent danger, she chose to support the last moments of her community and die with them. We don’t know how many hands she held but we do know she died with them. Those of us in the frontline of transforming this civilisation may well find ourselves in a future of ‘holding hands’. We must accept that this is one possible future.

In terms of policy, economics, and human behaviour, the basic economic reality of scarcity does work. Many people living in rural Australia grew up looking after water usage. If you have to make a meagre annual rainfall and a watertank last a year, you have watch usage like a hawk. On the other hand, if old people can’t afford heating in winter, they could die. Well, that’s a time honoured tradition. Australia has ineptly allowed gas companies to sell much of its gas, internationally, leading to scarcity and high prices for energy as we enter winter. I’m expecting an unusual winter death rate among the elderly this year. Feeding into an inflationary boom, those on more basic incomes can be expected to suffer housing dislocation. This in, perhaps, the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet.

Meanwhile the environmental impact of windfarms is already been felt and the next phase of renewable energy farms will not be given such an easy ride. The real difficulty is that we aren’t learning fast enough because, here in Australia, for the last 20 years 80% of our intellectual energy has been spent on arguing climate change denialism with our government. In the end, the example of the holocaust goes to one characteristic of modern politics so far – we are often very slow to the table. Timing being the essence, and we can’t escape the clear timing the IPCC have provided, we will damage our way out of this catastrophe. The question is, which is the lesser poison or the better trade off? Presumably the one that improves the chances of the ecosystem and human civilisation. There’s not much chop in voting for the view that 1 or 2 or 3 billion people can just suffer and die. There’s not much chop in loosing much more of the world’s ecosystems and species than we already have, because that will inevitably lead to the billions of people suffering and dying. The inextricableness of human development and a narrow range of climate and a particular variety of ecosystems, is conclusive. I support the work of the Foundation for Climate Restoration, the third and often overlooked leg of climate solutions. The scalability of technologies of removing CO2 from the atmosphere over the next decade is likely to have less impact and perhaps even a very positive total impact on ecosystems, than any other climate change solution, namely renewable energy development and population adaptation. To solve this crisis, to transform global civilisation so the next phase of human development is of a higher order of workability for people and ecosystems, we’ve got to work urgently together on all fronts, even if it means government ordered rationing.

The UK in WWII proved that a people faced by a single existential threat can adhere to austere rationing policies for several years. Even in the 1930’s the mathematical and nutritional knowledge was ample so that there were no cases on malnutrition in the UK during WWII. Today, we certainly have the capacity to design sophisticated systems for the allocation of energy, the development of renewables, the weaning from fossil fuels, and the equitable establishment of systems worldwide, together with an food security systems. What is still required is for nationalistic governments to get to the table put aside their extreme patriotisms for the future of humanity and the planetary ecosystems that support us.

We have a political choice: the easy choice or the hard choice. The easy choice is for all national governments to come to the table with good will to design global systems that will create both equity in resource access and as rapid a transition from fossil fuel energy as possible. The hard choice is to continue to bicker and terrorize each other.

Either choice will lead to the new civilisation, will lead to the transition off fossil fuels and to equitable distributions of resources. Even if making the hard choice, once a billion people have died and billions of others have suffered through the defensive and aggressive attitudes of extreme patriots, the billions of people of good will remaining,will see those extremists off. Such has been the way of history to date. Will this be the moment we will be able to put our past in the past and take the easy way, or will we insist that the past dictates our actions and only massive numbers of deaths will convince us that another model of governance and social organization is viable.?

The Future is My Past, So Long as I Can Remember It.

The adage, whosever doesn’t know their history is doomed to repeat it, goes for our personal, social, economic, and political history.

People have said to me, “Why are you guilty about things that happened 100 or 200 years ago.” While guilty is the wrong word for what I feel, and shame is much closer, the clearer expression is that I am full cognizant of my circumstances in world society and the historical facts and influences behind those circumstances.

I am fully cognizant of the whispers that maybe my ancestor was a slave trader in the Queen Elizabeth 1st era or abouts. I am cognizant that this is not considered a point of ancestoral pride. I am cognizant that my grandfather and grandmother went from poor white labourer immigrants to Australia, arriving just prior to WWI and went on to become successful middle class farmers in North Queensland by WWII, setting the opportunity for the tertiary education of me and all my siblings (5 in all) albeit that with a lot of help from Gough Whitlam’s free university program of the 1970’s.

I am cognizant that my grandfather was able to avail himself of land in 1916, on which to breed maize for the fledgling DPI while first Nations people continued to move traditionally through the countryside. Their access to country being largely locked away, my family hardly noticed that the Government moved them onto a mission. I am cognizant that we didn’t deal honourably, and certainly not with a treaty or relevant recompense for moving into the land and utilising the resource in advantageous yet destructive ways.

While a certain shame lives on in my cognizance that I was brought up not to steal, a value I hold dearly to, today, in the face of that we stole. At the best we bought stolen goods, and some might argue because our grandparents world view blinded them to the facticity of this. While that may be so, the English and Australian frontier government had no doubt they colonised a previously occupied land and fought off defenders with vile means. in otherwords they invaded and stole another people’s land.

I accept my personal history in the world of pain of many peoples of this planet. I accept the political and social history that I was tied to, and am still tied to, both in ineptitude and advantage.

Image: Tom Clohosy Cole https://www.behance.net/gallery/72357419/Destination-Planet-Earth

I am committed to creating a new future for my descendants and the descendants of all the people of the world. My past is mostly complete, like a book whose last word has been written. To the extent the society and economy and political systems have not completed the past, my past is also not complete. Everytime someone asks my, “Why do you feel…”, I know that they are ignoring or downplaying the present as given by that history, that past. I know that if too many people downplay the past, the more likely we are as a society of repeating it. Indeed, right now, many government and business institutions have failed to apply equitable attitudes because they are avoiding how they are still prejudiced. Their failure to be cognizant of how prejudice built our institutions and economy, is their failure to recognise that they are simply repeating historical world view prejudices, albeit they might declare they are only evaluating objectively who is deserving and who is not. They are not able to see that both ‘objectively’ is ‘subjective and prejudiced’ and ‘deserving’ is also subjective and prejudiced’.

Now that I am complete with my past, it sits like a clear memory of where I came from, and shows a clear possibility of where I could go on. This future is a past / historically derived future, what some call the default future. On the other hand, the past derived future is not inevitable as it would be if I had not completed my past. Ignoring and downplaying our past, leads to the inevitable repeating of it, the default future.

I now create a future. Not like a prophecy. Rather as a promise, a possibility of which I will apply every effort until such time as the bell tolls or am otherwise reduced to incapacity or convinced of the folly of my view. I stand, live, in a world which all ecosystems and every human is flourishing. As I look back over my past, to today, I see, remember, sitting here writing this article. My whiteboard nearby has a schedule of activities for today. I see my preparation for the refugee farmers seminar in Uganda that I am chairing this afternoon by zoom. I see the gathering of networks of eco-agricultural organisations and consultants around the refugee regenerative agriculture project. I see that I am wondering what to do about that funding is lacking. I’m unclear what I did about that.

Why am I looking back from the future to create how it was made? Simple because my brain is just a pattern making machine. And it takes those patterns from the past. If I want to have a future that is not defaulted to the patterns of prejudice and other limitations that I have inherited, then I must resort to putting my created future and how it got made, in the past. In reality I am as much making a new timeline of past, for my brain to make new patterns with, as I am making a new future that doesn’t exist for my brain to acknowledge. When I make the new memories of what I did next, then I’ll be clear about the steps I and many others, took along the path to this most wonderful world my grandchildren and their children are living.

Land Acknowledgements and Cognitive dissonance.

What I wrote in response to “Against Land Acknowledgement” written by a self proclaimed ‘Georgist’.

I also consider myself to be a ‘georgist’ and if by that you mean having the economic view that all living humans share equally in the planetary resources, then there are a number of issues pertaining to colonised indigenous lands, like my own Australia.

1. There was no treaty made or properly observed with the original inhabitants of the land. if you see a legal loophole then shame on you. The land is stolen and never ceded. To imagine otherwise is to say that I can come onto your property and just camp there, erect a building, force you out, and there would be no legal support you could turn to. Although this does happen in the west bank of Israel, it is anathema to most most civilised people;

2 The evaluation of land to be shared can only come about with full agreement of all parties from the get go. When one party has been force to concede, then no georgian equation can be made except on the restoration of a fully agreement of all interested parties, and that would mean dealing with restoration claims. To take that off the table is only to enact domination over part of the community, rather than any sense of equity.

3. How do we truly evaluate the resource that has been conquered, stolen centuries ago? Think of the value that has been derived from the resource of the Australian or North American continent, for that, in Georgian terms, is the full evaluation of the commons. Our failure to evaluate the commons has lead to the modern tragedy of the commons called climate change, but also the poorer developmental situation of all colonialised indigenous peoples. Why, because the failure of appropriate taxes on the value of the use of resources has lead to essential overuse, ecological systems destruction, climate change and an enormous mountain to climb in relation to social and economic equity. How do we know that? Because by definition, when resources are borrowed from the commons by a company, individual or even government as a whole, the taxable level for the use of that resource is set at a rate that allows the commons to conserve and even improve the resource. The appropriate tax does slow down the rate of development to a degree that allows conservation while placing a greater contribution from product to the community at large, thereby paying for equity in public accessible advancements – ‘highways and Byways’ like transport, energy, education, communication, knowledge growth etc.

All that being said, what has it to do with acknowledgments of country? Firstly, and as we include in many of our acknowledgments in Australia, the land was never ceded. It is a reminder across boardrooms, universities, government departments, and the self-centred, that we haven’t paid the rent. We are, like parasites, living off other people’s lost lives, and we are living off the rewards of theft, piracy, conquest.

Yet there is a deeper proposition also at stake. The proposition that, entangled with our conquering, we have overlooked important cultural resources. That too is part of the commons. And a Georgian would wonder, why are we not utilising that resource at all? Why is that human resource left to sit segregated, stagnating. My own view is that it is left to stagnate for the same reasons that up until recent decades, there was a single world view about productive agriculture and, regardless of the damage it has caused to our food quality, soils, and conservation of production for future generations, an ecological view of agriculture was laughed out of town.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost. The piper needs paying all the same, for as you imply, it is the land, the ecosystem, that requires the appropriate equities to be followed, and failing that, the ecosystem will languish, become unbalanced and ultimately become dangerous to the human being. And part of restoring those equities is fully acknowledging what we had been denying, who we are as a complete community, a commonwealth of diverse peoples, which diversity is a large part of the value of the commons.

If it feels humbling to acknowledge what you are complicit against others, then rather than give into your cognitive dissonance around it, trying cleverly to avoid what it is, you would best sit with your dissonance. Perhaps there is indeed a fully human answer that will come to you.

On Structural Racism or The Colonial Tragedy of the Commons.

Author’s Grandparents and children. Author’s father as a baby. 1930.

From my Australian context, as a middle class middle aged white man, here’ s what I see about structural race-based inadequacies.

1. My grandfather came to the country I live 105 years ago and took up land which at that time was inhabited by an aboriginal clan who lived or tried to live as they had for at least 10,000 years. My grandfather paid the government for the land. The aboriginal clan got blankets and clothes once per year.

2. Eventually there was not a life to be had as hunter gatherers as the forests were cut down and fences erected. Church and the state government collaborated to transport the local people to missions. Rebellious people esp young men were sent to an island outside their country to live with other rebels from other countries (sic aboriginal). Such artificial settlements are the hallmark of dysfunction today.

3. Mission raised peoples were bible trained, had great work ethic, but were afforded only minimal education. My grandfather’s legacy was to set up a middle class life for his grandchildren. A descendant of the mission of my age told me, I’ve got a university degree and I cannot get a job at the supermarket checkout. Today there is a growing middle class in the aboriginal community, mainly around jobs that are ether public service or aboriginal based businesses such as tourism.
These are the broad facts of the matter in my life. My family did not and perhaps could not pay for the land that gave us our station in the society. There is a sense of shame I have around this, that we were party to robbery. It is clear to me that the welfare of a society can only flourish on the fair recompense to all others of anything we wish to take from the commons. Whenever there are new people resident to the commons, they do not have automatic rights to the commons nor recompense (economic rent) from the use of the commons. Indeed the newcomers must permanently value add to the commons to a degree of a share of every originator or the commons, before being considered an equal share of that commons, including their own value added to which a share is now owned by everyone else. Now it can be shown, I think, that we interlopers since 1770, have value added to the commons of the territory of Australia. However we have also been party to damage to the commons and the sustainability of the resourses. It is a fact that we have not ever full consulted or negotiated with the originators of this commons, neither made a treaty nor recognised their primacy of stewardship. It is also a fact that we have made, and still make, a lot of excuses why we shouldn’t do that. Those excuses have led to a form of paternalism- maternalism that maintains a declining social resilience in certain parts of the nation.
Ultimately I believe that there is a social reconciliation, a balancing of the books of justice if you will, that works like a mathematical ‘strange attractor’. This ‘strange attractor’ of justice determines that a form of repeated social crisis occurs over time, such crisis as can only be diminished by the efforts exerted towards fulfilling the outstanding recompense. For mine, I cannot, even if I wanted to, give up my advantage. What advantage would anyone else receive from that? So I need my government to fully reconcile on my behalf (and all our behalfs), the outstanding recompense owed the commons, both to the indigenous community and the loss of natural resource and ecological status for our human flourishing. To the extent they make efforts and we can, therefore, all make effort, the lesser shall be the crises following. And to the extent they don’t, the worse those crises will be.