“Getting out into the field” means leaving the book-lined study to work with scientists, engineers and decision makers on specific social challenges. Rather than going into the public square in order to collect data for understanding traditional philosophic problems like the old chestnut of “free will,” as experimental philosophers do, field philosophers start out in the world. Rather than seeking to identify general philosophic principles, they begin with the problems of non-philosophers, drawing out specific, underappreciated, philosophic dimensions of societal problems...Field philosophy, then, moves in a different direction than either traditional applied philosophy or the new experimental philosophy. Whereas these approaches are top-down in orientation, beginning in theory and hoping to apply a theoretical construct to a problem, field philosophy is bottom-up, beginning with the needs of stakeholders and drawing out philosophical insights after the work is completed.I think this helps highlight where the Bahá’í world has been moving in recent years. Gone are the days when Bahá’í "scholars" could content themselves with having an encyclopedic knowledge of Bahá’í teachings and history without extensive engagement with the wider society. And those serving actively in the field are discouraged from limiting themselves to simplistic activities, such as handing out pamphlets or walking in a parade. Service now requires a great deal more thought and effort. And intellectual pursuits inspired by the Baha'i faith are becoming more and more mobile and “embedded” in patterns of community action.
For centuries, American politicians did not run up huge peacetime debts. It wasn’t because they were unpartisan or smarter or more virtuous. It was because they were constrained by a mentality inherited from the founders. According to this mentality, a big successful nation exists in a state of equilibrium between its many factions. This equilibrium is fragile because we are flawed and fallen creatures and can’t quite trust ourselves. So all of us, but especially members of the leadership class, should practice self-restraint. Moral anxiety restrained hubris (don’t think your side possesses the whole truth) and self-indulgence (debt corrupts character).
This ethos has dissolved, on left and right. The new mentality sees the country not as an equilibrium, but as a battlefield in which the people, who are pure and virtuous, do battle against the interests or the elites, who stand in the way of the people’s happiness.
The ideal leader in this mental system is free from moral anxiety but full of passionate intensity. This leader pushes his troops in lock step before the voracious foe. Each party has its own version of whom the evil elites are, but both feel they’ve more to fear from their enemies than from their own sinfulness.And the American constitution divides power so completely that big important action requires some humility on all sides, or else collaboration is impossible. All legislation becomes emergency legislation, too little, too late.
Other primates have of course none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males towards each other to make up after a fight, removing weapons from their hands, and high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concernas yet another sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we do not need God to explain how we got where we are today. On the other hand, what would happen if we were able to excise religion from society? I doubt that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good. Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.
If asked whether nature is fundamentally competitive or cooperative, I think most people would say competitive. The "struggle for survival" or "survival of the fittest" are often used as one-line phrases to sum up a view that fierce competition is the best way to advance in evolution, and that every organism's highest goal is to reproduce as much as possible. A classic example of this might be a male lion battling a rival for domination of a pride, another might be the finches on the Galapagos islands that Darwin studied. I recently came across a summary of Nine Nations of North America, written by Joel Garreau in 1981. In it, he argues that national and state borders are largely arbitrary, and he redrew the borders of North America according to what he thought were following cultural and economic lines. Thus, my home in Portland, Oregon was part of the nation of "Ecotopia".
As an admirer of maps and geography, I was immediately drawn into the theme and thought the premise was brilliant. I live in a state and nation that have arbitrary borders that don't follow any particular logic. Big, square states dominate the western USA, cutting across rivers, mountains, and lakes like their borders were drawn by a child who never set foot on their ground. Why not take another look at better ways to administer land?
It took me just a few seconds reviewing his map to decide that I disagreed with his rationale for borders. For starters, he left huge swaths of land empty of authority and completely left out what should be the main concern of administrative boundaries: water. Then it took me just a few more seconds to decide that I should perform the same exercise and draw my own nations of North America. Then it took me just one more second to decide that I should perform the exercise on the entire earth. Then it took me about 20 hours of work spread out over several weeks to finish the maps using Google Earth, and thus my thought experiment Twenty Nine Nations of the Earth was born.
