Christmas for Abraham's religions

The winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere) was in pagan times traditionally celebrating the coming of the light, but in Christianity the birth of Christ. According to an interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus was however born in March in the year 7 BCE, although September should have been the appropriate date for him as royal successor in the line of David in accordance with Essene rules. This actually created some concern about his right to succeed to the throne, which was however resolved by the Essenes and Jews in general and St Paul, and especially also by Jesus’ younger brother, James, who, having been born in the ‘correct’ month, had at some stage been seen as the ‘just’ successor. Jesus, an Essene, was (most likely) the crown prince to the Judaic royal house of David. The fact that the Old Testament prophesised a Messiah for one of the millennia after the Creation 4,000 years earlier, meant that Jesus arrived on the scene very close to the time for the fulfilment of that prophecy, which gave him considerable support among the Jewish people at a time of Roman oppression. The Essene lived by a very strict code of abstinence and religious protocol and his preachings fitted well with religious Jewish thinking in general. “As Heli was a ‘Jacob’, his son had the title of Jacob’s favourite son, Joseph. In 44 BC (as the concealed chronology shows), Jacob Heli had a son, Joseph. In March 7 BC, Joseph had a son, whose name and title was Jesus. Each of the three men, like their ancestors before them, bore the title ‘the Christ’, meaning that they were the heirs of David, the Anointed One.” While the priests and the ruling Herod were superior to him in position, Jesus was permitted to teach Gentiles and had a particular responsibility for them. His native language was Aramaic, a group of Semitic languages with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship. It is the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud. While Jesus has been the originator of Christianity, he was also considered, by the Essene at least, the rightful successor to the throne of the house of David, and his birthday, whether March or the adopted winter solstice. should therefore deserve celebration in the world’s Jewish community. As for Christmas for Muslims, Jesus, Isa, was a prophet and mentioned 25 times more often in the Qur’an than Muhammad himself. He and his mother Mary, Miriam, are revered: “When the angels said: O Miriam, surely Allah gives you good news with a Word from Him (of one) whose name is the '. Messiah, Isa son of Miriam, worthy of regard in this world and the hereafter and of those who are made near (to Allah)”. Qur’an [3.45] Jesus is however not seen as a God, but as a prophet and apostle, and his god is the same god as Allah. Let all the religions derived from Abraham therefore respect if not even celebrate this adopted date of Jesus’ birth. REFERENCES Dr Barbara Thiering – Jesus of the Apocalypse – Doubleday 1995 Dr Barbara Thiering – Jesus the Man – Doubleday 1992 Dr Barbara Thiering – Jesus of the Apocalypse – page 8 – Doubleday 1995 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language

World Gemeinschaft

Here is a verbatim extract from my book "world without war, made possible by empowered individuals":

Embrace – Culture of Pooled Commitment
We have investigated three streams of human activity and how moral and ethical values and principles can be promulgated in the ‘worldspirit’ and implemented in all three streams. As the values and principles were developed so that each stream can prepare suitable plans for each culture of commitment, they would have tended to develop somewhat independently from each other. In the end it is important that the three streams come together. This means that spirituality will influence commercial decisions in the stream of commerce, and influence citizens in their development of political constitutions and institutions in the stream of government. By corollary, government will influence spirituality when comprehensive doctrines are being modified to make the change possible from overlapping consensus towards true consensus, always retaining the separation of state and religion. Commerce will influence government in the financial and moral support towards cultural endeavours such as a wider curriculum in education to include subjects like history, languages, philosophy, art and religions, and support institutions in similar fields.
As I bring all three streams together in the embrace of a culture of pooled commitment, I will set the scene for creating a World Gemeinschaft out of a world society of peoples.
Rawls suggested the following basic political principles for his Society of Peoples:
“ … let’s first look at familiar and traditional principles of justice among free and democratic peoples:
Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples.
Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.
Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention,
Peoples have the right of self-defence but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defence.
Peoples are to honour human rights.
Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.
Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.”
The last principle is an indication that the Society of Peoples will not be an introverted and exclusive society, but will respect, tolerate and interact with non-member peoples. There will be acceptance of moral issues beyond those of purely political thought, and even a hint of altruism.
The term ‘self-defence’ will have to be clearly defined and must depend on consensus of the society as a whole, as it is a term that has been grossly misused in the past for other usually selfish purposes. The principles also make it clear that the only peoples who could form a Society of Peoples are ‘well-ordered peoples’, who would then have to agree on norms for the formation or adaptation of their individual governments’ constitutions and justice systems in order to come to a mutually agreeable system for the World Society of Peoples and its governance.
Rawls’ principles are, however, merely a political basis represented in the stream of government, which includes humanitarian aspects on which to build. It would need to be expanded to include aspects of the stream of spirituality, such as metaphysical and moral worldviews that have, particularly in the early stages of forming his ‘original position’, been shrouded by Rawls behind a ‘veil of ignorance’.
Peace or stability comes in two kinds: stability for ‘the right reasons’ and stability as a ‘balance of power or impotence’. ‘Right reasons’ means, that such stability:
“ … rests in part on the allegiance to the Law of Peoples. … it is stable with respect to justice; and the institutions and practices among peoples continue to satisfy the relevant principles of right and justice, even though their relations and success are continually changing in view of political, economic, and social trends.”
The French political scientist and teacher of social philosophy at the University of Toulouse and the Sorbonne, Dr Raymond Aron (1905–1983), called it ‘peace of satisfaction’ , as such peoples, who belong to legitimate regimes that abide by shared principles, have nothing to go to war about. Their basic needs are met and their fundamental interests are fully compatible with other democratic peoples. They do not aspire to change other peoples’ religions, nor are they driven by hurt pride or arrogance.
The closest current intra-national organisation to such a Society of Peoples, although not yet a government in the strictest sense of the concept, is the European Union. It is unique in the world. It sprang from the determination of a few politicians of a number of former enemy countries led by Robert Schuman of France after World War II to find a solution for preventing war in Europe:
“The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe is preceded by a Preamble which recalls, among other things, Europe’s cultural, religious and humanist inheritance, and invokes the desire of the peoples of Europe to transcend their ancient divisions in order to forge a common destiny, while remaining proud of their national identities and history.”
The European Union, representing 493 million inhabitants (2006), the world’s third largest population after China and India. It is not a federation such as the USA nor is it simply a common market or an organisation for co-operation between governments. While the member states retain their independence, they pool their sovereignty in order to gain a strength and world influence none of them could have on their own. This means that the member states delegate some of their decision-making powers to shared institutions they have created, so that decisions on specific matters of joint interest can be made democratically at European level.
The member countries have to be and are indeed liberal democratic peoples. This system is so attractive to non-member states that they will decide to bring about internal political and sometimes constitutional changes to gain acceptance to EU membership. In 2006, there were 27 member countries and three candidate countries including Turkey. This expansion by demand is a clear indication of the suitability of that system for including peoples of many different cultures and religions. The internal changes that may be needed to achieve acceptance for membership are not always easy, as existing political systems have evolved through centuries of history and are therefore entrenched in the psyche of the people, particularly where state and religion have at one stage been one and the same. To achieve such adaptation will require time, as there will be the need for those peoples to learn, adjust and adapt.
Nevertheless, all member peoples accept and support the Values of the Union:
“The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values, which are set out in Article I-2, are common to the Member States. Moreover, the societies of the Member States are characterised by pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men.”
The shared institutions of the EU include the Parliament and Council. Members of the European Parliament are elected by the EU citizens. They do not sit in national blocks but in seven Europe-wide political groups. Between them, they represent all views on European integration, from the strongly pro-federalist to the openly Euro-sceptic. The council is the main decision-making body. Meetings are attended by a minister from each member state, the selection of the minister depending on the subjects on the agenda. The presidency of the council rotates every six months.
This system of combining separate countries into a single decision-making and legal system is unique, and sets a very promising example for what could one day become a prototype for a world government. It has developed in a democratic way, provides extraordinary benefits for each state that none could have on its own, and makes war between them impossible. The EU functions as a sovereign entity in the international scene but it allows each state to maintain its cultural identity.
“The European Union is a federal body that has adopted the principle that decisions should always be taken at the lowest level capable of dealing with the problem. The application of this principle, known as subsidiarity, is still being tested. But if it works for Europe, it is not impossible that it might work for the world.”
‘Subsidiarity’ is another term for ‘bottom-up’ governance, and is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest (or the lowest) competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.
The EU was created for European countries and its bottom-up constitution is perhaps the reason why its administration is relatively large. To extend this society of peoples to a worldwide ‘union’ of societies of peoples would certainly require other parallel and somewhat similar societies of peoples in other regions, plus another level of administration to coordinate the various regions. All societies would have the same overarching principles and ‘law of the peoples’. However, with their different cultures and histories, they would need to tolerate reasonable differences in their interpretations. This would mean that the ‘original position’ and ‘second position’ of John Rawls in achieving internal governance and a social contract between peoples would have to be expanded to a ‘third position’ for the formation of principles of a just and reasonable union of the regional societies of peoples. Utopia? Perhaps, but then with positivity, patience and persistence, it will become a self-fulfilling reasonable facticity.
The EU has a Court of Justice to make sure that EU law is interpreted and applied the same way in all member states, so that the law is the same for everyone.
The concept of justice has various meanings. Law enforcement in many countries has created doubt whether it will achieve justice before the law, and has been harshly criticised in the term ‘the law is an ass’. If the courtroom is a battleground for combating lawyers finding loopholes in the words of the law, and the winner is decided by the price the defendant is willing or able to pay for representation, then the law is indeed an ass, as fairness is no longer the issue. Many laws, in their method of assessing punishment, echo the ancient feelings of revenge. The idea of ‘justice as fairness’ or any other conception of justice by liberal citizens is first of all developed on the liberal conception of right and justice. A law is always legitimate if it is formed by a government under its constitutional powers, but as a consequence, it may not necessarily be just if it does not also fulfil the test of liberal and humanitarian governance, which should be reflected in the judge’s decisions. The law, as it is written by a democratic government, will always only be able to cover generalities; it cannot and should not be specific to cover all contingencies. This means that its interpretation in the courts will rely on the judge’s reasonableness beyond the written word to apply constitutional, humanitarian and in a sense historical sense in its judgements. In most cases, this will also be influenced by the corpus iuris contained in the unwritten law of the collective cases. Hegel comments like this:
“There is an essential aspect in law and the administration of justice which contains a contingency and which derives from the fact that the law is a general prescription that has to be applied to the individual case. If you wanted to declare yourself against this contingency, you would be talking in abstractions.”
In developing the idea for the law of the people for a liberal, egalitarian and just society, Jean Jacques Rousseau says this in his introduction to ‘The Social Contract’:
“In this inquiry I shall endeavour always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided.”
Reasonable pluralism may not be possible within a people or in a society of peoples wholly relying on such a theory of justice, as through public reason it requires the fulfilment of reciprocity. To make reasonable pluralism possible and to achieve genuine reciprocity rather than a status of modus vivendi, it is necessary that comprehensive religious and secular doctrines include clauses that make them fit reasonably into the law of the people. In that situation, they will be able to live together in ‘overlapping consensus’.
In summary, a Society of Peoples is formed by well-ordered peoples who have liberal and just democratic regimes. John Laws:
“Political liberalism proposes that, in a constitutional democratic regime, comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right are to be replaced in public reason by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. Here note the parallel: public reason is invoked by members of the Society of Peoples, and its principles are addressed to peoples as peoples. They are not expressed in terms of comprehensive doctrines of truth or of right, which may hold sway in this or that society, but in terms that can be shared by different peoples.”
This is liberalism, not libertarianism that lacks reciprocity, and is pluralism where peoples have reasonable, expected and tolerated differences from one another with their distinctive institutions and languages, religions and cultures, as well as their different histories.
John Rawls makes a distinction between his theory of justice and political liberalism. He believes that the theory of justice develops from the idea of the social contract represented by Locke, Rousseau and Kant, yet he hopes to present the structural features of such a theory so as to make it the best approximation to our considered conceptions of justice. This would then seem to be the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society, especially when ‘justice as fairness’ together with other conceptions of justice are presented as a ‘comprehensive liberal doctrine’ in which all the members of the well-ordered society affirm the same doctrine. Aye, there’s the rub, for in such a society, where all the members of a society affirm that same doctrine, it will contradict the concept of reasonable pluralism and can therefore not represent true political liberalism.
The question is how: is it possible for those affirming a comprehensive doctrine, religious or non-religious, to hold a reasonable political conception of justice that also supports a constitutional democratic society?
“The political conceptions are seen as both liberal and self-standing and not as comprehensive, whereas the religious doctrines may be comprehensive but not liberal. The two books are asymmetrical, though both have an idea of public reason. In the first, public reason is given by a comprehensive liberal doctrine, while in the second, public reason is a way of reasoning about political value shared by free and equal citizens that does not trespass on citizens’ comprehensive doctrines so long as those doctrines are consistent with a democratic polity.”
Thus, the well-ordered constitutional democratic society of political liberalism is one governed by laws with citizens following irreconcilable yet reasonable and comprehensive doctrines by ‘overlapping consensus’. These doctrines can therefore, according to Rawls, support reasonable political conceptions – “although not necessarily the most reasonable” – which specify the basic rights, liberties and opportunities of citizens in the society’s basic structure.
This means that individuals of different peoples would have to be liberal in accepting and tolerating the differences between citizens in their society and other liberal and non-liberal peoples and their cultures and histories – in spite of irreconcilable differences in their comprehensive doctrines. They would discuss, reflect about and endorse what statutes they wanted for their peoples to achieve stability, and by relying on public reason reach ‘overlapping consensus’.
Inclusion of Comprehensive Doctrines
This acceptance of a pluralism in which comprehensive doctrines can exist next to each other on the basis of an ‘overlapping consensus’ can however only be a temporary solution or a first step, as it was derived from a theoretical rather than a real position. In this situation stability is based on a purely politically reasonable acceptance and agreement to tolerate unreconciled differences, and in which that political stability is relying on faith in reason to continue. The society of peoples proposed by John Rawls as a theory was a political development of well-ordered peoples into a liberal and just society, albeit with the risk of instability through its reliance on faith in reason in the resulting overlapping consensus. This status had involved a bias in the discussion towards purely political doctrine by shrouding sociological and comprehensive doctrines, both religious and secular, in a veil of ignorance. Even if this veil has become thinner in Rawls’ later thinking, as he has accepted discussions of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, they are still subject to a ‘proviso’ that they can support reasonable conceptions of political justice.
To overcome this bias, the streams of government and spirituality need to embrace the project of communicative action and discourse that takes place not only on a political level but also in a wider moral and ethical sphere driven by like-minded citizens of well-ordered societies as citizens and by peoples as peoples. This way a society of peoples will be able to formulate principles that allow its peoples to interact with each other in true stability for the right reasons, and will be able to prepare values and principles that are acceptable to all, similar to Hans Küng’s declaration with regard to the world’s religions, and in this way become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’.
For a number of ‘Societies of Peoples’ to become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’, their principles must become meaningful to the individual citizens and to the peoples, equivalent to the ‘shared mores’ of the communities that embraced ‘familiarity’ before the industrial revolution. It must embrace more than purely political aspects and include sociological philosophy and religious worldviews to allow for positive communicative action with regard to every form of human interaction, including civic virtue, altruism and comprehensive doctrines. These principles will then become overarching in the sense of the ‘worldspirit’ in all other arrangements between them, including the forming of special institutions.
It is necessary therefore that the continuing differences be resolved, as a next step, by norm-led philosophical argumentation with discourse ethics between adherents of the religious and secular doctrines and other liberal and just citizens, where all have rights of political participation as well as basic liberal rights. So far sociological and metaphysical subjects that have been suppressed by Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’, and had reached the possibility of forming a theoretical society with a stability relying on faith in reason. The ‘proviso’ in his later writing did not change this, as a proviso is just another version of ‘exclusion’. Such discourse must now reach beyond political philosophy, and open up to a much wider view of public culture than he allowed. It reached this point where the citizens had developed and enshrined a constitution based on history and reason. The ‘proviso’ still precludes the introduction of subjects outside political thought unless they support reasonable conceptions of political justice. This will create a popular autonomy for a society’s citizens at the expense to some extent of their private autonomy.
To bring this theoretical constitution into the real world, it will have to be overhauled as a living and ongoing social institution. Any discourse of this nature could in some instances be seen as civil disobedience, perhaps even heresy, but would be a necessary part of keeping a democratic constitution up to date from generation to generation, where its justification relies on the dynamic understanding of the constitution as an unfinished project.
Jürgen Habermas continued his discussion with Rawls after he had introduced the proviso, although after Rawls had died, and argues that some arduous work of hermeneutic self-reflection must be undertaken from within the perspective of religious traditions:
“... traditional communities of faith must process their cognitive dissonance that either do not arise for secular citizens, or arise only insofar as they adhere to doctrines anchored in similarly dogmatic ways”.
For Muslims, for instance, the Prophet’s revelations in the Qur’an and Sunna are unalterable, as the techniques of ‘usul al-fiqh’ (methodology for application of Islamic precepts) allow no possibility for change. However:
“In contrast, there is nothing to prevent the formation of a fresh consensus around new interpretative techniques or innovative interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunna, which would become a part of the Shari’a just as the existing methodologies and interpretations came to be a part of it in the first place.”
Consensus, or ‘ijma’, has a critical role even within Islam, as it is the basis of the acceptance of the text of the Qur’an and the records of Sunna as the fundamental sources of Islam and Shari’a.
This ultimate communicative action must aim at finding a truth, rather than reasonableness, along an epistemic path, which studies the nature, methods, limitations and validity of knowledge and belief in connection with these doctrines. This is necessary in order to allow them to resolve the differences that make a true consensus and true tolerance based in conciliation between them possible.
The targeted outcome will be to renegotiate the overlapping consensus of the ‘world society of peoples’ toward the achievement of a ‘World Gemeinschaft’ with spiritually true as well as political consensus that will be a lasting basis for stability. However, in order to achieve this, reforms and modifications to the religious and secular doctrines will have to be negotiated to find a truth that cannot be merely compatible with political justice but where a political comprehension of justice can be ‘derived’. This is in the sense of logicism for each worldview or doctrine to achieve true pluralism, a task that is likely to take a little time to complete due to the rigidity of some of the doctrines.
Such change is already starting to take place in Islam, especially with regard to the religious law of Islam, Shar’ia. This change was given particular impetus in Sudan by Ustadh (revered teacher) Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (1909–1985), who started the Islam Reform movement with considerable following in the face of opposition from the government. He was sentenced to death and executed on trumped-up charges in an unconstitutional court under the instructions of the president of Sudan, Numeiri. Three weeks after the execution, Numeiri was deposed and the court case, the charges and the sentence were, during the reign of the following interim government, declared null and void.
Ustadh Mahmoud made a clear distinction between those parts of the Qur’an that had been revealed to Muhammad in Mecca (al-islam), and those after he had moved to Medina (al-iman) . ‘The Second Message (Mecca) is Islam,’ he said, and concluded that the First Message (Medina) was an ‘explanation’, written into the Qur’an to help believers of a superficial or lower level (al-mu’minin) to become true ‘submitters’ (al-muslimin) at the ultimate level:
“‘Explanation’ of the Qur’an has been only in terms of [expedient] legislation, the Shari’a, and interpretation to the extent appropriate for the time of such explanation and in accordance with the capacity of the audience and the abilities of the people.”
Muhammad believed in and pronounced the equality of men and women:
“The equality between men and women is the universal rule in Islam, and Shari’a law discriminated between the two only because of circumstances prevailing at the various stages of development of society.”
Absolute freedom he considers a right, albeit subject to obligations towards the community:
“We have already discussed repression in this book and said that it is caused by fear, and that absolute individual freedom requires freedom from fear. To achieve such freedom from any form or type of fear, it is necessary to organize the community in such a way as to secure the individual against fear of the lack of subsistence, oppressive authority, and intolerant public opinion.”
Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was the first man to propose a direct dialogue for peaceful co-existence between the Arab States and the State of Israel after the 1967 six-day war between the Arabs and Israel.
One of his Sudanese followers, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, translated some of his works and is following through on the insights of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. He himself advocates social and cultural reform in Muslim communities in his ground-breaking book ‘Islam and the Secular State; negotiating the Future of Shari’a’, where he promotes the possibility of a Muslim society within a pluralistic democratic state.
“The framework proposed in this book provides the normative and institutional parameters and safeguards for the negotiation and mediation of the role of Shari`a among Muslims and non-Muslims now and into the future. By negotiation and mediation I mean to emphasize that there is no categorical and permanent resolution of the paradox of how to secure the religious neutrality of the state in the reality of the connectedness of Islam and politics.”
He suggests that Islam would be able to accept such reciprocity with other doctrines, although not in the sense of ‘al-mu’awadah’, the reciprocity principle of Shari’a, but if it were to reconsider an interpretation of the Qur’an on the basis of the earlier Mecca period of Muhammad’s teachings. An-Na’im claims that the superior Mecca revelations and principles were interpreted to be more ‘realistic and practical’ (in 7th century historical context) in Medina, because ‘society was not yet ready’ for their implementation. Now that historical conditions have changed, An-Na’im believes that Muslims should follow the earlier Mecca period in interpreting Shari’a.
“The Qur’an does not mention constitutionalism, but human rational thinking and experience have shown that constitutionalism is necessary for realizing the just and good society by the Qur’an. An Islamic justification and support for constitutionalism is important and relevant for Muslims. Non-Muslims may have their own secular or other justifications. As long as all are agreed on the principle of specific rules of constitutionalism, including complete equality and non-discrimination on grounds of gender or religion, each may have his or her own reasons for coming to that agreement.”
He suggests that:
“Shari’a principles by their nature and function defy any possibility of enforcement by the state, claiming to enforce Shari’a principles as state law is a logical contradiction.”
Informed by the social normativity of the ‘worldsoul’ and through communicative action with discourse ethics by the world’s communities with an ever-decreasing thickness of the veil of ignorance, perhaps with the help of the parliament of the world’s religions, individuals together will develop and promote the moral values and standards as set in the concept of the ‘worldspirit’. They will apply them as an overall ethic to all religious and secular worldviews and to commercial and governmental activities alike.
Hegel, inspired by Rousseau, demands from a true people’s religion of reason:
“Its teachings must be grounded in general reason. Fantasy, heart, sensuality must not miss out in this. It must be such, that all needs for living and public affairs of state will follow.”
This does not mean that secular people do not also have to learn tolerance and understanding towards religious people:
“As long as secular people are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities are, as it were, archaic relics of premodern societies persisting into the present, they can understand freedom of religion only as the cultural equivalent of the conservation of species threatened with extinction.”
This would put such secular citizens into a similar category as fundamentalists in the religious communities with regard to their contribution toward consensus. Michel Onfray’s atheism would clearly qualify for this. These citizens would have to participate in a learning process to accept that religions can contribute cognitive substance, albeit subject to translation from the religious language into the political language. This is an important aspect of Rawls’ proviso.
A Rolling Change
The implementation of obtaining worldwide consensus will have its difficulties, which, to be overcome, will take time. The painful process of change in Europe from the medieval class system through the era of emancipation towards a Rechtsstaat has not yet taken place in many Third World countries. That means that for such a change towards a fully democratic, just and liberal system in the remainder of the world to take place, it would have to be rolled out in a most co-operative and sensitive way to avoid the revolutionary friction that accompanied it in Europe. It will be necessary to recognise the difficulties:
• There are many disparate states of individual national economies and democratic systems in the world or even within regions. They will require cultural and administrative changes, similar to those that changed the traditional European systems following the Reformation and leading to the success of capitalism and associated bureaucratic applications towards social democratic and just government, the Rechtsstaat. In Europe this process managed, over time, to rationalise the differences between capital and market on the one side, and the citizen or family household and general public on the other. For Europe this was in many ways a painful process, and could therefore provide many lessons to the rest of the world community to avoid the mistakes that were perhaps necessary in order to eliminate them from the final model.
• For such changes to take place in the rest of the world and in order to show how they can succeed to involve the people in a positive manner, it requires intensive educational processes to develop the social capital as well as a philosophical understanding of the required changes. This does not need to be in the form of straight copies of the proven systems in the western world, but should be built in the grounding of local histories and cultures. Education must include the raising of an understanding that corruption is an unacceptable cost to achieving equality. Populations in dictatorial countries will require more adjustment towards a freethinking culture, as they have usually been deprived of such opportunities.
• These changes require financial assistance from the richer peoples, which includes support to those at present having an unsustainable windfall from the sale of natural resources, particularly oil. Such support must be sensitive to the local social and cultural environment.
• It will be essential that the existing global inter- and semi-governmental organisations be rationalised to achieve an efficient and unified approach.
• In terms of sociological philosophy, there is however but a narrow path towards achieving a World Gemeinschaft that is able to be self-reflective of its own identity. Simply welding together various social communities such as Rawls’ Peoples into a purely political society of peoples would still have barriers to overcome, barriers that exclude the life-world of citizens. In Nicholas Luhmann’s application of system, society may have succeeded to differentiate independent subsystems that are self-reflexive of their own specialised knowledge and entity, but cannot be so as a whole, as the individual in such an all-embracing society would become isolated.
• By contrast to such a subject-philosophical construction of a unified society’s self-awareness, it is possible to see the various parts of society as a higher level of inter-subjectivities, capable of communicative action among one another and with the discipline of discourse ethics, in which identity-building and collective self-ascriptions can be articulated,
“ … and in the higher aggregated public is also a self-awareness of the total Gesellschaft. This then does no longer need to satisfy the requirements of precision that must be set by subject-philosophy on self-awareness. It is neither philosophy nor Gesellschaft-theory in which the self-knowledge of the society is concentrated.”
In this transcultural diffusion and therefore perhaps unexpected state of overall self-awareness, it will then be possible for a World Gemeinschaft to react to political and social events. The highly aggregated, publicly condensed but life-world-like opinion building and will forming processes indicate the tight interlacing of socialisation, personalisation and ego and group identities. These interactions are by individuals, albeit of disparate cultures and origin, but with a shared and irrevocable normativity, such as the ‘worldsoul’, who will be bound together in a non-political World Gemeinschaft for the good of all, and as such will also be able to powerfully influence governments. Such a World Gemeinschaft will make a world without war possible.

Refugees, Immigrants

The European Union, USA, Australia and other first world countries have one thing in common: they are attracting people from developing and third world countries. Why? Those people are not just fleeing from dictatorial regimes but poverty and social unrest. In spite of the unfamiliarity of target countries’ cultures, laws, religions, and lack of their traditional community, they will risk their lives to travel legally or illegally to get away.

If they manage to be accepted as immigrants, they will find that they may not easily become part of their new social environment, and everything in which they are different from the general population will be very visible and may cause friction. As a result they will stay close to other immigrants, which will make their own wish to integrate even more difficult.

The population of the host country will see the steady influx of immigrants from foreign cultures increasingly as a threat to their own culture, as they fear a dilution of their inherited values. Instead of helping the newcomers and locals to understand each other, as is happening to a large extent in Australia, they prefer to express their resistance to this “intrusion”. Actually, it is a pity, as the infusion of new cultures and even races can only be of benefit, as it will create innovation on the one part and an influx of new genes in the other.

I suggested a solution to this problem elsewhere, and won’t go into detail again here.

In my view, the best way to reduce the number of people who want to leave their own country for “a better world”, is to create that better world where they live. This would be a win-win solution. It reduces the pressure on infrastructure, such as essential services, schools, hospitals, etc, that a sudden increase in the rate of population growth brings about, and it will improve the economy and reduce poverty in the countries of origin. That means that the effort both economically and diplomatically will reflect positively on the “donor” countries.

With politics at present being preoccupied with ‘navel gazing’ for the sake of the next election, an outward looking idea like this doesn’t even seem to enter the minds of the politicians.

If, for instance, the EU were to look at the changes that are occurring in the Middle East and North Africa with a view that this is an opportunity to assist countries in those regions as a whole to collaborate with each other in a way somewhat similar to that which took place in Europe after WWII. Then the solution to the economic and social problems resulting from the political upheaval towards democracy could be found earlier rather than later. That solution could even include the formation of a ‘Levantine Union’ (http://on.fb.me/aDxFyp), a society of peoples somewhat similar to the EU, but having the chance to learn from the EU’s mistakes of the past and present. The EU was created for the sake of peace, and in that regard has been successful. If a Levantine Union could achieve peace between peoples that feel aggressive to their neighbours because of ‘nationalistic’ tendencies, then such a Union would achieve the desire of those very same peoples.

The external assistance given must, however, be very sensitive to the cultures and religious preferences of the peoples. Humble advice is always welcome, the acceptance of difference is essential on both sides. All discussions and negotiations must be on an equal footing as suggested by Habermas in his methodology for ‘communicative action’. Thus ‘true consensus’, as discussed in my book ‘world without war’ (http://amzn.to/hAGSBH), can be found for the formation of constitutions for each nation that can fit into the overarching constitution of this new society of peoples without the need for a risky ‘overlapping consensus’ as suggested by John Rawls (The Law of Peoples).

Living in a peaceful region will eliminate the main reasons for its inhabitants to want to leave. At the same time it will reduce the temptation of members of the EU to build walls around their territory to prevent the influx of unwanted immigrants.

The next step will then be to use the successful example of it to create a similar society for the peoples in the Sub Saharan region, and again along the East coast of Africa, and on the West coast as well. These regional societies will grow like the EU did, as they will be attractive institutions for other countries. It will reduce poverty, the breeding ground of terrorists, and will ultimately achieve a world without war.

The Worldspirit is the Essence of History

This is a continuation of my earlier post of “humanity has a soul”. It deals with the expansion of the awareness of norms, the normativity, in the “worldsoul” towards the values which are collectively the “worldspirit”. The worldsoul informs the worldspirit, and the resulting values are the irrevocable moral basis of all human activities in the real world, leaving each individual in control by this empowerment and responsibility for the common good.
Human activities follow various life streams, and in each stream the principles required to prepare plans for action need to allow for flexible approaches because they will need to be sensitive to the local cultural and historical environment. Non-the-less, they must always remain within the irrevocable values of the worldspirit.
Margaret Mead in her anthropological study, “Culture of Commitment” (1970), divided human activities into three cultures of commitment: religion, commerce, and government. Johannes Heinrichs in “A Model of Value-Based Democracy as Condition of Ecological Sustainability” (2009) prefers to talk of four levels of parliament: economical, political, cultural, and basic values.
In my suggestion of three life-streams, I decided to follow Mead’s idea, although I prefer ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’ as this can then include a wider field of spiritual activities such as art, atheism, philosophy, etc. My scheme naturally has also some similarities with Hendrichs’ although I make no separation within the stream of spirituality as he does with cultural and basic values.
For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) , the a worldspirit (“Weltgeist”) is a central concept of his speculative philosophy. To Hegel the total historical reality, the “totality”, is the product of the worldspirit, by which the ultimate purpose of the world’s history is realised, namely Reason within history.
Plato was the first to suggest a worldspirit as ‘Anima Mundi’ in ‘Timaios’. His worldspirit could be seen as a mover of the world’s psyche and actions simply from its origin in the individual’s normativity. According to Plato, the Demiurg created the ‘anima mundi’ first and then the material universe. This ‘anima mundi’ was the commanding entity and consisted of two principles: Sameness and differentness representing reason and chaos, and he then mixed the two into a third essence. He tells us that the creation of the cosmos was not ‘ex nihilo’, out of a nothing, as there existed ‘structures’ in the form of ‘categorical ideas’ beforehand, which existed by ‘necessity’ and could not be altered or annihilated but allowed the ‘Demiurg’, the creator, some processes and denied others through which the resulting cosmos represents the product of ‘necessity’ and ‘reason’.
“Therefore this world order is caused by a mixture, which resulted from the unification of necessity and reason. Indeed, reason reigned over necessity, because it was able to persuade it to direct most of ‘the created’ toward the best. For this reason then [ … ] this universe came into being from the beginning.” (Plato, Timaios 48 a, my translation from the German text}
My version of the worldspirit is, however, much more banal. It is simply the collective term of the moral values informed by the worldsoul, and which are both ubiquitous and irrevocable, and as such will be central to reason within historical progress. Because they need to be irrevocable, it will be necessary to be sparing and intelligent, out of ‘necessity’ and ‘reason’ as by Plato, to include only those values that can be applied throughout mankind in all cultures. By corollary, some cultures may need to modify some aspects of their belief systems where they are irreconcilable with the innate human world order that is for the common good. The values of the worldspirit can therefore be: Civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty, truthfulness, altruism, cooperation, and discourse ethics. Justice is not what is written in the laws, but what represents the ethic that will need to be applied in writing and enforcing the law. Discourse ethics (Karl-Otto Apel) is a system that refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse.
The three life-streams or cultures of commitment, namely spirituality, commerce, and government, do each have separate disciplines within that I will not specify here. Their governing principles are developed through formal pragmatics (Jürgen Habermas) and can be summarised under the following headings: For spirituality it is the ‘global ethic’, for commerce it is ‘moral capitalism’, and for government say ‘social contract’.
Each stream requires a culture of commitment by the individuals striving to develop the moral consistency for building the action plans in keeping with the values set in the ‘worldspirit’.
The term ‘streams’ reflects the idea that the activities in the three cultures of commitment flow downstream like a river that springs from a rich source of inspiration of the individual and spreads its nourishment into the valley of human activity to sustain the life-world of mankind. To lead into the discussion of the three streams, here is a brief introduction into the concepts that, combined, will be the driving force for actions and the means that will result in the desired ‘concrete ends’ in each stream.
The necessary process of human interaction relies on controlled discourse. It must follow rules to ensure that communication will not become biased by the inequality of the participants, but takes place in an environment of truth, validity, truthfulness and therefore trust, as proposed by Jürgen Habermas, who developed the ‘theory of communicative action’. My project analyses the processes of a person’s forming a set of moral and ethical norms, a normativity, and engaging in discourse with other people to achieve an outcome of a ‘good’ acceptable to both ‘actors’ (Habermas). I deal with this in more detail in my book.
The link, http://bit.ly/gx4wb5, shows a graphic outline of an individual’s involvement in these three streams and the mind processes that are involved and described below, beginning with the development of a shared social normativity in the person’s mind as the categorical and irrevocable prerequisite for the ‘worldsoul’. This will in turn inform the ‘worldspirit’, which is the set of values central to and binding for the three action streams, the cultures of commitment. The participants in each stream then focus on developing the ‘principles’ for the activities on the ground, the ‘facticity’, to achieve outcomes in the ‘life-world’ as well as in the ‘system’ (Habermas) in accordance with values and principles agreed and established by communicative action.
This will be applied in a family situation or a larger group of people with common principles, in a business environment and in a religious activity. It will apply in our attention to the environment, and it will filter up into various levels of government and in the end to a world community.
By necessity, such discourse will take place on two levels:
First of all on a personal level in dialogue between two people, either as individuals or as representatives of other individuals, where the subjects will be comprehensive as in dealing with social, spiritual and political philosophy. This will be the process establishing the values of the ‘worldspirit’, and hence setting the irrevocable values and principles for the three streams of activity. These values will be common to most cultures, as for instance the ‘golden rule’, which has been the basis for the ethic of reciprocity.
Second, on another level of discourse between citizens as citizens within a people, and among peoples as peoples within a society of peoples, where the subjects may be more focused on political philosophy, but not to the exclusion of cultural, spiritual and social philosophy.
Three cultures of commitment cannot, however, exist as entirely separate entities within a people. They must communicate with each other and provide and receive input for the proper functioning of the community.
As the values and principles were developed so that each stream can prepare suitable plans for each culture of commitment, they would have tended to develop somewhat independently from each other. In the end it is essential that the three streams come together in an embrace, a culture of pooled commitment. This means that spirituality will influence commercial decisions in the stream of commerce, and influence citizens in their development of political constitutions and institutions in the stream of government. By corollary, government will influence spirituality when comprehensive doctrines are being modified to make the change possible from ‘overlapping consensus’ (John Rawls) towards ‘true consensus’, always retaining the separation of state and religion. Commerce will influence government in the financial and moral support towards cultural endeavours such as a wider curriculum in education to include subjects like history, languages, philosophy, art and religions, and support institutions in similar fields.
As all three streams come together in an embrace, a culture of pooled commitment, it will set the scene for creating a World Gemeinschaft made up of regional societies of peoples. I am not the first individual who suggested that a formally united world community is possible. Before me were Immanuel Kant, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls in particular, but all of them had a preference for a political entity.
My suggestion (as described in my book) is for the formation of regional societies of peoples, who will be liberal, democratic and just, and will have pluralism at least to the extent of "overlapping consensus" (John Rawls). This has similarity with the EU.
The ultimate target in the three streams will be for outcomes towards ‘a global common good’ in a World Gemeinschaft.
• Shared spirituality, where people of different cultures and religions can live co-operatively together in harmony and in a communal spirit of true pluralism.
• Shared wealth resulting from profitability in commerce will create opportunities for more employment, a reduction in poverty and a consequential decrease in population growth for many burdened peoples in the world.
• True consensus in peace supported by ‘stability for the right reasons’, general health and a thriving global civilisation amid cultural development.
• The environment will be carefully managed in the interests of all and will be able to support all life, human as well as diversity in flora and fauna.
Each of the three streams needs to embrace the other streams in a culture of pooled commitment in order to coordinate their activities under the overall banner of the ‘worldspirit’ and promote the principles to be followed on the path towards a World Gemeinschaft.
In the stream of spirituality, true rather than overlapping consensus between comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, achieved through negotiated modification of doctrines to remove irreconcilable paragraphs, will pave the way for the stream of government to develop constitutions for true pluralism that can derive from those modified doctrines. These negotiations will be supported by education and the building of social capital together with the stream of commerce in underdeveloped nations and burdened societies, made possible by moral globalisation, which will result in ‘rules-based’ replacing ‘relation based’ governance in their economies resulting in decreased population growth.
The streams of government and spirituality can build a communal spirit and charity beyond their boundaries to support the principles of ‘the common good’ and ‘stability for the right reasons’.
This may all sound like a dream, a wonderful utopia that could never be achieved. Never say never! It has already started to be fulfilled with intergovernmental organisations and in a small way with the example given by the European Union, a project in progress.
In the end, a World Gemeinschaft must not be a political entity or government as such, but an integral global community that shares common interests towards peace in the way that the European Union is evolving and proving itself to function successfully. The World Gemeinschaft will however be the most pluralistic in that it will globally embrace all peoples with their different histories and disparate cultures. As such it can sustain a world without war.
Let’s think anew with new insight and courage

Humanity has a Soul

(Much of this article is drawn from my book: “world without war, made possible by empowered individuals” - http://amzn.to/hAGSBH).
Why is Homo sapiens so successful? You’ll say it is our intelligence and our innovativeness. Sure – they are most important attributes as was also a highly developed language, which were also our distinguishing traits among all our relatives, whether human or hominid.
The scientific study of human evolution encompasses the development of the genus Homo, but usually involves studying other hominids and hominines as well, such as Australopithecus. ‘Modern humans’ are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the only extant subspecies is Homo sapiens-sapiens, us; Homo sapiens idaltu (roughly translated as ‘elder wise man’), the other known subspecies, is extinct. Anatomically, modern humans appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
The most accepted model for the extremely rapid development of skills and abstract thinking since then relies on studies of the diversity and mutation rate of nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA in living human cells. It is believed that all humans now living are descendents of a woman who is the ‘matrilineal most recent common ancestor’ (MRCA) for all living humans, who probably lived around 140,000 years ago. The existence of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’ does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each co-existed within a large human population. Some of these contemporaries have no living descendants today, and others are ancestors of all people alive today. The Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution proposes that a small, relatively isolated population of early humans evolved into modern Homo sapiens, and that this population succeeded in spreading across Africa, Europe, Asia an America, displacing and eventually replacing all other early human populations as they spread.
With man forming larger groups and consequently communal living, came a need to understand more of the world. Decisions were more and more made by reason rather than experience and conditioning (see Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s dogs), and inventiveness and planning became the background to human dominance over the world. There is evidence found in sites in Spain that a predecessor of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago also “buried” their dead, but this was more likely a necessity rather than spirituality. Other carnivores were able to consume carrion and to avoid being detected by predators, humans had to dispose of their corpses.
The world man lived in was not perfect as Leibniz or even Kant wanted us to believe. Neither was it as salutary as the world in which the ‘natural man’ of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s early writings lived, often falsely referred to as the ‘noble savage’, a term Rousseau never used. He believed that man living in nature, not in civilisation, was good until humans came to live together with other humans, because from then on there would be the evils of jealousy, envy and competition.
Survival depended entirely on the co-operative strength man could muster. After all, there was no design in the creation of that world, nor was there a Paradise, but a process of development and competitive forces for survival. And man was not very well equipped as a predator. Its nearest relatives were mostly herbivores and man’s preference for hunting left it short with regard to speed, strength and natural weapons. The only way humans could succeed was by grouping together and working as a team, with some division of labour. Mostly men and some women went out to hunt, and most women and some men gathered food near the fixed home base, where they tended to the offspring and defended the camp against predators. This is an exception in the usual habit of apes, as pointed out by Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal):
“This act of returning to a fixed home base is typical of the carnivores, but is far less common amongst the monkeys and apes.”
In order to achieve trust among the team members, a man and a woman would be allowed to become a couple without the risk of the head of the group taking his share as among primates. The exception to this is in the closest relative of ours, the Bonobo or Pigmy Chimpanzee, where sexual activity has a socially important role.
About 60,000 years ago, survival for man became more and more difficult, even competitive between rival groups of humans, as with an increasing population the availability of hunting grounds began to come under pressure. Because of man’s physical inadequacies compared to its predators and prey alike, coordination of the individuals within groups became an essential requirement not only for hunting and gathering, but in the end also for the defence of territory. How else could they drive a large herd of animals bigger than themselves over a cliff to get the meat? Such coordination does not happen without leadership, and with leadership comes power, and competition for that power. Such co-operation is not reserved for humans alone, as there are many animal species that rely on their co-operation for survival, even using signals to communicate. We all know about the co-operation among bees, ants, wolves and whales, and between different species as in humans and dogs chasing and cornering larger prey, and more recently killer whales co-operating with humans when hunting larger whales involving established rules about who gets what of the spoils.
In order to ensure cohesion it became necessary that rules had to be formulated and enforced, together with a chain of responsibilities and a code of conduct. It was around that time, when spirituality became evident, where the importance of a code of behaviour, hunting success and the dependence on climatic changes had created the need for understanding more of nature and its effect on tribal co-operation in difficult times. That is most likely the period when a spirit or spirits were created to help in providing the cohesion of the group.
This was the way communities developed, and in principle remained as a Gemeinschaft until the industrial revolution. Such a community had what I call a “village conscience”, where everyone knew what everyone was doing, and the communal moral code was expected to be adhered to or else there would be social sanctions. This meant that the perpetrator of an unacceptable deed would be frowned upon, isolated, or severely punished. The moral code was one of cooperation for the common good, as simple as that.
The industrial revolution cause considerable social and cultural changes. Communities became separated as people went to the cities for work, and in the end individuals became anonymous to the extent that they might not even know their neighbour in the same apartment block. As a consequence their moral code became their own individual responsibility.
Not all was lost, however, as this code was still embedded in each person’s psyche from early childhood on. Social behavioural norms are initially acquired during childhood in the context of behavioural patterns involving others and are merely pre-norms. The child learns through role-playing, often without others present, where it might imagine a situation in which it changes actors and is interchangeably for instance the shop owner of the stolen items, the thief, the policeman and the customer. It will also be exposed to the imperatives for life taught by its parents or carer. It will learn to behave within the restrictions of these imperatives, because if they are not obeyed, the child will encounter sanctions. It learns this not simply because of the positive or negative sanctions, but importantly as part of the caring environment, and becomes aware of a behaviour pattern to be followed. This behaviour pattern then becomes internalised and forms the character of the little person who as a result acquires the authority of its willpower.
During the teens, when ‘team games’ are played, the norms and imperatives will be reinforced and developed through the involvement of other players. By now, the play involves communicative roles, equivalent to the perspective of coordinated participants, where the reciprocity of the interchange of perspectives represents a cognitive structure. This developed from the ‘ego’ to ‘alter’ and self to other situations acted out as a young child. It then develops into a behavioural pattern involving recognition of signals such as speech or action through interaction with others, the ‘alter ego’ as the participating ‘opposite’, as well as through an awareness of the presence of observers of the game with them as a ‘neuter’, all being members of the same group.
The set of norms that develops does then not merely represent the awareness of a behavioural pattern of a group, but also includes the linked expectation that all members of the group, the ‘generalised other’, will act in a certain way in certain situations and by corollary they each have the duty to perform such actions as expected by the others. This reciprocity of mutual expectations and reactions in the surrounding ‘Gemeinschaft’ is referred to as ‘institution’. An institution is the mutual reaction of all members of the ‘Gemeinschaft’, and includes the police, the court and a public hospital, which we mutually expect will react in certain ways if called upon to assist, and who will attract sanctions if they do not. I suggest that such a ‘village conscience’ environment can one day be revived in a wider community like a global village, if the world’s societies want to become a ‘World Gemeinschaft’. Perhaps it already applies in the Commonwealth of Nations.
This social code is innate in homo sapiens, as it existed since man walked on this earth. It starts with the basic normativity of each individual. Normativity is the individual’s abstract realm of thought and awareness. A person’s awareness and sense of justice and a sense of the ‘good that is equal to all’ are the basic elements that inform decisions as to what one ‘ought’ to do in the world. Through interaction with others, it will be developed into an irrevocable set of norms that becomes the ‘social normativity’, which I call the ‘worldsoul’, as it is ubiquitous throughout mankind. The responsibility to firmly hold and follow this set of norms is held by all who agree to its validity.
My concept of the ‘village conscience’ is perhaps similar to the ‘Kollektivbewußtsein’ or ‘collective awareness’ that leads to the collective identity of an individual who is part of a group, as suggested by the French philosopher Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and also discussed in detail by Jürgen Habermas (Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns: Zur Kritik der funktioalistischen Vernunft):
“The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”
So here is the “worldsoul” that binds us together. It allows us to imbue all our activities with these basic norms. They can then be expanded into principles for the many activities of man.
According to Habermas, Durkheim separated the ‘sacred’ from the ‘profane’, and tried to find the origin of the ‘sacred’, morality and religion. He concluded that rituals existed first, and they were later joined and to some extent replaced by developed language with semantics and syntax, which were able to formulate clearer worldviews than mere symbols. A consensus on moral values was very much part of the first communities, and became part of the religious context. In more developed societies, these worldviews were seen, by consensus, as an opportunity to use them for the legitimisation of political leadership, and in this way supported the individual’s ‘moral authority’ and the validity of basic norms. This then was the basis for the development of ‘institutions’, which received their energy from the moral worldviews.
Moral values permeate all activities and are therefore applicable to each of the cultures of commitment, the three streams of human activities, namely spirituality, commerce and government. The ‘worldspirit’, that I will explore next time, represents in one concept the combined values of civic virtue, tolerance, justice, fairness, honesty and truthfulness, altruism and co-operation.