The challenge
is,
not in obtaining land, or money; it is in achieving unity regarding ethics
and goals.
Even though in the
following excerpt this author is
speaking globally, the parallels to any size human community seem clear. He
speaks a lot of a concept he calls "unity-in-diversity". This community
proposal preserves this "unity-in-diversity", on the individual community
scale.
From Glen Martin's book, "Millennium Dawn"
"Reflection on the concept of
unity-in-diversity
reveals that we cannot protect and maintain true diversity until we have
reached a certain level of genuine unity, which also involves a certain
level of universality. For example, "all persons are ends-in-themselves," or
"every person is a citizen of the Federation of Earth." If my unity is
Christianity, defined in any of the traditional exclusivistic senses, then
this necessarily excludes all that is non-Christian. If my unity is being
British, then this excludes everything not British. If my unity is my race,
then this excludes the diversity and individuality of what is not my race.
Only an all-inclusive unity with respect to human beings (and ultimately
beyond human beings to other sentient beings and our planetary ecosystem)
can fully affirm the variations and diversity of all the members, precisely
because we are all one at the deepest level.
We have little to fear and everything to gain from the idea of the
"totality" or "unity" of human beings as long as this is understood, within
an "open horizon," in its mutual relationship with authentic individuality.
No legitimate, free government can function if it does not affirm the
oneness and sameness of humanity with respect to equality, dignity, freedom,
and principles of justice as well as the absolute value in uniqueness of
each person, beyond knowledge and beyond all systems. Philosophers and
governments must deal with a concrete dilemmas posed by this duality in
everyday practice. Government must forster the universal equality of all the
universal applicability of the law to all persons (no one is above the law),
yet it must also treat people as concrete individuals formed to specific
cultural, religious, and historical circumstances and not as mere faceless
ciphers subjected indiscriminately to universal laws. (See Habermas, 1994).
Government must be institutionalized to avoid all forms of tyranny: the
tyranny of the majority or popular opinion, the tyranny of the state,
tyrannies of anarchic individuality, the tyranny of religion or dogma, the
tyrannies of fear, hatred, or prejudice, the tyrannies of capital and
wealth, or the tyrannies of power politics among nation states.
Correspondingly it must also be institutionalized to promote universal
peace, freedom, and justice. It can only do these things by affirming the
principle of unity-in-diversity that science
has shown to be the organizational matrix of our world at every level.
We cannot allow the horrible possibilities apparent
within our current nightmarish human condition to paralyze us. Fear that
this constitution would lead to tyranny is most basically a first world
assertion of our hidden desire to maintain our privilege at the expense of
the rest of humanity. We privileged few exhibit a maturity fear, in which
we are unwilling to grow toward mature ethical-spiritual awareness,
unwilling to recognize the principle of unity-in-diversity as the basis of
authentic human relationships.
Yet Levinas has a legitimate concern that no group
should come to power that assumes it has knowledge of the cosmohistorical
process (the ontolgical totality) and the relation of individual human
beings to that process. But how are we to prevent this from happening
except through democratic discussion and dialogue? Using any other means
would sink to the same violence that we were hoping to prevent. In our
present world of mass suffering, exploitation, and oppression, it makes
little sense to block efforts to achieve wholeness out of a speculative fear
that wholeness will deny individuality.
