SELECTED PASSAGES FROM GLOBAL DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN SELF-TRANSENDENCE

From the Prologue:

 This book articulates this immense potential inherent in human life for rising to a higher level of existence, to give birth to another world. All the elements are in place and familiar to us: our dignity, freedom, love, capacity for community, human rights, and global ethics. We shall see that the possibility of such ascending higher, of transformation, is built into the very structure of our lives. The solution to our self-destructive and suicidal planetary problems is “rising to a new level of existence.” The future can hold for us an ever-greater joy, excitement, and fulfillment. We can overcome our present world of dissolution and death.     (Page 10)

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If human maturity develops as an orientation for justice and compassion on a worldcentric level, how do we make this happen for a sufficient number of persons to transform our world order itself to one of universality, justice, peace, freedom, and sustainability? I argue that a real, effective global social contract is an essential component in making this happen. It is both a means and an end with respect to a fulfilled human community. At the present moment, our choices remain with death and continue to promote a civilization premised more on death than on life. This book attempts to explain what it means to “choose life” at the dawn of the twenty-first century.       (Page 20)

From Chapter One:

Because we are self-aware temporalized persons, we can find the meaning of the present in relation to a future that does credit to our ability to imagine, to envision, and to live within a horizon of higher expectations. If we expect little, and make this the meaning of our present, we will discover a future that gives us little. If we tap into our very real, higher human potential for peace, justice, and sustainability (all of which require holism), not only will the present have tremendous meaning, but it will impel a future commensurate with our vision.    (Page 26)

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Human liberation is an on-going process that embraces multiple dimensions and levels, all of which are characterized by increasing self-awareness of both the process and the results. Just as we move from childhood egoism into ever-greater awareness of the needs of others with its resultant mutual respect, concern, freedom, and love, so we can continue to grow throughout our lives in awareness of being, of the divine ground of existence, of our human finitude-infinity (see chapter two), and of the process of self-transcendence itself.      (Page 43)

From Chapter Three:

We claim we are being realistic through our structural denials of our universal human dignity. However, there is nothing small, or cowardly, or gingerly about human dignity. Daily it confronts us with the eschatological proviso; daily it confronts us with the demands of our “utopian intelligence.” We may demean ourselves by ignoring these demands in favor of a “realism” that is really cowardice, but our dignity remains intact because it is fundamental to our temporalized human structure. As Panikkar declares: “what constitutes the dignity of Man, is his freedom” (1979, 431). Our dignity demands transformation, a new attitude and a new understanding of our goal, which is precisely human freedom and liberation. It demands a redeemed and committed human community, and it demands that we ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.       (Page 83)

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Ultimately, these dimensions of freedom are interrelated with one another in the dynamic process of self-transcendence that is human life. Freedom itself is fundamental to the “truth” of our human situation. Our freedom and passion for truth must be recognized, embraced, and placed at the heart of our struggle toward a just and loving world system.

It is not only that I desire a better future, but that I ought to desire a better and transformed future. Of these future possibilities, certain ones rationally demand actualization, for example, peace, justice, human rights, and sustainability. I rationally discern other possibilities as what ought not to be actualized, for example, war, injustice, violations of human dignity, and the destruction of nature. These ideas are worlds apart from any form of utilitarianism or proportionalism, as we shall see below.    (page 105)

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The demand inherent in human freedom and coming to us from the future, fundamental to human temporality, requires that we establish a global social contract founded on the truth of our common humanity and our common planetary home. An adequate conception of freedom must take this into account. It does not matter that this demand is not a popular one within the dominant economic, mass-media, and political forces of today’s world. It arises from a future that has the power to overcome the dead hand of the past. A key step in the process of human liberation is within our grasp.  (page 108)

From Chapter Five:

The universe comes to know itself through us, and knowledge, therefore, cannot be intelligibly formulated as a human capacity without a concomitant consideration of human maturity, intelligence, perfection, liberation, and relationships—and all of these include love. Self-knowledge requires an ever growing maturity in humans and, therefore, also in the universe. Like many ancient thinkers, we begin to understand ourselves as microcosms of the macrocosm. We may formulate a theory of truth as coherence, but proper perception of coherence itself requires love.   (p. 143)

From Chapter Six:

Human beings are a whole in terms of our common dignity; we are whole in terms of our capacities for love and reason, and we are one with regard to our capacities for, and quest for, freedom. We are also whole as a human community, an emerging, dialectically developing unity, which as yet requires completion to become fully actual. Without democratic world law, it should now be clear, the fate of humanity and the Earth continue to be infused with great peril, with the possibility of nuclear holocaust and on-going planetary climate collapse. The “great promise” of this moment in history is found not only in recognition of our human family as one global community. It is also necessarily found in the recognition of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, or some similar constitutional unification, as the key to a peaceful, just, and sustainable future that more fully actualizes our global community.   (p. 172)

From Chapter Seven:

Only through such a global social contract can we establish a world system that makes true human flourishing possible through protecting human dignity, human rights, and justice on a planetary scale. The Earth Constitution institutionalizes the holism necessary for human flourishing. All nations become states within the Earth Federation, and global capitalism is brought under control and transformed into global social democracy within a market socialism in which reasonable economic equality progressively exists everywhere.

Human rights constitute the fundamental groundwork for human flourishing in dignity and equality. They will remain a mere abstract ideal until they become embodied in concrete, democratically legislated, planetary laws. Living in terms of the three generations of rights in the here and now can empower the process of transformation. If we want a credible future on this planet, we need a global social contract, turning the human community into a legally recognized community of peace, justice, and sustainability. We need to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.  (p. 221)

From Chapter Eight:

How are personal and collective wholeness achieved within the temporalized, ever-moving process that constitutes our human reality? We need to recognize the process of self-transcendence inherent in our temporality with its dynamic synthesis of finitude and infinity. We need to integrate our thought, feeling, awareness, and vision as intersecting energies behind the process of transcendence and harmonize them in ways that empower the process. We need to embrace the universal moral principles founded on the dignity and rights of each human being that emerge through the proper integration of thought, feeling, awareness, and vision. And we need the great leap forward in this process that can be achieved through embracing a global social contract premised on holistic values.   (p. 233)

From the Epilogue:

The demand, therefore, is inherent in our common humanity as well as in practical reality. It arises from the need for survival as well as for creating a flourishing future for coming generations. It arises from the ethical imperative to actualize our human potential to become worldcentric, loving, and compassionate persons living at peace on our common planetary home, guiding our self-transcendence toward ever-greater self-realization and fulfillment. It arises from the bliss, excitement, and joy that break forth as we adventure into our transformed future.   (p. 274)

 

 

SELECTED PASSAGES FROM One World Renaissance 

Sample chapters:
Chapter 1 PDF
Chapter 2 PDF

Selected Passages as a PDF

Selections from One World Renaissance

From Chapter One:

The principles of holism and harmony have deep roots in human civilization going back at least to the Axial Period in human history during the first millennium before the Common Era. For many thinkers and religious teachers throughout this history, holism was the dominant thought, and the harmony that it implies has most often been understood to encompass cosmic, civilizational, and personal dimensions. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Lord Krishna, Lao Tzu, and Confucius all give us visions of trans-formative harmony, a transformative harmony that derives from a deep relation to the holism of the cosmos. Human beings are microcosms of that holism and must seek ways to allow it to emerge within their lives and cultures.

Today, holism appears to us not only as a constant, abiding feature of our universe, but also as an emergent and evolutionary aspect of the cosmos and all life. In the face of the pervasive disharmony of much of human existence that we experience today worldwide, the principles of holism and harmony function, in the words of Ernst Bloch (1986a), as a gigantic “principle of hope.” We recognize that disharmony threatens the very existence of life on Earth, that we face the possible end of the human project and higher forms of life on this planet.

However, even as the danger grows, as the poet Hölderin sang, the saving insight emerges within our hearts and minds and within human civilization. The creative and revolutionary holism of the emerging planetary paradigm becomes a vision of the very real possibilities for a harmonious and transformed human reality. Today, the holistic vision of the ancient spiritual teachers is reborn on a higher level—consistent with the deepest discoveries of modern science.

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The question of harmony and its implications is clearly no longer merely a theoretical question for philosophers and cultural thinkers. Today, it is an absolutely vital question of survival, of restoring the possibility of a decent future for subsequent generations. We will see that dealing with the global crises that threaten human existence is directly related with the imperative to establish a world based upon human dignity and human flourishing, a world that will include both a spiritual renaissance and a practical, planetary social contract.

The emerging new paradigm understands that our situation at this point in history is unique. We must surely comprehend the ways in which the outdated early-modern paradigm remains an impediment to a viable and sustainable world order. Yet we must also realize the uniqueness of the present—there are few past precedents for how we are to move into the future because global awareness of our single fragile planet and the technology for destroying it did not previously exist in history. Today, we must envision a new, holistic future. We must start from this vision and allow it to guide our actions in the present, drawing us creatively forward toward a truly transformed future.

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The natural and social sciences of the 20th century experienced a paradigm-shift—across the board—from atomism and mechanism toward evolutionary and emergent holism. Today scientists know that everything evolves: from the universe itself to galaxy clusters, galaxies, solar systems, planets, biospheres, species, individual living things, societies, institutions, and psyches. Yet at the same time, this evolving multiplex universe exhibits a seamless wholeness, manifested in all its evolving parts, the parts themselves participate in “fields” or overlapping levels of wholeness.

Today, science has deeply understood that the entire cosmos is an evolving whole, and that our planet and the living creatures on it are intimate parts of this whole, the heavy elements that make organic life possible having come from earlier generations of exploding supernova stars. The physical planet on which we live is itself an evolving whole, and its evolution is intrinsically linked to the networks of living things that form intricate patterns of interdependence and holistic overlapping ecological fields everywhere, from the bottoms of oceans to the upper atmosphere.

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Holism is now the presupposition for the possibility and meaning of the parts on every level, from the cosmos to the planetary biosphere to human life. We must make a paradigm-shift from starting with the parts and trying to build wholes (peace, justice, sustainability, etc.) to an orientation that starts from the whole on every level. We must think of our individuality, our culture, our economics, and our nation as deriving from the holism of humanity, not the reverse. The transformation of primary perspective, of starting point, is one of the keys to human liberation.

Our consciousness and our institutions are reciprocally related to one another. And, according to the principle of holism on which the universe is constructed (articulated here by numerous thinkers) the uniting of humanity under democratic world law would engender a qualitative leap: the whole is more than merely the sum of its parts and new qualities would emerge with the wholeness of human institutions and consciousness that would be very powerful, liberating, and would give us our best prospect for a world based on peace, justice, and sustainability.

From Chapter Two:

 

The ethics of holism is scientific and cosmic, reflecting, as it does, the fundamental holistic principle of the universe as discovered by contemporary science. It recognizes human beings as integral to the cosmic process, not a mere accident of despair and hopelessness as modeled, for example, in much of Existentialism. A human being represents a new whole which is “a qualitative leap” that cannot be explained in terms of its parts. The ethics of holism encompasses traditional ethics but goes beyond the anthropocentric orientation of much traditional ethics (and beyond the transcendental command structure of much religious ethics) to affirmation of this cosmic framework, which means that a tremendous revolutionary hope is arising in humankind: the realization that “practical utopia” is indeed possible. Our gigantic hope is based on the vision of the very real possibilities for a new world, new institutions, and a new era of peace, justice, and sustainability for our planet.

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Holism sees every human being as having intrinsic and inviolable dignity, as does the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This dignity does not separate us from the rest of the empirical world (as does Kantian ethics) but unites us to the dignity of existence inherent in all things, a dignity compacted like a laser beam in our human form.

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The human mind, like the human body, reflects the holism of nature and the universe and, in turn, discerns this holism. We are at once both all humanity and a unique perspective on that totality. Moreover, mind and body are not two different kinds of things but two aspects of one emerging reality. Fact is no longer separated from value, for what is valuable is now discerned by science and reason as holistic and harmonious: cosmic, ecological, economic, social, and personal harmony. The intrinsic dignity of parts cannot be separated from the intrinsic dignity of wholes. A totalitarian denial of individuality becomes as impossible as the egoistic denial of community.

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The consequence of this is that harmony and holism themselves have become the new “categorical imperative” of ethics. Our responsibility is to discern our internal relationships with others and with the orders of living and natural things. From this careful assessment of these relationships, we can discern the principles of ethical action and apply these to specific situations. What attitudes, actions, and institutions promote health and harmony in the family, the community, the nation, and the world? We confront a world of particular cultures, races, nations, and individuals that often appear antithetical to one another, but emergent and evolutionary holism discerns the larger patterns of wholeness and acts to unite the particulars into ever more encompassing harmonious wholes in ways that do not deny the integrity of the particulars but rather fulfills them.

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What kind of human actions promote the integrity and harmony of the biosphere? Again we find that the biosphere cannot be protected both while human actions are not in harmony with its delicate ecological patterns but also while human beings themselves remain fragmented and divided from one another. What is a sustainable relationship to the ecology of the earth? How can we promote the emergence of human harmony in conformity with these scientific realities? What kind of political and economic institutions promote harmony with nature as well as integrity and harmony among human beings? How can love, friendship, and compassionate justice be promoted worldwide leading toward a peaceful, just, and fulfilled human community? We are in a holistic relationship with both nature and humanity, and these two aspects, human harmony and harmony with nature, necessarily go together.

The holistic emphasis is on the study of relationships and the fields within which these relationships operate with a view to maintaining, enhancing, and enlarging their harmony. The emphasis in ecology is on understanding the fields of interrelationships and interdependencies and conforming human activity to these patterns. The emphasis in human relationships is on seeing the issues from the point of view of the other person, culture, or nation with whom I realize I am internally related. In the process of understanding the other’s point of view, we look for mutualities, larger unities, and commonalities that unite us, and then work to actualize these in ways that are mutually fulfilling.

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My compassionate identification with the victims of the current world systems (systems most notably identified as global capitalism and the system of warring nation-states) leads me to demand the transformation of these systems of injustice and exploitation to compassionate, inclusive systems of cooperation, sharing, and mutual participation. The ethics of holism under present conditions is creative and revolutionary holism: We are morally required to transform the systems of Earth to ones of justice, reasonable equality, respect for human dignity, and ecological sustainability.

Since nothing is excluded from the ethics of holism, it is clear that political life within democratic societies, international relations between nations, as well as economic and business relations, must be guided by ethical principles of holism and harmony. Harris compares the ethics of holism to the universal principle of love (agape) taught by Jesus: “Genuine rational love, therefore, must extend to the entire human race…. Love of neighbor, in the full sense, transpires as love of the entire community and devotion to the ideal Kingdom of Ends.”

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Implicit in the new holistic paradigm is the vision of a cooperative and participatory world order in which war and exploitation have been abolished and replaced by peace, cooperation, rational love, and mutual economic and political efforts for the common good. And, indeed, it must be a world order, rather than one fragmented into autonomous warring economic and political units. The world of the early-modern paradigm, fragmented into conflicting national power interests and a multiplicity of conflicting economic interests, is gone forever from the most advanced conceptual and scientifically confirmable levels. A true world order emerges that has truly emergent properties due to its higher levels of wholeness and integration. It will become clear that such a “true world order” necessarily involves planetary unity-in-diversity through democratic world law.

From Chapter Three:

The fundamental issues with respect to the nature of government in relation to citizens have been elucidated at length within the tradition of political philosophy going back to Plato and Aristotle, but especially from the time of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke in the 17^th century to the present. What is the source and justification for the authority of governments to make mandatory, binding laws for their populations and to claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the administering of those laws? What rights do people retain with respect to the monopoly of authority and force claimed by the government, and where do these rights come from? What is the relation between the will of the people, or the common good of the people, and the authority claimed by governments? Where does sovereignty lie and how is it manifested? What is the relationship between ethics and politics?

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The wholeness of humanity demands that freedom be actualized in a planetary democratic government. At the same time that government expresses the holism of civilization, government is itself also an emergent principle of wholeness that must be actualized. Government binds people together within a common legal framework that is more of a cohesive whole than a society, culture, or civilization without government. The purpose of government is to make possible the flourishing of the citizens of Earth: their freedom. Each individual is an emerging whole within the larger whole of the human project. We dialectically contribute to the emergent perfection of that project at the same time that we strive to perfect our lives, for the purpose of living, as Harris says, is “harmonious realization of the self in a complete life…what Aristotle defined as happiness or the good for man.”

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The paradigm-shift from fragmentation to holism has clearly not yet reached the dominant institutions of global society, and the institution of the territorially bound nation-state remains a fundamental assumption in much of today’s philosophy of law. We have not yet achieved that global social contract that can institutionalize political and economic holism in spite of the fact that our “survival problems” cry out for such an expansion. The vision of transformative hope emerging from the new paradigm is not yet fully actualized. Nevertheless, contemporary philosophy of law has made great strides in moving in the direction of holism, and some of its formulations, even though developed within today’s framework of territorial states, explicitly or implicitly claim a universality applicable to all humankind.

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Much of today’s philosophy of law is similar in its situation to the philosophy of human rights developed at great length and in a wide-ranging literature since the ground-breaking formulation of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights are said to be universal, to be “equal and inalienable” to all persons, to derive from the inherent dignity of every person, and to be “the foundation for freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Yet the system of territorial nation-states has rendered their universal recognition and application nearly impossible. We will see that the philosophy of human rights and the philosophy of law imply one another in a multiplicity of ways.

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Let me briefly elaborate some of these principles. The first consequence of the paradigm-shift to holism with respect to government and law is recognition of the illegitimacy of the global political-economic system that is today rapidly shredding the possibility for any viable future for human beings on Earth. The dominant political and economic system of the world today violates wholeness, and, focusing as both nations and corporations do on external relations, violates the possibility of harmony. For every nation today, national and sectarian interests take priority over planetary interests, but planetary interests are those of the whole of humanity and future generations. They arise from our holistic situation and require a holistic perspective and set of institutions to address them.

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The holistic paradigm of law and government identifies a new common good which is a planetary common good. It recognizes that the fate of all people is linked together, both because we are all human beings and because a globalized world has forced awareness of these rights to peace and a protected environment upon us all. Engendering a new global democratic order will establish government and law directed toward making the world a decent place for all its citizens, not just the one percent, not just those in the global north, and not just those in North America, Europe, or Japan, and not just those within any particular nation. The very nature of holistic law demands this: the purpose of government and law is intrinsically moral and intrinsically demands universal application.

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In no holistic field does the principle of peace mean the absence of conflict. The internal differentiation of many parts necessarily means a dynamic process of conflict and mutual adjustment. But the process of conflict is vital to the functioning of the whole and does not destroy that wholeness, as do war and the economics of absolute winners and losers. There are many ways the process of conflict can be mediated without mutual destruction.

On the level of individual human beings as parts of the human whole, proper functioning is the realization that my flourishing (in dignity, freedom, and peace) is linked to the flourishing of all others. Again, conflict is inevitable, but a holistic system of law mediates this through dialogue, mutual understanding, conflict resolution, arbitration, adjudication, voting, compromises, mutual loyalty to a larger good, etc. The health of the whole fosters the cooperation and health of each of the parts.

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It is important to be clear that the process of emergence of this world peace system, and the planetary social democracy it entails, is not simply one arbitrary option among the various possibilities that we encounter as we reflect on our common future. We have seen that a dynamic principle of holism is fundamental to all the processes of the universe including human evolutionary development. Democratic world law is implicit within our emerging human holism. We can, of course, derail this process through environmental collapse or nuclear war, but the potential for harmony and unity-in-diversity of a nonviolent planetary legal order is at the heart of the emergent ethics of holism and the unity of our human condition.

This new world-peace system will not abolish national administrative and governmental units but will substantially remove the conflict of national partisan interests. National governments will then function more like states within the US or Pradesh within India. Holistic law recognizes that the cooperative regulation of everyone together engenders “positive freedom,” a freedom for each that is so much greater than the so-called “freedom” of isolated units trying to serve egoistic interests while in conflict with others and while resisting governmental authority. The nations and peoples of Earth will begin working together in ways deemed unimaginable during most of modern history since the Renaissance.

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One important function of the law in any society is its power of conflict resolution, binding mediation, and impartial adjudication of issues before the courts. Democratic theorists have always claimed that democracy is the one form of government that minimizes violence, making it possible for people to nonviolently address their problems, conflicts, and desire for change through procedural, due process methods. A holistic world government will necessarily set up worldwide mechanisms for conflict resolution, mediation, and dialogue directed toward mutual understanding among people to promote peaceful living among the world’s diverse groups.

Much of the current hatred, fear, and misunderstanding now rampant throughout the world will be rapidly mitigated. The disinformation and false propaganda of imperial nation-states, along with their patriotic minions in the corporate mass media, will no longer breed misunderstanding, suspicion, and fear. For the first time in human history, the real import of democracy will be actualized. For, to date, under the economic and political system of sovereign nation-states, the real transformative potential of democracy has been systematically undercut.

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The Constitution for the Federation of Earth does not need to be ratified by the people of Earth prior to our using it as a concrete symbol for the appropriate universal presuppositions. It is these presuppositions (an aspect of the holism that embraces us) that influence our thinking and our actions. By assuming the Constitution as a model and embodiment of rationally grounded universal presuppositions, we are transforming human false assumptions into ways of thinking and acting evermore congruent with the correct assumption that universal democratic positive law is implicit in the human condition from the very beginning. With the very future of the human project at stake, the kind of assumptions we make become absolute vital to the possibility of realizing a truly humane and transformed future characterized by peace, sustainability, and justice. Framing the Earth Constitution in this presuppositional role, is basic to the very possibility of our being successful. Holism must be the first principle in all our endeavors to achieve peace, justice, or sustainability on Earth.

From Chapter Four

he fragmentation that we inherit from the early-modern paradigm is a foundational or presuppositional fragmentation. Its basic premises assume that the world is fragmented. Such foundational disorder cannot be reformed because to evolve disorder toward the order of holism would mean giving up the premises themselves. Holism must take its place as the basic premise. Fragmentation must simply be negated so that a founded global society, premised on the holism of our human condition, can take its place. What is required is a global social contract.

One looks at a practice or institution and recognizes its disorder, discord, disgrace, even absurdity. On a personal note, I did that as a young college age person in the US confronted with the horror of the Vietnam War and the military draft. I did this not from any philosophical or moral sophistication but simply from a gut feeling, a deep, intuitive recognition not only that this war was wrong, disgraceful, and absurd, but that all war was wrong, disgraceful, and absurd. I had not been taught this by my church, by my family, nor by my culture. But I simply saw that this practice is something ruinous not only for my life but for humankind as well. My gut reaction led me to negate war, to put it aside, to declare that I would never participate in this disgraceful human behavior.

We need to do this for all human practices and institutions that are disgraceful and absurd. We need to let the holistic heart of our emerging humanity (characterized by reason, intuition, and love) break into our distorted surface awareness that is conditioned by perverted institutions and held in place by routine, habit, social conditioning, powerful class interests, and fear. We need to put away war, the fragmented absurdity of militarized sovereign nation-states, the institutionalized greed and exploitation of global capitalism, and the vicious attacking of any and all persons labeled as “terrorists,” and put on the cloak of peace and harmony that is emerging at the heart of our humanity.

Reason, the complement of love, sees the universality of the human community that love binds together. Reason sees the self-evident truth of the natural law principles articulated in this chapter and acts to secure these principles in human political, economic, and social affairs. Reason, like its complement, love, is also at the heart of the very concept of legitimate law. For the “logic of law” includes principles of justice, fairness, nonviolent human relationships, and universal human dignity, which are also the principles of love. A law for the world would be the very embodiment of reason and love for the world….

Love insists on justice and fairness for all people. When justice is denied (as it is, by and large, all around the world today), it blocks people’s ability to trust and love. Love not only embraces all people without discrimination and therefore is itself a manifestation of unity-in-diversity; love also empowers reason in its task. Without love, reason can become heartless social engineering. Without reason, love can become self-indulgent and ineffective sentimentality. Love supplies energy and reason’s universally affirmative character. It lifts reason to its highest potentialities. Like universal law, it embraces all without discrimination.

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Love is a principle of order just as much as reason, for love is the foundation of the relationships that bind us into families, communities, and the human continuum. Love also binds us to our wonderful planetary home and the ultimate cosmic miracle of the universe within which we live our lives. The conception of blind, heartless economic “laws” promoted by global capitalism is not only untrue, but it is a principle of disorder than cannot be reformed or evolved into an order premised on love, which would mean a world of peace, justice, and human flourishing. This disorder must be negated by our reason and our love, and a global social democracy must be founded and premised on the priority of human dignity and human rights within economic relationships.

The same is true of the system of sovereign nation-states. This “system” is no system, for it constitutes an institutionalized disorder dividing humankind into 193 incommensurate entities without any binding principles of law or justice above themselves. Whatever international rules of “global governance” they have developed to date are profoundly undemocratic and represent the few who dominate in the world, not all of humanity. One cannot evolve this system while retaining the principle of national sovereignty which is the essential component of this disorder. One must negate the disorder and establish an order founded on genuine principles, summarized by the five basic concepts articulated in this chapter. Sovereignty must be replaced by a global social contract founded on the human community itself.

Ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth would establish universal order, based on reason and love, in human political affairs for the first time in history. All of us are under a moral obligation to develop our reason and our love, but our ability to pursue this marriage of human excellence is inhibited and blocked by both global capitalism and the system of sovereign nation-states. Reason and love, therefore, cannot be significantly followed (for most people in most circumstances on Earth) or fulfilled apart from a global social contract both based on these principles and making possible their further development. Our capacity to follow the morality of aspiration indicated by the nexus of reason and love is made possible by universal enforceable laws under the Earth Constitution.

 

From Chapter Five

he world is therefore run by some 193 mostly militarized sovereign states, interfaced with gigantic multinational corporations, on principles that are merely voluntary, as all so-called international law is merely voluntary, with treaties from which nations can withdraw, or within which they can write “reservations” for themselves, and which they reserve the right to “interpret” as they please (although the Convention on Treaties urges that their interpretations be “in good faith”). To any clear thinking person, the insanity of this system could not be clearer. Our common human interests in peace, prosperity, security, dignity, and sustainability are all largely ignored by the self-interest of sovereign states. There is no planetary human community.

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Militarized nations, many with nuclear weapons, operate out of self-interest in a world system that explicitly rejects the rule of law (under the deceptive and disingenuous cover of promoting “international law”). Such a system is fragmented and anarchical, and therefore deeply immoral, to its very core. For the genuine rule of law is never merely voluntary, never subject to their making “reservations” for themselves, and never open to their own private interpretations of what the law requires. The rule of legitimate law results from people forming a social contract that binds them into a genuine community with a common good and common interests that supersede all particular interests.

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These stipulations of the Universal Declaration of Rights are, of course, in contradiction to the structure of the UN itself, whose charter affirms the lawless world-anarchy of sovereign nation-states. Hence, everyone has a right to life, liberty, and security of person (except when some nation decides you are a terrorist or an enemy); no one shall be subjected to torture (except when we decide national security requires this); everyone has the right to recognition as a person before the law (except if you are an illegal immigrant trying to escape poverty and injustice in your home country); everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing (except when national security interprets the situation differently). The UN Declaration correctly affirms the rule of democratic law; the structure of the UN trashes the idea of democratic law.

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The US has not, therefore, simply gone to some extreme and become a rogue state (as William Blum in his book with that title, and many others, have declared); rather the US has carried to its logical conclusion the assumptions behind the system of sovereign nation states: that human beings remain in a state of nature in which they interpret their moral obligations for themselves and in which the publicly determined rule of law does not apply. The US has simply drawn the final conclusion implicit in this system and abjured the rule of so-called international law for the pretense that it is.

If nations have the “right” to interpret international law for themselves, then the next logical step is that they have the right to write new international laws to suit themselves, which is what the US has done in its hybrid law-war model. The world condition is one of war, of might makes right, of power relationships. Within this situation, there simply is no “moral high ground.” We make up the “rules” as we go along, based on our drives to power and self-interest.

*     *     *     *     *

What are the moral differences between a CIA torturer or strategist who allows a bombing to take place, and a terrorist? What are the moral differences between a country that captures suspects in a program of “secret rendition” and sends them to countries where it knows they will be tortured (or to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib where it does the torturing) and a terrorist? If the tragedy of 911 was not a false-flag operation of secret elements within the US government, it was almost certainly something known about and allowed to happen for the obvious political purposes expressed in the on-line Project for the New American Century document, signed by leading hawks and Neocons within high levels of the US government (www.newamericancentury.org).

*     *     *     *     *

Public law does not replace morality with arbitrary conventions. It is rather at the heart of the moral demand, since it makes possible moral dialogue and discussion among free and equal citizen participants, as Jürgen Habermas has pointed out (1998a). And global public law is the presupposition of our humanity itself, of our common rationality and sociality. The moral principles deriving from this presupposition (from universal human rights and dignity to the Socratic and Pauline principles that evil should never be done that good might come of it) must be the basis of global public law.

Both state and private terrorism are deeply immoral, for they shatter solidarity and the imperative for a global nonviolent framework for discourse and lawful public order. The global framework, of course, would have to be free, equal, basically egalitarian, and peaceful, which is why the 1% with their wealth, power, and investments in the industrial-military complex hate the idea. This is also why many private terrorists fear this result as well, since a global framework would require that they grow beyond their current narrow rebellion and submit to a public framework for redress of grievances. However noble they believe their motives are in the violent struggle against global oppression, exploitation, and dehumanization, their methods would make them wanted criminals within a democratic world system.

From Chapter Six:

In my view the best and most practical blueprint for establishing a holistic political and economic system for Earth is found in the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Its Preamble explicitly invokes holism in a number of ways, including emphasis on the principle of unity-in-diversity, and its design establishes a matrix of holistic institutions cooperating with one another and the people of Earth in a planetary regime of harmonious and sustainable economic and political democracy. This constitution is the most important document produced in the 20^th century and should be studied in every school, college, and university in the world. My book, The Anatomy of a Sustainable World: Our Choice between Climate Change or System Change, studies the holistic design of the Earth Constitution in some detail.

The Earth Federation government itself reflects the structures of creative holism: interdependency, dynamic internal relationships between its parts, as well as a conscious orientation for unity-in-diversity. This is fundamental to establishing a sustainable world civilization based on an efficient and morally responsible world economic and political system. As we have seen, institutions influence and condition people. If we want people to act sustainably in their lives and economic relationships, these principles must permeate the institutions of which they are part. The Earth Constitution does exactly this. It functions as a global social contract in which people institutionally agree to forego war and live in peace according to the rule of enforceable laws.

*     *     *     *     *

The global economic meltdown that began in 2008 has led to a chorus of voices from economists and monetary theorists who believe that human welfare and the welfare of our planet should be the central premise of economics. Some of the concepts associated with “democratic socialism” are now being widely discussed by sustainability economists. Whether these thinkers use the forbidden “S-word,” or speak in terms of some form of “cooperative capitalism,” or of economics premised on the “public good” is irrelevant to their consensus. There are two central alternatives: either have money, debt, and the economy controlled by huge private financial monopolies structured around the accumulation of ever-greater private wealth for themselves (the present world-system) or place money, some essential forms of production, and the economy democratically in the hands of the people through a public banking system.

*     *     *     *     *

The issue is not the abolition of all private property. This idea functions as a red herring promoted by dominant elites to terrorize populations into not examining the present system carefully and honestly. The Earth Constitution explicitly affirms the right of private property (Article 12.1 and 12.16). The real issue involves the question as to whether the economic infrastructure that provides the means for all business and trade (banking) will be democratically owned by the people as a public utility to be used in the service of universal prosperity and sustainability or whether it will be privately owned to be used in the service of private accumulation of wealth for the rich and making a sustainable civilization nearly impossible. The central issues are banking, money creation, and the structure of property laws in general.

This is as much an infrastructure question as are roads and streets. Government normally builds and maintains roads, streets, electrical systems, water systems, sewage systems, and other vital infrastructure because these make possible the free exchange of goods and services that constitute a healthy economy. You cannot have all streets and roads as the private property of individuals or corporations to be used for private interests without throwing the society into chaos. But this is precisely what the dominant monopoly capitalist ethos advocates: The monetary system must be privately owned by giant financial interests while government must raise money through taxes on the people resulting in debt enslavement of the public to these private interests.

*     *     *     *     *

Under the Earth Constitution, the World Financial Administration is established in Article 8.7 with the directive to create a Planetary Accounting Office that makes cost/benefit studies and reports on the functioning of all government agencies including their “human, social, environmental, indirect, long-term and other costs and benefits.” It is also directed to create a Planetary Banking System and make the transition to a common global currency, valued the same everywhere. Such a stable and reliable currency will be fundamental to both human prosperity and the ability to create a sustainable civilization.

*     *     *     *     *

Global public banking will end this “system of scarcity” and put people and their needs before private profit by establishing global public, debt-free banking. The second major reform is found in section 8.7.1.7 quoted above: The purpose of the planetary banking system will not be to make money for the rich but to empower people to create businesses, jobs, social projects, and innovations that eliminate poverty, establish peace and harmony, and actualize sustainability. To this end, credit will no longer be available, as today, only to those with prior assets that serve as collateral. Credit will now be available based on “people available to work, usefulness, cost/benefit accounting, human and social values, environmental health and esthetics, minimizing disparities, integrity, competent management, appropriate technology, potential production and performance.” Every responsible adult or organization will have access to credit to be paid back at low or no interest rates, since the purpose of the credit is a sustainable and prosperous planetary community not the private wealth and power of a few.

*     *     *     *     *

This debt-free, interest-free money is used to promote the prosperity, free trade, and well-being of the people of Earth while protecting the planetary environment. Individuals, corporations, state and local governments may all take advantage of very low cost development loans and lines of credit that are not premised on exploitation of the debtors in the service of private profit. In addition, primary created (debt-free) money will be judiciously spent directly for global infrastructure needs by the World Parliament. Money and banking can now be used in the service of the common good of the people of Earth and in protection of the “ecological fabric of life” on our planet. The rich can no longer exploit the poor through a system of World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans and debt that has so far created such misery for the peoples and nations of Earth.

The Earth Federation will coordinate the international actions of demilitarized nation-states through world laws legislated by the World Parliament. Under the Earth Constitution, conflicts are settled through the World Court system and violators are subject to arrest and prosecution by the World Attorneys General and the World Police. Similarly, transnational corporations are regulated through the democratic legislation of the World Parliament. Corporate expertise and organizational infrastructures can now be used to promote universal prosperity while protecting the environment.

*     *     *     *     *

Under the Earth Constitution, there is a place for everyone and every nonviolent organization. NGOs, UN agencies, global citizens, nation-states, religions, cultures, and the diverse races of Earth will all be empowered through its fundamental principle of holism. The people of Earth will soon begin thinking holistically, and the economic and social institutions of Earth will immediately begin to gravitate toward creative holism. The future requires a deep existential and scientific recognition of our wholeness, of the oneness of humanity, our Earth, and its biosphere. Both the ethics and politics of holism demand this fundamental paradigm-shift. Our best hope for actualizing this future is ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The Earth Constitution serves as a living embodiment of these transformed practical possibilities that are the real source of hope for the people of Earth.

From Chapter Seven:

 

hat are the pros and cons of the attempt to create democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth? Some say it will save us from nuclear holocaust, ultimate climate collapse, and other such planetary disasters. Others claim it will open up the possibility of global totalitarianism. With the continuous technological revolutions in military and surveillance capability that have continued unabated since the Second World War, all these fears (of nuclear holocaust, ultimate climate collapse, and global totalitarianism) should be taken very seriously.

The first includes an understanding that the possibility of a major holocaust that has not significantly abated since the end of the Cold War. The second understands that human activity is destroying the planetary ecology on which we are dependent for our survival, and the third understands that totalitarianism, today, is a technological and military possibility exceeding anything previously dreamed of in human history. Such global domination might signal the end of human political freedom, perhaps forever.

The first and second concerns provide a fundamental argument for federal world government, the first articulated, for example, in Albert Camus’ 1946 essay “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” which called for a “world parliament” with authority over all the nations. The second has become a powerful force through the ecology movement that has largely developed since Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring. The third concern, however, raises doubts in people’s minds about the wisdom of placing governmental power in the hands of a single governing body for the entire planet. This chapter explains why these reservations concerning the danger of world government under the Earth Constitution are largely misguided.

Such doubts arise from the same outdated paradigm that gives rise to the possibility of totalitarianism in the first place. They involve a conception of “power” as “power-over” derived from the fragmented system of sovereign nation-states integrated with unrestrained global capitalism. This chapter attempts to draw on the new, holistic paradigm that this book seeks to articulate to show that this latter paradigm is behind the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The new paradigm that informs the Earth Constitution substantially transforms our understanding of governmental “power.” The “power” integral to the Earth Federation government will be qualitatively different from totalitarian or dictatorial power that we fear today. “Power” within a holistic paradigm is fundamentally different from “power” within the fragmented, early-modern paradigm.

*     *     *     *     *

In the US, the checks and balances intended to prevent tyranny were placed into the Constitution more than 200 years ago when high speed weapons were non-existent and instant life or death decisions did not need to be made by the Executive Branch. Since the advent of the Cold War, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of a vast military industrial complex, the Executive Branch of government has taken on immense powers that have dwarfed the checks and balances that were supposed to be supplied by the legislative and judicial branches. Presidents, the military, and cabinet meetings of high level civilian and military officials in the Executive Branch have taken on a huge, largely clandestine, power significantly independent of the other two branches. In G-8 or G-20 economic summit meetings, the huge corporations and world’s largest economies meet in secret to decide the economic rules for the rest of the planet. Checks and balances are practically nonexistent.

*     *     *     *     *

The Earth Constitution is permeated with the concepts of holism, sustainability, interdependence, and unity-in-diversity. The document emerges from the new holistic paradigm and therefore, once actualized as an Earth Federation Government, it will operate in a manner qualitatively different from traditional governments with their top-down, class based, structures. The Constitution makes clear that it operates through networks of relationships: the people of Earth with direct input into the World Parliament, itself based on unity-in-diversity, and the several agencies of the “Integrative Complex” operating within a cooperative and integrated system. Here we have the collective social mind for Earth described by contemporary science. We have the “global brain” awakening, described by Peter Russell, or the “deep heartfelt impulse to connect with others and co-create a world equal to our love and our capacities,” described by Barbara Marx Hubbard.

*     *     *     *     *

The Earth Constitution wants to make clear that the “powers” of world government are not indiscriminate and are limited in their scope to what transcends national boundaries, as well as being subject to numerous checks and balances. In spite of the fact that the Earth Federation will be operating on a qualitatively different holistic principle, multiple checks and balances are built into the system. These checks and balances can be seen as clearly preventing abuse of power by any persons or agencies of the Earth Federation government. But they can also be understood as arising from an integrated governing system, outlined by the Constitution, that will have no need to place extraordinary powers in the hands of the Executive Branch, for example, and no need to place extraordinary powers in the hands of the World Police or any other agency.

*     *     *     *     *

The recognition of the sovereignty of the people of Earth is equivalent to recognizing the Earth as a community. A community has common interests and a common good that bind it together in a system of social cooperation under that good. A collection of sovereign nations recognizing no law above themselves and each operating out of its own national self-interest can never be a community. We have seen that the Earth Constitution legally establishes a human community. By superseding national sovereignties and recognizing the people of Earth (and their representatives in the World Parliament) as sovereign, the Earth Constitution is legally recognizing common interests of humankind (e.g., peace, security, prosperity, human rights, sustainability) as more fundamental than the interests of individual states. Power becomes something different. It is no longer the power of conflicting autonomous fragments, but the power of the human community to represent the common good of humanity.

*     *     *     *     *

Within our Earth community, the economy will no longer be expansive in the sense of the gross (and inappropriate) indicator of an ever-increasing gross domestic product (GDP) produced by the fragmented nation-states in competition with one another. Under present methods of measuring GDP even destruction, pollution, and chaos can increase GDP and appear as an indicator of economic “health.” Under the new paradigm embodied in the Earth Constitution, the economy will be “intensive” (and not disastrously growth-oriented) in the sense of searching for ever-better ways to increase the quality of sustainable production, environmental restoration and protection, and human well-being within this framework. People will not obsessively seek monetary wealth within this framework, for they will be rich in community. Similarly, the power of the Earth Federation, deriving from the consent and active cooperation of the people of Earth, will result in a continual improvement and perfectibility of the rights in the bill of rights (Art. 12) and the progressive actualization of the “directive principles” (“certain other rights”) specified in Article 13.

*     *     *     *     *

Similarly, the new paradigm of power does not involve exploitation, which requires structural violence, that is, exploitation requires poverty, scarcity of resources, and human desperation for its success. But the holistic world system initiated by the Earth Constitution eliminates all of that. It establishes a universal social democracy that retains private property but regulates its accumulation in corporate or private hands so that democracy is not undermined in the process. It places human dignity and well-being first, and transforms the present soulless sphere of market forces in large measure by removing the conditions of scarcity necessarily required for capitalist exploitation. Within a genuine community of free and equal citizens in a condition of reasonable prosperity, people do not exploit one another.

The consequence of the domination of power in the sense of resorting to violence is human misery and loss of freedom. The consequence of power resulting from holistic integration is precisely the flourishing of human freedom. We become free from fear of enemies, from food insecurity, housing insecurity, healthcare insecurity, educational deprivation and, therefore, free to formulate life plans according to our personal values and flourish within our communities and natural environments in pursuit of those life plans, or by simply living fully within the fullness of our humanity and our communities.

*     *     *     *     *

Education will be directed to producing genuine “world citizens” who are loyal to the Earth and the common good of present and future generations, qualities that are also required for an ecologically sustainable civilization. Becoming such world citizens requires cognitive, moral, and spiritual development on the part of human beings, actualizing their capacities for reason, love, and intuition. The problems that I identified above in my list of nine factors in the rise of totalitarianism will be substantially overcome not only through the new world system but also through global education.

*     *     *     *     *

With the development of a universal consciousness of human beings and our common history upon Earth, the dynamic of a synthesized past, in a lived present, projected toward future possibilities begins to operate for humanity itself. We can ask about human destiny, human opportunities, human possibilities, and our common human future: about the gigantic hope for a transformed human future. In chapters eight and nine we will see further that a transformed future requires the realization of a human spirituality in which each person begins to live from a deeper level of awareness that connects them with the source, the ground of being. Education must take place with teachers, and within a context, that evokes development to higher levels of spiritual awareness in the learners.

Human beings possess immense possibilities for cognitive, moral, and spiritual development. Education, therefore, is about enhancing, refining, articulating and enlivening this creative process of actualizing these possibilities for individuals, for groups, and for humanity as a whole. It draws upon history and human knowledge in a dynamic interaction between the older generation and the younger generation directed toward a future of enhanced or transformed possibilities, including the possibility of living fully and blissfully in the present.

From Chapter Eight:

We are “the center of all surprise in the world”—“the crystalized potentiality of existence.” In a holistic human being, the fullness of awareness includes reason, intuition, and love. All three of these can open the depths for us. Each of these aspects of human awareness (as we will see further in Chapter Nine) can open up what Tillich calls “levels of reality” (1957: 42) closed to the conventional paradigm of totality. The “totality” of the world’s “war system” (Levinas), of its “system of sin” (Dussel), closes off these depths. As Gabriel Marcel remarks “there can be totalization only of that which is homogeneous” (1951: 50). A holistic world of many dimensions and depths is anything but homogeneous in this sense. To be open to these depths makes us capable of eschatological transformation.

*     *     *     *     *

Taking these thinkers as my point of departure, I find that the negativity of war lies in the act of objectifying the other by an autonomous subjectivity assumed to be in external relationship with the other. The world is conceived as a totality of entities in objective relations of power, subservience, alignment, or disalignment with regard to my (or my group’s) needs and interests. Other people, and the collective identities that I project on them in my objectifying of the world, are central to my assessment of threats to my security and well-being. War is the relation I have to all such threats (and ultimately even those now identified as allies continue to count as possible threats). The “I” here is most often a collective “I” involving nations, races, religions, or other groups.

When I am not actively fighting to eliminate threats and possible threats to my self-conceived collective or individual autonomy, I engage in politics (war by another name): maneuvering to enhance my strength, my position, my security and diminish the relative strength and position of others. “Morality” (in this objectified world of autonomous selves or autonomous groups versus others) lies in loyalty to the collective identity and its norms, for the “sticking together” with those identified as “we” over and against those understood as “them” is the foundation of my security and well-being. In a world “totalized” in this way, war, as Heraclitus declared, is king and master over all.

In such an objectified world in which other people appear as objects of threat or as allies, my autonomy and well-being also require a domination in which some are used as instruments to produce the wealth and security of others. The system of private property as defined by the laws of the society establishes relationships into owner and worker, manager and managed, those who produce and serve, and those who own and command. This system is an offshoot and corollary of the objectified negative relationship of war. My autonomous subjectivity, individual and collective, opposes its “we” to a “them” who are instrumentalized as enemies, subordinates, the labor force, the uneducated masses or poor people available for my corporate uses, or as my hired mercenaries.

*     *     *     *     *

Human subjectivity can also be seen to become aware of a primordial depths to things through several other encounters or “being struck by” certain aspects of experience that cannot be adequated to thought. I want to point to some of these encounters as aspects of our ethical situation, all of which also point to an eschatological imperative at the heart of the human situation—an imperative that we transform the world in the direction of a liberated and fully human future.

*     *     *     *     *

Not only does the encounter with the unsayable depths of the present moment break open the assumption of a determined past and a blocked freedom, the reading of history as the struggle for liberation means reading history in terms of God’s futurity. We break out of bondage to givenness into an ethical eschatology of radical praxis and liberating futurity. What circumstances and what institutions block or crush the futurity of being? What concrete possibilities can we point to for human liberation? Does everything have to remain in the realm of abstract symbols of a human liberation with no clear objects of focus for a concrete praxis?

*     *     *     *     *

The totalized conventional world of objectification, alienation, domination, and sin often provides illusory mechanisms (like voting within bourgeois class-based societies) said to allow for nonviolent ways of evolving the system toward the good. But such evolution never takes place because the premises of the system systematically block awareness of the depths that demand fundamental and immediate transformation. Holism is not totality (the totalization of an “objective” world utterly lacking in depth) but an integration and harmonization of all aspects of our human situation, including openness to the depths.

With increasing human self-awareness, the reality of the absolute demand for something truly new in history can become conscious. Martin Buber correctly identified human beings as “the crystalized potentiality of existence”—as “the center of all surprise in the world.” This includes the eschatological demand for what Kant called the “kingdom of ends”: a world in which war has been abolished and human dignity, and the dignity of the natural world, becomes the foundation for economics, law, culture, and planetary unity.

*     *     *     *     *

For the past several centuries, we have seen, the war system has been closely linked with the system of sovereign nation-states and global capitalism, gigantic institutions and forces self-contained and implacable in their violence. These systems and the ego-centered subjectivities that populate them use violence as the fundamental form of social control: violence in the rule of the rich over the vast population of the poor worldwide, violence in enforcing laws over recalcitrant populations, violence in protecting “property rights” from masses of poverty-stricken citizens, violence in eliminating or torturing perceived enemies, violence in the implementation of “economic shock therapy” (Klein, 2007), violence institutionalized in the form of military and paramilitary organizations within nearly every one of the world’s 193 sovereign states, and violence in maintaining the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over the future of all humanity (see Martin, 2010a, Chaps. 4-6).

Fundamentalists in various faiths may abdicate responsibility for action and passively wait for a miraculous intervention that ends human history. But intellectually mature and honest people know better. If the eschatological promise is to be realized, it will be through human actions: intelligence, responsibility for the other, and establishing the foundations for a loving and compassionate planetary community. How can this be done?

*     *     *     *     *

There is nothing whatever in the totalized world view of the Pentagon that might allow for an evolution to a humane, ethically based planetary community. The idolatrous character of the totalized world system is there for all who care to open their eyes and see. You cannot slowly “evolve” what is evil—denying a human community based on agape and objectifying the other as threat or enemy—into conformity with the Good beyond being. Even when they claim that their “intent” is not evil, Socrates, and Plato (like Buddhism and much of Eastern thought) have all pointed out that evil can be ignorance, and ignorance is to a large extent willful: we are responsible for refusing to overcome our ignorance.

*     *     *     *     *

This assessment reveals the hopeless juggernaut of our present world disorder, inherited from a dark past of centuries of racism, slavery, conquistadors, torture, and naked exploitation. It should be clear that human beings must find an eschatological liberation through overcoming global capitalism and the system of militarized nation-states. What concrete steps could we possibly take if not to create a global democratic set of institutions with authority over the nations, the private banking cartels, and the multinational corporations, and with the authority to abolish the Pentagon?

*     *     *     *     *

The continuing process of human beings breaking out of the totalized world system into the creative freedom, compassion, and hope of the “awakened” or “inspired” self (aware of infinity permeating our human situation) is a necessity if there is ever to be a world peace system, which would necessarily include ecological sustainability, reasonable prosperity, abolition of the war system, and freedom for all the world’s citizens. This process requires new modes of thinking, a new paradigm, for human beings (as Gandhi understood) in which they envision a planetary community under the rule of democratic laws with humane institutions and protected human rights. If we set up the appropriate institutions, the conditions will be set for the transformation of human consciousness from objectification, greed, fear, and aggression to compassion, love, and interactions based on the golden rule at the heart of all religions (Hick, 2004: 309-314).

The first step in the eschatological actualization of the promise of history, therefore, is the establishing of institutions that can defang the nation-state and transform capitalism from a cancer on Earth into a system of reasonable prosperity and ecological sustainability.

*     *     *     *     *

There are many reasons for ratifying the Earth Constitution. Most of these reasons are comprehensible at a pragmatic level by nearly everyone. But those aware of the eschatological demand at the heart of human history can see in its ratification, and in the quest for its ratification, an additional set of reasons. The Constitution defines its specific political, administrative, and economic arrangements in terms of a world of unity-in-diversity and the foundations of a new era of cooperation, peace, justice, prosperity, and sustainability for all humankind. It presents itself as an eschatological document beyond the reign of objectification, alienation, and nihilism.

From Chapter Nine:

 

Creative holism, as we have elaborated it in this book, is revolutionary because it means a pervasive shift from a fragmented and fractured world disorder to a harmonious and integrated world order. We have seen that some thinkers have expressed this revolution, currently going on worldwide, as a “paradigm-shift;” others have identified the transformation going on as a new “Axial Age.” However it is framed, the emergent holistic worldview derives directly from revolutionary 20^th century scientific breakthroughs that revealed the holistic structure of the universe and all levels of reality within it, including humanity and the ecosystem of Earth.

This emergent evolutionary and civilizational process of actualizing the holistic structures implicit in the cosmos resulted in the emergence of mind, reason, knowledge, and values within the human phenomenon. Each of us is a self-conscious embodiment of the whole and, at the same time, a life history in process of actualizing our own potential for holism, a process that is inseparable from our relationships to the larger wholes of which we are part. We are all individual (biological and psychological) systems and are part of Earth’s larger (ecological and civilizational) systems.

*     *     *     *     *

Human beings themselves are the holism of the cosmos, concentrated like a laser beam, and actualized in us. However, we understand that the cosmos is an evolutionary and emergent process, and now comprehend that we are responsible for the further actualization of holism, harmony, and coherence, most fundamentally in relation to human civilization and our precious planet Earth. Our gifts of reason, intuition, and love must be developed in order to fulfill this responsibility. Let us examine further the interrelation of reason and intuition and reserve love for subsequent sections.

*     *     *     *     *

We need to explore this confluence of reason, intuition, and love further with a focus on these characteristics, not simply as human phenomena, but as manifestations of the holistic cosmos itself, allowing us to realize ever more fully that human beings truly are microcosms of the macrocosm. We will find that the astonishing “inwardness” that we experience in ourselves—the inwardness that makes us think that we are not “merely animals” struggling for survival within a Darwinian struggle of the fittest, that we really are, in some profound way “the measure of all things”—is today confirmable through reason and science.

*     *     *     *     *

Human consciousness (which includes reason, love, and intuition) represents an emergent development of the cosmos itself. Unless we realize this within our deepest awareness and sense of self, we will likely feel dwarfed and insignificant in the face of the immense reaches of space and galaxies. But there are powerful arguments as well as intuitions that relate our consciousness to the consciousness of the universe itself. If the principle of systemic order in the universe has given rise to human consciousness, does this not imply that the same order is manifested in a cosmic consciousness?

*     *     *     *     *

We can now truly celebrate life, life as it is integrally related to the “primal flaring forth” and “universe story” of cosmogenesis with its emergence of beings capable of experiencing the cosmos in terms of universal, trans-personal dimensions of oneness, love, harmony, beauty, and compassion. A human being is not a detached subjectivity encased in a body with “access” to the world through the “doors” of the five senses as early-modern empiricism tended to assume. A human being is a whole, a perceptual, rational, emotional, desiring, intuitional, and loving whole—a whole that is in turn embraced by more encompassing wholes: humanity, planetary ecology, and the cosmos itself.

*     *     *     *     *

The bifurcation of human beings into reason and emotion, into rational cognition and irrational intuition, even into faith and reason is at an end. We encounter the world as whole persons. Our awareness is a synthesis of all these dimensions, and we understand that this holistic unity of human awareness has emerged from cosmic evolution making us, in very real ways, microcosms of the macrocosm, our self-awareness the fulfillment of a cosmic process of emerging consciousness and personhood. We can now be open to our eschatological possibilities for harmony, love, peace, sustainability, and justice that can be concretely actualized within a holistic world system under a holistic world paradigm.

*     *     *     *     *

Not only from the deepest core of our being are we openness toward the world but the world itself becomes “open” through us. Holism is always dialectical, dynamic, and reciprocal: we both experience the whole and are manifestations of the conscious whole. A human being is profoundly distorted through the early-modern picture of reason as a detached, analytical function, using formal inductive and deductive logic to “objectively” observe an “external” world, all the while suppressing its primal intuitions and energies of love and compassion. The world is only experienced truly and objectively through the wholeness of human consciousness, which includes reason, intuition, and love.

*     *     *     *     *

Holism is not some dreamy idealism incongruent with the reality of the human situation. It is rather a deep discernment of the truth of our situation, confirmed by “the scientific facts.” The minds of those who dominate in the power system of sovereign nation-states, the minds in the Pentagon and the militaries of the various countries, are literally alienated, that is out of touch with the reality of our situation. They are mostly operating under assumptions derived from the early-modern paradigm that have been entirely disproved by science and completely discredited by those who see the human situation clearly.

*     *     *     *     *

We have seen that democratic world law is the presupposition of our human rationality and sociality. We are inextricably both individual and social beings. The implicit holism of our context appears as the love that draws us to actualize that holism in concrete institutions and associations. The rational love emerging in us extends to the community and society, to law and ethics, which are all products of the organizing and integrating power of reason and love. Harris writes: “The morality of love does not abolish the law, it presupposes it.”

*     *     *     *     *

This is why reason, intuition, and love tell us clearly that the only legitimate form of government is non-military democratic government, founded on the equality, freedom, and dignity of all. Those who live fully and maturely have no need to exploit or dominate others. They have no need to reify the capitalist economic system with the pretense that “these are the objective laws of economics and I am not responsible for living off the labor and misery of others.” Rational love tells us differently. We are morally responsible for both the economic-social order that allows us to live off the unpaid labor of others and the world’s disorder of sovereign nation-states that perpetuates endless war and violence.

From the Epilogue

 

In this book I have attempted to show that revolutionary holism is capable of transforming the human condition from one of sickness and fragmentation to one of health and harmony. This requires holistic transformations that are both structural and spiritual. Even if a spiritual maturity involving awakening to the fullness of reason, intuition, and love were to inform the majority of humanity, health and harmony would not prevail as long as the global institutions of capitalism and sovereign nation-states remain in place. Moreover, under these institutions the likelihood of such maturity developing at all is practically nil.

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And this is precisely why sovereign nation-states can never give us peace—they effectively recognize no law above themselves and reserve the right to “interpret” international laws as they see fit. And the UN, as a treaty of such nations, has clearly failed to give us peace or prevent the collapsing of our environment. It has been colonized by both the power politics of sovereign nations and by globalized corporate capitalism. Sovereign nations are forever compromising with evil—the evil that they themselves dialectically generate. The present world anti-system perpetuates a never-ending cycle of violence and corruption.

Only the rule of democratic law, with representatives from all around the world debating the way into the future and how to deal with the multiplicity of global crises, can give us the peace necessary for both sustainability and human flourishing. A federated Earth is the only practical step that can transform world economics and disarm the world’s power-crazed militarized nation-states, along with their allies the transnational corporations. A federated Earth binds humanity together into a planetary community for the first time, recognizing a common good and linking together the structural and spiritual aspects of our human condition.

The harmonious convergence of spiritual and structural transformation is seen in the work of Errol E. Harris, among many others that we have considered in this book. The goal inherent in the emergent holistic upsurge of rational love, identified by him and others, can indeed be understood as working toward the Kingdom of Ends or the Kingdom of God on Earth. But a necessary part of this process, for Harris and others, is the foundation of democratic world government. Only the concrete transformation of our global institutions can genuinely open up our higher human possibilities.

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State terrorism reciprocally encourages private terrorism and only continues to reproduce the cycle of lawlessness and violence, as many have pointed out. Private terrorism cannot be combated by the lawlessness of the war system. It is a criminal activity and can only be combated by the rule of enforceable, due process of law, and by addressing the terrible injustices that inspire most terrorists in their rebellious quest. And we cannot properly prosecute terrorists until we have the rule of law, not the rule of war, in the world.

If the new categorical imperative is to create harmony in ourselves, within human civilization, and in relation to our planetary biosphere, then it confirms what Camus clearly argues and what Kant in his 1795 essay explicitly concludes: to live under a system of sovereign nation-states is to live in a perpetual condition of defacto war, which is immoral. The moral imperative is to leave this “barbarous” condition as rapidly as possible and establish “republican” government for all: protecting the “freedom and equality” of all persons as “subjects under a single legislation” establishing peace and ending war once and for all. We need a truly positive vision of a transformed future that can animate all our concrete efforts in the present. This is indeed the principle and manifestation of love.

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Our situation at the present moment in history has no real antecedents in the history of thought. We are aware of ongoing climate collapse disrupting the ecology of the planet and, with it, human civilization perhaps to the point of extinction. We are aware of our technical capacity to wipe out human life with weapons of mass destruction. Our hope in the present does not derive primarily from deterministic antecedents but from our capacity to envision a truly transformed future. It springs from the holistic expression of our reason, intuition, and love.

Drawing on the wisdom of the great religious and spiritual teachers of all ages, and drawing on our understanding of the fundamental role of democratic law at the heart of civilization, we must act in the present with the Earth Constitution as a model and guide for moving into the future. Our vision of the future will be the key to transforming the course of history and creating a decent planetary civilization. We must establish a planetary human community, one with legal, ethical, and spiritual legitimacy.

The universe story is significantly about us. It is a story about the emergence of consciousness, reason, freedom, and love out of the dynamics of the cosmic process, a process in which the entire universe is implicated at every stage. On planet Earth these qualities develop under a telos for wholeness, harmony, and love, both among human beings and in relation to our planetary biosphere. A necessary feature of this process is a world united under democratic law that legislates a decent global economic system of sustainability and justice and universally protects our human dignity and ability to flourish.

The Earth Constitution is, therefore, a key component on the way to a redeemed and transformed future…. Everyday, more people from all around the world are signing the “pledge of allegiance” to the Earth Constitution and declaring that the highest law for humankind is not that of illegitimate militarized nation-states but the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. They are living the reality of the future in the here and now and thereby bringing it to actuality. “The kingdom of God can be lived and not just hoped for,” declares Moltmann. But in the face of our devastating planetary crises, we might better say, “The kingdom of God must be lived in the here and now and not just hoped for.” Let’s make it happen.